Thoughts about virtual organizations
Apr. 27th, 2013 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davv(I would write much more than this, or rather... pack much more meaning into my words, but the test is on Tuesday.)
Say you have the kind of virtual organization software I've been talking about earlier: it lets people organize and coordinate, but the members of the organization are defined only by their cryptographic keys, and so are perfectly pseudonymous. Moreover, outsiders can't decipher what is going on inside the organization, and they definitely can't affect it (vote on issues or the likes); and the whole network overlay is run in a decentralized manner, so there's no one server to take down.
Now, what do we know about identity within an organization like that? We know that anybody could mass produce identities by making new keys. Therefore, identity will be defined by one of two things: either what you have (in the sense of something that can't be effortlessly duplicated), or by how you act.
If it's defined by what you have, then duplicating identities doesn't help because you're just spreading yourself more thin. If it's defined by how you act, then any given identity could be a fragment of a person (that is, a single real-world person holds many identities), or could be made up of many people (the other way around: a group shares the same key).
In a way, the latter is a special case of the former, but where the finite resource is "thinking time", or time spent thinking and acting. If you have twenty identities, each of these will seem one twentieth as active as if you had only one, all other things equal. But that's not really what made me think longer about this particular solution - but rather the idea that the unity of those identities, itself, can be virtual. A group mind could decide to have a single key, while the other kind of being - identifying as many in one physical creature - could have more than one.
And so my thoughts go towards the corvids again :) Perhaps my idea of the crows using a virtual organization as backup fits better with them than I thought; because if they are fluid in the sense of being somewhere between "separate people" and a true group mind, then this design permits that fluidity. And this would be another example of how both people shape systems by how they make them (crows would make something that fits them), and that systems shape people by what actions are simple and what actions are difficult.
Like wayfinding: where the paths of least resistance go affects how people act.
However, I think that even given the above, virtual organizations that really matter - that are set up to make something happen in the real world - would be closed in the sense that it would require a vote (or something similar) among the members to admit a new member. Otherwise, a member could just mass-produce new keys (as mentioned above) and outcrowd the other members in any discussion or vote. If one decides to use "thinking time" or a separate finite resource as an admission criteria, that's just an example of the above, but with an automatic admission procedure instead of one depending on a vote.
(An alternate possibility is that the finite resource is tested each time a decision is to be made, rather than on admission. I suppose societies that depend on unanimity work like this: if you have a hundred fake users, you can't argue for your point any better than if you have only one, because it all goes out of the same "thinking time" pool.)
Say you have the kind of virtual organization software I've been talking about earlier: it lets people organize and coordinate, but the members of the organization are defined only by their cryptographic keys, and so are perfectly pseudonymous. Moreover, outsiders can't decipher what is going on inside the organization, and they definitely can't affect it (vote on issues or the likes); and the whole network overlay is run in a decentralized manner, so there's no one server to take down.
Now, what do we know about identity within an organization like that? We know that anybody could mass produce identities by making new keys. Therefore, identity will be defined by one of two things: either what you have (in the sense of something that can't be effortlessly duplicated), or by how you act.
If it's defined by what you have, then duplicating identities doesn't help because you're just spreading yourself more thin. If it's defined by how you act, then any given identity could be a fragment of a person (that is, a single real-world person holds many identities), or could be made up of many people (the other way around: a group shares the same key).
In a way, the latter is a special case of the former, but where the finite resource is "thinking time", or time spent thinking and acting. If you have twenty identities, each of these will seem one twentieth as active as if you had only one, all other things equal. But that's not really what made me think longer about this particular solution - but rather the idea that the unity of those identities, itself, can be virtual. A group mind could decide to have a single key, while the other kind of being - identifying as many in one physical creature - could have more than one.
And so my thoughts go towards the corvids again :) Perhaps my idea of the crows using a virtual organization as backup fits better with them than I thought; because if they are fluid in the sense of being somewhere between "separate people" and a true group mind, then this design permits that fluidity. And this would be another example of how both people shape systems by how they make them (crows would make something that fits them), and that systems shape people by what actions are simple and what actions are difficult.
Like wayfinding: where the paths of least resistance go affects how people act.
However, I think that even given the above, virtual organizations that really matter - that are set up to make something happen in the real world - would be closed in the sense that it would require a vote (or something similar) among the members to admit a new member. Otherwise, a member could just mass-produce new keys (as mentioned above) and outcrowd the other members in any discussion or vote. If one decides to use "thinking time" or a separate finite resource as an admission criteria, that's just an example of the above, but with an automatic admission procedure instead of one depending on a vote.
(An alternate possibility is that the finite resource is tested each time a decision is to be made, rather than on admission. I suppose societies that depend on unanimity work like this: if you have a hundred fake users, you can't argue for your point any better than if you have only one, because it all goes out of the same "thinking time" pool.)