Abstract
Agreements, consensuses, protocols, resource-sharing, and fairness are all examples of social and political metaphors that define and shape new computational algorithms. The thought experiments and allegories about resource-sharing or agreement between nodes played a vital role in the development of "concurrent programming" (enabling processor power-sharing and process synchronization) and still later in the development of distributed computing (facilitating data access and synchronization). These paved the way for current concepts of consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, and other descriptions of cryptocurrencies, blockchain, distributed ledger, and hashgraph technologies, paradoxically reversing the relations between metaphor and artifact. New computing concepts and algorithmic processes, such as consensus mechanisms, trustless networks, and automated smart contracts or DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organizations), aim to disrupt social contracts and political decision-making and replace economic, social, and political institutions (e.g., law, money, voting). Rather than something that needs a metaphor, algorithms are becoming the metaphor of good governance. Current fantasies of algorithmic governance exemplify this reversal of the role played by metaphors: they reduce all concepts of governance to automation and curtail opportunities for defining new computing challenges inspired by the original allegories, thought experiments, and metaphors. Especially now, when we are still learning how best to govern the transgressions and excesses of emerging distributed ledger technologies, productive relations between software and allegory, algorithms and metaphors, code and law are possible so long as they remain transitive. Against this tyranny of algorithms and technologies as metaphors and aspirational models of governance, we propose sandboxes and environments that allow stakeholders to combine prototyping with deliberation, algorithms with metaphors, codes with regulations.
Highlights
Social and political metaphors played an essential role in the development of modern algorithms by defining the emerging computing and networking challenges in an engaging way
In the 1970s, these gustatory philosophers and festivities were swept aside, in favor of gangsters, generals, battlefield attacks and retreat scenarios in need of specific, novel algorithms capable of coordinating amongst unreliable nodes in new infrastructure. These later network experiments defined new potential modes of war coordination betweentrusting nodes. Were these thought experiments completely random or by-products of a Cold War mentality obsessed with game theory? Would the results of these thought experiments still look the same if they had instead pushed forward other aspects of food commensality, such as www.aetic.theiaer.org hospitality to strangers, social bonding, socialization through rules and hierarchies, ceremonial communion? Or, instead of the battlefield metaphor, a dance performance paired with a close reading of Carl von Clausewitz on the importance of chance and uncertainty in war? Is the current dearth of interesting thought experiments and metaphors a sign of technological stagnation rather than maturity, and perhaps even cause for concern?
Were these thought experiments completely random or by-products of a Cold War mentality obsessed with game theory? Would the results of these thought experiments still look the same if they had instead pushed forward other aspects of food commensality, such as hospitality to strangers, social bonding, socialization through rules and hierarchies, ceremonial communion? Or, instead of the battlefield metaphor, a dance performance paired with a close reading of Carl von Clausewitz on the importance of chance and uncertainty in war? Is the current dearth of interesting thought experiments and metaphors a sign of technological stagnation rather than maturity, and perhaps even cause for concern
Summary
Social and political metaphors played an essential role in the development of modern algorithms by defining the emerging computing and networking challenges in an engaging way. AETiC 2019, Vol 3, No 5 algorithms that resolved issues of resource sharing between computer processes (concurrent computing), fault-tolerance, coordination and nodal synchronization (distributed computing) developed only after these issues had first gained popularity as thought experiments ("Dining Philosophers," "Two Generals" or "Byzantine Generals" problems) or metaphors (flows, catch/throw)[17] These "unifying metaphors" and in the case of algorithms, stories, played a critical role in garnering support for and facilitating the adoption of new technologies by the general public, and in mobilizing the research community around a common goal leading to the development of new tools and technologies. Unlike the algorithms on which they were based, blockchain, distributed ledger, big data, AI and machine learning technologies transformed the relation to metaphors They are nor products of challenging and provocative metaphors aimed at fostering the development of new algorithms and their adoption by the masses. How did the early algorithms that relied on metaphors and allegories of governance (such as food sharing and commensality) to define modern computing and networks become a model and metaphor for (algo)governance in their own right?
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