Asymmetry (part 2)
The bumpy onramp to platform culture
(This is the second part of a multi-part series, so you may want to start with Part 1)
I don’t know if I’ll be able to sort precisely through the different meanings that I have in my head for asymmetry, but I do have a few things in mind. First and foremost, I suppose, I’m treating it as a vibe, a sense of unfairness or imbalance that different people, groups, or institutions can activate in us. But I do think that there are concrete instances as well. Our society is rife with material asymmetries, some of which we might gather under the heading of privilege, and others of which we could understand in terms of resources. There are also informational asymmetries—I’m not talking here about some people being smarter than others, but rather the fact that some people have access to information that others do not. And those different “instances” interact, replicate, reinforce, accelerate, complicate, amplify, et al. The idea of mapping them out to the point where we could accurately identify them (much less intervene) feels more than a little exhausting to me.
At the same time, and without putting too fine a point on it, I think we’ve allowed things to get to a point where we’re drowning in asymmetry. I don’t know if I can put it better than this—I know what I mean, and it feels accurate, but part of what I’m trying to do here is to articulate it better. It occurred to me that I may mean by asymmetry something like the inverse of the golden rule or Kant’s categorical imperative1. But that’s not quite it, either; those in power (or with more than their fair share of access, resources, information, etc.) tend to imagine that they already behave according to this ethic. Those who succeed according to a certain set of rules struggle to understand how those rules might not be intrinsically fair.
But I don’t want to ramble here. Instead, I want to talk about some specific cases where I see asymmetry emerging as an issue. As I was thinking about this pattern, I found myself engaging in a bit of light history, and it led me to thinking about whether this is a “new” problem at all, but something that’s endemic to online culture more generally.
There’s a line from Julian Oliver that I’ve used in talks (the image above comes from an old slide deck) which comes from an interview he gave. Here’s the broader context (which I’m providing because Oliver hints at asymmetry as well):
Infrastructure must not be a ghost. Nor should we have only mythic imagination at our disposal in attempts to describe it. 'The Cloud' is a good example of a dangerous simplification at work, akin to a children's book. Such convenient reductions will be expensive in time as some corporations and governments continue to both engineer - and take advantage of - ignorance.
I was thinking about Oliver’s line in part because of Cory Doctorow’s recent piece about how we’ve defanged regulation to the point where all sorts of corporations are allowed to ignore the law (“It’s not a crime if we do it with an app”). I feel like the overlap between them here reveals that pattern I mentioned above, a lag in understanding that’s intentional, exploitable, dangerous, and as Oliver notes, expensive. As I’ve thought about technology (and about whether and where things went wrong), I see that pattern appearing more and more often.
I think there were a lot of us (myself included) who wanted to see internet-era technologies in terms of progress, but anymore now, the arc of development feels more like punctuated equilibrium2. Periods of stasis are interrupted by sudden shifts tied to what Silicon Valley has valorized as “disruption,” the idea of moving fast and breaking things. To a degree, we might substitute symmetry and asymmetry in there—they definitely play a role in this process.
Let me see if I can get a little more concrete about this. Think for a moment about the idea of an “email address,” something we all have. I acquired my first email account when I was in college, in the mid to late 80s, but it wasn’t until the 90s (with the development of web-based mail apps) that email really caught hold (here’s a little history). For better or worse, I remember a time when there was some uncertainty about what to actually call one’s email handle (the idea of “email” or “e-mail” itself emerges in the early 70s).
It feels odd to think of it in these terms, I know, but the idea of digital messaging as “mail” that’s delivered to a particular “address” deploys the mythic imagination that Oliver describes above. These are metaphors that are so well-worn that they don’t seem figurative to us—email is on the edge of outlasting the original referent itself. (Most of what shows up in my physical mailbox is spam from local businesses addressed to Resident.)
This is also an example of what Lakoff and Johnson might describe as a conceptual metaphor. The point is that when we integrate these metaphors into our everyday understanding, we import not just the metaphor itself, but a collection of casual associations that accompany it. Email addresses, for most of us, imply the same level of permanence that our physical mailboxes do. We assume that there’s some degree of intentionality behind the emails we receive; we imagine a person on the other side, making the decision to send something to us. And that’s part of what I mean by symmetry - even if we receive junk mail, we imagine that it requires the same sort of intention and effort on the part of the sender.
This explains, to a certain degree, the early popularity of advance-fee email scams (aka 419, or Nigerian prince, scams). This sort of spam/fraud relies in part on the illusion that someone has sought us out specifically—how else would they know our email address? The average email user (once upon a time) would have no clue how easily and efficiently email addresses could be harvested (or brute forced), or how the email process itself could be automated. Unlike our physical addresses, which remain largely unknown unless we ourselves share them, establishing an email account makes us visible to a broad (and largely uncontrollable) network of potential senders. And the cost of reaching us through that network is negligible; individual scammers can send out millions of messages with minimum effort, profiting from even a tiny handful of marks willing to engage.
The asymmetry I’m talking about here is informational, a disconnect between how we understand (and use) our tools and those who are able to exploit the limits of our understanding. Email spam/scam is a pretty old instance of this, although I do still get dozens of “invitations” and “opportunities” every month from predatory academic journals and organizations that have harvested faculty email lists. What I’m going to do in my next post is to move forward in time a bit and visit some of the other episodes of so-called disruption. Eventually, I want to arrive at the present day, where I’ve got a couple of additional examples to share. So I think I’m going to tie this post off for the moment. More soon.
“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
My own understanding of this comes mostly from having read Stephen Jay Gould on evolutionary theory, many years ago.