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A new twist has been added to the cascade mix by the 2009 revolt in Iran and the "Arab Spring" uprisings that erupted in Tunisia two years ago. The highly-publicised role of social media posed new challenges for theories of contentious politics, and three related facets of the events of Spring 2011 made cascade theories appealing:

• The sudden, unexpected nature of the uprisings and their swift spread from country to country bring to mind the Eastern European regimes in 1989-1990.
• The lack of a strong, organized opposition during the early stages of the uprisings is a challenge for theories of social movements, and plays to the strengths of cascade models.
• The prominent role of digital technology, and particularly social media, lends itself to network-based models of society.

Cascade models suggest that contentious politics is an assurance game that can be solved so long as the transaction costs associated with information exchange are low enough. According to a popular narrative, social media networks lower those costs, rendering newly vulnerable those states that rely for their stability on information scarcity and on preference falsification. In an information-rich world, the low-information equilibrium is no longer tenable.

Cascade models have, well, cascaded out from academia and into the mainstream world as the primary way to understand the Arab Spring uprisings. For one influential statement, see Clay Shirky in Foreign Affairs, but a quick look through a bibliography of Arab Spring literature (here, here) will reveal many more.

As the current gained strength, it absorbed a number of tributaries. One was the Habermasian idea that a rich public sphere or a strong civil society is the fertile ground in which discontent can take root. Another stream focuses on the role of information and the media, bringing communication studies and media studies scholars into the cascade current. The end result is a current that has brought to the fore the role of social media in the Arab Spring, flowing into the sea of mainstream opinion. If you follow the River Nile of commentary about "Twitter Revolution" and "Facebook Revolution" and "Revolution 2.0" upstream far enough you reaach the theoretical source: Granovetter and Schelling, Kuran and Lohmann.

But it's a long way from Granovetter to the Arab Spring, and along the way important things have been lost, and Mistakes Have Been Made.

One of the lovely things about cascade theories is that they lend themselves to simulations. Take that idea of a threshold, for example. Doesn't it make sense that your threshold for action depends more on the actions of people in your social networks than people in some distant city that you've never met? So you can start doing computer simulations of cascades, and how they depend on network structure, and how they depend on the density of connections, and… well, the possibilities are almost endless. So network models have become a common way to extend the original simple ideas in more sophisticated ways. New hypotheses get expressed as network models, and the conclusions feed back into the theory.

But all the simulations in the world don't change the fact that adopting a network model is an input to the theory, not an output, and that the network society perspective brings with it a whole set of assumptions and priorities that need examination. For example, adopting a network model means relegating organizations and institutions to the periphery, and moving ideas of "self-organization", connectivity, and peer-to-peer communication to the centre — not because of any factual conclusion but because some concepts can be expressed naturally within a network model and others can't. Concepts of symbolism, identity, institutions, and the difficulty of establishing trust are hard to express and so get pushed aside or ignored completely. The popularity of agent-based models doesn't disprove the importance of such concepts, it just makes us blind to them.

In Timur Kuran's work, the central concept of "preference falsification" is grounded in the distinction between an internal, private viewpoint and an externally expressed opinion. There is, however, a difficulty with ascribing political function to an internal, psychological state of mind. A diagnosis of "preference falsification" is only possible after the fact of an uprising. Before the fact, from a political point of view there is no observable difference between a nation of preference falsifiers and a nation of contented citizens, and to the extent that there is any observable difference between the two, preference falsification loses its explanatory power. Similarly, what is the observable difference before the uprising between Lohmann's East German citizens, who each have bad experiences with their government but are unaware of its overall bad performance, and an East Germany of citizens who have had good experiences with their government?

The concept of preference falsification makes it dangerously easy to read one's own assumptions and views into the lives of others. The danger becomes apparent in Kuran's book-length exploration of preference falsification. He treats affirmative action in American society as a case of preference falsification, in which the "real" feelings of the silent majority were (are?) opposed to affirmative action, but were not voiced because "to voice misgivings is to invite censure. Conscious of the risks, Americans have tended to hide their reservations behind a veneer of public consent" (p 222), a claim that many would consider exaggerated, at least. He is quick to interpret an incorrect poll on the eve of Nicaragua's 1990 election as evidence of oppression by the Sandinistas over the previous decade. And while Kuran spends much time on preference falsification under Soviet Bloc communism, he has nothing to say about 1930s Fascist Europe. What does the concept of preference falsification have to say about lack of successful internal uprisings against the governments of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy? Were these cases of falsified preferences that did not have a chance to be unfalsified, or did the populace "really believe" in the official ideology? And is the distinction between the two politically meaningful or did Hanna Arendt have it right when she wrote that "politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same".

The Arendt quotation comes from a persuasive essay by Xavier Marquez, "On the Meaning of Political Support". Marquez goes on to quote Robert F. Worth of the New York Times writing about the fall of Gaddafi: "Everyone in Tripoli, it seemed, had been with Qaddafi, at least for show; and now everyone was against him." Here is Marquez at length:

Were these people deceiving themselves or others? Did the soldiers really support Gaddafi in the past but now do not? Do some of these people support Gaddafi still? The question makes less sense to me than it once did. It is clear that they once obeyed Gaddafi and now do not… but to attempt to determine if, in their heart of hearts, these people supported Gaddafi then (net of all of these forces) and now do not seems slightly absurd. Their obedience and disobedience, support and lack of support are nothing but the vector product of all the forces (threats of coercion, positive incentives, beliefs about Gaddafi, idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, moral convictions, obscure and half-formed ideas about the future, etc.) operating through them. It may make sense to attempt to disentangle these forces if we are interested in legal or moral responsibility, or in the private tragedies of everyday life in Libya, but it does not make sense to me to attempt to figure out if Gaddafi enjoyed some "genuine" level of support (independent of coercion, money, etc.) as a separate explanatory factor.

It's not that there is nothing to preference falsification, but it has come to occupy a status of orthodoxy, and it has pushed other mechanisms into undeserved obscurity. In Steven Pfaff's excellent "Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany", which presents a rich and multifaceted account of the events of 1989, I could not help but see a tension: it seemed to me that he falls back on preference falsification as explanation more often than he would like to (although he does point to other mechanisms) because of the absence of alternative frameworks in which to think.

Finally, somewhere in the middle of most cascade models there is a "safety in numbers" assumption. Lohmann (on p92 of her major article) writes that the cost of protest "is assumed to be decreasing in the turnout… This assumption can be motivated with the 'safety in numbers' characteristic of the technology of suppression: given the amout of resources a regime devotes to suppressing mass protest, it is plausible that a higher number of activists is associated with a lower likelihood that any one activist will experience injury, death, or imprisonment." Kuran writes "The external payoff to siding with the opposition… is apt to become increasingly favorable… with S (the size of public opposition). The larger S, the smaller the individual dissenter's chances of being persecuted for his identification with the opposition."

This assumption is weak. An action that the government could afford to ignore during a period of political calm cannot be ignored if it gets big enough. Tienanmen Square did not become a safer place the more people gathered, and neither does Tahrir Square: perhaps quite the opposite. Many protests are deliberately risk-seeking, actively looking to provoke a response from the government. As Gandhi said, "The function of a civil resistance is to provoke response and we will continue to provoke until they respond or change the law."

Do people join large protests because it is safer than joining small protests? Or do they join them because, for example, large protests simply matter more? When a country polarizes, the central issues become deeper dividing lines between supporters of the status quo and those in opposition. The question "which side are you on?" becomes one that has to be answered.

Wrapping Up

What I've tried to say is that there are underexplored weaknesses in the cascade theory description of uprisings which have continuing impacts on current debates, not only in the academic world, but in the wider world – even including the decisions and actions of dissidents in perilous circumstances. The weaknesses lie in the notions of preference falsification, in assumptions about safety in numbers, in assumptions built into the network models constructed on top of cascade models, and in blind spots regarding the forms of political action, the importance of symbols, the roles of institutions, the formation of identity, and other factors that shape the events around sudden uprisings. The effects of these weaknesses are amplified by the enthusiastic adoption of cascade models, supplemented by loose analogies and anecdotes as if they form part of the theory itself, and have a distorting effect on our understanding of these events, making it easy to see some patterns and difficult to see others. Of course, it would be easier to counter the influence of information-driven cascade theories if there were alternative approaches that also reproduced the dramatic "cascade" results. More on that next time.

 Org version 7.8.10 with Emacs version 23

I hope the geography tour is pretty uncontroversial, and that it helps to orient ourselves with respect to the three claims I made last week about the “Open Data Movement”:

1. It’s not a movement in a political or cultural sense of the word.
2. It’s doing nothing for transparency and accountability in government.
3. It’s co-opting the language of progressive change in pursuit of a small-government-focused subsidy for industry.

Of these three, I stand by about two and a half, although I do agree that the wording is sloppy and could be misleading. In my defense, I wrote quickly, expecting attention from my usual handful of readers (you know who you are; thanks for hanging around.) and not the much bigger audience that the post ended up attracting.⁷

It would take too long to engage in a defence of each of these claims⁸ so instead I’ll set out what I see as the contradictions and confusions that come out of labelling all four tribes that inhabit Open-Government-Dataland as a single movement, and distinguishing them from tribes who do not appear on this map: those share a similar interest (eg, Civil Liberties groups and journalists) but who do not focus on data. I see little coherence in the interests or priorities of the Open-Government-Dataland tribes; in particular the giants of the south-west cast a dark shadow over the other quadrants, and the other tribes may have to drive them out of Open-Government-Dataland or succumb to their hegemony.

Encyclopedia Britannica says that a social movement is a “loosely organized but sustained campaign in support of a social goal” and that’s the definition I’ll stick with. So what’s the social goal of the Open Data Movement? There is a technological goal, spelled out a few years ago by some of its leading lights in terms of the formats, timeliness, completeness and licensing of the data,⁹ but what is its social goal? Pretty much any description I’ve seen gives two separate goals: improved government efficiency and transparency, corresponding to the west and east hemispheres of Open-Government-Dataland.

Being in favour of efficiency and transparency is a bit like being in favour of chocolate and cheese: both are good, but it’s not clear that they have very much to do with each other. But the problem is deeper than this: Open Data advocates argue not just for efficiency, but for a particular vision of “efficiency” captured by Tim O’Reilly’s phrases “Government as a Platform” and “Gov 2.0”.¹⁰ This vision places the interests of “the public” or “the people” on the same side as corporations and in conflict with those of the state. The thinking of Open Data advocates is open to the same kind of critique that Jodi Dean makes today about Adbusters’ Kalle Lasn: that an apparent populist leftism disguises (intentionally or otherwise) an economically neoliberal agenda.

“Lasn misrepresents the economic problem of neoliberal capitalism as a division between neoclassical economics and the “new ecological or bionomic or psychonomic discipline that is bubbling underneath the surface.” Now maybe I just don’t know what he’s talking about, but it looks to me like the sort of stuff that is usually wrapped up as complexity theory, with all its talk about emergence and swarms and self-organization and criticality (I talk about this in the first chapter of Blog Theory). It’s the same set of ideas part of New Economy thinking, which isn’t opposed to neoliberalism at all but was a primary carr[ier] of it, especially insofar as regulation is bad and free flow is good. Thomas Friedman, after all, is like the poster boy of horizontality–The World is Flat”

It does seem to me that the ideologically neoliberal aspects of “Gov 2.0” have not been absorbed by some of those in the civil liberties tribe. Tim O’Reilly, for example, is both ambitious in his small-government vision (“Government 2.0… is government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and reimagined as if for the first time”) and explicit in his commitment to market-based delivery of services. He approvingly quotes David G. Robinson’s Government Data and the Invisible Hand:¹¹ “Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens”. When it comes to healthcare he writes “[government] should not [take part] by competing with the private sector to deliver health services, but by investing in infrastructure (and ‘rules of the road’) that will lead to a more robust private sector ecosystem”.

The “Government as Platform” vision is even more market-driven than that of the “Cambridge Study” reported by Jo Bates (link), and to which Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation contributed. As Bates says, the Cambridge Study argued for “unrefined digital data to be available for re-use at marginal cost (general zero for digital resources), whilst the charging regime on refined PSI products should remain intact. These refined products, it is argued, would then be in fair competition with other suppliers, since there would be equal access to unrefined data inputs… In a further paper, Pollock goes on to argue that the optimal charging model would be direct state subsidy or, in some cases, charges to update the database. These economic arguments thus draw on a liberal economic paradigm with strong emphasis on supply-side policies based on removing constraints on commercial production through liberalisation and marketisation, combined with taxpayer subsidisation of infrastructural resources such as data.”

Jo Bates’s paper This is what modern deregulation looks like (link) explores the contradictions between the efficiency and transparency hemispheres in a thorough and lucid way and really you should just read that if you want a better-informed version of my own views. Here is one of the more abstract and general sections, that sums up her claims:

“the current ‘transparency agenda’ [of the UK government, supported by prominent Open Data advocates] should be recognised as an initiative that also aims to enable the marketisation of public services, and this is something that is not readily apparent to the general observer. Further, whilst democratic ends are claimed in the desire to enable “the public” to hold “the state” to account via these measures, there is an issue in utilising a dichotomy between the state and a notion of ‘the public’ which does not differentiate between citizens and commercial interests… The construction… encourages those attracted to civic engagement into an embrace of solidarity with profit seeking interests, distanced from the ever suspect notion of the state.”

The “Government as Platform” vision widely accepted among Open Data advocates¹² thus overlaps significantly with the views of the UK government quoted by Jo Bates, culminating in Francis Maude’s statement that Open Government Data is “what modern deregulation looks like”. Is this neoliberal deregulation a vision that Tom Lee and David Eaves support?

The transparency agenda has been used by the PSI Reuse industry and by right-wing governments as a camouflage for other, economically neoliberal goals. Tom Lee describes the Open Data Movement as a “self-described nonpartisan activist movement” but while I accept his argument that the Civil Liberties tribe, including the Sunlight Foundation, are non-partisan (and, yes, are a movement), I do not think his characterisation can carry over to other tribes. The support, tacit or otherwise, of the Civil Liberties groups for the “Government as Platform” agenda, means that the Sunlight Foundation is promoting a neoliberal economic position with which its members may not agree.¹³ I don’t dismiss the views of Kevin Merrit, CEO of Socrata, as “self-serving and profit-motivated” when he argues that the Open Data Movement has promoted transparency, but I do believe there is a conflict of interest (which is a structural fact, not a personal quality) between arguing for an Open Data policy and then making money by providing software to implement that policy. It’s a conflict that makes episodes such as New York City’s unfortunate release of individual teacher assessments more likely.

Most Open Data advocates don’t phrase the issue in terms of private-sector provision of services, but instead phrase it in terms of civic engagement, non-profit groups, and “people”. Tim O’Reilly often phrases his arguments purely in terms of a civic public (and may see it that way himself), as in “This is the right way to frame the question of Government 2.0. How does government become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate?”

Carl Malamud goes further, arguing that the Open Data Movement is a replacement for a regime in which “the commercial sector is raping and pillaging the public treasury, getting exclusive deals on data that not only keeps out other companies, but researchers, public interest groups, and everybody else who make up ‘the public.’ In many cases, the government data is so tightly behind a cash register that even government workers enforcing the law can’t afford to buy copies of the data they produce or the rules they promulgated.” Others see no conflict between commerce and civic activity in this area: Tom Lee writes “I think it’s flatly wrong to consider private actors’ interest in public data to be uniformly problematic.”

David Eaves makes a strong argument for the vitality of the civic hacker tribe, and points out that Open Data has been largely ignored by Canadian corporations (although US companies such as Socrata have gained contracts for providing municipal “open data platforms”). The Canadian environment may be like that of the UK, where there is a “heavy weighting towards micro/small businesses in the … IT sector” to quote Jo Bates. Similarly, there are just are not that many Canadian companies deeply involved in government operations or in the use of public data.

(There have been positive statements from Open Text, and Desire2Learn has sponsored an “Edge Challenge” that has attracted app developers using open transit data [disclaimer: in my day job I have had some tangential involvement in that competition], but I can see what he means.)

So why would I focus on the private-sector, market-based actors of the south west quadrant when the civic hackers are perhaps more prevalent? Because of an argument made a year or two ago by Michael Gurstein, who asks “who is in a position to make ‘effective use’ of this newly available data?” and answers himself:

“‘open data’ empowers those with access to the basic infrastructure and the background knowledge and skills to make use of the data for specific ends. Given in fact, that these above mentioned resources are more likely to be found among those who already overall have access to and the resources for making effective use of digitally available information one could suggest that a primary impact of “open data” may be to further empower and enrich the already empowered and the well provided for rather than those most in need of the benefits of such new developments.”

Data’s value is combinatorial. It is most powerfully used by those who can combine it with other sources of data and who have the scale and resources to use it effectively. I think it’s fine that “civic hackers” are developing transit apps, but in the end that market is likely to be won by a single company under the current licensing and standards approaches.¹⁴

While Open Data advocates appear “open” to many new ideas, everything I’ve read suggests that they are near-united on the principle of “non-discriminatory” licensing, meaning making data available to commercial enterprises (of any size) on the same terms as to the Civic Hackers. The economy of data-driven products is similar to the economics of cultural industries: it tends to end in winner-take-all outcomes and favours large-scale enterprises. In cultural markets, this tendency has led many countries to adopt a toolbox of techniques to maintain domestic cultural industries in the face of the scale of the American cultural industry, from quotas to subsidies to non-market providers.¹⁵ Such measures have much in their favour, yet the Open Data Movement is apparently united in opposing them.

Economically, Silicon Valley is likely to be the major winner in the Open Government Data game. It is difficult to see how to justify a subsidy to Silicon Valley companies as a priority for cash-strapped governments of smaller countries.

An example: Jo Bates (again) describes the interest in weather data. “In the context of the UK there has been significant lobbying by the financial industry to get better access to UK weather data so that it is able to compete in this [weather risk management] market. Groups such as the Lighthill Risk Network, of which Lloyds of London are a member, have lobbied government for better weather data so that they can develop risk based weather products. Similarly, the insurance industry has requested real time information on the pretext that they might respond more quickly to extreme weather events such as flooding. My own research and the recent announcement suggest that these demands have been met enthusiastically by well placed policy makers in national government who are keen to develop a UK weather derivatives market.” Weather risk management might seem like an odd duck, but Bates reports that “This weather risk management market far outweighs the USA’s commercial weather products market which in 2000 was estimated at approximately $500 million a year”, touching over $45 billion in 2005-06.

The rhetoric of civic engagement is appealing, but blurring the boundary between small-scale civic “hackathons” and the major financial institutions is a position that simply ignores major economic and political issues.

The benefits of standards-driven formats are, for municipal activities, not obvious unless you want to attract global interest. I continue to believe that licensing and formats are an area where there is still room for innovation, and where a premature focus on standardization may shorten the lifespan of civic-hacker use of municipal data before the big players get to pull it into their own systems. I’d argue, as I have before, for some form of charging to be enabled, at least on large-scale commercial use of data. I’d also argue that standardization should not be high on the agenda for municipal governments looking to build and collaborate with a local community of hackers.

Let me return to my three claims:

1. It’s not a movement in a political or cultural sense of the word.
2. It’s doing nothing for transparency and accountability in government.
3. It’s co-opting the language of progressive change in pursuit of a small-government-focused subsidy for industry.

I’d argue that (1) holds: there is simply too much incoherence, too much in the way of conflicting interests and non-overlapping goals, for the “Open Data Movement” to be a movement. And see also the footnote.¹⁴

Item (2) is harsh. There are many within the “Open Data” sphere who live in the Civil Liberties area who have made significant contributions to transparency and accountability. But as a net effect, I’d stand by the claim – the overall impact of open data initiatives could well be to promote a kind of government that is prone to secrecy, as “small government” parties have often been.

Item (3): the co-option is being done by a vocal and influential section of Open Data advocates, but I’d definitely hold to the claim that the language of progressive change is being used, and the actions of civil liberties activists used, by some whose agenda is closer to neoliberal than egalitarian.

If you are still with me after all that; thanks for reading.

¹ Harlan Yu and David G. Robinson, /The New Ambiguity of “Open Government”/, Working Paper, draft of Feb 28, 2012. Retrieved from SSRN.

² Jo Bates, /”This is what modern deregulation looks like”: co-optation and contestation in the shaping of the UK’s Open Government Initiative/, The Journal of Community Informatics, 8 (2). Retrieved from ci-journal.net.

³ This article adopts a northern-hemispherical hegemonic worldview.

⁴ David Eaves, Open Data Movement is a Joke?, May 2, 2012. Retrieved from eaves.ca.

⁵ Tom Lee, Defending the Big Tent: Open Data, Inclusivity and Activism, May 2, 2012. Retrieved from sunlightfoundation.com

⁶ Alex Howard, No joke: Open data fuels transparency, civic utility and economic activity, May 2, 2012. Retrieved from govfresh.com.

⁷ If I had know the audience was to be so large, I would have written more cautiously, and then the audience would not have been so large.

⁸ While I don’t want to trespass on everyone’s attention for that length of time, if you are interested in discussing these do send me an email (tslee at web dot ca) and I’d be happy to respond.

⁹ Open Government Working Group, 8 Principles of Open Government Data, 8 December 2007. Retrieved from opengovdata.org.

¹⁰ Tim O’Reilly, Government as Platform, Chapter 1 of /Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice/, Retrieved from oreilly.com.

¹¹ David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William P. Zeller, and Edward W. Felten, Government Data and the Invisible Hand, 11 Yale J.L. & Tech. 160 (2009). Retrieved from SSRN.

¹² The only dissenting view I’ve seen that tackles it explicitly, apart from my own, is that of Andrea DiMaio, who also has some smart things to say here.

¹³ On this I disagree with Catherine Fitzpatrick, who shares some of my views about the Open Data movement and argues forcefully for them here. I appreciate Catherine’s robust arguments in the debate, but she does come at this from a very different political point of view to my own, as her comment on Tom Lee’s post makes clear.

¹⁴ Aside: David Eaves’ description of municipal-level civic-hackers (North-West quadrant) in Canada is compelling, but this group of people is also Not a Movement. Now some people claim not to care about the word “movement”, and if you don’t then skip back to the main text, but I think it matters.

There are many admirable socially and civically beneficial activities that are not movements. Many people coach children’s sports teams (I’ve done it myself); millions of people take part in such activities, they are committed, involved, and do a lot of civic good, but they do not form a movement: I was a soccer coach, not a public sports activist. Similarly, birdwatching has a long and distinguished history of contributing to social goals (protection of birds and their habitats) and of sharing their observations in socially and scientifically useful ways (my brother Dorset Dipper contributes to the Hertfordshire Bird Atlas) but birdwatching is a hobby, not a movement. This thing about technologists claiming to be a movement is something that, perhaps irrationally, irritates me. Calling “Open Data” a movement is not quite as daft as calling “NoSQL” a movement, despite the arguments of O’Reilly’s Mike Loukides, but to my mind invoking a “movement” is a way to give added weight and significance to activities that may be admirable and useful, but that are ultimately uncontentious: it smacks of self-importance and that rubs me the wrong way.

¹⁵ For a fine description of the economics of cultural products, and the toolboxes that smaller economies have used to maintain cultural diversity, see Blockbusters and Trade Wars by Peter S. Grand and Chris Wood, Douglas & McIntyre 2005. Link.