2-civics-2019-05-07.md

Data. Together. Let's read about it

Civics (May 7, 2019)

🎬 Recorded Call

Intro

A major lens through which governance of communities is understood is civics and citizenship. Even our own texts talk about "a civic layer for the web." But it's not clear that we really know what we mean by that! In order to think about communities, and more compellingly, what forms of space and collective action could be built around decentralized forms of governance, let's read about civics!

Readings

1. Iseult Honohan, Chapter V "Common goods and public virtue" in Civic Republicanism.

2. Paul Frazee Information Civics. Available at: https://infocivics.com/.

3. Optional Johnson, P., & Robinson, P. (2014). Civic hackathons: Innovation, procurement, or civic engagement? Review of Policy Research, 31(4), 349-357. Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ropr.12074

4. Optional Rethinking the Civic and Citizenship These optional readings flesh out the problem of citizenship especially through an examination of the No one is Illegal anti-racist and migrant movement. We often construct our sense of "civic" around a rights-based and liberal "citizenship regime". By examining places where that construct breaks down -- especially around immigration status -- we can maybe come to grips with the ways that "citizenship" can let us down, and maybe even the limitations of "civic" as a concept.

   • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Citizenship, esp. citizens and non-citizens and feminist critique

   • Nyers, P. (2010). No one is illegal between city and nation. Studies in social justice, 4(2), 127. Available at: https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/article/view/998 (open access)

   • Guardian article 'No human being is illegal' (2015)

   • Wikipedia article on History of Citizenship

Themes

Civic virtue (and how it gets made): "an extensive responsibility to the larger political community", aligned with concepts of common good, public spirit, civility (p. 147ff).

• "The argument underlying the idea of civic virtue is that the freedom of interdependent citizens ultimately depends on their active commitment to the collective goods they share."
• highlights critiques about civic virtue (p. 148ff)
  • subordinates individual to society, private to public
  • "The requirement of civic virtue may be seen to be anachronistic, oppressive, moralistic or unrealistic"
  • feminist critiques: originally militarist, masculinist, then gender-differentiated citizenship
  • it is too vague to give any understanding of its practical implications
  • it is too morally demanding, requiring conformity, unjust or unrealistic (p. 162ff)
• institutions and platforms -- how do they shape virtue?

The common good is teased apart into distinct senses in order to anticipate critiques that it is collectivist and potentially oppressive (p. 150ff)

• "corporate good of a social group", "unitary good of an organic of corporate whole directed to a single purpose": teleological (inspo: Aristotle, Rousseau)
• "aggregate of individual goods", sum of individual goods (inspo: Margaret Thatcher)
• "ensemble of conditions for individual goods" "the ensemble of conditions for individual fulfilment" (inspo: Locke, Rawls, Mouffe?)
• "individualist--instrumental" (republicanism) as "political participation and civic virtue are then the necessary precondition for realising diverse personal goods"
• "Those who are vulnerable in common to such dangers may be seen as living in a common world" (inspo: Arendt) or a intersubjective–practical sense of the common good in which people who are intrinsically social as well as significantly separate benefit as members of a group.

Disparate view of public/private flows from liberalism versus republicanism worldviews (p. 157ff)

• in liberal thought public and private are distinguished primarily on the dimension of control." e.g., public controlled by the state, private controlled (tightly coupled to agency)
• "For republicans the most salient dimension of the public is interest or relevance; what is quintessentially public is in the interest of all; what is private is in the interest of or relevant to one, a few or specified individuals, or sections of society. This does not map directly on to the state and the non-state." -- public and private as "different orientations" (more diffuse?)

Possibility of a Republican Citizenship may be much more limited in a contemporary state. Do technologies offer a possible solutin? cf. pol.is, gov0, etc.

Limitations of a "civic", especially based on (rights-based, liberal) citizenship.

• examining places where those constructs breaks down--especially immigration status-- we can maybe come to grips with the limitations of "civic" as a concept and think from alternatives.
  • Nyers' discussion of No One is Illegal frames citizenship as a type of action rather than a state of being. Citizenship for him comprises neither rights nor responsibilities, but a particular relationship or stance towards political action. It woud be intresting to consider the debt that this position owes to republicanism, which sees citizenship asrequiring more active stance to politics.
  • (we could also maybe atalk about "speech acts" and the relationship to that wya of thinking about political possibility).

Civic, digitally

• Frazee's case for decentralization movement "aim to somehow distribute political authority within a technical system." -- concepts of civics as reliant on "separation of powers", and absent in systems of authority
• Efficacy and effect of translating political concepts (politics) to technical expressions
• resisting the instrumentalism of both the policy ("civic") and technical ("digital") spaces: "civic hackathons are simultaneously using open data as the platform for new technology development while also striving to deliver civic engagement outcomes... Despite ongoing enthusiasm for the civic engagement possibilities of a hackathon, many questions are raised concerning the extent to which a one-time limited event (the civic hackathon) can truly enrich citizen–government relationships" (Johnson, p. 351ff)

Notes

• Intros, lots of new faces!

(there are really great intros in the)

• Why this topic?

MATT: Why are we doing these readings? Very early on in Data Together, we started talking about a "civic layer for the web", but I don't think we ever really knew what we meant.

I think the motivation for that phrase is the sense that the web can be a place where the interests of the collective can easily become lost, in a surging of vicious (that is, vice-ridden) behavior.

Thinking about how we implement collective responsibility or care is important to us as Data Together. This week is opportunity to think harder about what we could mean when we talk about "civics".

It turns out, it's not at all obvious what the extent is of civic behavior. And unsurprisngly, people disagree vehemently about the content of civic behavior.

Introducing the readings: One is very philosophical. Not only that, it's a case for a certain kind of reasoning citizenship, which is civic republicanism. The other is more about technology.

I wonder if we'll spend more time talking about fundamentals as much as possible, because we think and talk about technology all the time.

Where to start? There are tons of interesting things to think about here, and most of them revolve around the tension between the individual and the collective. Most of us, and I think this is especially highlighted for people who move in tech circles, become used to thinking about state and legal frameworks in terms of individual rights and freedoms and responsibilities.

The great, intellectually fantastic thing about civic republicanism is that it focuses fundamentally on the health of collective the first. This perspective allows us to step back and ask: How much do we want to put indivduals in the center of our thinking? What do we gain or lose by doing that? Regardless of whether any of us become civic republicans, reading a civic republican allows us to think more clearly about why we value freedom as a political virtue, as opposed to, say, equality.

Dawn put civic virtue at the top of the themes, and I do think that's the fundamental question we're interested in figuring out: What does it mean to be virtuous? What does it mean to do the right thing, in a political context? How do we set up a political struture or infrastructure in a way that makes it easier to be virtuous?

DAWN: Could we start by surfacing what people found interesting? Themes were trying to pull forward what was most from text.

How did people feel about the Honohan reading? What aspects spoke to you particularly– why do we show up on these calls together?

ERIC: One of the things that I really liked about the Honohan chapter was not the content of civic virtue itself, but the question of how virtuous citizens are made: incentives, civic education, religion, and so forth. How do you make virtuous citizens on platforms? What is the role of the Web in creating virtuous citizens?

KELSEY: I've been thinking a lot about civic virtue and the circumstances that surround it. For example, you can have a large political voice if you have a lot of free time, or if you have a lot of money. But it's a lot harder if you don't have those things, even to participate in activism

I've been thinking a lot about the intersection of that with the ability to create a system that allows people to be civically virtuous. It goes all the way back to the question of– do we live in a society of abundance or scarcity?

In Honohan, the section that got closest to this was the part where it was talking about how, instead of thinking of civic participation as a thing you are morally obligated to do, it could be more similar to maintaining a friendship, or building a familial relationship. It's its own value, to participate in it. It is a part of your own self-actualization. This, versus what I've been thinking in the back of my head: Is there a system where we're paid to participate civically (which is basically where capitalism places us)?

Frazee touched on this through the Bitcoin example: people with the most bitcoin get the most votes, which is a direct mapping of financial power to political power.

DAWN: I felt very uneven reading the Honohan article. I appreciated that there was an attempt to bring together and anticipate critiques from a few different positions. Whether or not I agree with all of the arguments that were put forward in terms of a model of civic virtue and how to inculcate it, I felt better situated in a set of literature that has talked about civics, that doesn't always feel present when we talk about things civically that are very technologically. I wonder about gap. I was trying to think about how it relates to digitally mediated life.

MATT: In the civic tech world– I don't know if this attitude comes from technologically mediated social engagement, but everything is about how to entice people to participate in a framework. We have that problem with Qri and Data Together. What that means is that we don't have a focus on the origins of civic responsibility. Where does the obligation and the motivation come from to be civically responsible?

Kelsey was talking about this: On the one hand, you can feel like there is a commandment laid upon you; or you can think, "I become more myself by doing this". Those two ways of seeing your actions, they blend in real life, but they're different sources.

BRENDAN: I’m wondering about how entangled obligations are with incentives.

LIZ: I'm wondering about how dreams are entangled with otherwise unlikely alliances.

DAWN: In the civic tech space, we've inherited concepts of an individual's relationship to government (+1 Liz). But there are these alternative conceptions: who do you owe your civic obligation to? On page 164, Honohan clearly makes the point that it is owed between citizens rather than to a central authority.

That's an argument that they're making, but it helps unseat assumptions that I forgot I was making.

BRENDAN: "Natualized assumptions"– that's a key phrase. I'm really glad that for this reading set, we picked things that help us to unseat our naturalized assumptions. Clasically, we read more Ostrom, and this– there's a bit of discomfort with this reading.

MICHELLE: Interesting to compare, too, to the emerging Chinese social credit system, and, say, someplace like Australia that requires voting (you get fined if you don’t vote).

JAKE: There's tension between having duty to the state that's set up and to your community. One of the points that it brought up that I deeply appreciate is that sometimes there's a need for civil disobedience– and they made that explicit. I wasn't entirely comfortable with this text; I wouldn't normally read it myself. I was constantly wondering if it would get into my need to have more intersectional analysis. I felt that was lacking sometimes, but at least it did get into a feminist viewpoint to some degree.

MATT: This text is pre-intersectional in a way. Coming from traditional analytic philosophy, where the individuals are abstracted (which is also the case in liberalism), it doesn't take into account what kind of person you are. It's just about 'persons', abstractly. The mention of feminist critiques felt like essentially a very long footnote: "...and feminists think also that we should be careful of militarism and of the public/private distinction." But it's not something that more fully grounds politics in lived experience.

DAWN: I really feel that point. I spent so much time reading the feminism 'footnote'. It was mentioned at the beginning but actually treated at the end. It almost felt like Through the Looking Glass– almost an inverted way from my natural inclination for how to treat these topics. It gave me a lot to think about because of that. Thinking– well, this is not incompatible with "a politics of the personal is political"– I had just finished off reading Silvia Federici, "Wages for Housework" essay collections, so I felt that I had just read these things that had very different angles of approach, but weirdly are not totally different from each other.

MATT: I was also thinking a lot about the feminism note, maybe because I just reread "The Moral Equivalent of War" essay by William James.

In the American pacifist canon, it's often cited as a very important work. What is argues is that war itself is bad, but everything else about war is great. It brings people together; it cultivates what he calls the masculine virtues– so we need to do is replicate something as close as possible to the experience of war.

That idea is the intellectual kernel of the thinking behind the Civil Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. We have a lot to be greatful for with the CCC; anyone who's ever gone to a national park should be really happy that the CCC existed.

I grew up thinking of the CCC as a model for what a government can do to help people out, and what people can do to turn their energy to the collective good. And, but, or also– it is troubling to think of how much that thinking shares with the military.

The problems of the military go beyond the fact that its main purpose is to kill people. They're also about the cultivation of loyalty as a virtue above criticism– which has always struck me as a real problem in a democracy. Republicanism has expressed itself so often in patriotic activities that organize themselves around an exultation of the state.

If we want to bring virtue back into our conversations, we have do it in a way that away from that. I also think about that Pete Seeger song: "What we learned in school today/the leaders are the strongest men/we elect them again and again.." All the institutions of the cultivation of civic virtue also have the danger of becoming organs of the state, and instruments of both oppression and propaganda.

DAWN: I watched a video called "Seeing Red", which is a documentary about American communists, and Seeger is extensively featured in it. So if you want a rabble-rousing Pete Seeger, check it out.

Rob and Brendan proposed an activity in chat before this call– can we try it? It's a pickup of what you said, and leads us into a discussion of the role of virtue in the individual and the collective, and what role the state plays. Let's have a round robin: What is your gut reaction to the quote:

Any commitment to civic virtue and the common good may be seen as subordinating the individual to society, or private life to public life, in a way that is incompatible with modern concerns with individual fulfilment. The requirement of civic virtue may be seen to be anachronistic, oppressive, moralistic or unrealistic. It may seem a throwback to small, weakly institutionalised ancient democracies, where there was no separate state to carry out collective decisions. In some interpretations at least, the historical notion of civic virtue oppressed citizens by requiring uniform standards of behaviour.

That's a collation of a lot of the critiques Honohan anticipates. What does it bring up in you?

ROB: When I read that, I had a very strong... "what?" reaction. When I was growing up, I saw myself as centrist, lot leftist or liberal at all. It's been a long way since I've seen myself that way; I've gone very far left and liberal. But reading that paragraph made me think in a more mature way about reasons I might have seen myself that way, as a younger version of me.

Those ideas that Honohan is saying are idealistic or possibly anachronistic– I was raised with those ideals. I take for granted in my life that there is a duty that is required of me, and I shouldn't be here if I'm not going to do it. It's ingrained in me, and it felt in-my-face to see that questioned to such an extent. It made me think back to the ways that I was unable to think of myself as left or liberal when I was younger.

KELSEY: The quote makes me sad because it feels like the common sense view as currently practiced. I ended up keeping a lot of quotes from that section, because it felt really honest. For example:

When people feel disenfranchised, they don't fight, they disengage.

It feels like what we're seeing on our national stage. It's hard, because everyone here on this call is probably more than usually engaged. Once you try being civically engaged, you see how simple it is, and how anybody could do it, but it's not an obvious thing, and it's not the thing that people ordinarily do.

ANA: I'm really caught up in wanting to understand what is meant by "civic virtue". Is that synonymous with participation? If not, then what are the critical qualities?

Secondarily, as this conversation has progressed, I've found myself thinking a number of times about the dyamics that cement groups together, and create in-groups and out-groups. What makes people invest further in a group or system, and what makes them decide to leave and take their efforts elsewhere? Is it possible to cement groups of people without the conflict of war, as was mentioned earlier?

If we are worried about participation, whose needs are not being met? Is there sufficient signal to show that needs aren't being met in a civic population?

MATT: My thoughts keep coming back to Nyers piece, "No One Is Illegal". One of the many arguments in that piece is that one of the principle outcomes of political action is the creation of a different sense of self on the part of the actor.

What you get out of a protest is not neccesarily policy change, but that the people who participate now understand themselves as part of the political infrastructure.

I had two reactions to that at the same time -- the one, which was so grateful to hear it, like please let that be true, because so little of what I've ever done seems to have any concrete effect AND on the other hand, skepticism that that result should be taken seriously, because there are so much that have to change at the policy level, and if we continue to fail to move those dials, there are so many disasters waiting for us on the other side.

I'm saying this in response because sometimes I think we look for metrics that may not actually measure very well what we're really doing, which is hopefully changing people.

LIZ: (slight topic change, but please return to this thread after!)

The reading that I did caught me by surprise, because I'm not used to thinking of moral terms. I'm not sure I'd dump that out of my mental model, but I really value self-discipline, and I value the dreams we hold together.

Can we dream together, and then can we (virtuously?) coordinate our work together to build a future we want to exist in? That's my limited personal philosophy. I came up short when challenged with these questions of virtue, or what a responsibility is to a collective. I was shocked to realize I feel very little responsibility to a collective other than the collective who I'm dreaming with.

JAKE: One of the things about this quote and about the potential for apathy to take hold– I feel, although I care a lot about certain issues that affect everyone, or at least big portions of society, or even minorities or other people who may not have enough influence over the direction things go, I often find myself wondering if I am devoting my energies the right way, in the most productive way. This notion of uniform standards of behavior potentially being entwined with civic virtue– it does leave a little wiggle room, there is some interpretation– but there may be value in a diversity of approaches people take to engaging in civic virtue.

For any given person, for any given agenda they may have, it can also be a bit complicated figuring out how they can be most effective at it. That's something I'm still trying to work through myself.

DAWN: Honohan did try to spend some space thinking about, what are some non-militarized ways of holding a set of obligations together? That involves education, incentives, structures of participation- Honohan spent time flagging, if maybe not treating at depth some of these questions. That weirdness around civic religion– we'll leave that aside.

I probably already knew I had an ambivalence or a concern about a lack of fealty to a nation-state, despite struggling with what it means to be a settler in Canada. I felt like this wasn't constrained– I think Honohan would try to think about it not only in that frame. Some of the questions about contemporary forms of republicanism that I'm used to are scaled down to a city size.

I was thinking about, to Liz's question, "what commons do I feel a sense of responsibility to?" I do see these interleaving layers of folks I have common cause with, that I spend time with because we have alignment on issues or we're working together toward a thing. But I do think there is something about adjacency, or being neighbors, or occupying the same space. There is a location to how I feel responsibility. I think Honohan tried to speak to that. Dave Harvey speaks to this. Curtis recommended this article with Dave Harvey, talking about spaces of hope. I see ways that obligations or responsibilities get built that are not just those of common cause.

ERIC: I had an opposite– I'm skeptical. I really appreciated when Honohan was abstract about describing commonalities between people. It left space for a self-definition of what the collective is, and what the collective interest is, rather than adjacency, or boundedness in a particular nation-state. Honohan does mention that people who live in the same country, their common interest is arbitrary in many cases.

There's one example where they work through this question of incentives and interests in civic virtue, and make the case that really rich people are going to value clean air and clean water too, because they also live next to the factory. There's an example there that had me really wondering: I think we know this from environmental justice– clearly, adjacency does not constitute a common fate or collective interest, because some people are more able to opt out than others. I don't think we would necessarily disagree, Dawn, but I had a different read.

MATT: I keep thinking about how one of the arguments against the philosophical basis of civic republicanism is that it worked just fine in the Greek or Rennaissance Italian city-states for two reasons: first of all, we radically restricted the definition of citizenship, so that mostly the wealthy were the people who counted as citizens. Second, these places were really small. What that meant was that political responsibility, which might mean showing up at the assembly to make decisions in a quasi-legislative fashion, or might mean standing shoulder to shoulder in one of these Greek military formations, a formation which if someone was out of step, would collapse. Because of the scale– a finite, human scale– it was relatively easy to cultivate in people the sense of mutual responsibility and mutual support.

Most of us, we live now in cities which are already gigantic, and in these nation-states, which are just immense. I have been spending time in India– it takes a month to hold an election. It's so unfathomably huge. The capacity organize systems that allow us to engage is small. The payoff of engagement is relatively small. So as a result, we become disengaged people. And the outcome is manifold. We get dictators. But also, we are not the people we want to be. We are not people who rise up immediately and claim the task that we think ought to be solved. That argument that civic responsibility is anachronistic is also often I think kind of nostalgic. It's not really anti-republican. We are just smaller than our ancestors were. We're smaller people, because we don't inhabit the kind of place that would allow us to grow to human size.

CURTIS: Honohan really seems to want to place civic virtue as a disposition (p.159 an "attitude" p.162) for individuals. The move here seems to be something like a reflective shift in the way of looking at a situation considering oneself as part of an interdependent network of individuals, i.e. a civic/political community. In this respect, H specifies qualities of civically virtuous activity, rather than sets of particular commitments. From my understanding of the text, civic virtue is a way of being-together, and H's account seperates civic virtue from the incentives and, I think, AFFORDANCES that institutions and communities have for virtous performance.

BRENDAN: Matt, you're speaking a lot to the notion of scale. A lot of writing that has emerged in a post-2010 framing are trying to grapple with this notion of scale. I think we have to really contest with our desire for an "other" in a lot of these contexts.

One of the things that we get from war is a very concrete sense of Other, which allows us to participate in larger groups. It creates a uniform set of desires, it reduces the number of things that you're worried about, and also simplifies your world. Having an Other allows you to participate in a larger group, because you naturally glaze over a lot of the things that we're contending with here.

We're talking about civic virtue– we're inherently dealing with a set of moral properties, a set of obligations versus incentives, which are intrinsically a property of people with enough time on their hands to ask these questions in the first place.

I think the internet is worth bringing up here. We mentioned adjacency, but now we have this freedom to associate by interest, and we can form groups at whatever scope or scale we feel comfortable with, in some ways, but in others we're sort of forced according to the constitutional rules of whatever system or network you're participating in.

There are a lot of questions that intersect. We have a notion of us/them dichotomy; we have a notion of us/them in orders of magnitude. I think a lot of our points of historical reference have to contest with that fact, that eveything was defined by a maximum scope, and we now are dealing with how far away the dish can run away with the spoon in terms of economics and in terms of group size. I think it's actually a different problem set. I think that's what makes a lot of our points of reference something to contest with. We don't have the same frame of reference that we had even 20 years ago.

DAWN: Transition to Frazee?

CURTIS: I was going back to some of the stuff we talked about at the beginning. In Honohan's account, motivations and incentives seem to be separate from opportunities and affordances to participate, which are more collectively managed theaters.

DAWN: This gets back to that core question around a relation– how can we think about these things as separable from a set of relations, or being in a community, or attached to an institution? By trying to slice up how these different pieces are treated, a performance of being virtuous in a community, we can talk about non-moral equivalence of participating in a community are. That gets lost.

CURTIS: Honohan gets started with this assertion that individuals living in any political community are interdependent. In any kind of interdependent relationship, there are matters of common concern. Honohan lists a bucnh of stuff. Then, the virtuous attitude is one that can engage with these matters of common concern, meeting these specific qualities. I think Honohan is careful to say that that's not necessarily going to entail one set, but how discussion about that can or should occur.

DAWN: I think that's on page 160; that's this idea of specifying a minimal set of obligations, but not a maximal. You have to be aware, do some sort of self restraint, and then engage deliberatively. And I really like the use of the word solidarity– be in active solidarity with each other. Which is trying to say, there are ways that we're obliged to each other. They're not specified, but be a good person in a moral sense.

KELSEY: I thought that the mention of 'affordances' specifically was a really good transition to talking about Frazee. I'm curious to hear what jumped out to other people– we've talked before in this group about: how do we design, as low-level as possible– for being our best selves?

The epigraph on the Honohan piece was Madison, talking about how despite your best attempts at legislation, you still need a civic virtue– which doesn't mean we can't still try to have really well set up structures.

I thought that the table comparing the rights of a thick server/thin client architecture in the Frazee piece was a really cool way of immediately going, oh yeah, that's not fair, that's not a participatory system.

JAKE: I really liked that aspect of the Frazee article as well, how it breaks down different kinds of participants in systems, and the ways that they may intentionally or not have different roles in the system.

One of the cases of an unintended consequence that they get into is with the Bitcoin protocol, and how miners ended up having much more power than perhaps was originally intended. On the one hand, the Honohan article seemed to be focusing a lot on citizens as an abstract concept, and ways in which we are the same. But when we get down to protocol design, it's very important to be able to suss out the differences citizens people may have from each other, what kinds of epiphenomena you can have from that.

ROB: Good point, where I get stuck with the article is that he seemed to want to do that by focusing on the technicalities– what the protocols don't enable. Those are the rights, as it were. But he conveniently sidesteps what I think is a problem there by bringing up Bitcoin but then failing to analyze Bitcoin in the same way he analyzes client/server architecture.

I was at a talk a couple months back, a Center for Justice & Accountability talk, about blockchain stuff. I was talking to somebody afterwards. The point that had come up in the conversation was the way that Bitcoin tries to take the tack in its languages, and in its technical design (largely) the same thing that Frazee is advocating that we need a grand unification of all of these things so that there's only one kind of actor. But the practical reality of Bitcoin is that there's not, in that once you have a certain divergence of power, that creates meaningful, qualitative differences (even if they aren't necessarily reflected in the protocol), they're more of an emergent phenomenon rather than out of the way the protocol is designed.

The large miners aren't technically different from other people participating on the blockchain, except they end up being completely different because of their outsizeness. To fail to account for that aspect of it, which is non-technical, or non-technical in the way Frazee approached it, that's an easy hole to fall into or trip over.

DAWN: I really appreciate Rob's comment and want to sit with it a bit more. This is a related point. I was struck by the set of civic metaphors that were used to describe technical artifacts. This transitions a bit into the Nyer, or some of the other articles: let's try for a rights-based citizen approach.

It was predicated on a reading of civic as tied to constitutionalism and rights. There's a lot of work done in doing an analysis in that way, that's actually reading into a technical set of phenomena, a specific set of– something is being read into it that might not be there. I was really grappling with the analysis. I had read it before, and need to re-read it like three more times, because I don't know how to feel about it

BRENDAN: Matt had a reference to stoicism and evaluation of virtue. There was a piece in the New York Times talking abot how the paragons of Silicon Valley now use stoicism as this metric for their own virtue. It was a bit of a takedown piece, talking about how this modality of thought has permeated everyone who runs Silicon Valley. If these are the people driving our technology, and then our technology drives our democracy, we need to talk about this stoicism thing. We need to examine how that affects us. It's really important to surface this question: Who are we, who are the people making these decisions, and what rulers are we using?

LIZ: I've gotta read that takedown piece! Personally, I'm looking for some guidelines to relational health. We know that we have relationships to the land, and in fact, we have relationships with technology, as well. It's very hard to draw the encapsulated boundary. That's where the rights-based work has been so effective. I personally hear movements now calling for relational uprisings. I'm wondering, if we have all these articles talking about what civic virtues are, if the civic body isn't exactly the right body that we are now reaching for, maybe is there another set of characteristics or values we might find?

DAWN: Transition to talking about the blog post? We had this whole side chat about stoicism– maybe we should have a summer reading group that's just about it! But Matt, I think you had a tentative response?

I don't know if this thread feels finished, but it feels suggestive to me of an unease we might have felt going in around what work "civic" is doing, and are we using the language of "civic"? Are we doing what we think we're doing, when we say it, and does it resonate with how we approach these questions?

MATT: To Rob, about the reality of Bitcoin– It strikes me that there is a real analogy to the gold standard. Part of what the gold standard is about is an attempt to find something that's outside of our merely constructed contingent reality, and ground value there.

Bitcoin is trying to step outside of all of the crap: banking, the heirarchies of the nation-state and all that shit and just find something that's purely technical. But it turns out, they're just trapped, still, also, inside some social relationships. They can't excise the social from their value.

That's a useful lesson, because they made a really big effort. And they not only weren't successful; also, they may be kind of a scam, fundamentally a pyramid scheme.

And then, what you were saying, Liz, it still feels to me like the social is really important. Maybe you're kind of right, in that the reason Dawn and I both can't figure out: what is the polity to which I owe allegiance, is a sign that we're thinking the wrong way. It's like we're trying to figure out: howe does the aether work? How does it spring back, and then stretch again?And it turns out, maybe there's no aether.

But I feel like there's something to which you are responsible and which is also responsible back to you: something bigger than yourself, to which you can contribute, and on which you can in some way depend.

I still want to have something like that. For me, it's never going to be God, or the church, probably the state, but I'd like it to somehow be a polity, in which I am enacting these mutual relationships.

For me, the take-home lesson is that we really do not have, and may have to be content with never having, a sharply defined sense of what the nature of our civic responsibility and virtue are.

"never god, or the church, probably not the state but maybe a polity"

Blog post and Writing

Pick up this discussion here datatogether#50

consider if we promote a set of blogs as a reading group that others can do with their close collaborators in order to surface great thoughts in a decentralized way

Links

Chat Log

14:33:41 From sds : I added the themes to the pad Matt P! We didn't coordinate but do you want to start? 14:35:04 From sds : (for recent joiners we are still in the "preshow") 14:35:54 From Kelsey Breseman : should do intros this meeting 14:36:48 From matt : cool to see people we don't know this time! 14:36:55 From matt : or anyway, people i odn't know. 14:37:03 From ana : Where will recordings go? 14:37:48 From matt : look, I'm an armchair philosophertoday 14:38:01 From matt : hi jake! 14:38:06 From Kelsey Breseman : the video is uploaded “unlisted” typically & used mostly by folks who couldn’t make it to the meeting 14:38:24 From ana : Thanks for the context! 14:38:26 From matt : hasn't been recorded yet 14:39:51 From matt : @daniel just fyi that we're recording the call so if you don't want to be recorded.. .consider muting video 14:42:25 From sds : awesome! great to have you join :) 14:42:31 From Kevin : Welcome, Jake! 14:43:03 From Michelle Hertzfeld : “Pestered nonstop” is more like it 14:43:13 From sds : Welcome! Yay! 14:45:33 From sds : Could we have a volunteer joint notetaker? I can be half a notetaker 14:45:42 From Kevin : I can take notes 14:45:45 From Kelsey Breseman : yes I can help! 14:45:53 From Eric : Me too! 14:45:58 From sds : Welcome! 14:46:30 From ana : I’m in Brooklyn too! Nice to see so many neighbors 14:47:10 From matt : because i'm lazy is why 14:47:16 From matt : and behind on everything. 14:48:02 From Michelle Hertzfeld : Can someone drop a link to the notes here, or tell me where to find it? (I seem to always forget that detail!) 14:48:07 From Kelsey Breseman : https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?both 14:48:07 From Eric : https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?view 14:48:11 From Michelle Hertzfeld : <3 14:49:05 From Kelsey Breseman : @dawn will there be time at the end to chat briefly about the blog idea? 14:49:19 From sds : yeah lets make sure we do that! 14:51:17 From sds : Maybe reflections and what struck folks? 14:54:08 From Michelle Hertzfeld : Shadow puppets! 14:54:42 From matt : what is missing from the list of themes/questions, maybe? 14:55:12 From sds : Matt P: You okay to keep stack? 14:55:18 From matt : yes 14:55:23 From b5 & liz : +1 14:55:25 From sds : ty! 14:58:40 From Michelle Hertzfeld : Friends: I did not have time to do the readings so I will mostly fly-on-the-wall, apologies! I’m sure I will have an uninformed opinion at some point tho ;) 15:00:58 From b5 & liz : I’m wondering about how entangled obligations are with incentives 15:01:11 From sds : Or even this issue of who os owed that responsibility -- Honohan makes the point that it should be owed to each other 15:01:45 From b5 & liz : i’m wondering how dreams are entangled with otherwise unlikely alliances 15:01:58 From Michelle Hertzfeld : Interesting to compare, too, to the emerging Chinese social credit system, and, say, someplace like Australia that requires voting (you get fined if you don’t vote). 15:02:14 From matt : some very related issues that ocme up in the No One Is Illegal ocnversations. 15:02:27 From matt : about extent of the poltiicla ocmmunity... not the same, but as I say related 15:03:34 From Michelle Hertzfeld : @b5+Liz: “Naturalized assumptions”, great phrase :D 15:04:12 From sds : I used the phrase "layered" writing 15:04:34 From sds : hard to know the argument until the middle/end of the paragraph 15:08:32 From curtis : hey all, just me wanting to type 15:09:01 From Kevin : Hi, Curtis! 15:09:20 From Rob Brackett : Also space race, to a certain extent 15:09:31 From Michelle Hertzfeld : What was the name of that book again? 15:10:15 From curtis : the analogy between politics and struggle (maybe not war) is somewhat covered by contemporary political theories like "Agonistics", right? As Chantal Mouffe wants to see politics as a struggle for hegemony over institutions of power 15:12:56 From matt : which book? 15:13:22 From Michelle Hertzfeld : War something something @matt 15:13:31 From Kelsey Breseman : the quote Dawn is reading: "Any commitment to civic virtue and the common good may be seen as subordinating the individual to society, or private life to public life, in a way that is incompatible with modern concerns with individual fulfilment. The requirement of civic virtue may be seen to be anachronistic, oppressive, moralistic or unrealistic. It may seem a throwback to small, weakly institutionalised ancient democracies, where there was no separate state to carry out collective decisions. In some interpretations at least, the historical notion of civic virtue oppressed citizens by requiring uniform standards of behaviour." 15:13:42 From matt : "Moral Equivalento f War" just an essay, veyr short, 1910 or 1906 depending on edition 15:15:30 From matt : I fee llike "anachronistic" is a distinct argument form the others. 15:17:04 From matt : For me the refernce in Honohan to Rouseau's General Will is really powerful. So much evil done in the Frnech Revolutin in its name. 15:18:22 From Kelsey Breseman : it feels like people feel like they’ve fulfilled their “civic obligation” if they’re generally aware of the news 15:18:35 From Kelsey Breseman : imo that’s step 1 of 2 15:18:49 From sds : I can jump on stack after this part to talk about the like "making" of civic virtue that Honohan identifies 15:19:03 From Kelsey Breseman : (I asked my mom to stop talking to me about news that made her upset unless she was doing something about it, has been an interesting experience) 15:20:35 From Kelsey Breseman : +1000 to that see also Womxn’s March 15:21:23 From sds : Liz on stack! 15:22:18 From matt : I also feel I want to respond to Rob osmehow. But not quite sure how. 15:23:02 From matt : Virtue does not need to be dictated to us by some outside authority. 15:23:14 From matt : cf. e.g. the stoics or existentialists. 15:23:17 From ana : I unfortunately need to leave early, looking forward to watching the rest of the chat on YouTube. Great to be here, thank you everyone! 15:23:25 From matt : bye ana 15:24:58 From matt : The other important axis here is the extent of the ivic eommunity or space. 15:28:07 From sds : do it! 15:29:52 From matt : p. 159 15:30:11 From sds : p. 171ff is the discussion of strategies 15:30:26 From Kevin : Rob on Stack 15:30:26 From b5 & liz : rob on stack? 15:30:29 From sds : Hmmm, I'm not sure, I guess I mean I have a set of relations, or like obligations to land 15:30:30 From b5 & liz : lol 15:31:00 From b5 & liz : athens was a slave-supported democracy 15:31:03 From sds : But Eric you flagged all good things 15:32:44 From b5 & liz : b5 on stack after rob 15:33:24 From matt : sorry sorry 15:33:32 From sds : Phew! resonates-- I saw adrienne marie brown talk about doing harm and pleasure activism 15:34:07 From sds : hits those issues of experiencing and doing harm and not also having the steps to deal with both 15:35:55 From Eric : The obligations to land is a good point, Dawn! 15:36:22 From matt : rob 15:36:35 From matt : I'm so sorry!!! 15:36:45 From curtis : H really seems to want to place civic virtue as a disposition (p.159 an "attitude" p.162) for individuals. The move here seems to be something like a reflective shift in the way of looking at a situation considering oneself as part of an interdependent network of individuals, i.e. a civic/political community. In this respect, H specifies qualities of civically virtuous activity, rather than sets of particular commitments. From my understanding of the text, civic virtue is a way of being-together, and H's account seperates civic virtue from the incentives and, I think, AFFORDANCES that institutions and communities have for virtous performance. 15:37:06 From matt : I wrote about some of htis war stuff like 25 years ago and havean ancient version here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/x6gpf0lxkf597y7/AAApACDcOSKXAdVSFmO7r0yGa?dl=0 15:37:41 From curtis : sorry! 15:39:06 From matt : Not sure I agree w/ this reading: " seperates civic virtue from the incentives and, I think, AFFORDANCES that institutions and communities have for virtous performance. " 15:39:20 From matt : but not sure how much of htat is me. 15:40:29 From matt : kelsey 15:41:26 From sds : lets take the transition 15:41:49 From Michelle Hertzfeld : This reminds me of the Chinese concept of “junzi” https://www.britannica.com/topic/junzi 15:41:58 From matt : "architectural rights" 15:42:15 From sds : I'm stuck on this doc, Matt can you share your dropbox link into notes? I want to read it 15:42:20 From Michelle Hertzfeld : “Virtue” (basically, civic virtue and family responsibility) was a key part of that philosophy (junzi) 15:43:09 From matt : for me it's stiocism, where the cultivation of virtue is mostly self-directed and also self-evaluated. 15:43:28 From matt : rob back o nstack 15:43:47 From b5 & liz : i like this point matt ^^ 15:43:49 From sds : this idea of universalism and abstraction and how concepts are treated v. interesting 15:43:51 From b5 & liz : (liz) 15:44:58 From curtis : IS there any discussion of incentives beyond the systems of honours? 15:45:22 From sds : where curtis? in honohan? 15:45:22 From matt : like in a corporation. 15:45:38 From b5 & liz : are there any concepts of “relational health” we could turn to? 15:45:40 From Michelle Hertzfeld : Yes to what Rob said — I started writing a comment to that effect, but he said it better :) 15:45:42 From matt : which is technically "publically" owned but where few people are actually engaged in decisions 15:46:16 From matt : +1 michelle 15:47:04 From b5 & liz : “you have the right to be a peer on the web” type thing 15:47:11 From b5 & liz : feels like a projection of values 15:48:04 From matt : sure. because everyone can abuse stoicism. 15:48:19 From matt : totally ripe for appropriataion by assholes. 15:48:23 From Michelle Hertzfeld : /me goes to google stoicism because I can’t remember things 15:48:32 From Rob Brackett : https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/style/silicon-valley-stoics.html ??? 15:48:35 From sds : I have a soft spot for seneca. def a summer reading letters from a stoic 15:48:41 From matt : :-) 15:48:53 From Rob Brackett : @b5 is that the piece ^^^ ? 15:49:44 From b5 & liz : yep! 15:49:47 From Michelle Hertzfeld : Ohhhhh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Stoicism 15:49:59 From Michelle Hertzfeld : ^^ re: the rebirth 15:50:29 From Eric : related: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/fashion/jack-dorsey-influencer.html 15:50:58 From b5 & liz : OMG THAT TITLE ^^ 15:51:00 From Eric : “Mr. Dorsey, in comparison [to Elon Musk], seems to be having less fun. 15:51:07 From b5 & liz : i read that yesterday! gold 15:51:41 From b5 & liz : pop-up reading group on stoicismm + adrienne marie brown’s pleasure activism 15:51:44 From sds : the old "wherever you go there you are" 15:52:04 From Michelle Hertzfeld : +1 to liz/b5 15:52:05 From curtis : lol but hey TRIED ;-( 15:52:16 From Michelle Hertzfeld : After this conversation, I feel like I need to stop using ‘civic’ loosely. I use it as short-hand for “gov stuff”, and maybe still that’s OK in the US, but for almost everything else — nope. 15:52:39 From Michelle Hertzfeld : I still like common good, or common outcome, or common….something :) 15:53:01 From b5 & liz : yeah what about the principle of non-violence as a determinant for behavior 15:53:19 From curtis : could be economy... but we're all so alienated 15:53:24 From b5 & liz : ^^ mHz I’m (b5) sooooo with you on this 15:53:56 From Kelsey Breseman : I can tie a small bow on the convo if you want :) 15:53:56 From b5 & liz : liz is too :) mHz 15:54:06 From Michelle Hertzfeld : <3 15:54:56 From Kelsey Breseman : it seems to be flowing through topics super well! 15:55:04 From Michelle Hertzfeld : I’m also thinking about how previous attempts at “civic virtue” were highly entwined with specific cultures and “tribes” and groups of people who shared more than “just” a nation-state. 15:55:06 From matt : @michelle read that short section on "comomon good" in the Honohan. It's really helpful for disentangling different senses of hte phrase. 15:55:09 From Kelsey Breseman : @all readings for June are up on the GitHub ;) 15:55:17 From Michelle Hertzfeld : Is it possible to have that “virue” without the other? 15:55:20 From matt : /me responsds ot ancient ocmmeont by @michelle 15:55:34 From Michelle Hertzfeld : @matt :thumbsup: thx! 15:55:53 From Kelsey Breseman : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1otR9YUXe4jRaj2lX84yqBazB5q4oinZ53QLeZuvbTls/edit#heading=h.n2pkfz4bgp12 15:56:07 From matt : or who maybe don't read any incoming communicaitons 15:57:58 From Michelle Hertzfeld : YES on this type of thing! <3 <3 <3 15:58:22 From Eric : 4. How to organize this for future iterations? 15:58:25 From sds : Can you make it view all? 15:58:36 From sds : cant view on non logged in device 15:58:46 From matt : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1otR9YUXe4jRaj2lX84yqBazB5q4oinZ53QLeZuvbTls/edit?usp=sharing 15:58:49 From Kelsey Breseman : view all now should work 16:00:10 From Kelsey Breseman : 1 more thing is: I really liked creating this draft + would do again throughout this season if we want to do this regularly & publicly 16:00:48 From b5 & liz : let’s debate this in a PR y'all 16:01:01 From Kelsey Breseman : +1 that sounds like a good idea b5 16:01:11 From matt : yes good point. 16:01:16 From matt : ^b5 16:01:31 From Kelsey Breseman : any comments from newer faces? (If you’ve had a chance to read it at all) 16:01:41 From Kelsey Breseman : curious what it looks like to an outsider 16:01:53 From matt : ^^ yeah that would be really interesting to know. 16:02:04 From matt : lets-read-about-it/blogs 16:02:05 From matt : in md 16:02:19 From matt : and then we post to wdgi 16:02:20 From matt : edgi 16:02:26 From Kelsey Breseman : pedantic debate about debating pedantic, perfect 16:02:33 From Michelle Hertzfeld : I have to run, friends! But in short — I also don’t want to make perfect the enemy of good 16:02:47 From Michelle Hertzfeld : Could also do a v1 blog or whatever 16:03:01 From Kelsey Breseman : +1 MHz, thx 16:03:14 From Michelle Hertzfeld : And we all don’t have a lot of time, so I feel like Kelsey’s time and what she can sustain (if she’s going to keep doing this) 16:03:14 From Rob Brackett : 👋 16:03:24 From Michelle Hertzfeld : …weighs a bit more 16:03:28 From Jake : +1, Kelsey. I watched the recording of the previous meeting, but a blog post summarzing could help engage with more people. 16:04:44 From sds : Totally agree that sounds like a wonderful addition! 16:04:53 From matt : https://witnesstointernment.wordpress.com/home/about/project-as-protoype/ 16:04:59 From sds : Also like what MHz said about avoiding enemy of the good 16:05:03 From matt : makes some similar arguments about form as argument 16:05:18 From Kelsey Breseman : datatogether#50 16:05:20 From Kelsey Breseman : for continued discussion 16:05:24 From Kelsey Breseman : :D 16:06:32 From Kevin : Kelsey, did you have a wrap up? 16:06:46 From b5 & liz : Readings are up! 16:06:50 From Eric : https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures 16:06:50 From b5 & liz : so good! prizes! 16:07:05 From Daniel : thank you 16:07:06 From matt : nice to meet y'all . thank you!!