Class Discussion

Post your comments about today's class here..

Rough consensus and normative design

The discussion today, and in the reading, seemed to describe the designers of proto-Internet and Internet technologies as largely driven by non-normative, technocratic design principles that made choices and decisions based on consensus as to how best to solve a particular problem. Part of the problem I see with this is that the lack of strong normative goals in their design is inferred, at least in part, from a lack of public discussion of the normative goals on parallel track to the technical consensus building.

I guess I wonder to what extent these developers were just implementing normative, though perhaps unquestioned, goals that they all shared--though shared culture, nationality, training, gender, race, etc. Maybe the lack of an identification layer is a technical decision, but maybe it's also the result normative view point that anonymous speech is more important than prevent hate speech, etc. Just because they didn't talk about that doesn't seem to be to say conclusively that the design choices of what the network would afford wasn't always a moral or social, in addition to technical, norms formation process. --Mgalese 18:12, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

Don't assume that technocratic design principles are separate from strong normative goals; "rough consensus and running code" is a normative choice about how to make decisions and what values to prioritize. erin 15:05, 11 March 2008 (EDT)

Right. I guess that makes sense, since rough consensus is at the very least a statement about the rights of minority viewpoints. It strikes me that our "Eden" story of internet isn't really a technocratic Eden free of policy, but of policy choices unexamined and unsurfaced.--Mgalese 15:29, 11 March 2008 (EDT)

I am curious how the early internet ethos developed. To some extent the decisionmaking-by-consensus arises from the non-hierarchical relationship of all the participants. Like customary international law, when nobody has the power to enforce rules against everyone else, all you have are norms generated by actual practice. But you are also right that the developers generally came from the same cultural background, which definitely impacted their choices about how to work together. erin 16:26, 11 March 2008 (EDT)

Elites and hierarchy: I think it's absolutely true that the "framers" were a self-selected, largely homogeneous group of people, but that's only part of the answer. They could proudly claim to focus entirely on the technology in part because they already shared so many values, but I also think, as Erin said, that they were in fact making affirmative normative policy decisions, and were simply doing so silently because, even among this group, many or most didn't have standing to engage in the debate. I don't believe for a second that it was an egalitarian enterprise. It has been my experience that engineers collaborating for long periods of time tend to stratify into "decision-makers" and "contributors" in very pronounced ways, with a few elites lording over the rest. Granted, they all may start equal, and the stratification usually (though not always) happens in a meritocratic way on the basis of technical skill, but once it happens it can often stifle debate about non-technical matters. Once the elites are established, the only basis upon which contributors tend to be able to challenge them is objective technical arguments. The normative decisions get made, almost in a vacuum, by the elites who are only holding court on technical discussions. But they are being made. I'm painting a darker picture than I think is likely to have happened, but I am really skeptical about all this talk of group ethos, and think it's at least as likely that it is instead rose-tinted rear-view analysis.