A reader at Blue Meanie commented on my Amartya Sen quote, and it made me think.

I looked again at the quote.

No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.

And I began to wonder. Is there an equivalent for project management? Could I say something like:

No substantial project failure has ever occurred in any “independent” and “democratic” organisation with a relatively free “press”.

I am sure there is something here. I will think more about it. If any of you comes up with better paraphrases please comment away; in the meantime I will seek to replace the three words in quotation marks with more appropriate ones.

….is better than a thesis. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

A number of people directed me towards the New York Times article headlined A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs, which talks about bringing civility to the web and discusses The Blogger’s Code of Conduct, an initiative called for by Tim O’Reilly.

Read it for yourself, it is important to do that. [Too often, far too often, I’ve met people who critique something without ever having seen the something in question. This happens particularly in a systems context, but the trend seems to gloop into other spaces as well].

In itself there is nothing I can object to in the Code of Conduct. Nothing I want to object to, it looks like nothing more than a sensible exposition of YOYOW. For those who hadn’t read it before, I quote (from Wikipedia) Katie Hafner stating what Stewart Brand said about YOYOW:

I was doing the usual thing of considering what could go wrong… One of the things that could go wrong would be people blaming us for things that people said on The Well. And the way I figured you get around that was to put the responsibility on the individual. It meant that you’re responsible for your own words, and if you libel somebody they sue you, not us. And what that turned into was copyright insanity, where people thought that their precious words should not be copied in other contexts.”

Brand wanted people to be careful even then; I’d love to know what he thinks of the current kerfuffle.

For me things are simple. I am all for doing away with anonymity in the main. If people want to protect anonymity in specific contexts, that is fine as well. But I will say what I want to say onymously, and encourage others in the conversation to do likewise.

What I am far less comfortable about is the implied attempt to moderate tone.

Attempts to moderate tone via the Trojan Horse of civility are dangerous. Everyone who challenges the ideas of his day can easily be painted as not being civil. Every such challenge can be made to sound bullying and manipulative, from Martin Luther’s Here I stand, I can do no other to Patrick Henry‘s Give me Liberty or Give me Death. In fact why stop there, go back as far as the Bible. In the context of those times, Jesus Christ is meant to have used some choice words in describing the Pharisees. I wonder what today’s equivalent of “whited sepulchre” is, in the context of civility.

When you take the lyrics of John Lennon, or for that matter even some of the early Bob Dylan, civility is not the word that comes to mind. They’re passionate to the point of being irascible. When you look at Hugh Macleod‘s gapingvoid, not everything he says or draws is civil. I know Hugh and he is a very civil man. I have many T-shirts with his drawings on them. Some I would wear anywhere. Some I would not wear in front of children. Some I would not wear at all.
But the choice is mine, what I do is not because of an explicit code of conduct. I do it because. Just because. Not because of some law or the other.

Do we really want the Blogosphere to be Bowdlerised?

Personally, I believe in building people up, not cutting them down. It is something I have taken time to learn, the power that words have, the damage that badly chosen words can do. Damage to those you love, your family and your friends. So I am not embracing being uncivil per se.

God is in the Details. So is the Devil. Civility is good, it is something I believe in. What I am less happy with is any attempt to legislate for civility, either formally or informally. Why? Because civility is a big word, and can mean different things to different people at different times and in different places.

So let’s go for being onymous where and when we can. Let’s go for owning our own words.

Conversations take place in all sorts of forms, and one of the weaknesses of the blogosphere is that only one kind of conversation tends to get captured. It is with this in mind that I direct those who are interested in this topic to what’s happening here, in Johannes Ernst’s blog, and here, in Gordon Cook’s blog.

Sometimes the conversations get heated, particularly when they revolve around any of the Three Is : Identity, Intellectual Property and the Internet. People spend an incredible amount of time arguing about what terms mean, what they should mean, what they shouldn’t.

And it is in this context I am reminded of the writings of an Indian, a Calcuttan, Argumentative as all Calcuttans are. Amartya Sen. In a book he published only sometime last year, Identity and Violence, Professor Sen makes an assertion I found staggering at first sight: that much of the violence we see in society is driven as much by confusion as by anything else. Confusion that takes many shapes, ranging from ignorance and illiteracy to that driven by the classic fear, uncertainty and doubt.

If you haven’t read Amartya Sen, you must. My favourite Sen quote:

No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.

I have rarely seen a sentence that touches upon so many of my interests at the same time, somehow capturing a socio-economic truth while meandering into issues related to freedom and democracy, yet at the same time stressing the importance of free communications.

One of the key messages within his recent book is the importance of social capital today. Here’s an extract emphasising the multiplicity of relationships:

Belonging to each one of the membership groups can be quite important, depending on the particular context. When they compete for attention and priority over each other (they need not always, since there may be no conflict between the demands of different loyalties), the person has to decide on the relative importance to attach to the respective identities, which will, again, depend on the exact context. There are two distinct issues here. First, the recognition that identities are robustly plural, and that the importance of one identity need not obliterate the importance of others. Second, a person has to make choices — explicitly or by implication — about what relative importance to attach, in a particular context, to the divergent loyalties and priorities that may compete for precedence.

Identifying with others, in various different ways, can be extremely important for living in society.

He goes on to say:

It has not, however, always been easy to persuade social analysts to accommodate identity in a satisfactory way. In particular, two different types of reductionism seem to abound in the formal literature of social and economic analysis. One may be called “identity disregard”, and it takes the form of ignoring, or neglecting altogether, the influence of any sense of identity with others, on what we value and how we behave. For example, a good deal of contemporary economic theory proceeds as if, in choosing their aims, objectives and priorities, people do not have — or pay attention to — any sense of identity with anyone other than themselves. John Donne may have warned, “No man is an island entire of itself,” but the postulated human beings of pure economic theory are often made to see themselves as pretty “entire”.

In contrast with “identity disregard”, there is a different kind of reductionism, which we may call “singular affiliation”, which takes the form of assuming that any person preeminently belongs, for all practical purposes, to one collectivity only — no more and no less. Of course, we do know in fact that any real human being belongs to many different groups, through birth, associations and alliances. Each of these group identities can — and sometimes does — give the person a sense of affiliation and loyalty. Despite this, the assumption of singular affiliation is amazingly popular, if only implicitly, among several groups of social theorists.

You may well ask why I spend so much time on the social aspects of identity. The reason’s simple. For me, identity is essentially something social and not personal, something that Sen emphasises. Incidentally, Shripriya, welcome to the conversation; I did notice your lurking earlier. I am a great believer in the robust plurality of identity he refers to; the personal aspects of identity are best manifested in the choices we make when determining the relative importance of different facets in a specific context.

These choices are also very important. And, as Stephen Smoliar and Prakash commented earlier, there is an intrinsic power play behind all this. It is the power that suddenly made “Muslim” mean “terrorist” in the wake of 9/11, the same power that made “citizens of New Orleans” morph into “refugees” and somehow “not-citizens” during and after Katrina. George Lakoff is a good place to start if you want to understand what happens in these circumstances.

Now while I stress the social aspects of identity, this does not mean I don’t care about the processes or technology associated with identity. There are many blogs which deal with that far better than I could; Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog is worth visiting if you want to know more; Kim provides a good springboard to the pool of conversations taking place in this respect. His Introduction to the Laws of Identity is a must-read. And if you really haven’t delved into this subject at all, you must must must watch Dick Hardt do his Subterrenean Homesick Blues impression. While there are many versions of it extant, this one, which he did at OSCON a few years ago, is as good as any.

I will spend more time on identity soon. A number of you have asked me for the 5 additional facets I’ve been working on since my first six, and I promise to oblige. But in the meantime.

There has always been an interplay between power and identity. The fear of misuse of power is one of the key drivers behind the wish for anonymity; yet every example I can think of where one person stood up for his beliefs: Gandhi; Prague 1956; Rosa Parks; Tiananmen Square; Aung San Suu Kyi; Nelson Mandela; the list is much longer, but the people are all onymous. They did not hide.

When we implement technical ways of supporting this rich and diverse thing we call identity, we provide tools for good as well as bad. There is a Guns Don’t Kill People, People Do aspect to all this. And unless we understand this, unless we understand that social identity needs to be robust, built upon personal choice and impervious to the kinds of reductionism Professor Sen refers to, we may be building weapons of social destruction. This is the fear that people have about the Semantic Web, which in their eyes is 1984 gone doolally.

More later.

Maybe it comes from being born and raised in Calcutta, where anonymity is rare and privacy rarer still. During my youth I often felt that Cal was the world’s biggest village. Lots of overlapping gossip circles and nosy neighbours and all that. But it was all in-your-face, so it didn’t feel like how it feels in the West.

Before you can have the curtain-twitching gossiping narrow-minded neighbour, you need to have curtains.

Curtains.

Things that prevent light from coming in, that create places of darkness. Things that people hide behind in order to disguise or conceal their snooping. Things that people draw closed in order to prevent others from seeing what they are doing.

Curtains.

I’ve heard many people make strong cases for anonymity, often in the context of democracy and dissent. [Maybe I need to revisit Cass Sunstein, I will do so this weekend]. We have to be careful about this, because we can hold up the development and enrichment of many things while we argue about anonymity.

There’s a lot to be said for onymity. When we look at the right to vote, we need to bear in mind that the voter is not anonymous. Even the dead of Cook County had names.  It is the vote that is anonymous, not the voter.

Onymity could help us solve many problems, from chat room predators to spam originators and everything in between. As we get better at onymity we may get better at preventing identity theft and all its consequences.

Every time we build systems to enshrine anonymity we pay a price. Sometimes it is worth stepping back and checking that the price is worth paying.