Project ideas I

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Thanks particularly to Nathan Schneider and Oliver Sylvester-Bradley for conversations about these ideas, which are very rough…
I still believe the idea some of us had for the Digital Life Collective is an important one: to experiment with new business and ownership/governance models for everyday internet services, because today’s aren’t working. The focus on business model, ownership and control is because these are the root causes of the problems with today’s systems, and so must be the place to look for change:
  • if we don’t want businesses to hold hordes of data about us, with the attendant loss of control, and security and privacy risks, we need to pay for services in ways other than advertising and attention
  • if we want less addictive technologies, they both need to not depend on our attention for monetisation, and to not require ever more attention for the growth investors demand
  • if we want a voice in how services are run, what is permitted and what isn’t, we need to have a stake in them ourselves
  • if we don’t like a small group of people becoming disproportionately wealthy and wielding control over the services we depend on
and so on.
The ownership model I think we should try is co-operative; this offers collective ownership and control. I have no illusions about the wisdom of crowds, and am very aware of the challenges of organisational democracy, but co-ops have a history of working on these, with some success. New internet era tools and techniques should be able to help. Still, many questions here, not least what type of co-op would make sense (a UK-flavour, Rochdale principlessetup, or something drawing on co-op culture elsewhere? A consumer co-op or multistakeholder?).
The most obvious business model is subscription services — you pay, you get service this month. I’m a little more open to alternatives here, but the benefits of clarity (you get what you pay for, no complex multisided markets you can’t understand) and simplicity to bootstrap are compelling.
The real question though is what would such a business offer, and to whom? I’ve got two ideas floating at the moment. One is modest, sensible and achievable, and the other is radical, ambitious, and quite possibly intractable.
The modest idea would be to take a service which already exists, and which doesn’t require network effects for adoption (because that makes bootstrapping incredibly difficult). Something like email, perhaps, or file sharing or shared calendars. We’d choose a system which already exists (or needs only modest adjustment), open source, offering some reasonable balance of security, privacy, usability, and either host it ourselves or in partnership with a provider. A consumer co-op would offer this to members for a monthly fee, with support and documentation perhaps exceeding that already available. We’d probably focus on a member community we could reach easily and which had common requirements; perhaps within one geographic area (such as the UK). Early adopters would be those especially frustrated with Big Tech, looking for alternatives for parts of their online world.
This is not necessarily an easy sell. People love the convenience of today’s Silicon Valley services, and free is a very appealing price. Very, very few people will pay for privacy or security. So the marketing message would be about shared ownership, and a personal touch — this system is actually set up for people like you, there’s someone on the phone to speak to if you have problems. Maybe less slick than Google Calendar or whatever, but it’s ours, it’s local, it’s friendly, it’s human scale. It’s not going to be a service for many millions, but it’s going to be useful and valued for the people who need it.
Assuming you could get this set up, you could extend to offer other online services. One of the strengths of this model, unlike some of the other subscription-tech offerings, is that it’s not locked to one technology. Consumers (co-op members) can have an ongoing relationship with one organisation, and benefit from a variety of services, which evolves over time as needs and expectations and technology changes.
The ambitious idea starts with an ambitious idea and adds some more on top.
If we want more control over our information online, we need new structures and processes for that data. People have been mooting and working on personal data stores, for instance, for years, but nothing has really taken off. More recently we have slightly different ideas such as HAT and Databox, trying hard to find business models where consumers can see value in getting data control. Because that’s the problem — convenience and free are really powerful, and privacy struggles to compete at all. (We could argue that the success of Duck Duck Go shows that people will choose privacy if they can; but as a search engine it is free and pretty convenient, and there are reasons for using it other than privacy — such as getting different/better search results, varied search features, etc.) The risks around privacy and security are vague, hard to understand, and in the future — it’s genuinely difficult to grasp or prioritise these when folks have other things to be doing.
That means we really need something convenient and compelling which people would want to use. What would that look like?
Convenience is about integration and seamlessness, as well as individual apps. And we need to be thinking about functionality folks don’t have today, because offering an email, calendar and filesharing suite which requires you to migrate away from Google or Microsoft isn’t likely to fly — people won’t go through the friction of migration for something similar to what they already have. So we need to think of something ‘next generation’ — something that offers new value we don’t get today.
There’s something of this integration of different systems in Oliver Sylvester-Bradley’s PLANET concept, which sets out a vision for a new collaborative, sustainable economy built with an open source platform. There’s a lot to like here, with new economics built in as well as community functions for local groups. (I’m not sure I buy all the detail in the concept illustrations — things like reputation and feed design need thought, given what we’ve learned about these in recent years — but it’s a great starting point.) What struck me about this was that it gets towards something like WeChat, with messaging, identity and payments infrastructure, and all kinds of apps. The seamless integration of these things is useful in China, and it’s something we lack in the West. So Oliver and I talked about new kind of open platform:
  • built on open standards and open source
  • collectively owned, sensibly governed
  • with proper 21st century agency over our personal information (data minimisation, running analytics locally rather than creating huge databases of personal information in the cloud, leveraging techniques like homomorphic encryption and zero knowledge proofs and secure multiparty computation)
  • and with agency over our identities (a good choice of identity providers looking after different parts of our identities), the ability to present different facets of ourselves in different contexts
  • with some sort of payment system built in — maybe a mixture of fiat currency, and other forms of money (such as LETs, utility tokens, or something else)
  • distributed and resilient, perhaps built on one of the new platforms like Holochain (or RChain?)
  • small pieces, loosely joined
With open standards and APIs, you don’t have to offer one solution to everyone on the planet. Instead, you could design a system that worked for one particular group of users; to start with, I’d suggest building for the UK. One legal environment and set of regulations, one language (to start with), some shared culture and values.
To really make it fly, just as the Hub of All Things has needed some open source bits with community stewardship, and a startup support bit and so on, you might need a variety of entities and funding structures, but having the core product/service delivery part a co-op owned by its users seems compelling. There’s lots of organisational and governance design work in a project like this, as well as the technical and product design work, and the social and ethical work to avoid the problems that have beset so many of today’s communication tools.
All of this could be a public sector project instead, and you’d still get many of the benefits (plus up front investment, one would hope). Digital public service corporation, anyone? I wonder, though, whether the population trust the government or public sector to run such a thing, now. Governments change, too — it’s perhaps harder to believe that the essential funding in the first few years would actually continue to be available, and you’d need a smart set up charter. Public sector IT, whilst somewhat improved in recent years particularly in usability, is not in a great state; so new skills and culture would need to be created or brought in. The nature of an open source distributed system would reduce some of the risks of a government-developed “platform”. You’d still have some interesting questions about how to ensure the delivery team was effective and stayed that way, was able to balance innovation and maintenance over time, and so on. (Of course you have these things too in a co-op, but the pressures would be different.)
Unlike the modest idea further up this article, you’d need a lot of resource to make this happen. You’d have to develop a strategy for how you’d get started — what would the right minimum viable system look like? I imagine it’s probably a year of deep planning and discussion just to get to the point that there’s a thing concrete enough to articulate properly, and an idea of where you’d start to build. But the work would be worthwhile, to think about what such a next generation system would need to look like, technically, functionally, socially, economically, organisationally. There are components which might form part of such a system starting to appear, in varying levels of maturity (and quite possibly technical competence, and appropriate governance), but I’ve not seen (other than Oliver’s PLANET) any expressions of the future whole system capabilities we might want to realise. You need that vision to get people working together and to unlock resourcing, even if much of the technology is developed elsewhere. The code isn’t the key here; the holistic proposition is: the product and service and organisation and governance — the things that are different from today’s everyday internet services, driven by ads and attention.
Even just as a concept, it seems like we could use something more than just the piecemeal components of self-sovereign identity, or next generation money or tokens, or secure messaging, or distributed compute, to help us imagine where we might be going. We need to imagine these things so we can think through the consequences and design things appropriately, to identify risks and opportunities not just for individual companies but for communities and society. We need to work through some ideas like this, in ways that are understandable by a larger community than just identity or data or cryptocurrency nerds, so that folks who are wrangling with tech policy and regulation, concerned about tech ethics, or just frustrated with Silicon Valley, can start to imagine some alternatives, and see how pieces of them might come to be realised. Then we can get more folks involved in shaping and developing such ideas, so we can end up with better technology down the line.
There will be alternatives to surveillance capitalism and the attention economy and the centralisation of power which frustrate so many of us today. We need to start thinking about them, talking about them, and building bits of them, and carefully avoiding the worst problems with tech development processes and culture that got us where we are today.
If you’d like to chat about these sorts of ideas and how to develop them, get in touch.