I see Beth Noveck has bailed from her position as deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, with no regrets from some inside the Beltway.
I've been a long-time critic of Beth Noveck going back to 2004-2005, when I first saw her lead the "State of Play" conferences at NY Law School on virtual worlds, and also saw her surface in the virtual world of Second Life for a time with a simulator called "Democracy" -- at first closed to the public, emblematic of what I find wrong with many of her projects. I was aghast at her collectivist theories for life online that privileged various groups and grouplets of people "collaborating" together supposedly for the greater good (but often merely to reinforce their own agenda) -- and I watched as her "crowd-sourcing" philosophy, just like Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: Organizing without Organizations, turned in on itself, and inevitably involved someone like her filtering out anyone who didn't get with the program of the group leader.
There were various wonky policy issues that she took up, chief of which was crafting the implementation of the president's very own open government policy -- and in my view this was done too quickly, too undemocratically, and with too little input. The entire gambit was emblematic of the sort of executive-run instrumentalist revolutionary action that we have come to see as a hallmark of the Obama administration (and will work against a second term) -- Congress was not involved and not invited and not expected to be part of shaping what "open government" means. (Hearings by Silicon Valley sympathizers like Barney Frank don't count.)
That's because "open government was basically a "progressive" agenda of an even more radical sort than the Obama administration's own realistic and compromising bi-partisan agenda, and was trying to do an end-run around institutions and power centers that it thought would thwart "transparency" or whatever the ostensible goals were. And they weren't necessarily *really* about technology or modernization, and weren't even about "democracy" in any mass and participatory meaning of the word, but a kind of cover for a class of technocrats with certain views to come in an impose their views on undermining intellectual property and eroding individual rights in favour of collectivist solutions -- working around America's system of checks and balances.
On the White House website Noveck ran, at first comments were open. But they would rapidly close on each post as nervous moderators worried about "birthers" and "truthers" showing up and diluting or distracting the discussion. While such interest groups became an issue for other sites soliciting votes or public opinion, it was exaggerated for this particular corner of the whitehouse.gov metaverse because not *that* many people would bother to come to something called "the Office of Science and Technology" and grapple with varous wonky tech policies.
Beth and her staff then moved to a MMORPG-like system of voting up or down comments to "hide" those less liked, but that was gamed and became a means of harassment as it does everywhere. She couldn't figure out how to set up a 1st Amendment compliant system that could still be filtered by the user to remove unwanted speech. (She finally closed them altogether.)
The projects she undertook -- opening up discussions on policies that closed too clickly to enlist enough invested stakeholders, or which were impervious to outside criticism of the recruited already-insers -- were sometimes seemingly benign and "scientific" but contained the same kind of landmines in them that Lawrence Lessig's work does -- her fellow on the campaign technology advisory committee. For example, the "peer to patent" concept sounds like a lovely means of accelerating the patent process, eliminating backlogs, and cleaning it up of trolls or something like that -- but what it ultimately is about is undermining intellectual property as a concept itself through banging at and restructuring one of its bastions.
If you peer closely at the various permutations of this program as it developed, there is a danger that it is ultimately about taking away -- or never giving -- patents from entities that are perceived as undeserving of them through peer pressure than it is ostensibly about accelerating the issuing of patents to masses of new innovators. If enough "expertise" is "crowdsourced" on patents, there are supposed to be more given, not less. Yet many of those attracted to the issue of "patent reform" just like the intellectual property "reform" in fact want to do away with any restrictions on copying whatsoever -- and they are loathe to affirm what their *positive* vision for a copyright or patent regimes are and focus only on what they see as abuses. Fred Wilson, venture capitalist, openly tells us that he hates the patent processes (except, I guess for his own ventures) and talks about fighting off two patent lawsuits as a "tax" on his innovation. This is very, very common thinking among the trendy wired elite these days, and I suspect this is a view among those "far-flung team of technologists, lawyers and policy-makers who opened a tradition-bound agency's doors using technology that distilled online collaboration into useful expertise that has sped up the review process" -- as one very enthusiastic review of Beth's Wiki Government" says about it.
Having followed her thinking and her activities for some years, I have some big questions about this, naturally. So often, the policies of the professor-extremists follow on from a false framing of the issue and one couched deliberately and provocatively in terms that are supposed to undermine the target institution's fears.
For example, the lefty academics that want to rewrite the constitution first in universities then in executive sessions tell you that the constitution is "outdated" and that it was not "inclusive". They barred slaves! Women were left out! We wouldn't want airplanes to still run exactly as Orville Wright made them; why our constitution? This fiat-thinking is designed to get people thinking along a certain track, "Why, yes! How could we still have a constitution that was framed without blacks and women!" Yet in introducing these two concepts -- it's outdated and not inclusive -- the provocateurs fail to explain why the same system that eventually did restore civil rights to blacks and women has to be overthrown now as "outdated," and why there is something different about blacks and women as entire undifferentiated classes of people that would have a different view -- as a whole -- about, say, property and states' rights -- such that *now* something would have to be redone. The Supreme Court has always provided updated correctives to the original concepts of the framers, and the constitutional is worth keeping and not overthrowing for that reason -- unless, of course, you're a socialist wanting to slip in a nationalization clause and pretend its about race.
In the same way, those in fact tackling the intellectual property regime try to frame the issue as "innovation" or even "the cornerstone of capitalism" (!) to describe the need to sic hordes (or at least, a small group of cadres Beth picked) of people to evaluate applications and speed them up.
There is a very good way to determine whether Beth Noveck was sincere and acting in good faith in "reforming" patents: there will now be more, not less patents issued. That backlog will be cleared and filled, not killed. We will need to check on this in the coming year to see what's up, as this campaign chiefly took the form of landing some of Beth's co-ideologues and colleagues into the Patent Office or Commerce office in charge of intellectual property where "reforms" could then be achieved by executive fiat where they hadn't by "collaboration".
I hope ultimately the Patent Office didn't graft ideas that in fact are stealth-forms to undo patents as a concept, and would be interested to get a report. It looked to me that having failed to do things like *remove the CIA* from being one of the parties that could get to veto suggestions for declassifications (which was one of her many astounding landmines set under seemingly dull and technical "wikification" and "transparency" exercises), she turned to the federal rules subject because it offered a huge, ripe field for burrowing within and tweaking rules in the direction of her agenda, under the cover of "efficiency" or "innovation" -- and thus undermining the national democratic institutions we have with their separation of powers and checks and balances. Always, and everywhere, that was Beth was up to -- she said openly in an essay some years ago that she wanted to "blow up Congress". Her words: "I don't want to blow up Congress (well, I do, but that's for another day".)
The open government movement has been in part a Trojan horse to undermine representative government, a concept loathed by wired geeks who want to replace it with "collaboration," by which they often mean merely a tribal executive that arbitrarily decides things online *without due process* in the kind of swarming "democratic centralism" that people like Prof. Gabriela Coleman bless as authentic democracy in the thuggish forms it takes online of Anonymous 4channers planning DDOS attacks -- but which is really online warlordism.
The crowdsourcing isn't really a crowd; it's a kind of elite network pushed into power by various maneuverings posing as a crowd, and it can never be a real crowd because this would bring the "birthers and truthers" problem, they say. So under the guise of a democracy that it doesn't ensure through institutions and checks and balances, the tech extremists then push through policies that they say can't be balanced through consensus from the public -- because the public are all birthers and truthers. See how that works?
As the govtech review summarizes the concept of "wiki government":
The book's central theme is that we need to rethink democracy in the digital age. Using technology, Noveck says collaborative democracy can strengthen public decision-making by connecting the power of the many to the work of the few. "The private sector has learned that better decision making requires looking beyond institutionalized centers of expertise," said Noveck. Now it's time for government to do the same. "The future of public institutions demands that we create a collaborative ecosystem with numerous opportunities for those with expertise to engage."
This all sounds lovely at first -- experts on, say, Social Security or health care being brought to help the government on a free basis, outside the hiring and lobbying system, relieving the few staff in Congressional or State Department offices of their mountain of work, generated by the modern world.
But there's a reason why institutionalized centers of expertise exist -- that's what makes them accountable to the public. The "ecosystem" enlisted and unleashed by coders and users of systems with a hacktivist kind of sensibility means politics is decided not through due process and deliberation, but by fiat in tribal sessions that browbeat institutional offices or overthrow them. Of course, the hated lobbyists that the wired left always invoke as their targets (although their big IT bosses are among those lobbyists LOL), do just that -- they pressure. But when they pressure, they have to register. They have to show the payments they've taken from, say, foreign governments or donors.
Not so little cadres -- or tribal swarms -- of people assembled online. Is there even a requirement to get their name and address in a Facebook log-on, or even determine if they are American citizens?
Wikitarians don't want the unwashed. "But as we all know, the Internet can be an amplifier, bringing on mass participation that can overwhelm the lofty goals of participatory democracy," says the govtech reviewer helpfully. Mass participation through the system of representative democracy doesn't "overwhelm" these goals, yet suddenly some people online do! Not to worry, say the geeks, they have an answer: filtration. Says govtech:
Noveck's solution is to design a governance process that sets up an egalitarian, self-selecting mechanism for gathering and evaluating information and transforming raw data into useful knowledge. Much of Wiki Government tells of how the Peer-to-Patent project worked, creating online networks of self-selecting citizen experts and channeling their knowledge and enthusiasm into forms that patent examiners can easily use.
So...Noveck with her radical views sets up the process and gets her friends to populate it. These people then "self-select" the others -- whether by gentle ignoring, or even muting or banning, it's not clear, but the Lord of the Flies model for eliminating challenges and dissent can often be what prevails online. Who does the channel-making? Can people vote "no"? (that's ALWAYS the test on these collectivist capers!).
So I see these "wiki" experiments, while perhaps well-intentioned, as merely an excuse to block real public debate (even as they hide behind "crowd-sourcing") -- and keep it out of Congress, where the debate is at least tethered to elected officials with some accountability to constituents -- and keep it out of the think tank and lobbying system. I'm all for overriding some of that. But I want accountability for the people doing it, too.
When Beth finally locked down comments, I saw it was impossible to play. Either you had to try to get on the network of elites that she was consulting with in building up her posse to push through various pet projects like her patents thing -- or you had to try to leave comments on the blog of Nancy Scola of personaldemocracy.org, one of her ardent fangirlz -- but few people took seriously the problem of Beth Noveck Coming to Power -- she was easily -- and scarily -- able to get a liberal New York Times tech editor to see "trolls" as the enemy needing to be "beaten by wonks" as the good guys without ever questioning that "trolls" may simply be legitimate dissenters.
Oops, Nancy also closed comments on her blog, and made it seem as if Beth's campaign advising and two years were some great act of selfless devotion of public service and now she was merely "cycling out" in some normal fashion. They weren't. One has to ask why she didn't stay the whole 4 years of her president's term. The White House! My God! Why wouldn't you stay in the White House! Why has it become acceptable for various public servants like this to bail after two years?! Why do people no longer find public service attractive, the way the Kennedy generation of figures like Richard Holbrooke did? Do they hope to avoid the taint of policies that will fail?
Answer: Beth was done buffing her resume. There was little more she could accomplish especially post-WikiLeaks. So she left because she had already gained everything there was to gain from that position, and now could return to influencing it anyway with the same people just as she did before -- but without any administrative headaches.
Then there's that MacArthur grant. I guess that's worth leaving the White House for. I do wonder how objective a study one can expect (like the patents project, which was reviewed by her own university, and not other "peers"). That's because the premise of "how digital groups affect institutions" is really about "activism to undermine and replace institutions" in the concept of these activists -- remember, she wants to "blow up Congress" because it's "in the way" -- too conservative or clunky or filled with special interests. That it is still elected and still functioning as one of the three branches of the state is of little interest. She has a vision of crowds -- well, special people that she curates and filters -- coming together to amplify their own point of view and winning with their perspective through force of computer code applied in executive agencies. What she doesn't like is a compromise forged in messy democratic politics in organic institutions like Congress.
I'm troubled by this story in a number of ways. For one, despite my deep critique of Beth Noveck, I'd rather have her in public office, where her actions have to be held to some public scrutiny and accountability, than in the secret conspiracies of universities trying to overthrow democratic institutions with various collectivist ideologies. I also think that public office is a great place for people who have these collectivist ideologies to be forced to face the music of how unviable and even destructive they are, and how much the American people don't fall for them when they erode free speech and begin to become a cover for various special interest groups with agendas. I also am keenly aware that these transparency and wiki and streamlining processes that Beth and other Gov 2.0 ideologues instituted didn't always apply to them. We got a list of all the White House staff salaries out of the "transparency" movement and that was a good thing. That list did *not* include Beth's salary or the salaries of other tech office leadership. Why? Isn't this an absolutely perfect example of the tekkie propensity to sic transparency on others, but figure out how to keep the spotlight off themselves?!
On the other hand, perhaps radical ideologies of the sort that Noveck and Lessig espouse should stay in universities where they don't get inflicted on the body politic?
I don't expect that Beth's "innovative theory" of the Twittering masses (or at least her Facebook friends) drafting legislation along with Congressional staffers online merrily together will be coming to pass soon. There's actually enough online these days -- your congressman's page, sunlight on his lobbyist payments; his voting record; the draft bills; endless blogs on the subject matter -- that you don't have to add to that a Second Life furry sandbox on top. If I, as an expert, say, on human rights in Russia, want to get my views across, I can use email, twitter, blogs, group letters with other activists, polls -- without having to form a cabal online and rewrite policy. I *elected a president*. He *appointed officials in the NSC or embassies or the senior levels of the State Department*. If I don't like those policies (and I don't), I have many ways to get my views across and even mitigate the policy -- along with every other interested stakeholder. Come now, do we REALLY need to make a wiki and allow coders and special interests to have a new wired, accelerated unaccountable way of lobbying stealthily?
Accordingly, I do have a lot of questions for Beth's projects, for wikitarianism in general, and for patents:
PROPOSALS FOR REMEDIES IN THE OPEN GOVERNMENT MOVEMENT
Open government with social media has to be social -- it has to have ordinary people, and not merely elites in it. It has to have effective means for polling and involving public opinion and not fearing it. Those tasks that are seemingly only for experts can still explain themselves in laymen's terms and involve experts outside the coders' narrow circles.
The gravest threat to open society and open government is not government or corporations, but coders and their hacker culture. This culture despises the rule of law and overthrows due process at every turn, even as it establishes rigid code-based solutions that force people into binary limitations of code. So any open government system based on coded platforms simply has to pay attention to the problems of the platform and hacker culture *first*.
o who does the coding for the collaboration platforms? What are their software making philosophies? Are they open source or proprietary? Are they open source zealots unwilling to countenance any proprietary solution? Are they open source zealots who refuse to accept criticism and involvement of users? Are they overly commercialized ventures only rewarding some software companies? Can ordinary citizens without a technical background or power users with sufficient technical knowledge participate *in the software making itself* (I'm a big believer in that part of it)
o who watches those coders after the platform is implemented? Do they serve the community or themselves? Do they bring in causes that aren't part of a democratic consensus and push them on others as "technical matters" that brook no dissent? Do they make up edge cases that aren't mainstream to "provide solutions" for non-existent problems?
o can you vote no? Can you vote yes? Can you vote BOTH yes or no?!
o is there a sign-on system using Facebook or some other real-life name and place identifier and a reputation system? Is participation only anonymous?
o Are comments open? Are they moderated? Are they filtered or curated?
o Are the budgets for the coders, particularly for the "free software" programs that involve expensive consultants endlessly transparent? Are the salaries of permanent staff transparent?
o Has there been buy-in for the platform from Congress and from other interested stakeholders, think-tanks, universities, labour unions, NGOs, etc.
o Does the "egalitarianism" or "self-governing" system involve the brutalities of hacker culture, with a few deciding to ban the many? Or is there an ombudsman system? is there due process? Are there rules? Do these rules look like Roberts Rules of Order, or the standard corporate TOS?
o Does the platform moderator overuse concepts like "troll" or "flame" to in fact chill speech? Are coercive notions of "civility" in fact used to ensure only certain schools of thought prevail?
o Can you express your satisfaction or disatisfaction in polls, comment systems, viable email systems, etc. on the platform?
o Who is framing the questions for debate? Are these cadres behind the scenes or staff, or are they the public at large through a proposal and voting system?
o How are issues of overwhelming and inclusivity debated and managed? Who decides about them?
o On peer patent project: how many patents were handled by this process? How many were refused? On what grounds? How many approved? If there are less approved now than before, why? How is this system monitored for honesty to prevent interest groups (like the "California business model" Silicon Valley tech companies) from hijacking it?
o How many pieces of legislation were passed? How is the effectiveness of their implementation monitored?
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