Chapter 03
Escape the Plantation

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There’s a good chance you’re reading this book sitting in a comfortable chair, in a room, in your home – in the privacy of your own space. Nobody is looking over your shoulder, observing what pages you dwell on longest, taking notes on how you react to every page. Certainly you don’t have invisible people tiptoeing behind your back, looking through your files and belongings, taking note of the kinds of books and magazines you read, making plans for manipulation of your perceptions.

Quiet enjoyment is so common in the physical spaces where we live and work that we tend not to think about the components that make it so reliable: building codes; code-qualified construction materials; occupancy permits; professional licensing and professional accountability of architects, contractors and building inspectors; laws and ordinances and enforcement agencies that exist specifically to prevent governments and marketers and thieves from entering our dwellings and other buildings without permission.

That would change if some natural disaster forced you to grab your belongings and move to a school gymnasium hastily turned into a shelter…
…or some financial disaster left you living in a large cardboard box by the side of a busy street…
…or you woke up one fine morning and found yourself living in one of those overcrowded slums on a hillside in some big third world city…
...or a slave living in an open shack on a cotton plantation in the early nineteenth century…
…or a slave living an ever-increasing portion of your life in one of the global plantations…

The Global Plantations

The major plantations are:

Plantation                Plantation Owner
Windows                 Microsoft
iOS                          Apple
Android+                Google
Facebook                Facebook
The Cookie Clubs     SAP + Oracle + Adobe + Microsoft + Doubleclick + Performics + WPP + Hitwise+…+…(unknowns)
Prismoid                  U.S. National Security Agency, + U.K. GCHQ, France’s  DGSE+DSRI, many others
Arpanet III               Contested

Over the years, many have attempted to provide oppressed plantation dwellers with a means to escape. The abundance of such attempts reveals why none of them has provided an efficient and effective underground railroad to freedom. Despite the oppression, the plantation dweller does have the comfort of knowing that the slave shack in which they dwell will keep the rain off their heads.

Reverting to computer language for a moment: software and devices that are designed to work with a particular ecosystem (plantation) tend to be installable and tend to work as advertised. Tinkerers may have time to tinker, but the rest of the world needs computer tools that let them get things done without having to wrestle with tools that require effort to work together.

Plantation tools work because the plantation owner provides strong governance. It may be governance that oppresses and manipulates and facilitates theft and fraud, but it is strong governance nonetheless.
Ungoverned underground railroads have worked in some places more than others. One collection of standards and tools that could be considered an ecosystem if it had stronger governance is LAMP, which stands for Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. Add to that the remarkable package management tools that started with dpkg and you have a system that updates itself better than the plantations do.

LAMP is a start on the right idea, but its name, precluding as it does very good alternatives to Linux (xBSD), Apache (Nginx), MySQL (PostgreSQL), PHP (Python), and others shows its fatal flaw. LAMP is a consortium rather than a community. Any participant in the LAMP ecosystem is free to “fork” a piece of software, that is, change it in ways that may make it incompatible with the rest of the ecosystem.

LAMP has found its place on servers, which tend to be run by organizations that provide management that amounts to governance. LAMP servers power much of the world’s information infrastructure.

But on personal devices – laptops, desktops, tablets and phones – LAMP is virtually nowhere despite the efforts of many to provide the underground railroad of escape from the plantation.

That’s a problem, because the personal devices are where the people are. And we the people are all down on the plantation. The situation seems hopeless.

But using a little imagination will bring us quiet enjoyment in our second homes, our information homes, absolutely and unequivocally. We even have it in our online offices, or what the IT people call “collaboration spaces” where files are shared among team members and contractors and suppliers and distributors and others outside the physical office buildings .

Introducing the Solution

Let’s take a look at an ecosystem from the physical world that provides a distinctly viable alternative to life on the plantation. We’re talking about the community where you live.

In the physical world, the world of physical real estate, your home has an occupancy permit that was issued by a buildings department, after one or more visits by a building inspector showed the home to be habitable.
Big or small, it complies with zoning ordinances. It can be designed and built by any architect and contractor of your choice, provided they are licensed to practice in the jurisdiction that includes your municipality. If you don’t like the ordinances that govern your municipality, you have two choices: get involved in the governance of your municipality and work to change them, or move to another municipality.

That itself would seem to border on the oppressiveness of the plantation until you consider who owns your municipality. The fact is that you own the city or town where you live. The reason you have the opportunity to participate in your municipality’s governance is simply that you own it.

More than likely, your town or city is governed by a small group of activists, elected by popular vote or appointed by those elected, or simply activists who show up for meetings of the various governing bodies. If you get involved, you can influence the governance of the place where you live.

Compare that to your prospects for participating in the governance of one of the plantations by trying to get yourself appointed to the management team or board of directors of Microsoft, Google or Apple.
Can the principle of participatory municipal governance be applied to online facilities? Yes, absolutely. The name of the facility that lets us do that is Osmio.

What is Osmio?

A technologist would characterize Osmio as a collection of certification authorities. Indeed, Osmio’s Vital Records Department issues digital identity certificates, which attest to a level of evidence that an individual’s claim of identity is accurate. Its Professional Licensing Board issues digital professional licenses to architects, contractors and building inspectors– which are also digital certificates. (Any InDoor facility must have an occupancy permit that has been signed by all three in order to be habitable.) .

Shortly we’ll explain digital certificates and the set of digital construction materials of which they are a part, but for now just know that a digital certificate is precisely what it sounds like: a claim that is attested to by an authority. It’s just like a paper certificate, but without the paper.

But calling Osmio a collection of certification authorities would be like calling Chicago a collection of municipal licensing and registration agencies.

Like Chicago, Osmio is a municipality. The Municipal Charter of the City of Osmio was created at the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure meeting at the Geneva headquarters of the International Telecommunication Union on March 7, 2005. Then May 23,the City of Osmio was introduced by me to a meeting of the United Nations World Summit on Information Society, also in Geneva.

Osmio is provides a source of regional governing authority. That is, it is a regional capital, where the region is defined as the set of communities that accept its authority in matters of identity and facilities governance. If you have a community that would benefit from Osmio’s governance, simply have those in authority in your community digitally sign a charter that establishes your acceptance of Osmio’s authority in identity and facilities governance matters.

The result of Osmio’s governance is an ecosystem with standards that are as rigidly defined as those of the plantations; perhaps more so. In an Osmio-governed community there is no more room to get creative with APIs than there is room to get creative with electrical codes when installing circuits in your physical home. It’s simply a matter of law.
Will such constraints stifle creativity? Jonah Lehrer presents evidence of exactly the opposite effect:

Need to Create? Get a Constraint

One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it’s often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. Pop songs have choruses and refrains; symphonies have four movements; plays have five acts; painters still rely on the tropes of portraiture.
Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is poetry. At first glance, the art seems to be defined by its liberation from ordinary language – poets don’t have to obey the rules of syntax and punctuation. And yet, most poetry still depends on literary forms with exacting requirements, such as haikus, sestets and sonnets. This writing method seems to make little sense, since it makes the creative act much more difficult. Instead of composing free verse, poets frustrate themselves with structural constraints. Why?

A new study led by Janina Marguc at the University of Amsterdam, and published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, provides an interesting answer. It turns out that the obstacles of form come with an unexpected psychological perk, allowing people to think in a more all-encompassing fashion.

The Solution Is Old – And Older.

That set of solutions that Osmio offers is not really all that new. In fact it’s been right under our noses.
The first part of our solution is old.
The rest is even older.

If the problem is that we are keeping our files, holding our meetings, and letting our kids hang out outdoors, beside a busy highway, then the solution is the same as in the physical world. If your problems are caused by being outdoors, go indoors.

In the online world we need buildings. This is about how we can get some.
We will obtain quiet enjoyment in our online spaces using the same methods that have been developed over centuries to build and manage physical spaces of quiet enjoyment.

The path to quiet enjoyment is defined by the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure.

The Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure provides the following things, which will make your computer and your network secure.

• A reliable source of identity, so the locks on the front door and the file cabinets know for sure it’s you. That means identity credentials of measurable reliability: digital identity certificates established through sound enrollment processes and asserted using reliable means. The first four components of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure deliver measurably reliable identity credentials for you – and for others you deal with.
• But a reliable digital identity makes you trackable, unless it’s accompanied by a system to prevent snoops and thieves and burglars and marketers and nosy government agencies from compiling a detailed picture of where you go and what you do and how to manipulate your perceptions. The fifth component of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure assures you that your anonymity is preserved, except when…
• …What happens when someone whose anonymity is preserved by the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure harms you or your children? Everyone wants privacy for himself, and everyone wants accountability from others. If you are harmed, there must be recourse – and so there is. Just as you can see the license plate on someone else’s car but you can’t know the identity of its driver or owner unless there has been an accident or other legitimate reason, the sixth component of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure means that all who use it have accountable anonymity.
• Reliable identities and anonymity and accountability are a good start, but how do you put them to use? The most carefully issued keys to the finest lock will not accomplish much if the lock is installed on that cardboard box dwelling by the side of the information highway or the slave shack with open holes where windows would normally be. We need to build our dwelling with the finest construction materials according to an exacting set of building codes, which you will find in the seventh and eighth components of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure.
• Building codes are a good start, but what individuals take professional responsibility for applying them to ensure the privacy and security of your information home, and those of the friends you visit? The ninth component of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure assures professional responsibility and professional liability for those who build your online home. As a side benefit, it delivers a new source of income to software developers and whole new professions for notary signing agents and others who are empowered to apply public authority in private matters.
• Your information home needs to work in the real world of social networks, email, search engines, the Web, etc. – the outdoor world. The tenth, eleventh and twelfth components of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure assure that while we have our spaces of Quiet Enjoyment, we also “live with the living.”