By Jo Suter

In his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow noted that Cyberspace would not be run by elected leaders.  He seemed uncertain about this however and did not really indicate how cyberspace should be organized. 

Unless Cyber Citizens have similar goals with other online users, they are not very good at organizing.  Yet organization is essential for solving complex problems.  The power of business and government emerges because of their ability to organize large numbers of people to make goods and services.  Less trustworthy is their ability to provide useful information to those outside their own company.  This may be related to the fact that their power to organize comes from the top.

Useful information can be of great value.  Other information may be just noise or a distraction. Bad Actors get in and it’s not always easy to tell who that might be, especially since they may not think of themselves as being bad.  (“On the Internet, they don’t know you are a dog.” – P. Steiner).  In the January 6 Capitol Riots a few individuals had bad intentions.  Most had bad information.  They actually thought that Trump won the election.  This is a problem, not only for those involved, but for democracy itself. 

Democracy is a process for use by large groups of people.   It’s a power play, not for the faint of heart.  Witness Myanmar and Hong Kong. The process we call democracy may not work quite the same at the local level however. Too much personal conflict.  Too many loud mouths.  Too many back biters, moles and spies.  Too much belief in unreal things that give believers some power or feeling of power.  

Democracy at the local level is not simply a miniature version of national politics.  The local level has a different function.  Part of that function is to find, filter, and give useful feedback to leaders and to other citizens at any level.  There must be a way to process all the information, even without a formal division of labor.  

How can one organize at the local level to filter information from the bottom up?  Create a game structure, an Information Game, with competition between small local teams, and with local judges that are mixed and re-mixed.  Balance the bias. Rather than sell promises or things that will always be suspect, challenge people at the local level to use a game process as an information filter.  Keep control at the local level.  Push target communities to make decisions by showing them alternative pathways and alternative processes.  

It may seem easier and more efficient to contact local leaders in order to get the game started, but it’s better to start with a cross section of the community, picking players and judges randomly, even for the first round, maybe by birth month. 

This process can start outside the target group. Subsequent rounds may mix local people onto each team.  Even if a target group refuses to accept results, players can still win a round in the game and collect a prize.  

Games can be played online or face-to-face.  The process itself must be transparent even if not completely public.  Some privacy of the team meetings is required.  In that way, better and more useful information may come to the surface. 

It is the end users who are the ones to determine the value of information by their action or inaction. Will the information be used to achieve some goal or task?  Is it misinformation?  Or is it simply noise? 

Power brings organization. Conversely, organization brings power because people will look to organized people for solutions.  Useful information brings organization too, if there is some task, some problem to be solved, and a good information filter.    The power of Cyberspace and Cyber Citizens then lies in bringing both useful information and an information filtering process to people at some local level where there is a problem to be solved. 

We must use the right tool for the right job, of course.  But what job? Arguments about capitalism vs. communism don’t always answer that question.  On the issue of police brutality, people at the top don’t spend much time thinking about it.  They may put someone in charge and throw a few million that direction, then go off to play golf.  It is really up to the local communities to deal with any police problems.  Local communities have much more power than they realize if they use an information game process to find better solutions. They must eventually include a few individual police as players on the teams if they want to find good solutions.   

Here is where Cyber Citizens can help even more than the federal government by creating information games, first among themselves, sending their winning ideas to the target community, then also challenging that community to set up their own information filter.  This may not happen spontaneously and so prize money may be needed to get the process started. Once started however, the value of useful information will pull it forward.  

There have been many recent discussions on the issues of Privacy vs. Transparency, Free Speech vs. Accuracy. Both technology and legislation can help, but these alone will not be sufficient, especially when trust in the media has fallen below 50%.  We must create information filters and push end users to create their own.  Bad information will never go away. That’s part of life and part of nature.  Without useful information filters, people will live in a smaller and smaller worlds controlled more and more by algorithms and by people at the top.