Transforming governance to address the Information Age: A direct response to Bruce Schneier
Bruce Schneier's 2023 RSA keynote prescribes the urgent need to reimagine today's governance. This essay evaluates Rulebooks as a potential solution to meet these critical, systemic challenges.
Authors
Mike Harris
Bryce Willem
Internet Governance, Transactional Trust, Risk Management, Response Essay
16 min read
June 12, 2023
Bruce Schneier, world-class security expert and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, delivered a potent keynote at the 2023 RSA Conference. In it, he illustrates the expanding gap between today's standardized systems of governance and accelerating technologies.
Our existing, human-driven systems of governance, conceived at the dawn of the Industrial Age, are ill-fitted to manage the speed, complexity, and scale of the Information Age. Rapid evolution of governance is only becoming more critical.
The current "here" is marked by misaligned incentive structures, systemic vulnerabilities, constrained resources, and reactive policymaking – increasingly opening us to catastrophic risks. We are bound within a polarizing, zero-sum, player-vs-player game, and the more capable our technologies become, the higher the tightrope we must traverse.
Schneier's envisaged "there," however, is a future that prioritizes cooperation over competition, yet accommodates plurality and functions at scales that reflect our steep technological advancement. It is clear we need to reimagine and consider novel, even unprecedented approaches to governance to move forward.
While Schneier admits to not having contemplated how to bridge "here" to "there," this essay introduces Decentralized Rulebooks as a powerful stepping stone in this journey.
As a novel technology, Decentralized Rulebooks can realign our incentive structures to produce desirable outcomes in a federated, inclusive, and democratic manner. They represent the first web-scale solution to be able to establish accountability in completely anonymous environments; they can flexibly accommodate both large and small, local-scale governance; they provide a new framework to better translate individual preferences into group policies. Ultimately, they are designed meticulously to make the web a safer, fairer, and more trustworthy environment.
Today, power accumulates because we combine governance with transactional utility, inadvertently monopolizing the governance of the services they create.
The essay is a direct response to the foundational points in Schneier's keynote, which we strongly recommend reading here. We will build upon those arguments and propose Rulebooks as an original, far-reaching solution to answer "how?" Ultimately, we hope this article generates further discourse, critique, and questions regarding Rulebooks' role in the next era of digital trust.
A Bridge Between Eras
To start, Decentralized Rulebooks accommodate the necessities of the Information Age while respecting our deeply rooted democratic systems. This extends the democratic foundation we have painstakingly built over generations and augments it with the agility required in today's rapidly evolving digital ecosystem. It insists on human-centric decision-making, ensuring that the most impactful decisions remain in the hands of people, not machines.
Rulebooks empower individuals to set and enforce boundaries while providing a safe, regulated environment for communities to operate. Technology, in this arrangement, is a facilitator – a tool to introduce efficiencies where applicable. Schneier questions the continued effectiveness of conflict as a problem-solving tool in our current context, pointing to the zero-sum, scarcity mindset, and polarization it fosters. He notes: "We have bad actors deliberately breaking the rules. And we have selfish actors taking advantage of insufficient rules."
Given their global operations, Internet giants wield unparalleled control that outstrips most governments' jurisdiction and capacities, leaving them ill-equipped to meet these immense regulatory challenges.
In response, Rulebooks propose an agile, highly-adaptive approach: Instead of chasing the chimera of a one-size-fits-all solution, we can deploy multiple variants of a rule-based solution, each optimized for specific contexts, and monitor their effectiveness in achieving desired outcomes.
Here is an overview of the system. Rulebooks facilitate voluntary, context-specific, and adaptable governance of transactions, rooted in the principle of "Proving Current Honesty." The network allows anyone to assume any role, with consequences ensuing only when rules are infringed. We will dig into these mechanisms in more detail, but for now, just know that control is provided voluntarily from the bottom up.
Exonym's Rulebooks are designed with a principle of minimization, aiming to create the most basic yet effective rules and policies relevant to a specific context. This lean approach not only makes the rules easier to understand and adopt by users but also enhances their utility and universality (users’ agreement to rules). The system's low resource footprint enables rules to be applied across highly specific and narrow scopes of context, further extending their application and general accessibility.
Real-World Application
To better understand the mechanics, let's ground the system in an example of how it could be applied in the real-world context of advertising standards.
There are five key components we will outline: Rulebooks, Leads, Moderators, Producers, and Utilities. To preface, anyone can create a Rulebook. This process is independent from becoming a Lead, but one must become a Leas to initiate governance over those standards.
Now, on to our example. To address the challenge of aligning global advertising standards with regional regulations, we might propose a straightforward Rulebook with a simple, yet encompassing directive: "Comply with local advertising standards."
This example commences with a country becoming a Lead, adopting this specific Rulebook, and opening a node. This is extremely advantageous to the country because while they have already established advertising legislation and everyone is meant to comply, there are many vulnerabilities that can be hacked. Notably, it is not a level playing field and the government is largely dependent upon the ad platforms to police those regulations against their own incentives.
To expand this point, many countries have legal limits on how much can be spent on political advertising. This guardrail for democracy now has a dangerous loophole, as political actors can run ads on major platforms and simply not report what they spend. Tech giants have withheld such information from authorities, making their platforms a blackbox for unlimited ad spending and unfair political persuasion. (This kind of violation is not inconsequential to democracy, as journalist Carole Cadwalladr underscores in her TED talk, here.)
Ad platforms act as gatekeepers, assisting governments in the enforcement of legal policies, thereby reducing the need for extensive oversight. While this relationship has its merits, it also introduces a conflict of interest, as these platforms both regulate and derive profits from the very systems they oversee. Given their global operations, these Internet giants wield unparalleled control that outstrips most governments' jurisdiction and capacities, leaving them ill-equipped to meet this immense challenge.
Establishing as a Lead with a Rulebook actively empowers countries to level the playing field and reclaim control over their own advertising standards, without reclaiming the onus of moderation. The current dependency on the ad platforms is replaced by an independent, self-regulating system. Countries can implement the Rulebook as legal standard and require their ad industry to adopt them, thereby directing advertising agencies to the officially administered Rulebook.
This enables a paradigm shift from governments needing to go to Internet giants and assert that they must follow the rules—and then hope that they actually do—to being able to say: "here are the rules; here is the system; we don't care who you are; this is how advertising standards work; adopt the system or you can't play."
In this respect, this system provides the means to implement a verifiable, informational representation of any regulations, standards, or terms online – and in a way that the whole world can interact with.
Agility is a critical characteristic of Rulebooks. As contribution-based, permissionless systems they permit constant improvement, self-correction, experimentation, and plurality.
Let's bring Moderators into this picture next. Per our example, the government is in a strong position to leverage the advertising economy and require ad agencies to join the network as Moderators (let's say as a condition of maintaining their advertising licenses). Moderators link to the Lead and open a node that anyone can subscribe to in order to be issued a cryptographic credential that privileges them to run ads in that country.
Moderators' role is comparable to local licensing authorities enforcing regional advertising standards. They can be trusted to comply with domestic regulations, as established governance mechanisms exist. They process issuance requests, revoke violators, administer accountability, and evaluate appeals. All these processes can be automated to yield a minimal footprint, ultimately decentralizing this currently centralized process.
Following this, we have Producers, who are essentially advertising agents, whether employed in companies, independent, or based abroad. Producers subscribe to a Moderator in the country they want to advertise in, thus pledging to uphold the regional advertising standards. This grants them a portable cryptographic credential to exercise this privilege. Any violation of the standards could lead to revocation and loss of privileges in that country.
Finally, the Utility in this scenario is an ad service like GoogleAds. Utilities integrate a Rulebook SDK to verify ad Producers' privileges to run ads in their respective countries. This process entails checking whether the ad targeting a specific region is included in that region's whitebox database and verifying its proof of honesty. Utilities thus act as channels for ethical advertising, enhancing trust in online ads.
Collectively, the Rulebooks, Leads, Moderators, Producers, and Utilities shape a trustworthy ecosystem rooted in respect for regional advertising norms. This approach importantly removes the need for countries to rely on private corporations to enforce their standards. It offers an innovative, decentralized solution that boosts regulatory control, promotes compliance, and reinforces global accountability in the advertising sector. Now let’s look at how this expands back to more general governance.
Voluntary, Self-Organizing Governance
In his keynote, Schneier cautions against an over-reliance on technological solutionism and the potential risk of human learned helplessness when technology is seen as a cure-all for complex governance issues. Here, the properties of Rulebooks step in, offering a novel approach to synergistically combine technology with human agency and help avoid such pitfalls. In a world that often seems void of tangible solutions, Decentralized Rulebooks provide a distinct, human-centric governance model that maintains the necessary agility to adapt at technological pace.
Agility is a critical characteristic of Rulebooks. As contribution-based, permissionless systems they permit constant improvement, self-correction, experimentation, and plurality. They are a dynamic and rapidly adaptive framework to meet emerging challenges and shifting contexts, especially in contrast to static, one-size-fits-all governance models.
In the current digital landscape, power accumulates because we combine governance with transactional utility, inadvertently monopolizing the governance of the services they create. Rulebooks disrupt this by separating the two, requiring human agency and distributing control in the process.
Principally, governance responsibilities are distributed between Leads and Moderators. Their control is thus established based on its utility and appeal to the users they govern. Moderators chose their Leads; users chose their Moderators. Control is always provided in a voluntary, bottom-up manner. Users and Moderators always have the ability to leave, join, or create alternatives that better align with their needs.
Rulebooks' bottom-up approach establishes the necessary flexibility for individuals and groups to self-organize toward their desired outcomes. Groups can flexibly adopt and disregard incentive structures as long as they are useful or not.
This maps on nicely to Schneier's vision for future governance systems that are both very large and very small. Rulebooks provide a framework that is versatile enough to accommodate large-scale global collaboration while also respecting the distinctiveness of smaller, local contexts. Demonstrating compatibility as a strength, they even integrate smoothly into existing systems, mitigating conflict that can emerge from abrupt, drastic changes between governance models.
One crucial challenge lies in balancing anonymous and accountable transactions. Complete anonymity can open a network to bottom-up threats such as criminal behavior, while a lack of it may lead to top-down threats, including autocracy and totalitarianism. One of the key innovations of the system is that it allows users to expose pseudonymous identifiers when joining an Moderator's representation of a Rulebook but preserve anonymity when interacting with Utilities and honesty is proven. This strikes an unprecedented equilibrium, ensuring both personal privacy and accountability across the Internet.
Fundamentally, Rulebooks offer a governance model that respects the caution against techno-solutionism. They propose a people-first, democratic approach that harnesses the best of technology while ensuring human agency remains at the forefront of our governance systems.
Schneier's 3x Macro Problems
The heart of Schneier's keynote presents three macro problems we must grapple with to effectively move from "here" to "there". Let's explore Rulebooks' fitness and response to each particular challenge.
Problem No. 1 is the misalignment of incentives. Schneier points that a feature of our existing systems is to generate misaligned incentives between individual or smaller group interests and the collective good. Our systems can regularly enable small special interests to become the standards for the collective.
Rulebooks present a robust alternative: a network that is intrinsically open, permissionless, and capable of ongoing self-organization. Rulebooks do not dictate what should or shouldn't be done, but rather provide the tools for individuals to design and enact suitable incentives. Anyone is empowered to create and manage their own preferential standards and can do so by becoming a Lead, becoming an Moderator, or joining a Moderator as a user in that specific context.
Earlier we explored the example of existing advertising legislation being enacted into Rulebooks. This is an example of plugging into a legal framework that's already established and has regulation. Rulebooks are open-ended as a technology, however, in that they can be created to establish regulation in contexts for which we don’t have clearly defined regulations, such as social media content moderation or managing misinformation in news.
Filter bubbles are a known problem in today's information landscape. They are largely a result of blackbox, outrage algorithms tuned to maximize attention and advertisement value. People have seldom the ability to leverage any real intentions, choice, or preferential control over what's appearing for consumption on their feeds. Rulebooks provide an intervention to overlay individual intentions into those systems.
Users can create Rulebooks or subscribe to existing rules that best align with their individual preferences. This makes it possible for those preferences to act as a filter to only present content that has proven to meet the desired standards.
Our current systems of one-size-fits-all governance have neither the flexibility nor the agility to maintain aligned incentives. Rulebooks' bottom-up approach establishes the necessary flexibility for individuals and groups to self-organize toward their desired outcomes. Groups can flexibly adopt and disregard incentive structures as long as they are useful or not.
Problem No. 2 is that our socio-technical systems are vulnerable to hacking. Schneier points out that socio-technical systems, including our democracies, can fall prey to hacking due to inconsistent, incomplete, or outdated rules.
Decentralized Rulebooks encourage continuous improvement with their permissionless nature, making them adaptable and resilient to hacking. Anyone can contribute to and adjust the rules, resulting in a dynamic governance model that self-updates to minimize loopholes and inconsistencies.
While it is important to note that any system, including Rulebooks, can be potentially hacked, the idea and security envisioned by the Rulebook document persist. If a breach occurs, it is not the Rulebook that fails, but the Leads and Moderators that need adjustment or should face accountability.
If an originally trustworthy Lead is successfully corrupted, Moderator are free to disconnect, create a new Lead, or join an existing one that upholds the original ideals of the Rulebook. Upon disconnecting, users who had joined that Moderator would be signaled and given the opportunity to rejoin their trusted Moderator under a new Lead, or join another Moderator under the original Lead or elsewhere.
Our current systems of one-size-fits-all governance have neither the flexibility nor the agility to maintain aligned incentives.
These mechanisms make it possible to replace corrupted institutions and ensure flexibility for trust to actively migrate rather than fester into general distrust. The system enables this flexibility but preserves a balanced amount of friction to help avoid fluid changes from happening all the time.
Problem No. 3 is how mismatched our current governance systems are to technologic power. According to Schneier, our current reactive, rights-based governance systems struggle to adapt to our expanding power dynamics, often relying on privileged actions where risks are present. The amount of damage a single person could do has always been limited. As technology becomes more potent and accessible (think AI, robotics, pathogen design, ...), the risk posed by any single individual—even accidental—renders our current reactive approaches untenable.
As far as this risk is amplified through the Internet, Rulebooks introduce a proactive, permission-based approach. They provide a platform for both permissionless privilege and license-type privilege, based on any desired onboarding process. It's not a replacement for rights-based governance, but rather a way to augment and manage it much more effectively today.
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Conclusion: "Here" to "There"
Decentralized Rulebooks can align incentives, minimize vulnerabilities, and foster a proactive governance model that is adaptable, democratic, and rooted in respect for individual rights and regional diversity. By decentralizing control and harnessing the power of collective wisdom, Rulebooks offer an effective solution to the challenges posed by our rapidly evolving digital landscape, where traditional governance systems are increasingly inadequate.
Importantly, Rulebooks are not just a technological tool. At their best, they are a manifestation of human agency, epitomizing our capacity for collaborative problem-solving. They reflect our ability to learn, adapt, and evolve, to forge new paths in response to changing circumstances. By recognizing and utilizing our innate capacity for cooperation, Rulebooks offer an alternative to the conflict-ridden systems of the past, paving the way for a future of democratic, inclusive, and sustainable governance.
This transformative potential of Rulebooks is perhaps their most significant contribution. In the face of mounting complexity and an uncertain future, they offer us not just a tool, but a roadmap – a vision of what governance could be in the Information Age.
Rulebooks may well be a steppingstone Schneier didn't anticipate, but they mark a promising start from "here" to "there."
Authors
Mike Harris
Bryce Willem
References
