#structurelessness

[haggishlyhagging]

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power, and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness—and that is not the nature of a human group.

This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smoke screen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is curtailed to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

-Joreen, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ in Radical Feminism, Koedt et al (eds.)

[asfaltics]

the tyranny of structurelessness

AC6262, 15 January 2019

foreground ex The Anthropocene : The Human Epoch (2018) to the right, one row forward, ex Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018)

epigram from an (unknown) neighbor's reading, the phrase being coined by Jo Freeman ca 1970 her text here; see also

—

something similar (2011)  

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

FORMAL AND INFORMAL STRUCTURES

“Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group. This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites.”

-  Jo Freeman aka Joreen, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Originally in The Second Wave, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1972.

[an-ephemeral-blog]

Openly structured communities

If someone asks me, “What is open source software?”, I have an obvious answer: “Software that is licensed as open source and makes its source code available for users to review, modify and share.”  Ditto “What is open science?”, to which I’d respond: “Science that is made available to review by anybody and available to reproduce by anyone with the necessary skills and equipment.” 

It’s important to note that open source software and open science can be created by ‘closed’ communities.  A secretive company that makes all of its employees sign NDAs could create open source software and “throw it over the wall” periodically to users, ignoring all bug reports and feature requests.  An elite group of researchers could work in isolation and only after finishing publish all their materials in an open access journal. 

That this doesn’t often happen is a testament to the way our values express themselves in all aspects of our lives.  Someone who believes strongly in open access is unlikely to enjoy participating in a secret scientific cabal, for instance.  But the conflation of ‘open products’ with ‘open communities’ can cause problems when people assume that all they need to do to foster an open community is create a specific kind of product licensed in a specific kind of way.

Now, secret scientific cabals are obviously not ‘open’, so most open-aspiring communities are unlikely to adopt that structure.  But what structure will they adopt?  Too often the answer is none.  While a lack of formal structure may work for some small projects, it can also cause significant problems, problems which subvert the open and egalitarian aims of community members.

Jo Freeman’s classic essay, The Tyranny of Structurelessness, explains why a lack of formal structure does not prevent structure from emerging:

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. [...] The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.

[...]

As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

For this reason, many ‘structureless’ communities are less open than even formally structured closed communities.  While the latter may have a high barrier to entry, for instance employment at a specific company, at least the route to meaningful participation is clear.

Perhaps you are already convinced that a formal structure for your community is desirable.  Excellent!  Back to our earlier question: which structure?

The same egalitarian impulses which can lead a person to reject formal structure might also inspire someone to say, “Let’s let the community decide what structure to use!”  While, again, this may work for some projects, especially small ones, it can also cause problems.  I see two reasons for this.

First, the process of choosing a community’s structure can be enormously complex.  It is a task which requires the cognitive ability to compare multiple abstract systems and select from among them that which best fits your project and community.  It also requires the interpersonal social ability of communicating with members of the community to gauge enthusiasm for the proposed structure.  If there are pre-existing tensions within the community, you need to know of them and how to navigate them.  And of course, you need to feel empowered to do all of this individually or collectively.

Which brings me to the second problem.  In some ways, “We’ll let the community choose the structure!” just kicks the issue of structurelessness down the road a bit.  Because what does it mean for the community to choose the structure?  Which structures will be considered?  How will community members give feedback?  Who determines who a ‘community member’ is as this phase?  Who is organizing the feedback process?  How will a decision ultimately be made and where does that power come from?  You end up needing to pick a structure in order to pick a structure.  It’s turtles all the way down.

In the best case scenario, however, these two problems cancel each other out.  Few people are willing or able to take on the social and cognitive burden of setting up an initial structure.  Therefore members of a community may be relieved rather than upset when someone steps in to propose an initial structure without consulting them first.  So long as that initial structure is itself an open structure, people will often greet it with open arms.

But what makes something an open structure, if it’s not the fact that it creates an open product nor the process by which the structure was adopted?  That is, shall we say, an open question.  ;)  Here’s one possible answer:

An open structure is transparent.  Governance work is done, wherever possible, in open channels: forums, mailing lists, logged chats or in-person meetings where notes are taken.  A maximally transparent structure doesn’t just take notes, it also summarizes them for ease of reading and crafts communications channels like announcements-only mailing lists where people can learn about major decisions without having to weed through information that’s irrelevant to them.

An open structure is accountable.  It gives community members clear routes to making small and large changes to both the outputs of the structure and to the structure itself.  For instance, a structure may have a founding charter from which it derives its authority, and that charter may specify that changes can be made to the charter given a vote of 3/4ths from members, membership being a role also defined by the charter.

An open structure is inclusive.  Participation in the community and in the governing structure is limited by behavior rather than by irrelevant personal characteristics such as employment by specific organizations, a lack of educational credentials, or demographic differences like race and gender.  To be clear, the characteristics I just listed are only commonly irrelevant.  Communities formed around an identity or requiring specific skillsets only taught in certain credentialing programs may find them quite relevant.  Restricting membership based on those characteristics may make a community comparatively less inclusive, but they should still be considered under the broad umbrella of ‘open’.

Without a formal structure, it can be difficult for newcomers to tell if a given community is transparent, accountable, and inclusive, and near impossible for them to trust it will remain so. 

Why would an informally structured community that is currently transparent, accountable and inclusive ever lose those attributes?  There are many reasons, but chief among them is the fact that each of the values I listed above exists in tension with other important and desirable values.  For instance, ‘transparency’ exists in tension with ‘privacy’.  ‘Accountability’ exists in tension with ‘stability’ and ‘efficiency’, as the work of holding leaders accountable can cause unpredictable changes and slow the development process down.

I see ‘inclusivity’ as existing in tension with a phenomenon that I don’t have a pithy one-word label for, and it is the inclination to prioritize the needs and desires of those who are doing most of the work.  Like ‘privacy’ and ‘efficiency’, this inclination is an inherently positive thing and something that open communities need to respect.  If there’s one person doing 90% of all translations for your documentation, for instance, her opinions on how to change the translation process should count for more than any other random member of the community.  But how much more?

Open communities may value transparency over privacy, accountability over stability and efficiency, and inclusivity over prioritizing individuals based on behavior, but they should not always and in all cases do so.  Where they draw the line is a judgment call, and having formal discussions and structures which address these tensions help to make this a conscious and ongoing judgment, rather than a hidden and outdated one.

There are many templates out there for making new websites, for drawing up a new open source license, or for setting out to conduct a new reproducible science experiment.  I would love to see some templates drawn up for how to create an open community.  I think it would be a tremendous help for many people currently struggling to make their communities as open as their products.

[mitarm]

Decentralized governance and four fallacies

Together with popularization of blockchain we can notice revived calls for decentralization of national and international governments, their reboots, or even their dissolution. But such calls lack fundamental understanding of how our governments operate, their role in our global society, and what all in fact regulate and control our existence beyond just governments.

Jo Freeman in her essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness reminds us that humans tried to remove centers of power and organize themselves in a horizontal way in the past as well, and presents to us issues with power relations she observed in a 1960s women's liberation group.

What she observed was that once you removed explicit centers of power, implicit and hidden centers of power emerge. I see this is as a normal social phenomenon. More people we have to coordinate with, more effort and time coordination requires from us. Especially as the community scales up and more people join. We start interacting more with those we interact easily, and cliques emerge. Through time some of those gain more power than others because they do not distribute their power outside the clique in the same way as inside. So power concentrates.

The difference is that this power is implicit, hidden. While in traditional communities with centralized structures we established institutions for checks and balances, like transparency and accountability, those do not exist for implicit centers of powers. The whole concept of a "public service" is based around public being able to oversee the service. But once we remove those public services and replace them with private services we loose mechanisms to oversee their behavior. We are lucky if we can even detect that such concentrations of power exist at all.

Thus, I would name the first fallacy of decentralization: a fallacy of structurelessness. It is better to have clear and explicit centers of powers with transparency and accountability than pretend that we have decentralization, just for those centers of power to emerge hidden and unchecked.

Moreover, just having a decentralized underlying technology like blockchain does not mean that the community using it is decentralized. Or that using a centralized technology means that the community is centralized. Wikipedia and many open source projects can be seen as communities with centralized technologies which help the community operate together, but the community itself is decentralized and global. On the other hand, Bitcoin mining power has concentrated in few mining pools, despite technology being decentralized. This leads to the second fallacy: a fallacy of equating decentralization of power with decentralization of structure.

Those building such new decentralized systems to replace existing governments and institutions often become victims of a fallacy of beautiful models and designs. Our minds are limited. To be able to think about complex processes we create simplified models using many assumptions and reductions. We love such models. Simplicity is beautiful.

Those tools are important to help us give insight into those complex processes, but we have to be wary of starting to believe that this is all there is to those processes. That we can then just create code which encodes this simplified models and require humans to adapt their behavior to the code. We can observe that in modern urbanism where we segment cities into clear and predictable areas of different uses. This makes it easier to reason about cities, but it establishes artificial limits on possible interactions between people living in those cities. We get commuter parts of a city where people just sleep over the night. And parts of a city like financial districts where people work just over the day, but over the night nobody is around. This makes those cities and communities fragile. So different from old cities like Jerusalem.

Such models are maybe locally useful, but globally restricting. It is simply not possible to make one model, one design, which will serve everybody. Nobody likes to make programs with a long list of exceptions, but I would claim that this is what we should start doing. We should start making programs which can be messy. Be easily adapted, changed, modified. Web is like that. Wikis are like that. Programs should also be like that.

Arthur Brock talks about this by describing how cryptocurrencies have crises of governance because they have removed people from the design. It is easier to design things without messy people, but then do not be surprised when design collapses in practice.

Lawrence Lessig discusses the idea that there are four modalities which regulate us: the law, social norms, the market, and architecture/structure. Of course they also interact with each other and are dynamic, changing. On the Internet, we can see architecture/structure in a form of the code which governs cyber spaces we inhabit. Lessig talks how the government has multiple ways to regulate, not just by passing laws. And not just the government, but everyone who controls cyber spaces. Moreover, he talks also about the danger of moving from direct and explicit regulation by laws to implicit and indirect. For example, by changing the architecture/structure. Instead of using laws to legalize segregation one can use highways without easy crossings and railroad tracks to divide communities. Such urban changes still regulate, but we lose on transparency and oversight. It is a similar issue to the previously described fallacy of structurelessness. Those issues exist online as well. We replaced regulation of the cyberspace by law with the code operated by private companies. Who oversees that code? Does public have any say in it? Do you know what Facebook removes from your feed and which videos are deleted from YouTube?

But for this discussion much more important is realization how many things regulate us and how are they all intertwined, besides just law. We developed through centuries so many social institutions for all bugs and issues we discovered in our social and economic processes. We might think those institutions are rigid and slow, unneeded, and obsolete. But this is often a consequence of a fallacy of beautiful models and designs. We just do not realize all the reasons for some things to exist. Yes, we could often improve them and modernize them. But it is a fallacy to believe we can reboot a living system from scratch.

Through that we lose all the knowledge embedded inside those institutions. Most of them we are not even realizing we have. Many of them are there to protect us against misuses and mistakes which can happen. Inefficiencies are sometimes a feature to allow for a human to detect a problem.

Every founder of a community can tell you how many small things are necessary to establish for a community to really live, and especially to make it pass the first generation. Even in software we are often unable to rewrite the code from scratch successfully. And we would want to do this for such a complicated ecosystem as our society and economy is?

Current system is a mess, but how can we know that without it we would be better of? We already had unrestricted capitalism in 19th century and learned that it has shortcomings for those who do not own the capital and means of production. How we know that by removing safety belts embedded inside current institutions the old oligarchies will not reappear? That we will not have again the wild wild west. Just this time, instead of six barrel manual guns we will have assault weapons and cyber attacks at a disposal of every individual.

The DAO hack was an example of such realization. We are unable to write perfect contracts. This is why we created the judicial system. It is not perfect, but it is still better than what was at the disposal to the community to do in the case of the DAO attack. At the end, effectively rebooting the system to try again.

The main danger is when these fallacies combine. They reinforce each other. They make us think that we can reboot the society because we designed a beautiful, decentralized, simple, and generalized model, which we encoded into a protocol, code. But by doing that we forgot about humans and what makes us humans. The chaos of all exceptions and special cases. Concentrations of power because we have friends. Because we like some people more than other. Because we do trust some people. It is not simple. It never is simple. But that is OK.

[xuhulk]

Bureaucratic systems are actually really good systems for distributing resources. You have to negotiate. You have to express explicitly what resources exist and how they should be distributed. In a communal system built around shared consciousness, what starts to happen is that people with charisma start to lead and cultural norms kick in. Communes ended up being places that were deeply racially divided, even though none of them would ever cop to being explicitly racist or wouldn’t even want to be. Gender norms were incredibly conservative on communes. I don’t know how many photographs I’ve looked at of young women, pregnant, barefoot, carrying loaves of bread.

One of the things that I think we’ve inherited from the ‘60s is a habit of seeing the cultural space as the space in which we do business and make change. And the trouble with that is that it makes it very hard to negotiate things like class or race or distribution of the kind of social goods that come from business.

Power to people is a really good way of ignoring the structural differences between kinds of people. Structurelessness is a problem. And it’s less of a problem when you share cultural similarities with other folks, or genotypic or phenotypic similarities. So Stewart Brand’s circle tends to look a lot like Stewart Brand. It tends to be mostly white, often male. And that’s true for many elite Silicon Valley leaders. I don’t think that shared cultural similarity is a sufficient structure. It results in bad distribution of resources. It gets very hard to get resources to people who are different than yourself. I think our challenge is to find ways to reach out to folks who are different than ourselves, not to build clusters of likeminded people.

I remember being blown away by From Counterculture to Cyberculture when I read it sophomore year of college, though I think I took away a very different message then than I would now. In fact, one of my first proud moments as a student organizer was inviting Fred to come give a talk to our Free Culture chapter. Anyway, everything Fred Turner says on this topic is worth reading & listening to and I can't wait for his next book!