IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 25

assumptions and current paradigms
or patterns that construct at least
some of the debate about technology and society.
One is the persistence of the call
for connection and social interaction as a fundamental part of what it
means to be human. Another is the
insistence of new levels of transparency in the dealings and interactions
of people, companies, and institutions. Part of the test for this next
phase of the technology-society
conversations will be the level of
visibility or transparency with which
it is conducted.
Can people see, at least, what is
going on? How hidden will be the
actions and real motivations of the
main players, including of people
and communities themselves? To
an extent, calling out the need for
greater visibility will be one component of the "brave" part of our
brave conversations.
It's possible to go a step further and seek not just visibility
and transparency but legibility as
well. The idea of legibility is not
just the opportunity to see what's
happening but to "read" what's
happening, to have a chance to
understand and follow the conversation as it were.
Legibility implies literacy, of
course. Anyone can see the letters
on the page. But you can't read
them unless you are literate. At least
part of the next conversations about
the web and the interaction of tech-

nology and society will be whether
people have the literacy skills to
read the technology, social, political
and cultural currents with which the
conversation will be grappling.
A final issue deals with rights
and assets.
Especially in the field of data,
one strand of thinking that is becoming more powerful is the contention
that we can do much to equalize the
technology-human interaction if we
vest in people the rights to their data
about themselves. It's basically a
challenge to vest people with rights
to their identity.
Property rights could be a very
old solution, or partial solution to a
very new problem. In the process,
property rights could play a part
in shifting the balance of power
towards ordinary people. If we
assume that people tend to care
more about problems and challenges in which they have a genuine,
perhaps even literal, vested interest,
then investing people with rights
to create assets they might want to
more energetically contest and protect could be vital.
And that process, presumably,
need not stop with humans. Why
wouldn't it also apply to nature, animals, institutions and process, and
even to the machines themselves?

Arteries and Capillaries
[Most of this section is based on the
presentation given at the "Brave Conversations" event by Nick Gruen.]

"What the poor majority in the developing world do not have is easy access to the legal
system which, in the advanced nations of the world and for the elite in their countries, is
the gateway to economic success, for it is in the legal system where property documents
are created and standardized according to law. That documentation builds a public
memory that permits society to engage in such crucial economic activities as identifying
and gaining access to information about individuals, their assets, their titles, rights,
charges, and obligations; establishing the limits of liability for businesses; knowing
an asset's previous economic situation; assuring protection of third parties; and
quantifying and valuing assets and rights."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_Polar

SEPTEMBER 2017

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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

Brave conversations imply brave
institutions. And brave institutions
imply as much attention to the "capillaries" (the smaller, more local,
and experiential modes of implementation and execution, close to
the ground and close to people) as
they do to the "arteries" (the bigger,
top down systems of command and
control and status-focused hierarchies of institutional power and policy direction).
In fact, it is more than speculation
to suggest that much of our current
institutional performance, especially
in and around government and public purpose, betrays a dangerous
imbalance that has underestimated
both the value and significance of
the smaller "capillaries" of practice
and implementation. That leaves our
ability to translate brave conversations into equally brave and effective
execution, stranded, perhaps fatally.
Arteries tend to favor top down
hierarchy and privilege theory over
practice, strategy over delivery, and
policy over execution. In the evolving world of a decentralized Web,
and an associated culture of distributed power and local autonomy, we
have witnessed the agile flexibility
of the "lean" production system in
Toyota, for example, open source
software production, and the growth
of peer-produced services and platforms like Wikipedia.
What these and emerging technologies like blockchain suggest is
quite different desires to organize
flows of information and learning
and policy and implementation.
The results of existing patterns are
often projects that fail to realize the
intended ambitions that drove their
development in the first place (for
example, more education spending
doesn't result in better Program for
International Student Assessment
(PISA) scores, resulting in billions of
dollars of "leaking" human capital
and human potential every year).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_Polar

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017