[okfn-discuss] Tragedy of the Lurkers

Tue Oct 3 11:41:42 BST 2006

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your post and Rufus: for your great summary of different
resource using scenarios in commons.

I think that's the best invitiation to de-lurk I've seen yet on a list
yet!  - so not wishing to exploit under-provision and free-ride but
hopefully to contribute something to the common resource pool..

Rufus's comment about whether the tragedy of the lurker is a true
tragedy made me think a bit again about the *tragedy* in the tragedy
of the commons again.

In Aristotelian poetics a classical tragedy centres around the actions
of a protagonist who is often referred to as the tragic hero. As the
drama develops a sequence of events builds up which crystalise in the
cathartic moment where the tragedy is revealed, and the protagonist is
undone and meets his nemesis.

The tragedgy is tied up with the concept of hamartia which is the
cause of the protagonist's fall. Hamartia is a mistake or perhaps flaw
of character that is of the protagonists doing, but is unknown by the
protagonist. The cathartic moment in the tragedy occurs when this is
revealed to both the protagonist and the audience.

Garret Hardin (author of the 1968 Science article that popularised the
Tragedy of the commons) said he meant tragedy in the systemic sense of
Whiteheads 'The remorseless working of things'. Self interest of
private property owners using the commons drives them to greater and
greater resource useage until the ultimate destruction of the resource
commons with a remorseless mechanistic certainty the seeds of which
lie in the structure of the commons system itself.

This sense of tragedy seems different from the Aristotelian version of
tragedy but perhaps can be resolved by using the anthropomorphic trick
pulled in company law.

If 'the commons' is framed as a protagonist in the way that a company
frames a group of social and ecomonic relations as a legal individual,
then we have an actor who can be the tragic hero.

In this sense Hardin's protagonist 'the commons' unknowingly contains
within its system the flaw that leads to its nemesis.

I'm not sure however whether lurking does constitue a sysetemic flaw
that leads to the unknowing or remorseless downfall of information
commons like open knowledge or free software.

It's true that many projects do founder for lack of funds, lack of
support or lack of participation, but as Rufus points out the commons
of open knowledge is built and only exists by virtue of its useage or
currency.

To me the more appropriate candidate for tragic hero in the tragedy of
the lurker are lurkers themseleves. In greek literature the hamartia -
or flaw is often that of the hubris of the protagonist -

"doing or saying things that cause shame to the victim, not in
order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has
happened to you, but merely for your own gratification." 

In greek times shame was characterised by unwanted public attention on
for instance weakness - the victim of hubris defeated in combat in
public is not physically wounded but publicly shamed. The shamer is
guilty of hubris.

In fickle network attention economies perhaps this is reversed with
any attention, however seemingly bad being positive and flow
capturing. Non-participation or lurking could thus be seen as a kind
of contemporary version of hubris - witholding attention to cause
shame.

As in every tragedy the cathartic moment must now be revealed but what
will befall our tragic biotech corporate FLOSS project lurkers and what
wil be their nemesis?

Perhaps the collapse of a mission critical open source server software
project, will lead to a promethean eternity of proprietary over
generously version numbered upgrade cycles, with attendant long term
disasterous effects for TCO, the bottom line and ultimatley the
protagonists promotion prospects within the horizontal performance
related benefits structure of bioinformatica.com.

cheers

/julian

--references

[0] IIRC disclaimer
[1] half remembered critique of aristotelian poetics
[2] wikiepdia for everything else

On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 10:22:09AM +0100, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> peter murray-rust wrote:
> >Rufus et al.
> >
> >In my latest post http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=78 I have 
> >argued that lurking in an Open Source project constitutes a tragedy. I 
> >have no idea whether this is widely recognised or whether an economic 
> >theory has been developed about it - if not does it makes sense?
> 
> The issue of 'lurkers' that you discuss falls firmly into category 
> (iii). 'Lurkers' after all are those who use the knowledge you've 
> created without contributing back. Whether this constitutes a tragedy is 
> difficult to say. Of course it would be better if more of these people 
> contributed to the projects they used -- and the lack of contribution 
> may well be resulting in 'under-production'. However in trying to do 
> anything about this one is caught in the classic dilemma: in trying to 
> exclude people (or force them to contribute more) one will reduce usage 
> and perhaps prevent the full reuse of one's work (and you'll almost 
> certainly reduce the contributions of those who currently *aren't* lurking).