Schlagwort-Archive: Infrastructure

A medieval city – the ideal metaphor for a platform

The development, from the accumulation of some houses to a city, as an economic, social, cultural and political center, followed the traffic routes since the beginning of civilization – along coasts and waterways, e.g. from Marseille via the Rhone, Saône and Rhine to the north. Although many German cities date back to Roman times, more than two thousand years ago, most cities were appointed in the Middle Ages and the second half of the twentieth century. We identify many aspects of the medieval city in the architecture of today’s virtual platforms. This makes a medieval city to an ideal metaphor for a platform.

If we sketch the characteristics of a virtual platform, the similarities catch our eyes.

  • Access control
    The medieval city was surrounded by a wall that protected the possessions of the inhabitants. Access was only possible for authorized persons through guarded city gates. Within the city wall, the inhabitants lived in defined quarters.
    Platforms are also structured according to topic areas and stakeholders. The gate to the platform also opens only for those, who have a corresponding account, i.e. a user ID and a password.
  • Infrastructure
    In a medieval city, the residents used common facilities – from the town hall, the market square, public streets, schools, pubs, to prisons and execution sites.
    Virtuality also requires a general infrastructure – from administrative facilities, marketplaces, workflows, training areas, entertainment areas, to facilities for the punishment of extreme misconduct.
  • Cultural diversity
    The population of the city is made up of different cultures and professions. You find patricians, craftsmen, merchants, day laborers, hangmen and other trades.
    The platforms also have a large variety of members, who are divided into providers, consumers and platform operators, who meet there to do business with each other.
  • Economic hub
    In the Middle Ages, the reason for the foundation and mainstay of the city was the market place. There were goods for sale, manufactured in the city or procured from far away. In addition, guilds evolved, which mutually enriched their kindred business.
    The virtual platform also serves, above all, for the regular exchange of services between providers and consumers and to strengthen the own specialty.
  • Governance
    Due to the dense accumulation of many people, strict rules for coexistence were effective within the city walls. The craftsmen were organized into guilds, which determined regulations regarding education, tools and quality for their field of expertise. Non-members were not allowed to practice the respective craft. Taxes were collected to finance the administration of the commons.
    Virtual platforms also define rules that certify participants according to certain criteria, determine clear procedures, and ensure the outcomes of their work through best practice. The taxes of the virtual platform are the membership fees and donations.
  • Future development
    The progress of the city was the responsibility of the city lords, who were made up of members of the upper class. They decided on the expansion of the infrastructure, the influx of people and the promotion of certain trades.
    Accordingly, the operators of the platform are today primarily responsible for the continuous expansion of the functions, the administration of new and existing members, and the definition of new scope of services and standards.

Bottom line: The scope of a medieval city was determined by the physical accessibility, i.e. eventually by the wall. The same applies to a virtual platform – because you are globally only one click away from the platform and it is accessible to anyone, who has access to the Internet. The counterpart to the city gate is the access control, which protects the platform from unauthorized use. A wide variety of cultures can settle and do business within the area, as long as they comply with the regulations. Everyone benefits from the expansions, which offer constantly growing services. The aspects of a virtual platform become visible on the basis of a medieval city. This makes the medieval city the ideal metaphor for a virtual platform.

Creating controllability step by step

A utopia of total control was described again and again in books and movies. Think about 1984 by George Orwell, where Big Brother has control of the most private spheres of life. Or remember Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, in which the possession or reading of books is legally forbidden and where the pervasiveness of the mass media in private life is well illustrated. These conceptions of the future that are shown in many science fiction stories provide an unattractive end state that was surely not developed at one go, but gradually. The required bases for such scenarios do not evolve from one day to the other. The whole begins completely innocently, by creating the controllability step by step.

Ueberwachung

The utopias provide only scrappy ideas, if at all, how these controls are created. The following steps show a possible scenario.

  1. Develop appealing offerings
    Everything starts with the technical feasibility. New products and services provide attractive solutions that are becoming by and by affordable for most of the consumers. With the television the unidirectional connection of spectators began. Broadcasts were sent from one sender to many receivers. With the Internet we have the bi-directional connection between many senders and many receivers. In this case there is also data transmitted that does not serve the actual purpose (e.g. duration, frequency and the interests of the users). On this basis further applications are possible, like the navigation system, cashless payment or the electronic passport. These applications transfer more and more confidential data.
    The users are thereby bound into the future control system, without being aware, how much they reveal about themselves.
  2. Free use through advertisement and handing over data
    For high prevalence more and more free or at least cheap offers are made that are “paid” with the supply of data. The users cannot determine, which data is getting exchanged with the data release or the regular update of the app.
    For data fisher men, like the global secret services, it is a smart approach to develop an attractive software that supplies them directly with the appropriate information.
  3. Creating laws and regulations
    This procedure becomes legal by explicitly confirming the terms and conditions of an app by the users – without this confirmation one would not get the software. One suggests security to the citizens by limiting the duration of the data storing and, for example, the necessity for a judicial decision for using the data. This is raising the question, which spies would have ever been made responsible for their illegal bugging and monitoring actions. This makes the juridical question questionable.
    The apparent rule of law is pure sham, as long as national borders and the nearly impossible control of their activities as well as the national self-interests provide the operators sufficient free space.
  4. Facilitating exhaustive tracking
    We weave today inadvertently a close meshed net of our behavior with the introduction of mobile offers, like the mobile phones, computers, navigation systems, location-dependent services and applications for detecting vehicles and packages as well as our individual browsing behavior. And everything can be found in the data storages of the Cloud. Calling a competitor of your employer by phone and the download of internal documents and the trip to this enterprise permit already nowadays unpleasant conclusions.
    The infrastructure is already there. As soon as unscrupulous persons receive the access, we are in a still more terrible 1984.
  5. Abolish alternative offers
    In order to guarantee all this it is helpful that alternative behaviors are no longer available. With the conversion of payphones from coins to calling cards it is any more possible to phone, without storing the connection details. The abolishment of cash, as it is getting real in Scandinavia, makes it impossible to pay, without having the payment documented. The electronic passport guarantees that all border crossings can be evaluated.
    As soon as those aspects of our everyday life are virtualized, everything is in the hand of those, who have control of this system.

This is nota re-narration of 1984, but a list of steps that lead to a pervasive monitor. With a close look, we will recognize that we let these steps already behind us in those regions of the world, where constant supply of electricity and information already exists. Occasional attempts to use these channels with appropriate filters for censorship leak out. This is not a classical end time scenario of conspiracy theoreticians, but our current reality. With the divulgence of governmental secrets by Snowdon, we had to learn that our fantasy is not big enough, in order to be able to imagine the current practices.

Bottom line: We already overhauled the utopia of George Orwell with today’s technical possibilities. The controllability of all people is technically possible today. If the scruples of those, who have the control, continue to disappear or control is taking over by a strong power, we will be in the position of Winston Smith – only with drastically expanded consequences.