NB: The following post is not immediately related to Indian policy, but is a more general discussion picking up from a recent patent application on a possible scenario for future governance.“The present invention includes methods and technologies for defining and administering device manners policy (“DMP”), propagating DMP, reception and recognition of, and compliance with DMP. Such policy may be used to communicate to various mobile and other devices the “manners” with which compliance is expected or required. Similar to some of the social manners honored among people, such as with “no smoking” or “employees only” zones, “no swimming” or “no flash photography” areas, and scenarios for “please wash your hands” or “no talking out loud”, devices may recognize and comply with analogous “device manners” policy.”
Ars technica provides an excellent summary of what the patent entails here.
DMP borrows its principles from existing social conventions related to mobile devices, for example, “concerns ranging from unintentional rudeness to critical security and privacy matters. Such mobile device intrusions may be summarized as socially undesirable audible or visual disturbance or unauthorized information or data capture.”
The application suggests many devices that may be DMP-enabled, including personal data assistants, digital cameras, laptops, and cell phones, besides linked ancillary devices. The patent entails directing the course of action taken by DMP-devices through sending signals from a (possibly) short-range or physically restricted broadcast device. I thought I would share a few scenarios with you:
1. Devices upon entry to a museum would have to initiate compliance with the “no photography” DMP by disabling any photography capabilities, such as provided by cell phone cameras, digital cameras, and digital video recorders.
2. Those following my earlier posts might recall my preoccupation with bootleg recordings – the application suggests that a “no recording” DMP may be provided in the form of an audio signal, inaudible to human listeners, in connection with music or some other audio/video reproduction.
3. A theatre or “silent zones” in hospitals,for example, might use DMP to automatically shift all cell phones into “vibrate” mode while they are within, but resume normal functionality when they are taken out of the area.
There are many among us who might feel that such design might be useful (no more bossanova, bhangra, or bhajans to annoy one while watching the annual Aamir Khan flick). But there are technical issues present against its imminent application, not least of device compatibility. This is, of course, besides those who believe that the DMP is merely a variant of Digital Rights Management, and thus unworkable (recall also Swaraj’s recent post on DRM).
Now all of this takes me to something I really wanted to write about, based on recollections from a lecture delivered by Jaron Lanier, who is considered by some to have coined the term ‘Virtual Reality’. It links also with a classic essay by Lawrence Lessig, The Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw might teach, on the identifying characteristics of cyberspace architecture (which is defined as the “code, or the software and hardware that make cyberspace the way it is”).
Lessig argues that the writers of Internet code have greater control over people’s behaviour than others. He also admits that developers of this architecture are fragmented, and that there is no unique author of this ‘alternate sovereign authority’. But I shall stop at the first premise, which is increasingly cited by commentators (such as Lanier) to support the radical belief that governance and regulation is now and in the future going to be in the hands of an oligopoly of software and Internet engineers.
This patent application is one proof. Another validation lies in the growing number of social networking sites (Second Life; Facebook) that have emerged in the recent past.
To consider the control of civility in human relationships: in the real world, this is controlled by rewards and penalties created by government through a criminal justice system, which seeks to ensure that people behave in a certain manner in their interactions with others. According to some, civility (in a basic sense of not being malicious to another) in relationships (real or virtual) hinges on an economic incentive attached to one’s existence (which stems from reputation, goodwill, etc). In the virtual world, if there were no economic incentive attached to the creation of an avatar (as the alter ego is known in Second Life), and no cost of creating an alter ego, or any pseudonymous identity, people would descend to uncivil depths unimaginable in real life.
The power of countering such undesirable behaviour lies in the hands of engineers and programmers who can determine how individuals behave in such virtual interactions merely by tweaking design. This effectively entails a transfer of control over governance to the engineer. A simple example of this is in the social networking sites themselves, which are designed to make it impossible to register on to a network without a legitimate email identity (e.g., logging on to a university network on Facebook requires that a user have a valid university email ID)… The scenarios presented in the DMP patent application offer other examples.
But, while I have my own opinion on the subject, my question is this: Is the legislator’s job really in threat? Are engineers going to, literally, “rule the world”?
