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Reputation Boundaries

In preparation for the upcoming release of Autometa cSpacer, my Sep 6, 2002 reply to a Todd Boyle post to the decentralization mailing list:

But the key thing is, who the heck do you think owns your reputation? Answer: the community, not YOU. People working on reputation frameworks surely recognize this fact, on some level ...

As one of those people ... ownership and property rights are both social contracts. A framework of reputations owned by a monolithic "community" would be the worst possible combination of a small town and Orwellian nation-state. The act of observation alters that being observed. A history of observations inevitably constrains future actions.

A multiplicity of "communities", decentralized and diverse, is an acceptable alternative provided that:

• (a) individuals explicitly enter into contracts (social and legal) that define their reputation in each community
• (b) there is horizontal audit transparency of reputation data (i.e. no special rights for community owners, affiliates or law enforcement)
• (c) there is sufficient financial and cultural separation between communities to incent meaningful choice (a market) in social contracts.

In this context, "community" = country, state, county, town, company, audience, market, industry sector, discussion group, search engine, weblog or other shared-risk ecosystem.

Decentralized = geographical + policy decentralization.

100% transparency does not lead to loss of privacy. 100% transparency leads to loss of speech. All speech and action becomes part of a continuous game of posturing, creative writing and mediocre (not even amateur) performance art.

Community boundaries segment risk, define topology and vary feedback. They are necessary for evolution, learning and behavior change (historical role of reputation systems).

Moving faster does not make time less important. It makes distance more important, as an alternate unit of separation.