(The multi-month hiatus here on Monomorphic has been due to me working on my thesis. I am now able to, briefly, return to this and other indulgences.)

Life presupposes taking responsibility. It presupposes investing people, objects and matters around you with your concern.

In particular, democratic society presupposes that we all take full, in some sense, responsibility for society itself, its decision making and its future.

However, he who lacks information about some matter cannot take responsibility for it. And thus we often defer to authorities in practice. Authorities allow us to specialise our understanding, which increases our net ability to understand as a collective, assuming that we have sufficiently well functioning interpersonal communication.

There are whole categories of problems that routinely are assigned to specific, predefined authorities and experts; for instance legal matters, constitutional matters, whether some person is mentally ill, medical matters, nuclear and chemical hazards, and so on. Fields where some degree of extensive training is generally required. (However, under the right conditions, these authorities could probably also be called into question by the public opinion.) The opposite is those categories of problems that are routinely assigned to “public opinion” and all of its voices and modulating contraptions and devices, its amplifiers, dampeners, filters, switches and routing mechanisms.

Responsibility aside, in order to maximise an individual’s prospects for life, and by extension society’s prospects for life, it seems important that the individual possess just the right knowledge that they need in their situation. Adding more knowledge is not always a benefit; some kinds of knowledge can be entirely counterproductive. Nietzsche showed this (“On the use and abuse of history for life”), and we can easily apply the idea of computational complexity to see how having access to more information would make it harder to make  decisions.

This is especially true for some kinds of knowledge: knowledge about potential grave dangers, serious threats, monumental changes threatening to take place. Once we have such knowledge we cannot unlearn it, even if it is absolutely clear that we cannot act on it and that we do not have the competence to assess the situation fully. It  takes effort and an act of will to fully disregard a threat on the basis of one’s own insufficient competence.

On the other hand, knowledge about opportunities, about resources, and about problems that one is able to, or could become able to deal with, would generally be helpful and not harmful. However, even this could be harmful if the information is so massive as to turn into noise.

Even disregarding these kinds of knowledge, one of the basic assumptions of democracy – that each individual takes full responsibility for society – seems to be an imperative that is designed never to be fulfilled. An imperative designed to be satisfied by patchworks of individual decisions and “public opinion”, and whatever information fate happens to throw in one’s way. Out of a basic, healthy understanding of their own limitations, individuals generally assume that the democratic imperative to know and to take responsibility was never meant to be taken seriously anyway, but one does one’s best to match one’s peers in appearing to do so.

It seems to me that the questions we must ask and answer are about the proper extent of responsibility, and the proper extent of knowledge, for each individual. For the individual, taking on no responsibility seems detrimental to life; taking on full responsibility for all problems in the world right now, here today, would also be an impossibility. There would be such a thing as a proper extent of responsibility. One’s initial knowledge and abilities would inform this proper extent of responsibility, and the two might properly expand and shrink together, rather than expand and shrink separately.

In a democratic society, in so far as one wants to have one, we should ask: what is the proper level of responsibility that society should expect from each individual, and what level should the individual expect from himself as an ideal?

More generally, empirical studies of how public opinion functions and how democracies function in practice are needed. It is inappropriate to judge and critique democracies based on their founding ideals when the democratic practice differs sharply from those ideals – as inappropriate as it is to critique and judge economies based on the presumption that classical economic principles apply to economic practice in the large.

Reason can be understood as man’s ability to think according to precise rules. Logic is one such set of rules: by using axioms and inference rules, we are able to generate vast arrays of valid statements. For instance, we can attempt to prove mathematical truths, or we can work out how to place furniture in a room, or the quickest way of carrying out five different errands in an afternoon.

Two essential functions of reason are finding solutions and validating solutions. In finding solutions, sometimes we apply reason as a search process, that is, we work through a number of combinations until we find one that works, or until we give up. By deduction we can reduce the size of the search space, and sometimes deduction will lead to a result without any search being necessary at all. In validating solutions, we might obtain the proposed solution from anywhere, possibly from outside reason itself, and then, again it is sometimes a search process: we may attempt to find contradictions that invalidate the proposed solution, and we do not always find them immediately. This would be validation by absence of contradictions, but we might also validate a solution affirmatively by using it in a problem. For instance, we can verify that 7 is the square root of 49 by computing 7*7, and it would be useless to verify it by testing that 7*7 does not equal any of the values 1,2,3…48,50,51,52… infinity.

Reasoning is a slow, tedious process, and it can only consider so many possible solutions in a given amount of time. But it is reliable, and the results of different pieces of reasoning can often be composed to yield a larger, consistent result. But it is clear that our minds have other ways of functioning as well, with other strengths and weaknesses. In particular, it seems that reasoning is essentially a reactive process. It reacts to a given problem with given constraints and rules of inference. But it seems to be unable to create. Creativity appears to always come from extralogical, extra-reasonable places. Creativity in the spontaneous sense of a child drawing a picture with crayons, or a novelist writing a book, or an orator using a particularly persuasive combination of words that captures a fleeting feeling, or a commuter taking a different route home from work, out of curiosity. The distinction is not always clear-cut: a decision like choosing the colour of a wallpaper could be done both using “principles” with which one reasons logically, or using a spur of the moment feeling about what is good. It is clear, though, that the two can interact very productively: often a complex mental activity needs a dialogue between reason and extra-reason, and not just in the sense that extra-reason produces a suggestion that reason validates. This seems to be the danger with excessive reliance on rationality and scientific skepticism, then – it risks shutting out the essential extralogical factor and reducing decision making to searching, or from another viewpoint, it risks invalidating the most powerful search heuristic of all.

It seems as if there is a parallel, of sorts, with modern democracy in this distinction. Democracy at the national level, too, is a reactive form of decision making today. It is true that groups of a small or moderate size sometimes can create things collectively, and when they do, it seems to be the case that the form of the group enables individuals to take turns in influencing the group and being responsible towards it: the individuals make serial contributions that layer on top of each other to form the collective contribution. But voters in a national democracy do not have a format that allows this process to take place across the entire group, and the scale is too great. Those who create proposals are smaller subgroups or elites, and the voters are reduced to playing one of the roles that reason can play: affirm or reject proposals. In fact, not even this, since they are typically not asked to affirm every proposal – they are able to stage a revolution if their discontent becomes tremendously large, and otherwise they only have the ability to voice rejection every four years or so. (The exceptional case where very large groups can create something collectively would be when they share a common sentiment very well, for instance in the event of a national crisis.)

The seat of creativity is ultimately in the individual, and not in the collective. When democracies create agendas, goals, projects and proposals, they are not acting democratically, but channeling individual elements within.

Various technologies have come out of academic experiments, volunteer work and government sponsored research to assist with encrypted communication. PGP/GnuPG and SSH are classic mainstays. Onion routing, as implemented in the TOR system, is an effective way of concealing the true origin and destination of data being sent around. Darknet systems like the I2P project aim to build a complete infrastructure for an entirely new kind of Internet, piggybacking on the old one but with anonymity and encryption as first class fundamental features.

I think we are only at the start of a coming era of political conflicts centered around communications technology, and that more and more issues will have to be ironed out in the coming years and decades. The stakes are high. On one hand control and political stability, on the other hand individual rights and democratic progress. This is not new. One thing that I think is potentially new and interesting though, is how mathematics and computer science ought to become increasingly sensitive and political in the coming years.

Today disciplines like genetics and stem cell research are considered controversial research areas by some people since they touch on the very foundations of what we think of as life. Weapons research of all kinds is considered controversial for obvious reasons, and the development of a weapon on the scale of nuclear bombs would completely shift the global power structure.  One fundamental building block of communications control is the ability to encrypt and to decrypt. These abilities are ultimately limited by the frontiers of mathematical research. Innovations such as the Skein hash function directly affect the cryptographic power balance.

Most of the popular varieties of encryption in use today can be overcome, given that the adversary has sufficient computing power and time. In addition, human beings often compromise their keys, trust the wrong certificates, or act in ways that diminish the security that has been gained. Encryption is not absolute unless the fact that something has been encrypted has been perfectly hidden. Rather, it is a matter of economics, of making it very cheap to encrypt data,and very expensive for unintended receivers to decrypt it.

It is not possible to freeze encryption at a certain arbitrary level, or to restrict the use of it. Computers are inherently general purpose, and software designed for one purpose can almost always be used for another. If the situation is driven to its extreme, we might identify two possible outcomes: either general purpose computers are forbidden or restricted, or uncontrolled, strongly encrypted communication becomes the norm. Christopher Kullenberg has touched on this topic in Swedish.

Those who would rather not see a society where widespread encryption is commonplace would perhaps still want to have what they see as desirable effects of computerisation. In their ideal world they would pick and choose what people can do with computers, in effect giving a list of permitted and prohibited uses. But this is not how general purpose computers work. They are programmable, and people can construct software that does what they want. If the introduction of non-authorised software somehow is prohibited, and all applications must be checked by some authority, applications can still usually be used for purposes they were not designed for. This generality of purpose simply cannot be removed from computers without making them useless – at least that is how it seems today. It seems that it would take a new fundamental model of computation that selectively prohibits certain uses is needed in order to make this happen. (In order to make sure that this kind of discovery is not put to use by the “other camp”, those of us who believe in an open society should try to find it, or somehow establish the fact that it cannot be constructed.)

Mathematics now stands ever more closely connected with political power. Mathematical advances can almost immediately increase or decrease the resistance to information flow (given that somebody incorporates the advances into usable software). The full consequences of this are something we have yet to see.

One of the central ideas of the manifesto is that our relation to music is dependent on physical presence and responsibility. Physical presence as opposed to the illusion that distances and places are made irrelevant by the internet and digital communications. Responsibility as opposed to the idea of mindlessly shuffling through a very large or infinite archive of recorded music. One of the ways in which music conveys something is when I choose music to play to somebody else, and I take responsibility for the effects of the music on that person or on a group of people.

Fleischer constructs the idea of a “postdigital situation” and holds it up as a model for how music is to be valued, critiqued, understood, and, essentially, how it is to take place, or come to matter. The postdigital situation is constrained by a physical space where music is being performed and listened to, where responsibility relations exist and evolve, and where bodies are set in motion. The digital world, the internet without boundaries, can be a means of gathering people in such a space and informing it, but it does not replace it. The “postdigital” goes beyond the naive idea of the digital, which ignores places and crowds.

Olle Olsson at SICS has also discussed this book in English. More to come!

Much later, when I was a student in London, I was subject to budget constraints and went for the cheapest flight whenever possible. Accordingly I found myself flying with an Irish airline, Ryanair, quite a lot. This enterprise is marked by its grisly yellow and dark blue colour scheme and continuous experimentation in lowered flight standards, comfort and safety, all for the sake of lower prices. For a 1-2 hour flight between England and Sweden it was fully acceptable.

Recently I have been flying between Japan and Sweden quite a bit. The intercontinental flight can last more than ten hours, and takes on quite a different character from short flights. Some of the essential absurdities of any flight journey become increasingly difficult to ignore during this time period.

Firstly, there is the fact that the airplane that more than a hundred passengers ride in is a sealed off, highly fragile, mobile cross-section of society and a habitat for human beings. Airplanes need continuous replacement, draining and replenishment of food, waste, excrement, water, fuel and electricity. The air pressure and temperature inside the cabin are artificially maintained. The similarities with an imagined future biodome on the moon are not a few. What happens if an airplane has to land on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean and doesn’t have enough fuel to fly back, or there is some kind of technical problem? All of these buffered flows which the airplane must always replenish would be interrupted, and our very lives are hooked up to those flows.

In addition, hundreds of people are placed very close to each other for an extended period of time with minimal lateral separation (although there is some longitudinal separation in the form of seat rows). A certain neuroticism is provoked. We become hyper-aware of our neighbours and what they do, what they talk about, how they dress and what habits they have. We try our best not to notice. And this lattice, this packing of people, is surveyed from above by the panoptic eyes of the flight stewards and hostesses. Observation not only from above but also from peers becomes essential in maintaining order in a closed-off society where governmental violence cannot reach and the usual norms might easily be violated. Security breaches are to the greatest possible extent preempted by the pre-flight security theatre, and what remains of risk is contained by observation and observability effects.

This pressurised air and pressurised micro-society is spiced up, or muddled, slightly by the increasingly confused roles of the stewards and hostesses. In the jet set era, the air hostess was an object of attraction, an apple of the eyes of businessmen, an icon of liberty who had authority but no doubt also a certain intoxicating effect which helped to pacify. Today she is more clearly authoritarian, but the old role has not quite been erased from people’s minds. Something oedipal threatens to take place. Is this person who serves me food a nurse, a security guard, a mother as well as a possible lover? The neuroticism of the family extended into international airspace. All authority figures merged into one. Male stewards only slightly less confusing.

Fortunately airlines are very happy to serve up small doses of wine and beer to take the edge off the situation. Flying is absurd, but for the moment we have no other way of getting around.

But even though the Internet is built on a decentralized architecture, it also supports applications/services that are highly centralized in their architecture and in their intended use. Google and Facebook are two very famous such applications. On the other extreme are applications that might be called P2P, including notorious file sharing systems such as Bittorrent, and also simple email (which was designed for decentralized use but is becoming heavily centralized with services like Gmail).

In recent days there’s been much discussion about Facebook’s role, particularly since it has been taking more and more liberties with the vast amounts of data about it users that it holds, scaling back the notions of privacy and integrity as they see fit. Many people are calling for decentralized alternatives to Facebook to rear their heads, and I suppose people have been calling for decentralized search engines as well for some time.

Much seems to be at stake here. What’s the future direction of the internet? A few giants holding all the data, monopolising certain functions, or a distributed network of peers, creating functionality together? The debate is ideologically charged and could be mapped into a big government/small government discussion, although I think it would be fruitless to do so. What is certain is that radically different applications can be created using the centralized/decentralized models and that it is rarely a case of merely “porting” an app from one architecture to another, the way you port an application from C to Java. On an abstract level, the two models could serve as substrates for the same functionalities (such as social network services), but the concrete implementations would have very different characteristics.

Do we create centralized applications because our legal systems, property rights systems, and so on, have not evolved at the same pace as our infrastructure, so that our tendencies, habits and ideals from a brick-and-mortar world are preserved in the world of fiber and switches, appearing ever more outdated?

In Sweden this debate has been especially pronounced recently with companies like Flattr being firmly on the side of decentralized models. Flattr is trying to be a universal donation system for content on the internet, and the vision behind it is a large number of decentralized creators of “content” (which are themselves consumers).

I’m not sure which model will win in the long run. I prefer to think that both models have a role to play and that they can coexist nicely. But lately it seems as if the centralized model has had a bit too much momentum. Let’s dig deeper into the decentralizing potential of the internet!