Digifesto

There are polarizing discourses on the Internet about the following four dichotomies:

• Public vs. Private (information)
• (Social) Inclusivity vs. Exclusivity.
• Open vs. Closed (systems, properties, communities).

Each of these pairings enlists certain metaphors and intuitions. Rarely are they precisely defined.

Due to their intuitive pull, it’s easy to draw certain naive associations. I certainly do. But how do they work together logically?

To what extent can we fill in other octants of this cube? Or is that way of modeling it too simplistic as well?

If privacy is about having contextual control over information flowing out of oneself, then that means that somebody must have the option of closing off some access to their information. To close off access is necessarily to exclude.

PRIVATE => ¬OPEN => ¬INCLUSIVE

But it has been argued that open sociotechnical systems exclude as well by being inhospitable to those with greater need for privacy.

OPEN => ¬PRIVATE => ¬INCLUSIVE

These conditionals limit the kinds of communities that can exist.

Social inclusivity in sociotechnical systems is impossible. There is no such thing as a sociotechnical system that works for everybody.

There are only three kinds of systems: open systems, private systems, or systems that are neither open nor private. We can call the latter leaky systems.

These binary logical relations capture only the limiting properties of these systems. If there has ever been an open system, it is the Internet; but everyone knows that even the Internet isn’t truly open because of access issues.

The difference between a private system and a leaky system is participant’s ability to control how their data escapes the system.

But in this case, systems that we call ‘open’ are often private systems, since participants choose whether or not to put information into the open.

So is the only question whether and when information is disclosed vs. leaked?