It's actually

It's actually Brahmin. It's an Ellis Island name from Brahmin, Germany.

Thank you very much. The first thing I have to say is that the idea that you're funding research on tooling, I'm about to try to design with the help of things I can subscribe to my very first website. And by the way, folks, my first presentation as an independent scholar, I'm proud to say. So the idea that you're funding research on tooling to go between tooling providers is like terrifying, absolutely terrifying. And I'm gonna share a lesson for those of you who work across disciplines. I'm gonna, based on your comment, this is a small group for you. So I'm known. I was thinking about the titling and I went with a titling as I have had it in my head, but I'm also those who know me in my world expect me to be jumping off the edge of the cliff. That is I, I don't do privacy because a bunch of brilliant people do privacy. They don't need me in privacy. My job is finding the edge and then standing on it. And sometimes I fall over, but that's where they expect me to be. So a title like parametric virtues in the world that knows me would've brought people out. And I can see that for people who don't know me, it's like, what the are you talking about? But let me tell you what I'm gonna talk about. So let me try to share my screen. First of all, though, I did, I wanted to thank Josh and Nathan and, those of you who are also involved in the public AI seminar, which is how I come to, MediGov for bringing me into this. I was aware of this world of crafting, coming from the computer side and, Timothy, you one of the Timothy, you almost was willing to write a book about that and chunking the law in the same way. But I had not realized things have developed in the way that you brought me into it. So I'm doing a second volume of change of state. And, so I really appreciate you bringing me into this, conversation and learning about what you're thinking about. So this is a one off presentation for you because I was trying to speak to what I have come to know so far of the ways in which members of this group are thinking and writing and the kinds of things that you're doing. So if the screen is good, I'm going to go. But if you want to stop me at any point, feel free to interrupt me as I go. And otherwise, I'm off and running, but I'll say two more prefatory things. And that is that this is quite dense. Theoretically, I'll leave you with the slide deck. And and you have a link to a lot of the publications that will further expand upon many of the points here. And some of this is the parametric virtues part. The examples are things that I'm still working on. So that part is work in progress. But and I may speak fast, but we know from cognitive psychologists that you actually will remember more if I talk too fast. So unless it's really too fast for a non native English speaker, I'm gonna keep going. But as I say, feel free to stop me. So these are the topics I'm gonna go through today, the basic argument, forms and phases of powers, some details about the nature of systems and how they emerge. And then the core of it for what you're doing going forward is some exemplar categories of parametric functions and to think about what their virtues would be, and examples of them and where I think that the kinds of questions I think that brings members of this group too. So, governance takes place at the conjuncture of social, technological, and informational systems, three different kinds of systems. And those systems are constantly those kinds of systems and specific examples of them are constantly interacting at the same level, infra and supra, and which direction that is, same infra or supra, is, of course, pertinent to where you are relative to governance processes that are in play. When I look at your analysis and, like, the policy toolkit, up and down are very clear, and you're designing it as a whole. But when you're operating within it and trying to figure out how to act, where you are within that, is pertinent and where you are relative to the systems you're trying to enact with. So parametric processes. And let me say that it was actually Lawrence Tribe, the another Harvard law professor who started writing about calculation and the law in the early nineteen seventies. It was Lawrence Tribe who first turned me onto this argument that, that information policy, anytime you're dealing with information and communication, you are dealing with constitutional matters because you're dealing at what happens within and between systems. So I've always defined information policy as parametric policy. Parametric processes, those that occur at the borders of all of these systems are those of particular importance for meta governance. The the terms border boundary and parameter mean different things. They can be they are often used interchangeably, but they, conceptually mean different things. And those differences are useful for our analysis. And I think for your analysis, when you are thinking about things, I've seen various phrases like the government share, the government face, or looking at the point at which governments interact with whatever it is that's outside of them, whether that's the citizens or other governments or whatever. So the border is the edge and that which lies along it. So you've got border zones in The US that's a 100 miles. That means 90% of The US population lives within The US border zone where, constitutional principles are treated differently. The boundary is that which marks the limit, the bright lines, and the parameters, the defining characteristic of the system being bounded. So the focus here is on the parameters and, processes that happen along the parameters and what you do, with those, informationally. And I think of, sorry, I think of, your meta governance, interests as very much, information policy, interests. From my perspective, which is a very broad definition, that's irrelevant. You don't need my definition. So when we are thinking of parametric processes as tools of governance, as policy tools, and they are parametric functions, we can call these parametric virtues. And you have a piece there on, the history of this concept. We can call these parametric virtues in the sense that that word, as it began in the concept of virtue and as it's developed in the digital world. So virtue was pre modern, the reference is the sacred. You have virtue when you are connected to the sacred virtue in the modern world, where the reference is material, you're virtuous when you got a lot of money in certain versions of Christianity that are pretty dominant, and the virtual and the postmodern and, the, where the reference is community as a source of virtue, which gets back to again, the purposes, the goals towards which those of you involved in MediGov, might be driven. So parametric virtues are parametric functions that are driven by and serve the community as defined from a particular, social systems perspective. Parametric functions are also virtual in a second sense, and this is Roberto Scazieri's sense. He's an Italian economist, still writing, wrote brilliantly about different kinds of labor and how that was affected in the virtual environment from an economic point of view in the 1990s. He uses the concept virtual to mean things that do not yet exist, but that can be brought into being with what we currently know. We don't need any more research using resources we currently have. It just doesn't exist yet. So it's in this sense that there is a virtual phase of power. And I'm going to be going through, the different forms and phases of power, shortly. But when you think about parametric functions, those that are involved in meta governance and the emergence of new governance systems, then you want to be taking into account in my view, power in all of its forms and all of its phases. Social technological and informational systems co determine each other. It's not that there's technological determinism, all three of these co determine, but there can be differences in the relative weights of each at any particular historical conjunction as you address a particular issue or problem. So whether a particular parametric function should be considered virtuous depends upon its relationship to an effects upon the community with which it is associated. I'm gonna stop here and make one more comment about the title. I think the concept of virtue in this presentation adds another layer of complexity that with another half hour, I would have removed. I stuck with it because I'd used that in the title, which have just been parametric functions. I wanted you to know why the word virtue was there, but I acknowledge that that adds yet another level of, theoretical complexity. So here are the distinctions among forms of power that I'm encouraging you to think about in each step of what you do. The first two of these are, two, well, the first, the first three of the, the first two of these are what are called faces of power that political scientists have thought about since sort of the beginning of time, instrumental control over the material world and structural control over social structures, organizations, and processes. Very famously in the 1970s, we came, Steven Lukes, to the three phases of power, and he started talking about symbolic or persuasive power. It's where it's where you're talking about control over perceptions and beliefs often common referred to as soft power. And then I've added informational power, which is control over the informational foundations of power and its instrumental, structural and symbolic forms and control through new tools of power made possible only as a result of digitization. So these are quite distinct. They can interact, they can come together, but they're distinct and you would act differently depending on what you're trying to accomplish and what you have available as tools. So and, resources. They come in different phases. It's not just that there is or is not power. We have, four phases as well. So power can be sunk. The enduring effects of exercises of power in the past, like post colonialism. It can be actual. I'm shooting you right now with this gun. It's potential. I'm telling you, I've got a gun behind my back and I'm gonna shoot you if you don't behave. I'm not exercising at present. This is the foundation of game theory, which is one of your keywords for this entire series. And it's virtual in Scazieri sense. It's power in a form that does not yet exist, but can be brought into being with knowledge and resources currently available. I believe this is among the things that the public AI group is talking about. Compositional game theory is I'm understanding the publication that Josh and others of you have been involved in is an effort to use one or more forms of power in its virtual phase. That's how I understand what you're doing there. Just a bit on the concept of emergence in complex adaptive systems theory and its iterations refers to the appearance. It's one of the along with the infrastructure, one of the most misused words of our era. And so I'm making a deal about it. It refers to the appearance of a system that cannot be explained by the operations of any of its parts. That's because the parts of a uniquely come together in a novel way. It's a new system that has emerged and only because it becomes apparent when it is there as a system, the parameters that are affecting or involved in emergence can be established incrementally changing or radically new. Systems, I'm gonna keep moving. I feel like I'm taking too long. This is describing what goes on in change of state and that, that you can look at, at least four different dimensions of systems. I look at their identities, their structures, their borders and how they change. And you can, look at different tools and modes of acting these parametric processes according to how they're affecting the systems. And that's what change of state does. So here's the crux of it for you. This is the new work. What I started trying to so this is like a first pass at trying to categorize parametric functions and give examples of what they would be. So one category would be complexity, how complex you are at that interface is measurable. There's a whole long story about that and the written work. So two examples of how you deal with that as a policy tool, a governance tool is first is requisite variety. The amount of complexity you need in a border zone in order to adequately engage with systems on the other side of the border has to equal the complexity of those other systems has to be at least that complex. A second example would be negative capability, the ability to have comfort with uncertainty. That's one of the things that was a real characteristic of early Internet designers. They didn't know what they were building or what they could build. And everything kept changing under them, what they were after, what the tools were, what the technologies were. They became comfortable with uncertainty. Temperature would be another category. There's friction. You generate heat when systems rub together at their borders, tensions, conflicts, oppositions. I would point you to the work of Julie Cohen as an absolutely brilliant legal scholar who talks about friction in her book on privacy. And then there's air gaps. You can think of WikiLeaks, but you all, you guys all know air gaps, where you're trying to do the reverse. You're not raising heat, you're lowering heat by trying to prevent contact between systems to ensure that they remain cool. And of course, one could launch into a Marshall McLuhan, disposition here. Filters would be a third category. Two examples would be porosity, the extent to which it is possible and the ways in which it is possible to cross the border. There's the aperture. How much can be seen of what is across the border? How much light gets through? The historian, Fernand Braudel, was helpful to me in thinking about this. Triggers, that is, you can have a nudge that gently I'm going to stop for a second. Excuse me and let I think the cat has gotten trapped in the closet. And rather than have an accident, excuse me for a moment.

Yes. I'm known for large conceptual leaps, but even for me but, yes, that presented an unhappiness. Sorry about that. Here I go again. Triggers. I have to say one of the most fun I ever had was an academic, was in the nineties when I published a piece called where the title was trigger. It was on the treatment of labeling in US Supreme Court decisions, and now you're gonna get to see the cat, in US Supreme Court decisions because it it turned out that chronologically, they treated labels, they moved through Baudrillard's four labels of value, four types of value as he moves towards hyperreality. That's how the US Supreme Court was dealing with the relationship between labels and physical objects. Anyhow, so it was really fun to say I have to go home and work on trigger as in the Western, you know, yoho trigger, the horse and away. So triggers nudges are very familiar to everybody. That's gotten a lot of public play. Speed bumps would be the reverse. You're putting on mild obstructions that slower control one's behavior without, preventing it altogether. And then there's topology. And this first one, I have a full piece on this if anyone wants it. I don't think I did not put it up in the group, but I could add it. But I did a study of Facebook or Meta in terms of where they are in accounting systems. There are these official categories that accounting systems use to locate and companies get to pick which ones they want to be labeled with. Use to locate and companies get to pick which ones they want to be labeled with. And, if you look for Facebook, Metta using, accounting standard accounting system categories, they disappear. They aren't biggest company in any category at all because they've, like, hidden what they're doing. If in the virtual reality stuff, should that ever take off. But one of the things they would be doing is mining an enormous amount of informational quantities of informational resources that are not currently of value, but would be of value in future. They're learning everything that you're looking at, all of your behaviors, all kinds of things, your sense of things that they aren't talking about. It's probably buried in their terms of service. It's not something that's, that isn't data that's out there for, to buy or sell right now, but they're doing it for the future. And so I think of that as topological. The corporation disappears, the resources being gathered, but nobody knows, in a sense. And then folds and folds are, very common and come in multiple types in systems theory, which again drives how I think about governance. Folds are essential for emergence. You can't have a new system unless there has been a fold that lets something new happen. You can have folds that hide things. An information policy example would be information classification systems, folds that connect things. So if you have a good education system and folds that blend things together. So I think of language training programs for immigrant immigrants that deliberately train in the new language by bringing together people from multiple other native languages. So you're doing lots of blending, at the same time. So just some examples, open to critique, recommendations for others. When I think through these lenses at what I have been able to learn so far from conversations in the public AI and then where the Medigob website has led me to with the time I've been able to give it, And I will be giving it more because I'm learning a lot from you. Are you taking all forms of power into consideration? Most of what I see looks as if it involves structural power only. And so there might be additional dimensions that could let you build out when you think about how decisions actually get made or what you're trying to accomplish with any particular governance system. Are you distinguishing among your activities according to which phase of power is involved? So some, you would, even with the same goal in mind, you would use different policy tools and different parametric processes for different for different phases of power. So you might establish your own communication distribution system as a workaround for sunk power but meanwhile simultaneously fight for legal or regulatory change in order to empower community voices effectively. And by effectively, I mean connecting with actual decision making. The last, you know, so these are some of the, the questions that I've had for the public AI, seminar because it's not clear to me where that document is going in terms of which phase of power, you're trying to exercise and actually which form of power you're trying to exercise and what the target is. Other questions for you, how does taking into account these various forms of and phases of power affect the use of the elements of the policy kit as it's applied to a particular type of problem? As I understand it, you've got the abstract elements of the policy kit. The understanding that then you would move down to the meso level. At the macro level, you move down to the meso level to apply to a particular problem. Smart cities was one. Then you have the analysis of the Dow governance systems, all of that. What happens, in terms of how those are used or whether or not you would use various elements of those kits or choose your kits or the community rule, choice and all that if you take into account all these various forms of phases of power. And then finally, what's missing from my analysis, from the perspective of what would be useful for you, in your own endeavors. And here's how to keep talking, and I will leave these, the slides with Josh. So thank you for listening.

Yes. It was. I admit.

The establishing the parameter define makes the boundary, and it depends where the borders are. And that's why I think the difference in those concepts, it's important, and you are the perfect audience for this because you would by definition, you're gonna come from a very distinct cons understanding of parameter.

part

So to me, that would be one small subset of what I mean.

So let me say one more thing about change of state, which is I mean, people have described as four books in one. If you think this talk was dense, but it does come with bibliographic essays. You got help. So it provides a way of thinking about the world of information policy and a history of conceptual framework, not that blah blah blah. And then the second half of the book goes through it's actually something like 32 different information policy issues that are divided up by these, by identity structure, borders and change of systems. And then within each chapter, issues raised by social systems, informational systems, technological systems and how they interact. But the the what I think is the crux of it and that gets to what you're saying in terms of the way the way that you are very clearly, conceiving of the concept of parameters is in government and relative to governance is that identify it's like six to eight trends in ways that the law has been changing that interact with social trends that we know a lot about from social science research. And so you can see the interactions between deciding you can go for libel charges of defamation in a in fictional work when the issue is falsity. Okay. What's going on here? And the the bottom line of all of that, the going into all of that detail then for what's happening is we change the law in all of this. It's like a five twenty four page book or something is that you can ask the question and address the question, what are we doing to ourselves? And so it's like, you need to go into all that detail in order to get back up to the macro level question of, you know, where on earth is all of this going? So what you're talking about is very much a part of that. And the book is trying to argue that there are other things that we don't necessarily think of as those kinds of direct, well, either we don't recognize them, they're latent instead of manifest as opportunities to engage in the way you're talking about. Or they are what I call latent as opposed to manifest, barring from Robert Merton. But, an easy example that I use in the book, that doesn't require the digital environment was one during World War Two, and they put limits on the use of lumber by the paper industry because they needed it for military purposes. And books started having really, really thin paper and newspapers were getting thinner and smaller because they couldn't afford the paper. So it was information policy, but you but it was latent, not manifest. It was indirect, not direct. And so, the book book tries to build a larger way of making those arguments and pointing out that there in a sense is almost nothing you can do in the information policy space, which I could be misunderstanding this, and I've yet to go through a full crypto training, which I have promised Josh I will do. But my understanding is that by definition, like, the all the Dell governance stuff would fall into this information policy domain because of how you're operating.

Okay. Yeah. Sorry.

So what you are talking about is practice, Nathan. This is if I can remember starting at the back and you'll bread crummy forward. I refer to as governmentality starting from, Fukova going beyond. The most succinct but comprehensive definition of information policy as I use it is the book is the description of the book series on the MIT Press website. They think it's way too long and it is, but that's as succinct as I can make it. So when I use the word policy, I'm not only talking about governments and formal processes. I'm talking about at the moment using the word governance both as an umbrella term, but as as a less than umbrella term, as a category for formal and informal decision making by public and private decision making makers and governmentality is the habits and predispositions through which which would include practice and it becomes part of your habit that which is, of course, again, those of us who teach, that's what we're trying to so that was the if you I don't know. I think you had at least two other questions in what you asked if at this point you can recall those.

a

What do you mean?

Yeah. I was just wondering, Sandra, how you like, how your work interacts with conversations about the meta crisis. Not that I've done so much deep diving into that world. But to me, like, I hear that term and from what I've read, like, in in putting it into your framework, I think about, like, potential power and how you spoke about, like, this future or kind of, like like, someone holding a gun behind their back and, like, you know that there's potential power, but they obviously have, like, forms of power even though it's, like, future potential. And I feel like the metacrisis kind of, is this, like, fear of accumulation of power, but it's, like, very potential. It's very, like, abstract. Feels, like, disconnected from current states. Although, like, of course, like, with the gun, it's like there is this connection with actual current power and sunk power. But I'm curious, like, in your work, how you think about, like, the time element. Like, how you think about building systems for, these, like, future potential states that that we're, like, heading towards and kind of, like, what what we can do now to sort of, like, yeah, like, prepare for and, like, move towards this, like, future potential even if it's this, like, harmful accumulation of potential power. Yeah. I know it's a good question. But

Yeah. And let me make one preparatory comment that also then links back because what you're saying again links back to one the first question I think Nathan asked, which is how I think about the virtual. I started walking down this intellectual path because in 1978, it became clear to me that we were gonna have to rethink the entire legal system because of digitization. And I wasn't, this is because I was reading people, other people, Ellen Weston, William O Douglas and people like that, but it, that was it. And then it took me a few years to get into graduate school, but that was the question I walked into graduate school with. So the question of how I think about the virtual is inseparable from my asking, you know, we didn't know the experiences. I mean, we're losing a generation, by the way. I can remember because I was in my thirties that my dreams changed when I started command line moving around cyberspace command line in the earliest stuff, which actually I first experienced in the eighties with some beta databases. Dreaming differently, relating to infinity differently. This generation is gone and dying out and somebody should be interviewing for those kinds of things. But, yeah, indistinguishable. So let me ask you quickly, how you are defining metacrisis before I directly respond to your question.

Yeah. I mean, I don't even know if I feel confident enough to to explain it to me. I guess, briefly, I think about, like, almost in a parametric way, like, the interactions of, you know, a handful plus of crises from climate crises to political institutional crisis.

Yeah. Yeah. I would think about that as there are a couple three dimensions of it at least, problems of governability. So one thing is we keep seeing a recurrence of and this is interesting. It's I'm always attentive to this in the Dow governance conversation because the question of will the state disappear, which people first started talking about the seventies and then the eighties, we say, no, you know, my position is, and it was that of others that it hasn't disappeared. It's changed its form. It changes its nature as it has, as it has done multiple times. That doesn't mean there are alternative sources of power that, but I think that if one one not immediately scary, although ultimately conceptually scary way of thinking about it is that there is already ungovernability altogether. And the one the first place I put that into print was in, in a book there's a book in the series on cloud computing. It's an edited volume, and the press thought it was, like, unfinished. It needed a concluding chapter. So they asked me to do it, and I did it. But based on the work in the book by others, my conclusion was that the cloud computing is among those things that's actually ungovernable. And there are other kinds of things. So that's even before we get to climate change, wild corruption, selfishness, greed. And if the question is it's in the future, I can't tell you how many times a day I'm thinking about Gaza. You know, there are plenty of people who don't think it's in the future. So the what to do about it part of your question was the hardest. I'm not sure what it would be to you talk about harmful accumulations of power. And can you say more about that? Or possibly harmful, I think you said. This is Yeah. In the chat. Thank you.

Oh, yeah. Thanks for posting, folks. Yeah. I think I guess I'm I'm I wanna read more of your work and and understand what you mean on a deeper level when you talk about, like, changing kind of changing forms, like, working from where we have to where we need to be. Right? And, like, I feel like interacting with these systems and thinking about their potential, requires a lot of kind of, like, translation work almost. Like, how can we have folks who are, I don't know, at different stages of life, literally generationally perhaps or or those, like, directly addressing accumulation of potential power in the future, kind of, like, coming together in current in systems currently to and designing them in a way that can send them on a a better trajectory, more regenerative or whatever the different

Un unfortunately, I'll make a a kind of short comment here. And and and if you'd like, we we can go on also back channel or later in the conversation if there's time. But there's one of the things that is most successful about powerful forms of governance as they well, there's the personal and Max Weber is still worth reading. Everybody should read, you know, Max Weber. But aside from personal power, but that there's this excruciating detail. So I think Josh has heard me say this, but if I were to stand up, one of the most important elements of the US government in terms of whether or not, say, scientific information is taken into account when they're thinking about environmental matters, just an example, is the office of management and budget, which is in the White House, and which gets to make rules. This began in the 1970s, and they keep changing how they do it and what they're keeping track of, but they get to decide whether or not a regulatory agency can spend money on information analysis of data and research, taking research into account. The White House is deciding this. Now, if I put up a poster that said, I'm gonna talk about the office of management and budget, people would fall asleep on the street for miles ahead of me. But if you wanna know what's actually going on in our regulatory system, that's something you gotta know about. That's a lot of intellectual hard work. You know, it's in a sense, it's not reasonable to expect everybody to understand the office of management budget. I've just, you know, finished almost, you know, forty years of trying to help undergraduates at least understand what the five different rights are that are in the first amendment. And when you come to a place like Texas, one of the advantages, one of the interesting things about having taught in different states is the differences in getting a sense of the differences in their education systems. And it turns out in Texas, they get, like, one semester on federal government in, I don't know, tenth grade, eighth grade. And otherwise, it's all Texas. So if you talk about the Supreme Court to them, they ain't got no idea. I had to, like, completely it took me a couple years. Had to, you know, completely redesign the course so they had the basics. Anyhow, I'm able to stop there, but I think that's one of the problems, one of the real barriers.