(2012-01-12) Carson Deep Trust Shallow Trust And Phyles

Kevin Carson: Deep Trust, Shallow Trust, and Phyles. A recent exchange between Venessa Miemis inspired me to add a section to the chapter on phyles and other networked economic platforms, in my Desktop Regulatory State manuscript: The Value of the Phyle as Opposed to Other Models of Collaboration.

Venessa Miemis, a scholar who specializes in questions of networked collaboration, in early 2010 experienced a personal epiphany (in her words a “snowcrash”) on the significance of networks as the wave of the future.

• All this time, I was thinking way too big, trying to understand how to change the world. I kept asking myself, “but how do we leverage networks?”
• We don’t.
• We ARE the network. Networks self-organize. We only have to leverage ourselves, and the infrastructure gets built.
• Each one of us has to create our own ecosystem of relationships that will be beneficial to us personally. We’ll all have some relationships that overlap, but none of us will have the exact same set. The point is that we want to build trust so that when we need help we know who we can access to help us.
• What happens when your entire organization of people, as a unit, is a network in itself, but each person also has their personal networks of relationships to draw on, which extend beyond the organization?
• You then have an INCREDIBLE competitive advantage
• Your organization becomes agile. It becomes a learning network
• we already have everything we need to make this happen. It’s already in place.
• All that needs to change is the mindset.
• The first step is to build our networks.

Two years later, she complained of the slow pace at which networks were actually taking off. The transaction costs entailed in setting up stable trust networks are a lot higher than those for establishing connections.

• Fast forward 18 months or so, and I find myself embedded within overlapping networks of networks…. and yet I still don’t see the magic happening that had appeared so clearly in my mind
• I chuckle now looking back at my own starry-eyed naivete
• We’ve been through the binding phase over the past few years, which was all about getting linked. We delighted in relatively low risk interaction and sharing, finding our tribes, forming communities of mutual interest and learning
• But now we’re moving into the collaboration phase, and there are some different requirements.
• The next few years are going to be defined by a culture of learning and interactivity that involves more trust, and so naturally, more risk.
• actually helping each other, working together, experimenting, prototyping, and adapting to changing circumstances
• Are you gonna steal my idea? Are you gonna follow through with your commitments? Are you gonna take the credit?
• For me, it all comes down to trust.

Stowe Boyd, in response, suggested that establishing that level of trust was too high a hurdle without some intermediate steps. Instead of trying to establish stable, ongoing collaborative networks, he argued, we should be engaging in ad hoc, project-based cooperation: ((2012-01-09) Boyd Getting To Trust Better Swift Than Deep)

• I think Venessa is trying to do something that’s very hard: she’s trying to get a group to form a collective, with a shared set of principles and shared goals*
• But why form a collective? As she points out, it’s risky. If you want to build things, you can define a small project to test some ideas, and form a Hollywood-style project team to accomplish it.
• The way of the future is cooperation, not collaboration.
• People are capable in some circumstances of relaxing their general desire to establish deep trust — that time-consuming, political practice —and will simply adopt a role in a project, and suspend their disbelief about other’s motives, etc. This is a way to get folks to suspend their innate concerns about trust and control
• This is how freelancers generally work, and it’s the way that cities work.
• But Venessa and her friends are involved in forming a collective, and there is no short cut for them. They will need to build deep trust, and establish processes and practices, and politics to manage them.
• My recommendation to Venessa was and still is to take the short cut, though. Define some constrained projects, with more modest goals and defined time frames, and work on them with a few others
• But such collectives are not a higher form of human solidarity that we should aspire to, and are not what we have to build in order to get big things done. On the contrary. An increasing proportion of professional work is being performed by freelancers, who live in a short-term project based economy
• The costs of deep trust are too high, in general, for what they return

The problem with the kind of ad hoc, project-based, one-off free agent relationships Boyd described is that they leave the individual isolated without a safety net, and thus leave the project-based model of p2p collaboration open to cooptation (as free agents become a precariat) by capitalist business firms.

Miemis argued, in response to her perception that Boyd “misinterpreted [networks based on deep trust] as attempting to form some kind of unified hivemind,” that they were not a “cult,” “sacrifice of self-interest,” or “borg.” Rather, they served the purposes of genuine self-interest, constituting (in the words of Brian Eno) a “scenius.”

It strikes me that David de Ugarte’s phyle model is a middle case between these two extremes. It overcomes the transaction costs of achieving deep trust by providing a basic infrastructure of transparency and reputational tracking—not to mention adjudication mechanisms—to recreate the functional equivalent of “deep trust” where it has not been developed by purely interpersonal relations. And having done so, it creates a larger framework—a platform—within which ongoing collaborative relationships can take place.

At the same time, it provides the risk and cost pooling mechanisms that prevent an unprotected society of atomized free agents from being reduced to a precariat.