Monthly Archives: February 2017

Noncooperation and the Latency of Weak Ties

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As Centola and Macy summarize, the key insight of Granovetter’s seminal 1973 work (Granovetter, 1973) is that ties which are “weak in the relational sense – that the relations are less salient or frequent – are often strong in the structural sense – that they provide shortcuts across social topology” (Centola & Macy, 2007). While this remains an important sociological finding, there are important reasons to be wary of generalizing too far: such ‘weak ties’ may not be sufficient for diffusion in complex contagion (Centola & Macy, 2007) and identification of such ties is highly dependent on how connections are defined and measured (Grannis, 2010).

Furthermore, recent studies probing just how far ‘the strength of weak ties’ can be taken allude to another underexplored concern: the latency of ties. For example, Grannis points to the oft glossed-over result of Milgram’s small world experiment (Milgram, 1967): 71% of the chains did not make it to their target. As Milgram explains, “chains die before completion because on each remove a certain portion of participants simply do not cooperate and fail to send the folder. Thus the results we obtained on the distribution of chain lengths occurred within the general drift of a decay curve.” Milgram and later Dodds et al. (Dodds, Muhamad, & Watts, 2003) correct for this decay by including in the average path length an estimation of how long uncompleted paths would be if they had in fact been completed. For his part, Grannis argues that the failure caused by such noncooperation is exactly the point: “it calls into question what efficiency, if any, could be derived from these hypothesized, noncooperative paths” (Grannis, 2010).

I call this a problem of latency because one can imagine that social ties aren’t always reliably activated. Rather, activation may occur as a function of relationship strength and task burden, or may simply vary stochastically. In their global search email task, Dodds et al. find that only 25% of self-registered participants actually initiated a chain, whereas 37% of subsequent participants – those who were recruited by an acquaintance of some sort – did carry on the chain (Dodds et al., 2003). They attribute this difference to the very social relations they are studying: who does the asking matters.

In their survey of non-participants, the authors further find that “less than 0.3% of those contacted claimed that they could not think of an appropriate recipient, suggesting that lack of interest or incentive, not difficulty, was the main reason for chain termination.” Again, this implies that not all asks are equal – the noncomplying participants could have continued the chain, but they chose not to. In economic terms, it seems that the activation cost – the cost of continuing the chain – was greater than the reward for participating.

One can imagine similar interactions in the job-search domain. Passing on information about a job-opening maybe relatively low-cost while actively recommending a candidate for a position may come with certain risk (Smith, 2005). In many ways, the informational nature of a job search is reminiscent of ‘top-of-mind’ marketing: it is good if customers choose your product when faced with a range of options, but ideally they would think of you first; they would chose to purchase your product before even being confronted with alternatives. In the job-search scenario, unemployed people are often encouraged to reach out to as many contacts as they can, in order keep their name top-of-mind so that these ‘weak ties’ – who otherwise may not have thought of them – do forward information when learning of job openings. Granovetter does not examine the job search process in detail, but his findings – that among people who found a new job through a contact, 55.6% saw that contact occasionally while another 27.8% saw that contact only rarely (Granovetter, 1973) – imply that information was most likely diffused by a job-seeker requesting information. In this case, the job seeker had to activate a latent weak tie before receiving its benefit.

Arguably, the concept of latency is built into the very definition of a weak tie – weak ties are weak because their latency makes them easier to maintain than strong, always-active ties. Yet, the latency of weak ties, or more precisely, their activation costs, are generally not considered. In his detailed study of three distinct datasets, Grannis finds that a key problem in network interpretation is that connections’ temporal nature is often over looked (Grannis, 2010). I would argue that a related challenge is that the observed relations are considered to always be active. Using Grannis’ example, there is nothing inherently wrong with the suggestion that ideas may flow from A to C over the course of 40 years; the problem comes in interpreting this as a simple network where C’s beliefs directly trace to A. Indeed, in the academic context, it’s quite reasonable to think that an academic ‘grandparent’ may influence one’s scholarly work – but that influence comes through in some ideas and not others, it comes through connections whose strength waxes and wanes. To consider these links always present, and always active, is indeed to neglect the true nature of the relationship.

Ultimately, Grannis argues that the core problem in many network models is that the phase transitions which govern global network characteristics are sensitive to local-level phenomena: if the average degree is measured to be 1, there will be a giant component. Given this sensitivity, it becomes essential to consider the latency of weak network ties. A candidate who doesn’t activate weak ties may never find a job, and a message-passing task for which participants feel unmotivated may never reach completion. In his pop-science article, Malcolm Gladwell argues that some people just feel an inherent motivation to maintain more social ties than others (Gladwell, 1999). Given such individual variation in number of ties and willingness to activate ties, it seems clear that the latency of weak ties needs further study, otherwise, as Grannis warns, our generalizations could lead to “fundamental errors in our understanding of the effects of network topology on diffusion processes” (Grannis, 2010).

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Centola, D., & Macy, M. (2007). Complex contagions and the weakness of long ties. American journal of sociology, 113(3), 702-734.

Dodds, P. S., Muhamad, R., & Watts, D. J. (2003). An experimental study of search in global social networks. Science, 301(5634), 827-829.

Gladwell, M. (1999). Six degrees of lois weisberg.

Grannis, R. (2010). Six Degrees of “Who Cares?”. American journal of sociology, 115(4), 991-1017.

Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American journal of sociology, 1360-1380.

Milgram, S. (1967). The small world problem. Psychology today, 2(1), 60-67.

Smith, S. S. (2005). “Don’t put my name on it”: Social Capital Activation and Job-Finding Assistance among the Black Urban Poor American journal of sociology, 111(1), 1-57.

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Don’t Miss the Confab Call on Responses to Hate, Feb. 8

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In case you missed our announcement last month, we want to remind the NCDD network to register today for our next Confab Call, this Wednesday, February 8th from 1-2pm Eastern/10-11am Pacific with Not In Our Town (NIOT).Confab bubble image

Not In Our Town is an NCDD member organization that uses film and community-wide dialogue to support towns and schools around the country in formulating a response to hate crimes, bullying, and hate groups. The Confab will feature a presentation from NIOT’s CEO and Excutive Producer Patrice O’Neill on the work they do, how it has changed since the spike in hate crimes since the election, and how the D&D field can support the growing need for conversation on addressing hate and violence in our communities.

You won’t want to miss this opportunity to connect to important work of using dialogue to address. We highly encourage you to register today for this great call!

This call is part of NCDD’s ongoing #BridgingOurDivides campaign that seeks to highlight key resources and methodologies our field can use to address divides that the 2016 election created and exacerbated. The call will be a perfect opportunity to learn about how you can access and use the over 100 of films and discussion guides that NIOT has created to support dialogue and action around dozens of kinds of bullying and hate, all of which can be critical tools for the D&D community to tap into.

We are excited about the possibilities this Confab presents for seeding collaborations. Be sure register today for this great call!

On Violence and Protest

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the role of violence in social movements. Such violence could take many forms, from punching nazis to property damage.

Conventional wisdom among the mainstream left is that such violence isn’t a good tactic: not only is morally problematic, it is typically unsuccessful.

In his biography of Gandhi, Bhikhu Parekh describes Gandhi’s utility argument against violence, which went hand in hand with his moral argument against violence:

Gandhi further argued that violence rarely achieved lasting results. An act of violence was deemed to be successful when it achieved its immediate objectives. However, if it were to be judged by its long-term consequences, our conclusion would have to be very different. Every apparently successful act of violence encouraged the belief that it was the only effective way to achieve the desired goal, and developed the habit of using violence every time ran into opposition. Society thus became used to it and never felt compelled to explore an alternative. Violence also tended to generate an inflammatory spiral. Every successful use blunted the community’s moral sensibility and raised its threshold of violence, so that over time an increasingly larger amount became necessary to achieve the same results.

There are some compelling points in that argument, but it fails to address the larger question: is violence never a justifiable means for social change, either morally or pragmatically?

After all, Gandhi’s level of commitment to non-violence may not be the example we want to follow. In an extreme example of pacifism, Gandhi wrote of Jews in World War II Germany:

And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring [Jews] an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can…The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

In contrast to Gandhi’s view, there are many reasons to think violence in response to genocide may be permissible – or should even be encouraged.

My friend Joshua Miller recently reflected on this question, writing:

…in many ways, the canonization of Gandhi and Martin Luther King have served to create an artificial standard of non-violence that no social movement can ever really achieve and that neither the Civil Rights movement nor the Indian independence movement actually achieved. Plus, if violent repression by the police goes unmentioned in the media but activist violence becomes a regular topic of debate, then it will appear that the only violence is coming from the activists. 

I particularly appreciate his insight regarding the ‘canonization’ of Gandhi and King – they both deserve praise for their work and impacts, but we tend to enshrine them as peaceful activists who could do no wrong; who should be emulated at all costs. Malcolm X, on the other hand, is pushed by the wayside, his story is less told. Yet he did have an important and lasting impact on the American civil rights movement; could King’s pacifism have succeeded without Malcom X’s radicalism?

I have no easy answers to these question; indeed, such easy answers do not exist. But I think we owe it to ourselves to think through these questions – is violent protest ever morally justified? If it can be morally justified at times, is it ever pragmatically justified? Do our collective memories of history really capture what happened, or do we tell ourselves a simpler, softer story – do we only remember the way we wish it had happened?

Perhaps, as Camus wrote, there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.

 

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the question of sacrifice in politics

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Elizabeth Eckford attempting to enter Little Rock School on 4th September, 1957

(Atlanta, en route to Starkville, MS) Sacrifice can be a political act; often politics requires it. Sacrifice would be unnecessary in an ideal society and pointless in a completely static one; but in an unjust society that is subject to change, it is both necessary and powerful. Social movements are fueled by sacrifice. However, sacrifice also presents risks that we must learn to contain.

I’ll consider two cases in this post. Gandhi pledged in 1932 to starve himself to death over an issue related to untouchability. Black parents sent their children to segregated Little Rock schools in 1957 in the face of mob violence. These were acts of sacrifice in the sense that people voluntarily risked something of great value to achieve a political end.

The Gandhi example is fraught. He originally swore to starve in order to prevent Dalits from receiving separate representatives in an all-India legislature. The most charitable interpretation of this rather perplexing stance is nationalist: he wanted everyone to vote simply as an Indian. The great Dalit leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar insisted on separate representation for the so-called Untouchables to prevent them from being dominated by caste Hindus. When he visited the literally starving Gandhi in prison, they negotiated a compromise involving a temporary set-aside of seats for Dalilt. Ambedkar wanted that provision to last for ten years “to stabilise opinion” Gandhi countered:

Five years or my life. Tell your followers that is what Gandhi says and plead my case before them, and if they do not accept this from you surely they do not deserve to be called your followers. My life is in your pocket. I may be a despicable creature, but when the truth speaks through me I am invincible. You have a perfect right to demand cent percent security by statutory safeguards, but from my fiery bed, I beg of you not to insist upon that right. I am here today to ask for a reprieve for my caste Hindu brethren.

Gandhi used a threat to end his own life (and thereby produce an enormous emotional upheaval in the subcontinent) in order to limit a provision intended to help the least advantaged Indians. Soon, the Mahatma converted his fast into an attack on the very principle of Untouchability, but he still used a threat to sacrifice himself to defeat Ambedkar, who was never persuaded on the merits yet found Gandhi politically “invincible.”

The Little Rock school desegregation campaign is far more attractive, yet Hannah Arendt famously disapproved of it. Partly, that was because she interpreted US racial conflict from the perspective of a formerly assimilated German Jew who had concluded that Jews would never be accepted in Europe; thus she leaned toward separatism rather than integration. She also misunderstood race and racism in the US. But most importantly, her republican political ideals caused her to overlook the value of sacrifice.

In a republic, citizens are both rulers and ruled (to use Aristotle’s definition). They make joint, binding decisions about life-and-death matters after airing their differences in public fora. Sometimes, a citizen must pay a high price—for instance, being drafted and then killed in a battle for the republic. But that is not a “sacrifice” in the sense of an individual, voluntary act. It’s the outcome of a joint decision made through law.

A core republican idea is “non-domination.” No citizen may just tell any other citizen what to do. Citizens are governed by general laws that must be defended with general arguments. Therefore, the paradigmatic examples of sacrifice for Christians—God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac; God sacrificing His only-begotten son for love of the world—are not models for republican politics.

People are either citizens of a given republic or not. Arendt strongly opposed statelessness because it made refugees into citizens of nowhere. She thought that children and adolescents were not citizens because they couldn’t rule. In “Reflections on Little Rock,” she describes schooling as preparation for “future citizenship.” Because children are not current but future citizens, to ask them to act politically is to expect them to be ruled without ruling.

However, the most startling part of the whole business was the Federal decision to start integration in, of all places, the public schools. It certainly did not require too much imagination to see that this was to burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve. I think no one will find it easy to forget the photograph reproduced in newspapers and magazines throughout the country, showing a Negro girl, accompanied by a white friend of her father, walking away from school, persecuted and followed into bodily proximity by a jeering and grimacing mob of youngsters. The girl, obviously was asked to be a hero–that is, something neither her absent father nor the equally absent representatives of the NAACP felt called upon to be. It will be hard for the white youngsters, or at least those among them who outgrow their present brutality, to live down this photograph which exposes so mercilessly their juvenile delinquency. The picture looked to me like a fantastic caricature of progressive education which, by abolishing the authority of adults, implicitly denies their responsibility for the world into which they have borne their children and refuses the duty of guiding them into it. Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world?” And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the schoolyards?

Arendt didn’t use the word “sacrifice” in this passage because it was not yet part of her vocabulary. Ralph Ellison took her to task on that point in an interview with Robert Penn Warren:

That’s right – you’re forgetting sacrifice, and the idea of sacrifice is very deeply inbred in Negroes. This is the thing – my mother always said I don’t know what’s going to happen to us if you young Negroes don’t do so-and-so-and-so. The command went out and it still goes out. You’re supposed to be somebody, and it’s in relationship to the group. This is part of the American Negro experience, and this also means that the idea of sacrifice is always right there. This is where Hannah Arendt is way off in left base in her reflections on Little Rock. She has no conception of what goes on in the parents who send their kids through these lines. The kid is supposed to be able to go through the line – he’s a Negro, and he’s supposed to have mastered those tensions, and if he gets hurt then this is one more sacrifice.

To her credit, Arendt wrote to Ellison, “It is precisely the ideal of sacrifice that I didn’t understand.”

Danielle Allen, in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, rightly makes the dispute between Arendt and Ellison a central issue for democratic theory. Allen argues that sacrifice is a characteristic political act, because even belonging to a community requires giving things up, and changing it usually carries a higher price. Although formally we all sacrifice by belonging to a community, the actual level of sacrifice always differs very unfairly. Unequal sacrifice is thus a fundamental reality; it calls for specific responses, such as acknowledgement and recompense.

I agree; political theory must address and encompass sacrifice. Acts of sacrifice also have specific cultural and religious resonances, different in each tradition, and these are resources for the world’s oppressed people. The trouble is that sacrifice is also coercive and can overwhelm deliberation. As with many aspects of politics, what we need is balance.

Bridging Our Divides with NCL’s All-America Conversations

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NCDD members might want to check out the All-America Conversations initiative being hosted by the National Civic League, an NCDD member organization. NCL is encouraging communities across the country to host short, public conversations focused on questions of how we can begin #BridgingOurDivides, showing that our country can still work together. They are providing a toolkit and webinar training series to help conversation hosts plan and convene these events, and we encourage practitioners in our network to consider hosting one yourself. You can learn more in the NCL announcement below or by learning more here.

All-American Conversations: Bridging Divides. Building Community.

National Civic League is launching All-America Conversations to demonstrate that locally, we are still able to work together across dividing lines to create stronger, more equitable communities.

Communities that host All-America Conversations will:

  • Better understand residents’ aspirations for the community
  • Learn how residents talk about and see community challenges and divisions
  • Gain clear insight into what small actions would give people confidence that we can work together across dividing lines
  • Help residents engage with one another in a productive conversation
  • Demonstrate a commitment to inclusive engagement

All-America Conversations are designed to help cities and other groups understand residents’ aspirations for the community, the divisions facing the community and, most importantly, the small, specific actions that give people a sense of confidence that we can work across dividing lines.

The format/template for All-America Conversations is flexible and scalable. Some communities will decide to focus on engaging underrepresented residents about their specific concerns and perspectives. Others will hold conversations designed to bring together people on different sides a specific divide to talk with one another and explore shared values. Some communities will use these questions and conversations as part of a large public meeting with breakout conversations.

Conversation Resources and Support

All-America Conversation Toolkit

Everything necessary to hold a productive and meaningful conversation – just add residents.

The toolkit walks you through:

  • How to identify whom you want to engage and how to recruit participants
  • Where to hold the conversations
  • How to set up the room
  • Selecting and preparing facilitators and note takers
  • What questions to ask
  • How to adapt the conversation guide to different types of meetings

The kit also includes a tips for facilitators and note takers, a note taking tool, ground rules, a sign-in sheet, sample recruitment letter, sample email to engage the media around these conversations.

Download the Toolkit and other resources

Support and Coaching Calls

NCL is hosting a series of 1-hour conference calls to provide support for communities or organizations hosting All-America Conversations. Calls will include a brief overview of the purpose and potential of these conversations and available resources. The main focus is providing local communities with the support, coaching and guidance necessary to make the conversations work for them. So, each call will include dedicated time for support and coaching from NCL experts to help you adjust the conversations to fit with existing efforts, your local context, staff resources and community needs.

You can watch the Jan. 31st, 2017 toolkit webinar here:

You can find the original version of this National Civic League announcement at www.nationalcivicleague.org/all-america-conversations

How to Move from an Extractive to a Generative Economy?

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One of the big, unanswered questions in our political economy today is “what constitutes value?”  Conventional economics sees value as arising from market exchange and expressed as prices. A very simple, crude definition of value.

But how, then, to account for the many kinds of value that are intangible, social or ecological in nature, and without prices – activities such as child-rearing and eldercare, ecological stewardship, online peer production, and commoning?  There is an urgent need to begin to make these forms of value explicitly visible in our political economy and culture.

Two new reports plunge into this complicated but essential topic.  The first one – discussed below -- is called “Value in the Commons Economy:  Developments in Open and Contributory Value Accounting,” The 49-page report by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Niaros focuses on socially created value on digital networks. It was co-published yesterday by the Heinrich Boell Foundation and P2P Foundation. 

Another important report on how to reconceptualize value – an account of a three-day Commons Strategies Group workshop on this topic – will be released in a few days and presented here.

The P2P Foundation report declares that “society is shifting from a system based on value created in a market system (through labor and capital) to one which recognizes broader value streams,” such as the social and creative value generated by online communities.  The rise of these new types of value – i.e., use-value generated by commoners working outside of typical market structures – is forcing us to go beyond the simple equation of price = value.

Michel Bauwens and sociologist Adam Arvidsson call this the “value crisis” of our time.  Commons-based peer production on open platforms is enabling people to create new forms of value, such as open source software, wikis, sharing via social networks, and creative collaborations.  Yet paradoxically, only a small minority of players is able to capture and monetize this value.  Businesses like Facebook, Google and Twitter use their proprietary platforms to strictly control the terms of sharing; collect and sell massive amounts of personal data; and pay nothing to commoners who produced the value in the first place.

This is highly extractive, and not (re)generative.  So what can be done?  How could open platforms be transformed to bolster the commons and serve as a regenerative social force? 

The P2P Foundation report is a welcome splash of clarity on a topic that is often obscured by deceptive terms like the “sharing economy” and mystifications about the structural realities of digital cooperation. 

The Bauwens/Niaros report starts with a section analyzing the theoretical nature of the “value crisis” we are experiencing, before moving on to three powerful case studies of alternative value-systems pioneered by the Enspiral network, Sensorica and Backfeed.  The report concludes with a series of policy recommendations for changing the economic and political infrastructure. 

The Value Crisis

The real roots of the “value crisis” stem from the fact that “contemporary capitalist value-practices are no longer able to determine what value is,” write Bauwens and Niaros.  Stock market valuations are notoriously unable to attribute a reliable (financial) value to a company because so much value resides in social intangibles – the goodwill of consumers, brand reputations, and social sharing.  Stock analysts can try to add up the resale value of factory buildings, equipment and office furniture, but there is no reliable, consensus method for assigning a value to all the social beliefs and activities that make a company valuable.

Such a delicious irony!  Contemporary capitalism loves that it can freely appropriate software code, personal data, user-generated information, videos, etc. – a shareable cultural abundance that the world has never seen before.  Yet investors have great difficulty in monetizing and commodifying this value.  It is hard to make abundant social value artificially scarce and therefore saleable.

So we have the spectacle of commoners having trouble protecting the use-value that they create, which businesses are aggressively trying to channel into extractive market production and consumption.  (“Extractive” because companies want this value for free, and don’t want to reward the social communities.)  And yet even with their great extractive powers (lots of capital, copyright laws, terms of service contracts, etc.), large companies are finding that it is difficult to develop reliable flows of profit.

Toward Value Sovereignty

The focus of the P2P Foundation report is how to move from an extractive digital economy to a regenerative one.  Hence the focus on how three digital communities are trying to protect their “value practices” and create a “value sovereignty” beyond the pressures of capitalist markets.  These communities are trying to achieve a “reverse co-optation” by generating value flows from the old economy to the new, and by developing new value-accounting systems to properly honor social contributions.

One such project is Enspiral, a highly participatory, mission-driven coalition of entrepreneurs and other entities, many of them based in New Zealand.  “Enspiral calls itself an ‘open cooperative’ because of its commitment to both the production of commons and an orientation to the common good,” write Bauwens and Niaros. One of its innovations is the use of “capped returns,” which puts a limit on how much an investor in the Enspiral infrastructure can receive in return.  As the report notes:

….the shares issued by a company would be coupled by a matching call option which would require the repurchase of the shares at an agreed upon price.  Once all shares have been repurchased by the company, it will be free to reinvest all future profits to its social mission. Through this mechanism, external and potentially extractive capital is ‘subsumed’ and disciplined to become ‘cooperative capital.’”

Sensorica is an open collaborative network that is experimenting with new ways to combine commons and market forms.  It has an elaborate “value accounting system” for keeping track of its members' contributions to market-based projects. This system is then used to allocate revenues in proportion to each member’s role. Is Sensorica a new kind of (market-driven) co-op or a new type of (mission-based) commons?  Maybe a hybrid.

A third case study looks at Backfeed, a production community that relies on the blockchain ledger as an infrastructure for decentralized production.  Backfeed is more of an aggregation of individuals working together to sell to markets, than a commons.  Still, the cooperative organizational structure has the potential for making it capable of acting as a “value sovereign” community. Many others are exploring how the blockchain might enable cooperative control over a community's resources, whether for sale in the market or for internal use-value.

Policy Recommendations

The P2P Foundation report concludes with a series of policy recommendations that would help protect the kinds of value regimes described in the case studies.  It proposes open cooperatives to create new types of livelihoods and the use of “reciprocity-based licensing” to protect against value capture by capitalist enterprises and foster solidarity among generative coalitions.  The report also calls for open supply chains and common network resource planning to help promote an open source “circular economy”(e.g., “design global, manufacture local”).  

Bauwens and Niaros envision new sorts of political collaboration to provide a counter-power to the old economy and advocacy for peer production communities.  Local “chambers of commons” and “commons-oriented entrepreneurial associations” are needed, not to mention new forms of transnational collaboration, they urge.

At a time when the political left has trouble moving beyond Keynesian economic models and the management of neoliberalism’s many crises, Bauwens and Niaros point to some new models of commons-based peer production that could help transform the terms of engagement.