Family Road Trips and Feudal Crowdsourcing

Many people from large countries remember being forced by their families to travel with them on long road trips, or are young enough to still have that prospect hanging over their heads. If you are one of those people and you are or were also in the habit of chatting with your online friends while stuck interminably in the backseat (or worse having to ride bitch), you'll find that off- and online are not just a little alike. These striking similarities may point to something deeper in our human psyche. In writing this analogy, I hope to help my friends who have been, are, or will be in a similar predicament to what I currently am in now, understand what we here at the Bibliotheca Anonoma call "feudal crowdsourcing".

The west has been tamed. Average users of the Internet never see the utopia the Cyberspace Declaration of Independence promises them. Instead, we call the system they live their online lives in feudal crowdsourcing. The "feudal" part comes from the fact that there are kings (corporations like Google, Facebook, etc.), lords (people who run groups, "servers", etc.), knights (users to whom the lords give official or unofficial power or influence), and serfs (ordinary users). The "crowdsourcing" part comes from the fact that it is free and easy to be a lord, no personal services to the king being necessary as was the case in medieval times, and lords are, consequentially, numerous.

On this family vacation, the various governments through whose jurisdictions we pass are the kings. They affect the lives of everyone on this trip without actively interfering with it. They make the trip possible, by building the roads on which we drive and providing other amenities for our convenience, and they also establish regulations. They set speed limits, charge for admission to parks and other attractions, and require identification for checking into hotels, but they do not decide when we are to eat or sleep, where we will visit on a particular day, or how we will spend our free time in our hotel rooms. As no one on the trip can affect what they do, their acts are essentially acts of nature, and to us just as capricious, unpredictable, and inescapable.

Kings are equally remote from both the lords and serfs. They wield immense power, but more often their power is enforced by the knowledge that it exists. Their actions affect few directly, but the threat thereof coerces all but a few into compliance with their orders. It is the corporations that have contributed the funds needed to create and defend the platforms on which users socialize; and it is the corporations that demand agreement to restrictive terms and conditions as a prerequisite to using these platforms.

On this family vacation, Dad is the lord. He plans the trip, sets times to wake up and assemble, and decides which hotels to stay at. He pays for the gas, the food, and the hotels. He and Mom take turns driving. He scolds stragglers and berates misbehavior. There are many like him, as the traffic rather rudely reminds us.

The users whom the corporations allow to run communities are in a similar position. These users are essentially absolute monarchs over their personal fiefdoms, for there are far too many of them for the kings to directly supervise. They can choose and fire whomever they want to help them run communities. They can make rules and kick out people for violating the rules (or because they don't like these people). They can remove posts at will.

On this family vacation, Mom is a knight. She argues with Dad over his choices, sometimes forcefully. But once they reach a compromise, she defends it just as forcefully, if not more. She does our laundry whenever we stay in a hotel with a laundromat and brings us fresh fruit every night. There are many like her too, one assumes, but only one of her is on our trip with us.

The relationship between knights and lords is more akin to what a historian would recognize as feudal. Knights are called "moderators", "operators", "administrators", and other words signifying power and responsibility. Lords are able to exercise a personal and superintending control over what knights do, for the knights are few in number and more often inadequate than excessive. They can choose how much of their powers to delegate to their knights. They can appoint knights as they want and fire them as they wish.

On this family vacation, Grandma (Dad's mother) and I are mere serfs. We have no control over where we'll be or what we'll be doing at a particular moment, and we are lucky if we have knowledge of it immediately before. However, the status of serf also has its benefits. We don't have to spend any of our own money, and Dad handles our social interaction (buying tickets, asking for directions, etc.) for us, sparing us expense and embarrassment. Our transportation and accommodation are taken care of for us.

Ordinary users are in a similar position. They may lack the technical expertise to operate servers themselves, or the political know-how to run communities themselves (and believe me, politics is involved.) They accept having little or no say in their day-to-day governance because to them, not having to make hard choices or do hard things is worth having one made or done wrongly from time to time. When decisions they disagree with are made, their disagreement can be passionate, but it is with the decisions themselves, and not with the system under which they have been made, which is why feudal crowdsourcing has survived mostly unimpaired until the present.

The theory of the legitimacy of democratic states states (pun not intended) that in return for popular support, financial and military, governments protect the lives, property, and other rights of the people. Yet lords neither pay for nor help to defend legally (the equivalent of military service) the running of the servers which host their fiefs. Theoretically, lords are the tools of kings. Practically, kings can't keep track of, never mind watch, what's in their toolboxes. Here, then, is the first major mismatch between feudal crowdsourcing and the traditional model of government as an exchange of loyalty for security.

This mismatch is carried downward. The serfs have a similar relationship, or lack thereof, with the lords and knights. Serfs can't pay for something that's free in the first place, or fight for something they can lose as easily as they got.

The lord-knight relationship is the only one that remains sort of functional. This is because getting someone to do something for you is almost implicit in the concept of society, and is represented as the common-law agent-principal and attorney-client relationships. These are manifestly not reciprocal relationships like the government-citizen one is, for agents receive only such powers as they need to do their duty, and are under an obligation to put themselves strictly in their clients' shoes and act only for their clients' benefit. Bureaucracies rely on this principle and the lord-knight relationship is no exception. Lords are free to appoint, command, and remove knights; knights have no rights of their own arising from this relationship.

Yet bureaucrats are supposed to be public servants, as amenable to the needs of their masters as they are obedient to the orders of their superiors. In a democratic state, direction of bureaucrats by elected leaders unites, or at least reduces the conflict between, the two contrary obligations. The knight-serf relationship does not recognize the former at all. As a consequence, serfs have no way to point out, let alone correct, maladministration on the part of knights. Small wonder that abuse of power has been the bane of Internet communities large and small.

The king-knight and king-serf relationships are mediated by the lords; they are defective because of the faults in the king-lord relationship.

Feudal crowdsourcing is a showcase of government in the absence of the exchange principle. Whatever scruples or qualms we might have about its morals or ethics, we must consider its practicalities, or why it works. However vigorously we criticize its faults, we must recognize the merits that provide the reason it has survived up to now.

Feudal crowdsourcing gives every class of users something. The kings get to wield immense power over what is said and done on their platforms, and the subjects to that power to more or less voluntarily submit to it. The lords get to rule a community at no expense and little effort and skill. The knights get power over serfs without even that minimum of effort and skill, simply by currying favor with the lord. The serfs get to socialize with each other for no more than the cost of an Internet connection despite physical distance.

Until the majority of users realize that their problems stem from the system of feudal crowdsourcing, not just from whoever occupies the position of king, lord, or knight for the time being, there may be temporary respites, but no real change. But serfs will not move when there is nothing to move to that provides the benefits of feudal crowdsourcing with less costs to them. The maxim that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others may well apply to feudal crowdsourcing when it governs general-purpose communities.

Even anons, who are justly proud of their lack of kings, still have named lords and knights. The problems of the king-lord relationship are eliminated but those of the knight-serf relationship remain; instead of being powerless subjects of a despotism we are now disenfranchised citizens of a republic, allowed to watch the game but not play in it.

Feudal crowdsourcing divides Internet users into kings, lords, knights, and serfs. The king-lord and knight-serf relationships are marked by an absence of responsibility on those who wield power and an absence of support from those who are subject to it. The lord-knight relationship functions, but not to the benefit of serfs. Serfs accept feudal crowdsourcing because of a lack of alternatives with its genuine merits. Eliminating kings removes one dysfunctional relationship but retains all the others.

Feudal crowdsourcing is so ubiquitous and the question of an alternative to it so intractable that we must work within it to improve it. But it is clear that if nothing is done about it the station wagon of the Internet will continue to hurtle along on the road to doom.