If only one word was allotted to define democracy it would be decentralization.
At times in human history certain groups become more powerful than the rest. At times these are dictators, in other occasions the rich. The democratic ideal attempts to limit the power of specific groups or individuals, under the perception that power begets power (e.g. the rich can buy an election), and extreme centralization of any kind is detrimental to society. Classic examples of this are preventing conflict of interests (e.g. separation of powers between branches of government), and limiting wealth (e.g. estate tax).
One can treat the value of limiting power as axiomatic, or derived from basic “fairness” but one could argue that this is better explained by two utilitarian arguments:
- All centralized systems are corrupt, because rulers take care of themselves first.
- No single person holds access to the truth in its entirety, and so cannot make all ideal decisions by themself.
It is only now that we begin to identify these motifs in the software industry. While it has been à la mode in the last 50 years to criticize monopolies in many areas such as energy and finance, up to recently software companies held a young and revolutionary attire, and were largely free from criticism.
The software industry has become ultra centralized. Companies like facebook and google are controlling the majority of the world market. We are all experiencing the harms of it, even if we’re not always aware.
The best way to show this is through examples. Here are some conflicts of interests:
- Whatsapp used to have a phone button. Surprisingly clicking it would have phoned someone through the cellular network. For its reasons, whatsapp has decided to switch this to make the call through whatsapp. Since that day I have to invest something like 4 clicks until I can get to the same functionality. I can do nothing about it. There is no law that can make whatsapp consider my opinion.
- In facebook I usually have to work extremely hard to get a proper link for something. A video for example. Clearly this serves facebook, because I can’t easily share stuff outside facebook. It might have been intentional, or maybe it’s just unprioritized.
- Facebook does not share ad revenue with content creators. Why should it, when it’s obvious creators don’t have any choice but to publish in the only social network.
- OkCupid has decided it will display a badge for those who support planned parenthood. This is so you can filter easily those with this specific, apparently atrocious, political belief. It is singled out, out of many different infos your profile has, and displayed at your summary card. Lucky me, I’m pro planned parenthood.
What gives these companies the audacity to act at times so regally is not their trust in their products. It is more related to the monopolistic closed-garden character of the software industry as of late, which makes users de facto captives of their service providers.
And this behaviour was not always the case, nor it is inherent to software. Compare WhatsApp to good old email. Email is an open protocol that allows communication between servers to achieve the goal of communication. Humanity has come to agree on this imperfect protocol. This allows competition between email providers. In plain english, if gmail is bad, I can move to Outlook and will not suffer any consequence. However if WhatsApp is bad, or disregards my wishes as a user, I can’t really do anything about it. I still need to use it to communicate with my friends.
Luckily software companies are usually run by smart and usually benevolent people. So we find ourself in this sort of meritocracy, where the CEO of facebook creates himself an image of a king philosopher. I.e. Facebook is for the people, even if not by the people. We could have had it worse.
But as mentioned before, beyond sheer conflict of interests, there is a whole different class of dangers to centralization of ideas which is practically unavoidable, even if interests are aligned. This is the danger of singularity vs plurality, or the inevitable imperfection of any single method to do something.
In general it makes a lot of sense to share and reuse ideas. In software engineering we reuse libraries of code, avoiding the need to write the same logic again and again. We can augment to existing libraries if the project is open source, and this is a very efficient way to conduct a software industry. In nature, we see the same biological mechanisms and ideas repeating across many different organisms (e.g. the cellular energy manufacturing mechanisms). This is also efficient and good. However, this is a double edged sword, as this uniformity also represents a danger if some virus, digital or biological, finds an exploit that is also common. In nature this is mitigated by the mutation and sexual reproduction which causes variance of organisms even in the same species. The similar mechanism in the open source community is the concept of branching code — copying free code and modifying it, sometimes with purpose to re-merge with the parent, or just start something else.
On the other hand, when facebook has one algorithm that chooses which stories we read, and google has one algorithm to decide which site should be on top, no matter how good this algorithm is, it leaves us exposed by its sheer singularity. It might be the case that we miss a lot by spending the bulk of our time reading our friends’ posts, chosen by an algorithm that tries to maximize the time we spend in the facebook site, rather than, say, the number of insights we get. This centrality of algorithmics and services can cause a scarcity of ideology. Again, this is not because their owners are malicious or that this was someone’s intention. It is simply because there isn’t one way to get to the truth. Any paradigm of thought misses some things. Any expert employs a set of heuristics that has blind spots. Similarly, every one algorithm misses something. It is the diversity of algorithms or ways of thinking that allows a society to exist robustly (granted, not too diverse, e.g. if we didn’t speak the same language we could not gain from this diversity). Instead of this, in many ways, due to centrality of algorithms or the metrics they employ, we are becoming a “head” oriented society (see this explanation for head vs tail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail). This means that we all see the same movies, read the same books etc’. If all billions of humanity see the same episodes of “Game of Thrones”, we might be under-investing in other areas, and missing some good, more tacit art or ideas. The promise of the internet as a tool for pluralism is endangered by the centralized nature of today’s software industry.
If a democracy is only as good as how it manages to decentralize, these issues pose a real threat to the efficacy of our governance system. A society must always strive to evolve to the best version of itself, and so we need to prevent these forms of centralization by law, and by technological alternatives (e.g. blockchains, open source software, open standards, modular services).
