Martin Springer
February 2007

Autonomous Domains

Dropouts like Roel van Duijn managed to form the face of the city Amsterdam in the late 1960ies. He helped to create the Dutch Provo movement through happenings around 1965 at a statue in the centre of Amsterdam. He experimented with a Physical Commons by inventing the White Plans (e.g. the White Bicycle Plan). Eventually Provo got elected in the Amsterdam city council.

The majority of Amsterdam citicens hated and despised the Provos for their views. All the more it is astonishing that they looked away and tolerated them. The Dutch publisher and historian Geert Mak explains that the tolerance of Dutch people arises on the pragmatic backgound of merchands and seamen. This makes sense to me: a society comprehends that tolerance is economically more rewarding than a zero tolerance policy.

Then again the Dutch society, like many others, feels that todays world is in a state of permanent crisis. Dutch politicians like Rita Verdonk support the most rigorous immigration policy in Europe. A politician like Pim Fortuyn and a publicist like Theo van Gogh get killed by extremists because they make publically controversial statements.

Apparently the opposite of my above assumption is also true: if a society finds itself in a state of crisis, killing people for the mere fact of being different can be more rewarding than grudging tolerance.

Two phenomena that happend since the 60ies can be held liable for this development: Globalization (increasing interdependence, integration and interaction among people, companies and corporations in disparate locations around the world) and Technological convergence (a vast array of different types of technology to perform very similar tasks).

Geert Mak points out that the current crisis straigthens up the misconception of a multicultural miracle in Holland. Roel van Duijn says that society works like a club in which you have to know the codes. He claims that in our time there are few points of contact between the Allochthones and the Authochthones. As a member of the Amsterdam city council Roel van Dujin puts his best foot forward to integrate people from the quarters where the Moroccan people live - unfortunately without much success.

Both ways are thinkable: either a society lives together in peaceful tolerance or they kill each other sooner or later. The first option is more profitable for the majority of the people, in the second case a few racketeers benefit and the apathetic majority suffers. Of course I prefer the first option and I ask myself how the vision of a tolerant society can be realized in the digital space.

Without doubt one prerequisite for tolerance is that some form of communication must take place between the agents of different opinions. If one monopolist controls the communication infrastructure the exchange of information is one-sided, because the controlling party can determine the rules of the communication game. A bilateral arrangement always requires that two parties can negotiate on equal terms.

In the 1960ies the city of Amsterdam provided a functioning communication environment to their citicens and therefore the Provo movement could emerge. Public space (e.g. places, buildings, streets) provides the communication environment in a city. People can meet, express and exchange their views. The insight that killing each other is unfavourable, is the result of permanent negotiations between the people in a city. Moral detetermines the rules of the communication game.

Enter the digital space. Moral can only establish itself if communication between users is not impeded. Traditionally moral was a very high value for internet users. The system to establish moral was simple and worked very efficiently: basically everyone could go where he wanted but if somebody neglected the unspoken and unwritten rules of a group he got kicked by the SysOp. Usually the SysOps were identical with the people who administrated the bulletin board systems (see e.g. Community Memory).

Robert Musil wrote in 'The Man Without Qualities' that moral replaces soul by logic. I think we can say that in the digital space the moral of a community is the logic that replaces the soul of the SysOp. The moral of todays SysOps is the strategy of digital media service providers in a global economy. Business models bundle digital media services with the sale of devices (e.g. Nokia Navigation) or with targeted advertising based on seach words (e.g. google AdSense).

If the moral in the digital space is a logic of maximising the profit for a few major service operators sooner or later the members of a dependent community of digital media users will have to follow the same logic.

The digital space is being commercialized in stealthy way. The initial position is that most communication services are free of charge. Hence the basic services (e.g. determine your actual location with a Nokia handset) will be free initially. The service providers will charge fore more sophisticated digital media services once the user base is large enough (e.g. navigate to another location, search with google). Digital media services are "phased in". E-mail is for free, still users pay for SMS. Economical growth requires that sooner or later users of sophisticated digital media services will learn that in digital space they get nothing for free.

On the other hand the digital space is infinite and data can be copied. The commercialization of the digital space has not been a problem as long as the service providers did not want to control the entire communication between users. Moral could establish itself as long as middlemen could not impede communication in the digital space. Communities could group around a SysOp who restricted the time and size of membership after her fancy. A certain degree of trust existed between the members of a community and a certain degree of respect and tolerance existed among different communities.

If the citicens of Amsterdam had believed that the Provo movement is a gang of terrorists they would have stoned them to death. They did not because they knew the codes. The form of the Provo protest was always ludique and nonviolent, and therefore much more persistent than the RAF in Germany.

Obviously also in the digital space society works like a club in which you have to know the codes. It is reasonable to assume that malfunctioning communication and FUD are reasons for the growing barbarism. In the physical space as well as in the digital space many individuals have lost the feeling that they are part of a community. They take public services for granted, because they pay for them. They are told that a system requires payment to get going and get spoiled because they expect that they system works if they only pay. They learn to pay for convenience and get lazy. If they are unhappy with the public services they pay for commercial services. The druglords of communication are more than happy to satisfy any imaginable desire in an environment where commercial transaction has replaced solidarity between users.

I agree with Michel Bauwens who wrote that the only solution is to create communities that will produce a fully autonomous distributed infrastructure. It may sound paradoxical, but a way to ensure that digital communication remains a public good is to specify the necessary DRM tools in the form of open standards available to the public.

The public availability of communication tools requires that digital media standards can be implemented as open source software. This does not mean that all the tools necessarily have to be open source - some for profit enterprises may decide to sell their communication tools as binary only software.

In order to be publically available, the communication infrastructure must be unexpensive and it must offer an easy way to manage, join and leave communities. As in physical space I can imagine different ways of management: gated communities where the members trust each other and one "leader" determines the rules and open communities where the community will take care that misuses of the rules are avenged. Both types of communities are possible and do not exclude each other.

The Beatles sang: "Can't buy me love". Prostitution always existed in the digital space and it will always exist. Everybody can choose if he pays or not. Therefore I feel that we have to make sure that the very same devices that offer the access to paid entertainment services will offer the entrance to Autonomous Domains where money can't buy the entrance ticket.

Not for the first time in the history of media powerful middlemen try to intercept the free communication between people for reasons of financial profit. Accordingly a ludique and noviolent resistance movement is forming to defend the freedom of communication. In almost the same manner as in the analogue space the communication environment (the tools, protocols and interfaces) must be a public good in the digital space - created by the people and provided for the people. The means to express and determine who can be a member of an Autonomous Domain and who can not could be a facette of interoperable DRM.