One of Jonathon Zittrain’s most important observations in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It is that generativity applies just as much to networks as to the devices we attach to the networks. According to Zittrain, the founders of the Internet made two crucial design choices that allowed the Internet to function as a generative network. One is the “procrastination principle,” (a modified version of Homer Simpson’s campaign slogan) which posits that “most problems confronting a network can be solved later or by others.” (p. 31). The other principle is the “trust-your-neighbor” assumption:
The people using this network of networks and configuring its endpoints had to be trusted to be more or less competent and pure enough at heart that they would not intentionally or negligently disrupt the network. The network’s simplicity meant that many features found in other networks to keep them secure from fools and knaves would be absent. (p. 31-32)
These two assumptions point to the fact that designing the Internet was more than an technical engineering accomplishment, it was also an attempt at social engineering. The trust assumption transformed the nascent Internet, as opposed to the closed proprietary networks of the time, into a more or less voluntary society. This allowed the Internet to flourish, but the same problems that plague open society’s in the “real” world can (and do) crop up in the “virtual” world of open networks. The discipline of evolutionary psychology, and the work of Oxford University’s Robin Dunbar can shed some light on why the voluntary, open Internet of the early days worked and why it may not work as well in the future.
One finding to come out of Dunbar’s work is that the size of the social group or network is limited by the cognitive abilities of human brains. “Dunbar’s number” is 150, meaning that once a social group grows beyond that size, humans lose the ability to create, store, and recall intimate personal knowledge about the extra people added to the group. This personal knowledge is useful not only for remembering birthdays and phone numbers, but also for
creat[ing] a sense of trust and obligation that smoothes the process of interaction – and, in particular, reciprocation and co-operation. …what makes human society’s societies possible is the fact that the members implicitly (emphasis added) agree to honour their social obligations. …If we didn’t abide by these rules (most of the time, anyway), social life in groups would not be possible. (Evolutionary Psychology: A Beginner’s Guide, p. 122-4)
As groups and societies grow larger, they have to face what Dunbar calls Deacon’s Paradox, after the anthropologist Terrence Deacon. Deacon developed the Paradox during his investigation of human pair-bonding and the sexual division of labor, which creates the opportunity for partners to cheat on each other. Somehow, cheating must be kept to a minimum, or the social fabric itself will tear. Applied to social systems in general, Deacon’s Paradox points to the danger of free-riders and the difficulty of constraining anti-social behavior within groups. According to Dunabar Dunbar,
…the free-rider problem becomes increasingly intrusive under two general conditions: when social groups are large and dispersed and when the costs of co-operation are low (that is, when individuals are willing to co-operate without being too inquisitive about whom they are sharing their resources with). Under these two conditions, free-riders will find it relatively easy to locate naive individuals who are unaware of their behaviour. (Evolutionary Psychology: A Beginner’s Guide, p. 126-7)
These two conditions perfectly describe the Internet as it exists today: to the extent that Internet users can be labeled as a social group, it may be the largest such group to ever exist and the ease of sharing information, not to mention involuntary information “sharing” via malware and bots, make the Internet the perfect candidate for the free-rider problem. Deacon’s Paradox is the social science equivalent of Zittrain’s fear that the growth and success of the Internet (a social network, as well as technical network) makes it more vulnerable to attack and abuse from a growing group of free-riders. Perhaps the work currently being done in evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, and related fields could be of use in addressing the pressing issues Zittrain highlights in his book.
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