Abstract

Proposes a new online legal knowledge system that would be free to use and targeted at ease of accessibility. The harms of legal ignorance are explored, and issues of equality in the status quo are raised. The benefits of general legal knowledge for society are also explored and used to motivate the proposal. A legal ontology tailored to this project is established. Some specifics of the system are elaborated upon and analyzed in the civic context. Ethical questions about such systems are posed, and necessary future steps explored.

mcole_WebJD

Malcom Gladwell is right.

I don’t think he’s quite as right as he thinks he is, but he hits the nail on the head when he argues that networked movements are inherently bad at affecting structural change. To crystallize his analysis, is in generally true that “The Internet” (please excuse the personification) can do whatever “The Internet” sets its mind to: investigations, electoral campaigns, journalism, whistleblowing, etc. What holds it back from solving all the world’s problems is that “The Internet” is atrocious at follow-through.

Structural change requires orders of magnitude more follow-through than solving isolated issues. In fact, the very definition of a structural problem is that it’s not just a one-time occurrence. It’s easy to mobilize “The Internet” for a particularly compelling single narrative, but unless it also mobilizes for everyday occurrences of that same problem, there’s no hope of structural change. This is the core of the strong tie/weak tie phenomenon: weak ties may buy you an afternoon of someone’s time on twitter to help a good cause, but if you want someone to devote months or years to combating the underlying issue, you’re going to need something stronger.

Consider the Kony 2012 campaign. Kony 2012 was about as successful as anyone could every reasonably hope any online campaign to be. It convinced a truly startling number of people that a particular Central African warlord needed to be found and arrested. It even led to a US senate resolution. Sadly, Joseph Kony has yet to be apprehended, but that is only a minor setback for an otherwise remarkable movement, right?

Not exactly. While the campaign did mobilize people to support the apprehension of a particular African warlord, is has failed utterly to maintain their attention to combat the problem of African warlords generally. The Invisible Children organization has even fallen apart since then (partially due to unrelated finance issues). Clearly, the enthusiasm of the internet is closer to a stick of dynamite than a bonfire. I don’t mean to sound too cynical—when well placed, you can do a lot with a stick of dynamite, but it’s simply the wrong approach to handling structural problems.

http://www.wideopenspaces.com/save-pangolin-video/

Next, consider the pangolin. In response to John Sutter’s Change the List piece on pangolin trafficking, The Internet was abuzz with enthusiasm to help save them from extinction. As a result, readers donated $17,000 for PSAs and aid. When one pangolin went missing, many heartstrings were plucked. Overall, a rousing success.

Which has, as far as I can tell, translated into exactly zero interest in combating the structural issues surrounding animal trafficking. Pangolins are doing a heck of a lot better now than they probably would have been, and thousands of people can rest easy knowing they’ve helped conservation efforts, but that’s little consolation to the other variously furry critters on the brink. Once again, the single issue was solved, but the structural one remains untouched.

The online campaigns that seem to be the most successful at addressing structural problems are the ones where a core group of well-organized and committed (read: strongly tied) individuals maintain the movement consistently and fall back on the internet and social media to address single issues as they arise. At the risk of counting eggs before they hatch, this seems to be the strategy of Black Lives Matter. The movement is characterized by several central figures particularly devoted to advocacy, who stir up intense social media fervor when particular things happen, i.e. Ferguson or Baltimore. This was also the approach of many of the Arab Spring movements. Social media helped mobilize protesters, but without the activities of the strongly tied organizers, the protests would have been yet another internet-mediated flash in the pan.

So Gladwell was perhaps a bit more dismal than he needed to be in his criticism of the internet as a tool for change.  It is an effective tool, and if utilized well can be a powerful ally to any social movement. But it is also inherently bad at confronting structural problems, and any halfway serious movement would be well served by taking to heart Gladwell’s love of strong ties.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is an organization founded in 1999 by a professor and a civil rights lawyer, both civil libertarians, to “…defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities.” They currently spend that vast majority of their resources tackling the issue of student and faculty speech on campuses though publicity campaigns, strategic litigation, and other legal avenues.

FIRE appears to follow a similar model of advocacy to groups like the ACLU or the EFF, but is somewhat more single-issue. Since I’m most familiar with the activities of FIRE, (I’m a donor!) I figured they’d be a good case study.

FIRE’s primary method of resource generation seems to be email. Like MoveOn and other similar organizations, periodic mass emails function to stir interest in the group’s activities and convince people to donate. These emails are almost exclusively about specific issues, seemingly designed to spur individuals with interest in particular cases to donate. This plays well to the monitorial model of citizenship, and closely resembles the actions of many other modern email-based campaigns.

Interestingly, the incentive to garner donations has encouraged FIRE to take a pseudo-journalistic role in addition to their advocacy. In order to send compelling emails, FIRE has to extensively research and document campus speech issues for their donors, to the point that the fire website is a decent source of news and information relating to the issue. The above-linked ACLU and EFF do the same thing.

In fact, sometimes the journalism IS the advocacy. Besides asking for donations, FIRE also uses mass emailing to spread news about important and sometimes time-sensitive information that may spur recipients to further action. For example, once, in response to a FIRE mailing, I sent a letter to the University of Tulsa urging them to reconsider a recent decision. This use of email is different from the donation-seeking use in that it encourages direct action on the part of recipients. The attention these activities bring to the issue helps to sway public opinion, and the mind of the administrators involved (hopefully).

While not a digital media, FIRE does notably still use physical mailings in addition to digital ones. These mailings are functionally similar to the emails, but manage to come off as more personal, probably because of the physical cost associated with sending them.

FIRE also has a social media presence, which they use to spread information. This information can be easily shared over user’s social networks, with provides both increased distribution and social capital, since you are seeing posts shared by your friends rather than mass emails.

FIRE uses the internet to help disseminate some of their publications. They publish several guides to various speech issues on their website, which they allow anyone to freely download.

The more I look into the specifics to FIRE’s operations, the more it becomes clear that they take a very traditional approach to their advocacy, with modest digital inroads to spread their popular appeal. Perhaps this is appropriate for a legally-minded foundation; it certainly seems to be similar to other civil rights organizations that continue to have important social impacts (ACLU, EFF). It seems to be effective for them, and I suspect I may donate again in the future, perhaps in response to some issue-based email.

I initially wanted to look into the internet activities of the “men going their own way” (MGTOW) movement, which is a delightfully crazy little online endeavor that has been described as “lesbian separatism for straight men.” In a nutshell, (and please provide your own air quotes where necessary) the basic ideology is or seems to be that since society is set up to favor women and because modern women are increasingly unattractive as mates, reasonable, sensible men should eschew all romantic relationships with the opposite sex and concentrate only on their own pursuits.

They’re totally nuts, but have somehow managed to hew out a corner of the internet for themselves using digital technology. I thought (and continue to think) that they would be a fun movement to pick apart and study, but I failed to find any sufficiently academic or even pseudo-academic sources describing their origins or history. (Exhibit A: I couldn’t find a better link than Urban Dictionary for MGTOW above.) My original research has led me to believe that the movement is centered on a number of forum-hosting websites devoted to MGTOW specifically and/or so-called men’s rights activism, along with certain corners of reddit.

While I wouldn’t say that the movement strikes me as particularly effective socially, the fact that such a movement has gained any purchase at all seems somewhat remarkable, and is probably almost entirely attributable to technology. Without the ability to anonymously connect with similarly minded people all over the country and world, it is unlikely that such a strange movement could have garnered nearly the attention that this one has. MGTOW may actually be a model case for the technology-mediated birth of a counterpublic, as humorous as that statement may seem.]

Before I discuss the power of a technology like Rynda, I’d first like to spend a paragraph or three in (poorly-researched) defense of the personal responsibility model of citizenship, whose cardinal sin in my view is historically poor implementation rather than any inherent flaw.

The goal of the personal responsibility model of citizenship is to instill in the citizenry the idea that the benefits afforded by membership in society also carry an ethical obligation to be good custodians of that society. Typically, this custodial duty is defined in terms of specific community actions: volunteerism, charity, respect for the law, etc. There are clear weaknesses to this approach, especially in its ability to affect a healthy level of government skepticism. But it is important to note that this traditional definition of responsibility is not the only possible definition.

I would like to advance a different model of personal responsibility citizenship, which in addition to volunteerism and charity, places great emphasis on a personal responsibility to affect social change. After all, the reason that the society of today is (almost certainly) a better place to live in than the society of 1930 is because of the actions of generations of social reformers. As the heirs of that society, we too have a duty to reform and improve. This carries a multitude of derivative duties: to be as informed as necessary and to advocate through voting, for example.

This updated responsibility model solves most of the problems with the old model, and when one considers the fact that it is applicable to both conservative and progressive ideologies, it may be the most widely acceptable model yet. If we can agree that this model of citizenship is worth promoting, the relevant question becomes “How to we enable this type of behavior?” Here a technology like Rynda shows great promise.

One of the greatest challenges with personally responsible citizenship is connecting individual resources with needs. My father, who is a perennial volunteer at local homeless shelters, experienced this living in Japan: he had a desire to help, and there were certainly people in need of help, but because he could not speak Japanese, he was unable to find good venues for volunteerism. While language is a particularly extreme barrier, shades of this problem exist in almost every community. Atomistic citizens who may not have a predictable or consistent ability to volunteer often lack a good way to quickly become involved when they do have time.

Rynda works by connecting requests for aid with offers of help from other users. The goal is to create an “Atlas of Help” that will promote mutual aid between citizens. The value that I see in a model like this is in the ability of individual users to rise to the occasion is response to a particular event or crisis, or just generally on their own terms. This presents certain advantages over traditional service organizations whose schedules may not permit many prospective volunteers to engage in group activities. Rynda would instead offer a more Uber-esque system whereby user can volunteer when and only when they want to. By making responsible citizenship easier and more accessible, Rynda could enable more responsibility-inspired mutual aid.

Which is more inclusive, Disneyland or a traveling carnival?

To participate in Disneyland, you must buy an expensive admission ticket, which puts entry out of reach for many who cannot afford the fee. But once inside, everyone has equal access to all of the rides and attractions. (Almost) no one has any inherent advantage at enjoying Disneyland simply because they are white or rich. This type of activity is inclusive in the Habermasian sense—once inside, status is fairly well bracketed.

Meanwhile, anyone can attend a carnival regardless of whether or not they can afford an expensive admission ticket. The tradeoff is that people with more money have an advantage in enjoying the carnival, because they can play more games and see more attractions. This is the philosophy of many modern tech companies, who offer all customers a free service knowing full well that some segment of power users will achieve greater utility from the platform than others.

But exclusions can occur on the basis of more than just financial means. A far more pernicious form of exclusion is exclusion based on ideology, because such exclusions create faux public spheres that purport to facilitate discourse but in actuality are little more than echo chambers. An example of something like an ideological Disneyland would a moderated internet forum. If you don’t hold enough majority viewpoints you run the risk of being denied entry (banned), but if you do, then all users have roughly the same level of power.

An ideological carnival, on the other hand, would be something like Twitter. Even individuals with fiercely anti-majority views can access and use Twitter, even though they will never have the same power (i.e. number of followers) that other users may have.

Viewed in this light, it becomes apparent that the carnival is a fundamentally more inclusive model of technology, because the carnival philosophy at least has the capacity to ensure some positive utility for all people, whereas the Disneyland philosophy provides no utility for people who cannot “afford” entry.

The primary argument against the inclusiveness of the carnival-type approach to technology (with little to no exclusions based on ideology) is that groups of users can band together to “silence” others, even though the silenced individuals have the technical ability to use the service. This is the “Twitter trolls” argument, which is that the service effectively allows Bad People a heckler’s veto. What this argument fails to consider is the difference between self-imposed and system-imposed restrictions. For example, it is difficult to have a conversation both in a library and at a rock concert, but in one case it is because you as an individual don’t want to make noise because of social conventions, and in the other case it is physically impossible to hear each other. It is fundamentally better (more inclusive) for any silencing that occurs to happen because the individual involved personally chooses to be quiet than it is to have the system physically prevent an individual from speaking, assuming we are agnostic to the views involved. Thus, the carnival approach defeats the Disneyland approach because all censorship is self-censorship (which, while not great, is better than the alternative).

So the most inclusive possible technology, in my view, is one with no bars on entry and no removal-based moderation. While (ironically) I don’t use it much myself, reddit fits this bill fairly well. Individual subreddits do not, but the service as a whole allows anyone to make a subreddit and post almost whatever they please. I suppose it might be worth pointing out that “most inclusive” does not necessarily mean “best.”

The problem:

I have great respect for the US judicial system. It is set up as an adversarial system with endless procedural rules and avenues of appeal, all for the express purpose of ensuring a fair outcome for everyone involved. While no human institution is entirely without fault, and the judicial system is in no way immune to pervasive implicit social effects, I am a firm believer that the US judicial system is one of the best approximations of “fair” that humans have yet constructed.

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and in the US judicial system, the cost of this fairness is pretty terrible inefficiency. Those endless avenues of appeal have a bad habit of being somewhat costly, which is the main reason that capital punishment is actually more expensive than life without parole in practice.

Some of this inefficiency is intrinsic to the process. For example, we could expedite decisions by limiting the chances of appeal, but this would directly impact an individual’s ability to seek a fair outcome. Such inefficiencies are probably not worth correcting. But there are other inefficiencies extrinsic to the process with can be corrected in ways that would augment the power of the judiciary to affect justice in the community.

In particular, I would like to focus on one particular extrinsic inefficiency in the judiciary: the inefficiency in connecting individuals experiencing injustice with lawyers and resources to pursue remediation.

The solution:

I propose a new website called WebJD, styled similarly to the ever-popular WebMD. The goal is to provide individuals with access to enough information that they may autonomously decide whether their case has enough merit to warrant talking to a lawyer, thus helping these individuals connect with the help they need.

Pursuant to its goal of connecting people with expertise, the site would be painstakingly constructed to be easy to navigate by non-lawyers. I’m still thinking about the best ways to accomplish this, but since most legal questions among citizens tend to involve the legal relationship between some individual or group and oneself, the primary form of organization would likely be by second party. In other words, a user might begin their search by selecting from a list of {Employer, School, Businesses, Family/Friends, Strangers, City/State Government, Federal Government}.

Within each of these options, users could further refine their search. One hypothetical path might be “City/State Government” -> “Civil actions against citizens” -> “Subpoenas.” The user would then be taken to a Wikipedia-esque page on subpoenas with information about them, requirements, what typically results, etc. The website would feature a zip code-powered Lawyer Finder, and a link to the finder would be prominently displayed on the subpoena page.

None of this is particularly new or ground breaking. What would make WebJD unique is that it would keep track a user’s per-visit history to prioritize page results and information (perhaps with a blossom algorithm? Something similar to Akinator). The goal would be to build up a database of usage history that could be used to intuit things about the particulars of a user’s problem. This would enable WebJD to make relevant information recommendations.

To make this process more intuitive, effective, and transparent, the list of previously viewed pages would be included in a UI element at the top of the screen. If a user visits a page which is not relevant to their problem, they may remove it from this list so that it won’t factor into the recommendations. With a well-constructed algorithm and a deep pool of usage data to draw from, this would hopefully allow WebJD to direct users to information that they need, even if they did not know at the outset that they needed it. Needless to say, WebJD would not store any information other than that required to improve the algorithm.

The only remaining unknown is where WebJD would acquire its data. I will be putting some thought into this, but perhaps something as simple as scraping from Wikipedia (with appropriate attribution, of course) would be enough. As long as it is able to provide user with the information necessary to make informed decisions about when to seek legal counsel, WebJD stands to be effective in its goal.

In an earlier blog post, I talked about the problem of police oversight and proposed a new technology to help solve it. I argued that the fundamental problem was one of incentive: police have very little incentive to document their own wrongdoing. The idea behind my proposed technology was to empower the people, who do have an incentive to document police wrongdoing. Now on the topic of collaborative technology that seeks to improve government, I am reminded of why I thought it would be such a good idea.

Just to review, I proposed a mobile app called “CopWatch” that citizens could use to document and evaluate their interactions with the police. GPS data would also be recorded so that the interactions could be mapped. Pictures or video could be attached to a report.

CopWatch falls beautifully into Benkler’s theory of the networked public sphere. As a mobile app, it is inherently designed to take advantage of the proliferation of creative capital inherent in the spread of mobile smartphones. The resulting maps would not be the work of a single individual, but the result of thousands of individual people creating content without direct compensation because of a common goal.

It was designed around the idea that data is valuable, especially public data. The argument CopWatch implicitly presents is that communities can use large amounts of user-generated data to achieve the kind of oversight that government consistently fails to accomplish. This data would not only be made publically available, but also mapped (literally) in a way designed to be meaningful to the average person rather than a statistician. This data would empower citizens to create even more information about underlying trends in policing, thus supporting the secondary generation of content as well.

It is also designed around the value of increased autonomy, which Benkler also presents as an important tenant of the networked public sphere. Without this technology, people have very few tools available to them for sharing information about their police encounters with the community. Social media may represent an easily accessible avenue, but anything posted there will likely be buried in a sea of new content within minutes. Fairly privileged citizens with easy access to legal help may have more direct mechanisms available for dealing with police encounters, but traditionally, disadvantaged citizens have had no way to do the same. CopWatch would enhance their autonomy by allowing them to individually decide to address the problem of negligent policing.

But a slight expansion of my original idea would make CopWatch an even more valuable addition to the networked public sphere.

First, a bot could trawl the #copwatch tag on Twitter and Facebook for report information spread through these means. This would make the service even more open by allowing people without the app or even without smartphones to participate, increasing the amount of data and proving those people with the same expanded autonomy.

Second, the CopWatch website could also host a discussion board about policing generally. This would empower individuals to collaboratively analyze the data to draw more meaningful conclusions. This would also turn users into curators, potentially increasing the value of the content.

As expanded, I think CopWatch would be a powerful force in the networked public sphere by creating both primary and secondary content and empowering citizens to make a difference—aspiring app developers take note.

In The Purge (2013), James DeMonaco attempts to show a world where, for one night a year, people are allowed to do whatever they want with no formal consequences.

It is a horror film.

But does the lack of consequences for one’s actions really have the power to turn ordinary people into savages?

Enter 4chan.

4chan is a website composed of 63 anonymous image boards, where anyone can make or contribute to threads on any conceivable topic. Many of the boards are interest-driven. /a/, for example, is devoted to anime and manga, /v/ is for video games, and /fa/ is for fashion. There are also NSFW boards, like /hc/ (hardcore) or /h/ (hentai). Perhaps 4chan’s most famous board is /b/, “Random.” /b/ is NSFW, and nearly anything goes. Exceptions to this rule are few and far between: advertising, doxing, violating US law, and My Little Pony.

But of particular interest is /pol/, 4chan’s politics board.

Officially dubbed “Politically Incorrect,” /pol/ is a political discussion board with nearly perfect anonymity and next to no moderation. As you might expect, this leads to some unfortunate trends—Nazism, racism (particularly anti-Semitism), and every –phobia you could imagine and probably a few that you can’t. But that’s not what makes /pol/ an interesting case study.

To see what does, let me take a quick step back. Stormfront.org is perhaps the most infamous neo-Nazi website on the English-speaking internet. Seems unfortunate, no? Do me a favor: try going to Stormfront to tell them how wrong they are, and let me know if you are successful.

Here we discover an interesting fact—all of the “worst” websites on the internet (by prevalence of “hate”) are heavily moderated. They have to be, because if they weren’t those dratted progressives might weasel their way in and bother everyone. It turns out you actually can’t create a racist utopia (how’s that for an oxymoron?) without controls on access. The same kind of controls that most websites use to keep the racists out, I might add.

What makes /pol/ so interesting is that it does not have these controls. This means that /pol/ has, with varying frequency, posters from every possible political bent. It is not uncommon to see a thread about social security next to a thread about gay rights next to a thread about the ZOG next to a thread about how awful feminists are. Sometimes threads on opposite sides of the same issue appear in close proximity.

There is also a massive volume of amateur political commentary/meme creation in response to major events. (It’s a bit like reddit in that way I suppose, but I don’t see why anyone would want to spend time on that horrible excuse for a website.)

Everyone is equally welcome (or more accurately, equally unwelcome) to post, no registration required. Everyone is anonymous, so there’s no cashing in on reputation to bolster one’s arguments. Everyone can say practically anything they want. It is, for lack of a better metaphor, a 24/7 free speech Purge. The only direct consequence that you might face is a flurry of angry replies (which might have been your goal in the first place, come to think of it).

What would Habermas say? I haven’t the faintest idea. But the part of me that sympathizes with his work thinks it’s really cool that a place like this exists.

/pol/ is a beautiful demonstration that the absolute worst human nature and the online disinhibition effect have to offer is still miles better than what errant moderators can create. It’s also wonderful proof that civility and rationality are not synonyms.

My homework to you, dear reader: go, tap into your inner troll, and start a flamewar on /pol/, no account required.

Last August saw the historic events of the Michael Brown shooting unfold in dramatic fashion on the streets of Ferguson and in headlines across the country. They brought up a very old conversation, police race relations, with a renewed sense of urgency. At its heart, this issue is a crisis of confidence in the trustworthiness of the police—a major problem for an institution that exists to serve the people and relies on their support.

In the search for solutions, technology has been a popular option. Dashboard or body cameras have been tried to mixed success in police departments across the country, but issues abound. In some cases, the cameras can simply be turned off. Even when the cameras do capture alleged misconduct, questions remain about how useful that video could even be. That fact was thrown into sharp relief by a New York jury’s decision not to indict the officer involved in the death of Eric Garner, despite the existence of video documenting the incident. I propose that the root problem is one of incentive—simply put, for all their good and noble intentions, police have a strong disincentive to document their own wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, the party with the strongest incentive to make progress on this problem is the community itself, especially its marginalized segments. Thus, I propose a new technology which would empower these groups to act in their own interest: CopWatch.

CopWatch would be a fairly simple mobile app. Users could use the app to report an interaction with the police. GPS data would be taken from the phone, and the user could specify the nature of the interaction (traffic stop, stop and frisk, etc…) and a “satisfaction rating.” The app would also support mobile video or photo uploads to document the interaction.

This data could be used to map not just police action, but also the nature of those actions and the effects that those actions have on the local community. It could be the case, for example, that two neighborhoods might have similar levels of police interaction, but while one neighborhood saw almost exclusively positive interactions, the other was dominated by negative ones. These maps could be compared against crime and demographic data to see where police are over patrolling relative to the population and crime rate.

By itself, data doesn’t do much. But trends uncovered by the data could help inform policy decisions to help tackle these problems. Data could also help justify police action to citizens when it is legitimately warranted; after all, the burden of police-community relations does not fall only on the police. This data could help police prove the effectiveness of police tactics, which would also help bolster public trust.

A dataset like that generated by CopWatch could also help a nation capitalize on differences between existing policing regimes. Perhaps the police in Denver have certain very effective policies in place, while police in Cleveland are not doing as well. CopWatch data could help identify model districts and facilitate the adoption of good police techniques. This would help turn the diversity of policing styles inherent in a large nation like America into a major asset.

It is unlikely that any single solution could hope to tackle such a huge problem, but it is almost certain that police and citizens alike will be turning to technology for help. Technology that empowers the groups with the strongest incentive to improve the status quo will likely prove to be a powerful tool, be it in the form of CopWatch or something else. If thoughtfully constructed, such technology also stands to improve policing altogether.