My first start-up was an MMO company. My role was to design the socioeconomic and governance structures for an online world. It was wonderfully geeky opportunity for a 20-year-old political theory major and gamer.
As Raph Koster has written, the advent of many-to-many live video (Facebook Live; Periscope) and augmented reality gaming (Pokemon Go) has brought new relevance to that work, highlighting the challenges of having vital communication controlled by private interests and the resulting importance of civic tech projects.
One of the big questions we grappled with was whether participants in mediated space (games, social media, chat rooms, etc.) could claim to have rights. (See this fun and earnest declaration.)
In political theory, rights — as in civil rights — have one of three points of origin that place them above government, laws, and other forms of human decision-making.
- Natural: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’ You are human, you have rights.
- Divine: They are granted and flow from a god.
- Social: We grant them to each other.
The question was whether any of these premises could hold true in a mediated environment. It boiled down to whether participant(s) could use their rights to overrule the will of the the mediator — the game maker, social media company, etc. And, in each instance, they couldn’t.
- Natural: The mediator invents and controls the laws of nature. “Right to free speech? You’re no longer able to talk.”
- Divine: The mediator is, functionally, god. What they grant they can take away.
- Social: This works as long as the mediator sees themselves as part of the community. But it’s a choice they can reverse at any time. (Today? Today I’m a god.)
Our concept of inalienable rights assumes the basis for those rights is inaccessible and immutable. Even (most) religious people assume their god isn’t going to show up and change their mind.
In a mediated environment, the mediator is an active participant, accessible to the participants, and most definitely mutable. They can change or pull the plug on the whole thing at any time, ending you, your world, and your rights.
Conclusion: Our concept of rights cannot apply in mediated, or virtual, space.
So, can you have rights in Facebook? Can they be obligated to broadcast your side of an interaction with the police?
Facebook exists as a private entity in meatspace. They are subject to the laws and regulations of government, which means they can’t be the origin point for rights. Further, nothing prevents Zuckerberg from shutting the whole thing down tomorrow, or simply removing live streaming as a feature.
So, no, you can’t have rights in Facebook. The best case scenario is where they choose to use their power to defend your rights. But they don’t have to. And this is a huge problem when Facebook (and other mediated technologies) are our central means of exposing and communicating injustice and the abuse of state power.
Geoffrey MacDougall 