Bookmarked Disinformation and its effects on social capital networks (Google Doc) by Dave Troy

This document by US journalist Dave Troy positions resistance against disinformation not as a matter of factchecking and technology but as one of reshaping social capital and cultural network topologies. I plan to read this, especially the premises part looks interesting. Some upfront associations are with Valdis Krebs’ work on the US democratic / conservative party divide where he visualised it based on cultural artefacts, i.e. books people bought (2003-2008), to show spheres and overlaps, and with the Finnish work on increasing civic skills which to me seems a mix of critical crap detection skills woven into a social/societal framework. Networks around a belief or a piece of disinformation for me also point back to what I mentioned earlier about generated (and thus fake) texts, how attempts to detect such fakes usually center on the artefact not on the richer tapestry of information connections (last 2 bullet points and final paragraph) around it (I called it provenance and entanglement as indicators of authenticity recently, entanglement being the multiple ways it is part of a wider network fabric). And there’s the more general notion of Connectivism where learning and knowledge are situated in networks too.

The related problems of disinformation, misinformation, and radicalization have been popularly misunderstood as technology or fact-checking problems, but this ignores the mechanism of action, which is the reconfiguration of social capital. By recasting these problems as one problem rooted in the reconfiguration of social capital and network topology, we can consider solutions that might maximize public health and favor democracy over fascism …

Dave Troy

Bookmarked Second Life was ahead of its time (by Neville Hobson)

I’ve thought regularly about Second Life in the past months with all the hyped up Metaverse talk. In a Dutch post last November (machine translated link) I wrote:

Sitting around a virtual table with Zuck’s avatar to have the same video call conversation on a virtual laptop as behind my real laptop? No thanks. Where are the new affordances? Not in recreating your office or gym I think. The arguments are the same this time, the visual and audio effects 15 years more advanced, the mentioned use cases just as unsatisfactory as they were in 1993 when the still-existing Digital Space Traveler started. In my opinion, replicating what was already possible is not enough, new affordances and agency are needed to convince. And yes, that’s what it always starts with, with replicating, but starting with that we already did 20 years ago, so let’s not do it again and build on it.

We see companies enter Roblox the way we saw before in Second Life (a profitable business all these years). But what has really changed in the mean time, except the computing power of our graphic cards and our gigabit internet links?

It feels to me that in all the metaverse discussion this time around, as Neville also notes, there is very little awareness of what went before. I’ve walked virtual worlds for well over 2 decades, but it seems none of that existing experience feeds the current discussions much.

Much of this past action isn’t in the mainstream memory today when people talk about ‘the metaverse’ and make comparisons with Second Life those years ago.

Neville Hobson

I notice a strong and persistent reluctance with Dutch civil servants to use the word citizen. Apparantly because the Dutch word ‘burger’ carries overtones of ‘kleinburgerlijk’, petty bourgeois, of bourgeoisie, and of the general disdain university students voice for ‘burgers’ (with ‘burger’ being bandied about as an insult amongst them, which gained national usage through the 1990’s Jiskefet satirical tv program). Many civil servants said to me they think the word citizen is ‘old fashioned’.

I find this not only an oddity, but also detrimental to public governance and potentially dangerous.
Not using the word citizen obscures how in the relationship to government citizens have basic human rights, specific constitutional rights, and some duties. A citizen has autonomy and a certain power vis-a-vis the government.
Not using the word citizen, easily obscures that power and those rights to civil servants.

I hear civil servants talk about

  • ‘customers’, usually in the context of providing public service
  • ‘clients’, often in the context of the social domain, reminiscent of how therapists talk
  • ‘inhabitants’, usually a hand-wavy acknowledgement that other people are involved, but in an abstracted, passive or even statistical way,
  • ‘users’, usually carried over from an IT related context
  • or worst case ‘residents’ as if you’re institutionalised.

In all these cases it creates either a distance to people or implies power assymmetries. It makes it easier to dehumanise people. The consequence is the creation of policies about people, but not with those people, because people are never perceived to be on equal footing. Policy gets done over people’s heads, done to them. Participatory processes are then easily reduced to a ritual, a checkbox to mark, something that is a pain and a drag without which your policy process would be so much more efficient. Clients, users and inhabitants are never equal to those who determine policies, whereas citizens would have to be met eye to eye. Acknowledging people as citizens would require curiosity about their needs, motives and actual experiences when developing policy.

Every civil servant I’ve worked with cares about good governance and public service, and individually they wouldn’t treat people as passive objects on which their policies operate, but collectively in their work context they do abstract people out of the equation. And their own choice of words contributes to that, makes it more likely to happen, I think.

In conversations with our public sector clients I always talk about citizens with emphasis. I often also introduce myself as citizen (not as consultant e.g.).

In our projects we always emphasize the need for civil servants to go outside, to check their data and documents against the reality outside, and as often as possible create conversations with real people, with citizens.

With the drive towards ‘data driven’ work, this is ever more essential. Data must be presumed to always describe only a sliver of reality, and to always do so badly on top of that. There is always a check against reality necessary when you want to start relying on data in policy decisions. Visit the places and the people represented in the data, do you recognise them? Do you have a sufficiently nuanced, detailed and rich view on an issue before making a decision? Do people’s stories validate the data, is their meaning incorporated?
Acknowledging people as citizens is also essential to being able to see and use government data publication as a policy instrument, meant to provide agency to people in the context of societal issues and as equal partners in addressing these issues.

Hight time for the public sector to use the word citizen routinely and meaningfully again.

In reply to Collective Creativity by Wouter Groeneveld

Interestingly this came up yesterday at the FOSS4G-NL conference I visited, where Amélie A Gagnon talked about scenius as communal genius, a scene that jams together and creates results no single genius could. She also mentioned Austin Kleon’s quote ‘don’t be a genius, create a scenius’ (see his post on scenius, and about mapping a scenius, something I’ve elsewhere seen done based on LinkedIn profiles to see what is missing in terms of capabilities, roles and skills, to make a scene somewhere ‘explode’)

…and call it collective creativity: without a collective, the creativity of each genius partaking in the above meetings would never have reached that far.

Wouter Groeneveld

An exhibition on the work of Swedish artist Mamma Andersson was one of the highlights of our recent visit to the Louisiana Museum. Her style spoke strongly to both me and E. We brought an A0 sized poster of the painting shown below back home:


Dagen Efter / The Day After (2020) by Mamma Andersson

What to me was an interesting parallel, despite the huge differences in subjects, medium and expression, with the work of Arthur Jafa we saw at Louisiana as well, is how Andersson finds her inspiration.

She collects, as does Jafa, large amounts of images, including from old(er) books, and surrounds herself with them. Transforms them into black and white images before creating paintings intuitively from them.


Mamma Andersson surrounded by material she collects, and an overview of a sample of that material below. Photo by Ton Zijlstra CC BY NC SA.

(More images from the Louisiana collection)