Technological revolutions and the search for trust

image: The Economist

So essentially: wild growth, societal disruption, then readjustment and broad adoption.  Perez describes the “readjustment and broad adoption” phase (the “deployment period” in the diagram above), as the percolating of the “common sense” throughout other aspects of society:

“the new paradigm eventually becomes the new generalized ‘common sense’, which gradually finds itself embedded in social practice, legislation and other components of the institutional framework, facilitating compatible innovations and hindering incompatible ones.”[2]

In other words, once the established powers of the previous paradigm are done fighting off the new paradigm (typically after some sort of profound blow-up), we come around to adopting the techniques of the new paradigm to achieve the sense of trust and safety that we had come to know in the previous one.  Same goals, new methods. As it happens, our current “1.0” regulatory model was actually the result of a previous technological revolution.  In The Search for Order: 1877-1920[2], Robert H. Wiebe describes the state of affairs that led to the progressive era reforms of the early 20th century:

Established wealth and power fought one battle after another against the great new fortunes and political kingdoms carved out of urban-industrial America, and the more they struggled, the more they scrambled the criteria of prestige. The concept of a middle class crumbled at the touch. Small business appeared and disappeared at a frightening rate. The so-called professions meant little as long as anyone with a bag of pills and a bottle of syrup could pass for a doctor, a few books and a corrupt judge made a man a lawyer, and an unemployed literate qualified as a teacher.

This sounds a lot like today, right?  A new techno-economic paradigm (in this case, urbanization and inter-city transportation) broke the previous model of trust (isolated, closely-knit rural communities), resulting in a re-thinking of how to find that trust.  During the “bureaucratic revolution” of the early 20th century progressive reforms, the answer to this problem was the establishment of institutions -- on the private side, firms with trustworthy brands, and on the public side, regulatory bodies -- that took on the burden of ensuring public safety and the necessary trust & security to underpin the economy and society. Coming back to today, we are currently in the middle of one of these 50-year surges -- the paradigm of networked information -- and that we are roughly in the middle of the above graph -- we’ve seen wild growth, intense investment, and profound conflicts between the new paradigm and the old. What this paper is about, then, is how we might consider adopting the tools & techniques of the networked information paradigm to achieve the societal goals previously achieved through the 20th century’s “industrial” regulations and public policies.  A “2.0” approach, if you will, that adopts the “common sense” of the internet era to build a foundation of trust and safety. Coming up: a look at some concrete examples of the tensions between the networked information era and the industrial era; a view into the world of web platforms’ “trust and safety” teams and the model of regulation they’re pioneering; and finally, some specific recommendations for how we might envision a new paradigm for regulation that embraces the networked information era.   === Footnotes:

1. Perez, p.4

2. Perez, p. 16

3. Weibe, p. 13.  Hat tip to Rit Aggarwala for this reference, and the idea of the "first bureaucratic revolution"

image: The Economist

So essentially: wild growth, societal disruption, then readjustment and broad adoption.  Perez describes the “readjustment and broad adoption” phase (the “deployment period” in the diagram above), as the percolating of the “common sense” throughout other aspects of society:

“the new paradigm eventually becomes the new generalized ‘common sense’, which gradually finds itself embedded in social practice, legislation and other components of the institutional framework, facilitating compatible innovations and hindering incompatible ones.”[2]

In other words, once the established powers of the previous paradigm are done fighting off the new paradigm (typically after some sort of profound blow-up), we come around to adopting the techniques of the new paradigm to achieve the sense of trust and safety that we had come to know in the previous one.  Same goals, new methods. As it happens, our current “1.0” regulatory model was actually the result of a previous technological revolution.  In The Search for Order: 1877-1920[2], Robert H. Wiebe describes the state of affairs that led to the progressive era reforms of the early 20th century:

Established wealth and power fought one battle after another against the great new fortunes and political kingdoms carved out of urban-industrial America, and the more they struggled, the more they scrambled the criteria of prestige. The concept of a middle class crumbled at the touch. Small business appeared and disappeared at a frightening rate. The so-called professions meant little as long as anyone with a bag of pills and a bottle of syrup could pass for a doctor, a few books and a corrupt judge made a man a lawyer, and an unemployed literate qualified as a teacher.

This sounds a lot like today, right?  A new techno-economic paradigm (in this case, urbanization and inter-city transportation) broke the previous model of trust (isolated, closely-knit rural communities), resulting in a re-thinking of how to find that trust.  During the “bureaucratic revolution” of the early 20th century progressive reforms, the answer to this problem was the establishment of institutions -- on the private side, firms with trustworthy brands, and on the public side, regulatory bodies -- that took on the burden of ensuring public safety and the necessary trust & security to underpin the economy and society. Coming back to today, we are currently in the middle of one of these 50-year surges -- the paradigm of networked information -- and that we are roughly in the middle of the above graph -- we’ve seen wild growth, intense investment, and profound conflicts between the new paradigm and the old. What this paper is about, then, is how we might consider adopting the tools & techniques of the networked information paradigm to achieve the societal goals previously achieved through the 20th century’s “industrial” regulations and public policies.  A “2.0” approach, if you will, that adopts the “common sense” of the internet era to build a foundation of trust and safety. Coming up: a look at some concrete examples of the tensions between the networked information era and the industrial era; a view into the world of web platforms’ “trust and safety” teams and the model of regulation they’re pioneering; and finally, some specific recommendations for how we might envision a new paradigm for regulation that embraces the networked information era.   === Footnotes:

1. Perez, p.4

2. Perez, p. 16

3. Weibe, p. 13.  Hat tip to Rit Aggarwala for this reference, and the idea of the "first bureaucratic revolution"

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