Recreating Society & Organizational Behavior

Thanks to shows like Doomsday Preppers, the recent Mayan calendar scare and the general apocalyptic malaise of the post-financial crisis world, I've recently taken an interest in the end of the world and what it would be like to rebuild society.

Survival guides and a few reality TV shows (including my favorite, The Colony) already show us what we'd need to survive an initial catastrophe, but I'm more interested in what comes next. What would it take to approach what we have today and what improvements, if any, could we make?

A society is by definition more than one person, so you'll need some help along the way. Naturally, the first thing my mind turned to was group dynamics. After you've secured your basic needs - and even during it unless you're going solo - a certain set of norms for group behavior must be established and serve as a foundation going forward.

Security

First and foremost you need to be sure that those in your immediate vicinity won't materially harm you. That requires one of the following:

• Physical separation from threatful individuals and groups
• An established history of peaceful coexistence or cooperation
• Some other reassurance that someone means or poses no harm. This could take the form of a larger population on your side, rendering individual outsiders or groups of outsiders innocuous, or some notional reassurance, such as strictly observed symbolic codes (think truce flag).

Trust

This largely overlaps with security, but I feel that the word more extensively alludes to emotional and informational aspects. Trust is the concept that not only will someone refrain from materially harming you, but also that they are as they represent themselves to be and will maybe even help you in times of need.

Accountability

What will keep someone in my community from riding on the coattails of others? We've historically remedied freeriding and collective responsibility in a couple of ways. One is community-based, in which a population is small enough to collectively understand how much any given individual puts into and gets out of the system. This allows a community to decide who can manage what according to their known circumstances. Perhaps a seemingly capable person would get a lot of flak for skimping on their investment in their community, but we wouldn't expect the same for infants and we'd expect compassion to come into play for elderly or sickly individuals. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell suggests the number at which this solution breaks down is 150 individuals.

After it is no longer feasible to effectively track who gets what they give by means of relationships and gossip alone, we've managed by implementing my formal systems: central governments and courts for enforcing property rights, credit scores and background checks for establishing reputation, etc.

Humans have an innate sense of fairness that they seek to realize whether through soft means, such as peer pressure and retaliation, or through a more officially-recognized vehicle. In the context of our scenario, accountability will come naturally to a certain scale as individuals specialize and recover a previous standard of living. Obtaining it will then require more sophisticated technology or forms of organization.


The above characteristics are interrelated and by no means an exhaustive list. However, it has got me thinking about what it takes to make any team - in a survival scenario or not - to function effectively. It also seems that a key to instilling relationships of this nature is some sort of central identity, suggesting that tribalism, by necessity, is deeply rooted into what it means to be human.

Privacy, Accountability and Sustainability

Big names, big changes

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's vision of the future is one in which people relinquish more and more privacy. With the successive changes that Facebook has implemented and its virtual monopoly over personal networks, he's gradually succeeding in making that a reality. One of the initial groundbreaking aspects of Facebook was its convention of displaying users' real names, as opposed to the fabricated usernames of more anonymous contemporaries, such as AIM and MySpace. That sparked the gradual process of deprivatization that today has culminated in the Timeline feature, which makes Facebook actions - particularly historical activity - more visible than ever before.

Zuckerberg isn't alone in his campaign to open up our online lives. Google's new privacy policy now permits greater sharing of private data across its network of companies.

Encouraging the greater disclosure of private information certainly makes sense for Facebook, Google and other businesses. They're no doubt looking for better indicators of individual preference, in order to make their ad services easier to customize, more effective and more appealing to advertisers.

There are also benefits to reap from the network effects of having more information visible. Tracking and broadcasting users' actions across a site generates more content and makes users more invested. It was the feature I recall as most controversial - News Feed - that transformed Facebook from a social networking utility into an entertainment destination. New features aim to similarly increase the amount of time users are on the site.

One big murder mystery

But what does online privacy have to do with sustainability? One of the obstacles to sustainability - and to any undertaking in a large society generally - is establishing accountability. In a complex, dynamic society such as ours, the volume of actors and interactions enables anonymity, which can undermine accountability.

To understand how anonymity can degrade accountability, destroy trust in society and pose challenges to it, you need only look to con artists. It's the ability to travel to untainted markets that allows the snake oil salesman to continue peddling wares that fail to deliver. If would-be victims could consult Yelp or some other fair assessment of the product or salesman, he would soon be unable to profit from fraud.

Along those same lines, The Economist recently presented a strong argument for why limited liability status shouldn't enjoy anonymity. Among other things, the combination permits entrepreneurs with a record of failures to conceal their past and, quite possibly, their incompetence, and makes lenders generally less willing to lend.

How do I know I can trust you?

Anonymity wasn't a problem in early societies and still isn't in sufficiently small or close-knit ones. Where communities are too big, mobile or loose to base trust on personal experience or communal knowledge, we have had to address the problem of anonymity by establishing alternative measures of reputation: brands, credit ratings, permits, certifications, criminal registries and other signals. In place of direct or second-hand experience, the solution has been to use technology to establish transparency. If current trends in privacy continue, we'll be able to do that much more effectively in the future.

As regards sustainability, the challenge has been in establishing what damages have been inflicted on the environment by whom. One part of this dilemma can be solved through science, by more accurately defining the health implications of a practice or substance. The other must be redressed by linking agents to the often nebulous environmental repercussions of their actions. The environment suffers because of the tragedy of the commons and the only way to resolve it is to establish a clear connection between individual actions and outcomes.

The above examples illustrate the trade-off between privacy and accountability, but it can permeate any sector of life. How can I assess performance if decisions are largely closed-door deals? How can I know whose interests a politician represents if he's funded through a faceless super PAC? And how can I know whether an employee or my kid's teacher is suited for the job if I cannot review and corroborate their past? In spite of these doubts, full transparency is not always desirable.

Challenges to transparency

Even though greater openness can minimize risk and deter crime, there are also justified reasons to oppose it. If you're a law-abiding citizen who doesn't conform to popular norms - if you're a minority in some way - that may be reason enough to advocate privacy rights.

Those reasons become further warranted when transparency is implemented asymmetrically. Imagine a case where potential victims of oppression or exploitation have the details of their lives open to scrutiny while the identities and doings of their oppressors remain unknown. This already happens. Intelligence agencies and secret police in authoritarian regimes are able to uphold the status quo partly because they exist in shadow, inoculating their members against individual culpability.

An Afghan officer using anonymity to her advantage.

The prospect of change and the imperative to forgive

Perhaps the most compelling reason to resist the dismantling of privacy, however, is its implications for the capacity to change one's life. Transparency already limits opportunities for ex-cons, which serves at least theoretically as a deterrent to would-be criminals, but consider apparent law-abiding citizens or victims of circumstance.

In The Road to Serfdom, economist Friedrich Hayek argues that one of the most crippling aspects of living in a communist society for both the individual and the economy is the lack of prospects, the virtual inability to alter one's position. Could extensive transparency in a free market democracy similarly limit the capacity for self-reinvention and sentence individuals to their fates earlier in life? It's a consideration that forces one to wonder at which point we're best equipped to make decisions and whether weighing earlier ones will make our lives more a function of our initial environments.

The need for feedback

There exists an optimal balance between privacy and accountability and it will hinge on delineating between what details are of import and which are not. Should it matter that I'm a Mormon? Should it matter what I download?

When it comes to material impact on resources, however, which is what public health and sustainability are fundamentally based on, I cannot conceive of an instance where that information should be kept secret. There's no justification for the Soviet Union delaying the news of the Chernobyl disaster or for private enterprise to underreport their resource use. Similarly, entities should get credit for improving quality of life where it is due.

I'm not a robot

But information on its own isn't enough. Many of us - including myself - often operate according to what's in our immediate interest, what we can get out of the system for ourselves with the least input, if at times at the expense of others. I shouldn't expect greater visibility on its own to compel people to act in the best long-term interests of what they hold dear.

At the same time, we often make decisions based on emotions and unexamined desire. I contend here, as I have before, that people are a social animal, willing to do that which will elevate their status in the eyes of those whose opinions they value. At that point, it's no longer about the environment as much as it is about sharing a common identity and showcasing accomplishments within that framework. I may not actually care about sustainability, but may care only about the approval of others who profess that they do. By necessity, there will also be circles that define themselves by being anti-environmental, regardless of whether they genuinely care.

In order to propagate the sustainability mentality then, it is necessary to establish it as an esteemed lifestyle and leverage humanity's social apparatus to encourage people to pursue it. Luckily, I don't think that behavior is founded exclusively on competition for social status. People are capable of reason as well and I believe it is this that will decide the conflict with those who define themselves in opposition to sustainability.

Data drowning

The issue remains of how best to convey information in a world drowning in data. Science and education can impart us with a sense of what's better for health and the environment, but the key will be conveying information in a conveniently digestible and meaningful packet.

That's been the aim of the new environmental rating system for cars, which permits comparisons across electric, hybrid and conventional models. The ranking is communicated according to a grade letter system that consumers are already familiar with.

I envision that products in the future will universally carry an assessment of their ecological footprint, in much the same way foods already display nutritional information. I also wouldn't be opposed to wearing some indicator of my sustainability on my sleeve. If that proves too much sensory overload, then perhaps in the same way technology is helping generate and disseminate data, it will one day improve our ability to process that information.

But don't rely on it. A few professions that you're overwhelmed by the complexities of today's world can easily double as an admission that you're not fit to make decisions in your own interest.