Social Stack
= The emergence of a new “social layer” of services, software and social norms on the Internet
Discussion
John Clippinger and David Bollier:
"Just as the Industrial Revolution redefined our relationship to Nature and to one another, so too the New Sciences and open network platforms are enabling diverse peoples from around the world to invent new digital/physical hybrid expressions of themselves. The new social networks, communities, movements, enterprises and institutions now arising are fundamentally changing how the human species is shaping the world. It is also resulting in new forms of bottom-up human agency, social coordination and innovation. In its largest sense, open platforms are giving rise to new forms of flexible, self-defining and self-organizing societies. We have entered an era in which the coordination costs for collaboration are nearing zero and unforeseen opportunities for collective action at enormous scales are now tenable.
Seen through the lens of evolutionary biology, the emerging Social Stack is a significant evolutionary threshold. It is introducing new “fitness functions” for the evolution of human norms, behaviors and institutions. This in turn is opening up new “solution spaces” for solving intractable problems at all levels of society. Design innovation has reached a point that it is now entirely practical to design and build powerful new sorts of global social ecosystems.
These new digital environments are capable of organizing social trust and collaboration in highly constructive ways. They can unlock knowledge and opportunity in previously unimaginable ways. Yet because these very technologies come freighted with worrisome surveillance and data-mining powers, they also require vigilance against an alternative dark, dystopian future.
ID^3 believes that an integrated Social Stack could have historic implications for governance, economics, institutional structures, social organization and much else. It would enable people to develop new sets of norms as networks or communities on the Internet, providing them with powerful, practical new tools to manage community production and exchange. This could radically (if indirectly) affect all levels of society.
What exactly is the Social Stack? It consists of five layers of social technologies, each of which deals with distinct challenges in securing and sharing personal private data in controlled digital contexts.
The five layers deal respectively with Core Identity; Identity Management and Authentication; Trust Frameworks; Core Services; and Applications.
The purpose of the Social Stack is to help establish distributed systems to manage personal identity on open platforms. Together, the five layers can enable trustworthy forms of collaboration, exchange and governance of resources. These technologies are already actively developing and starting to coalesce fitfully into a more integrated, open software platform. It is a process that ID^3 is actively facilitating in a number of demonstration projects.
The basic goal of the Social Stack is to enable people to develop trusted online social and commercial relationships that can persist and scale. This capacity depends upon people being able to control their own personal information. They must also be able to efficiently authenticate other people’s identities based on self-selected criteria for mutual association, trust and risk.
If equipped with the proper tools, distributed networks and groups could allocate their resources and privileges among their participant-members as they see fit. The Social Stack would enable sustainable, bottom-up forms of governance to take root and grow. The system could be used to advance commerce, civic engagement, social purposes or non-market provisioning.
In this sense, the Social Stack has sweeping implications for political governance in both theoretical and practical terms. It could transform the role of the State, by empowering citizens to devise new forms of self-actualized institutions that exhibit greater social legitimacy, efficacy and adaptability than governments. As a technical and political matter, the Social Stack would not consist of a single, monolithic set of protocols and software systems, but rather an evolving plurality of approaches animated by users themselves. It would also be completely decentralized and open source, and so the platform could not be “captured” by any single player or group and would always be capable of evolving and innovating.
Ever since Hobbes proposed the State as the only viable alternative to the dread state of nature, citizens have entered into a notional “social contract” with “the Leviathan” to protect their safety and basic rights. But what if networked technologies using the Social Stack could enable individuals to negotiate a very different sort of social contract (or contracts)? What if digital systems enabled people to band together into quasi-autonomous governance units for mutual protection and provisioning without resorting to government while reaping superior forms of services and protection?
There is good reason to believe that the Social Stack could indeed help people overcome classic collective-action problems such as poorly crafted rules, inadequate enforcement, weak sanctions, etc. Instead of having to look to the State, it is possible to imagine alternative governance institutions that could be more effective, at least for many important commercial, civic and social needs. People could be empowered to control their personal information and identities, and to develop bonds of social trust and reputation in stable, enduring online communities.
Equipped with these capacities, people could feasibly undertake cooperative endeavors and commerce at scales and intensities previously impossible. Anyone could theoretically use the Social Stack to become an authoritative, secure and seamless guarantor of identity on global networks. They could develop sophisticated, value-based ecosystems animated by their own bottom-up interests (“pull”) rather than by top-down, seller-oriented power and marketing (“push”).
The new institutional forms in networked ecosystems would generally be more efficient, flexible and responsive than their conventional equivalents. They would open the door for greater experimentation and the evolution of new types of institutional systems and social practices that express the collective will of a group. Like the diversity of a gene pool, the Social Stack would help catalyze innovation and practical improvements in institutional behavior." (http://idcubed.org/open-platform/socialstack/)