2021 CE
Discovered recognition as the fundamental unit for building social systems. Social credits was an attempt to capture social recognition in a manageable format. I was convinced that data can be the new socius.

The Struggle for Recognition

Axel Honneth, 1992

For I can only extend value to another as an individuated person—and be valued in return—if we share some orientation toward values or ends that allows us each to signal to the other the significance of our particular qualities for the other’s life.

What will emerge is that Hegel, through the concept of Sittlichkeit, and Mead, through the ideal of a democratic division of labor, each sought to describe a form of value community demanding a high degree of normativity.

Social valuation requires a social medium capable of expressing differences among human subjects in a universal, intersubjectively binding way.

Under the conditions of modern society, social solidarity is therefore the precondition for symmetric value-attribution between individuated subjects. Such symmetry means that each regards the other through a shared lens of values—values that make the other’s capacities and qualities appear significant for the pursuit of common ends.

The difficulty that Mead both derived and failed to fully reckon with is the task of assigning a common good to the generalized other—a good that allows every subject to understand their own value to the community in the same terms, without thereby obstructing each subject’s autonomous self-realization.

The question posed by social valuation is: what kind of evaluative framework is capable of measuring the “worth” of an individual’s particular attributes?

Young Hegel and Mead alike envisioned the future of modern society as the emergence of a new, open value system—one within whose horizon subjects would learn to mutually attribute value to the life-ends they have freely chosen.

The Idea of Socialism

Axel Honneth dismantles the accumulated imagery of socialism and returns to its animating core: social freedom. Social freedom holds that human liberty depends not only on the individual but on the human environment surrounding that individual—on society itself. After all, for individuals to pursue freedom, must they not first arrive at some shared understanding of what freedom means? To realize this foundational value, Honneth proposes not a deterministic, historically inevitable socialism but an entirely different kind: one that experiments with, evaluates, and archives social institutions.

He goes further, arguing that this form of solidarity is possible not merely within intimate communities but across society as a whole. This stands in some tension with my own research, which has emphasized the primacy of small communities—though the tension resolves somewhat in his aspiration toward a federation of such communities. Equally important is his insistence that the addressees of this renewed socialism are not a class—not the proletariat—but all democratic citizens. This points away from class-based solidarity and toward a civic, organic solidarity grounded in the affirmation of individual difference and particularity. My task, then, is to help people’s individuality emerge and take shape not through personal indulgence or collective convention, but through the self-determining perspective of society itself.

My own conviction is that social deliberative bodies must arise through technology rather than through law and administration. Honneth describes a structure in which democratically formed public opinion influences legislators at the national level, monitoring the overall organism’s purposiveness and even reshaping its internal dispositions. I believe this approach must disentangle itself entirely from the state. The state is modeled on monarchy—it is the legacy of a compromise struck in the name of modernization. What I envision instead: from within any given private sphere, the formation of will and opinion can give rise to small public domains, within which the practical work of realizing those intentions can take place.

To leave law and administration behind is to relinquish control over external forces. Therefore, what remains valid is only the formation of will within the newly emerging society itself—directed toward what that society desires and hopes for. What are the means and the substance through which people might, in the course of everyday life, pursue better lives through democratic deliberation? That substance, I would say, must consist of ceaseless questioning, the raising of possibilities, and experimentation.

Social credits

Who gets the credit for the value created in a society?

What is a social credit?

A social credit is a record of recognized social value. Social value is formed as members of a community perceive their interactions with one another and make judgments about their worth. By analogy with market value—where a product’s price is determined not by its use value but by the exchange value recognized by market institutions—social value is determined not by an individual’s fixed traits or capacities, but by the meaning their actions hold for others. Credits mark, relationally, how our actions have helped other people. In the examples below, each member is understood through their relationships; individual characteristics are present only as implicit potentials.

To recognize such social value is to make it explicit and to consent to it together. Recognition, when expressed in language, integrates the divergent perspectives of its participants into something intersubjective. The one recognized comes to see, through the other’s eyes, a dimension of their own social identity they might have missed or misread; receiving that affirmation, they are moved to repeat and sustain the same forms of interaction. The one extending recognition exercises their perceptual capacity to draw out the other’s social value, and in doing so, takes the initiative in forming a relationship.

When made public, a social credit attests to the recognized person’s social value and anticipates the value they may generate in the future, thereby building social trust. Social trust raises predictability and stabilizes and encourages social interaction. When a third party consults social credits, they are drawn toward similar forms of social participation. Should a network of social credits eventually take shape, it is reasonable to expect that one could trace the very links through which social value is generated and transmitted.

The purpose of social credits is to help members of society self-organize into micro-societies that maximize their genuine social value—freed from the calcified frameworks of received social wisdom. This is something market organization and capitalism have partially achieved; social credits are an extension of that achievement, aimed at overcoming its limits. The goal is to concretize and systematically engage with the social value that markets, through exchange value, fail to capture.

The social credit app

The primary interface is a web app designed for convenient use on mobile devices.

Credit content and tags

The content of a social credit is a written statement expressing a judgment of another person’s social value. Keywords within the text that best characterize the credit’s subject can be hashtagged (#). Hashtagged keywords are not only highlighted for the recipient—they also function as data for sorting and displaying credits. A double hashtag (##) makes the credit private. A URL related to the credit can be attached. Photos may also be included; to keep the written content primary, thumbnails appear as flat blocks of color.

Credit push/pull

Users of the web app can compose a social credit and either push it to another user or pull it toward themselves. A push means the content concerns the other person; a pull means it concerns oneself. A push or pull proposal must be mutually agreed upon by both parties before it is issued. If the recipient is unsatisfied with the content, they can revise it and re-push or re-pull, or decline it outright. For users not yet on the platform, credits can be pushed or pulled via email or text message.

Profiles and brands

Users store their received credits on their profiles. A multi-profile feature allows users to organize credits according to different identities. Personal brands, corporate brands, product brands—any unit functioning as a social actor—can be fashioned into a brand and used as a profile. Profiles can be subdivided into sections: a consumer electronics brand, for instance, could manage credits separately for each of its products. Multiple accounts may administer a single profile; in such cases, the profile is treated as a revenue-generating organization and billed accordingly.

Social credits

The current challenge is determining what it means to users to have their social trust established on the basis of social credit data—and what genuine value can actually be delivered to them. Here is a summary of the ideas developed so far.

  1. Individuals and organizations can mutually vouch for the substance of their sponsorships, partnerships, and collaborations. A company that issues eco-certifications can mark another company as environmentally responsible. A paper manufacturer that protects forests can identify which publishers use its paper. To a third party, such connections would appear as a network of social impact—a map of how diverse social actors (brands) make one another possible.
  2. Introduced into autonomous project work, credits allow the contributions of each participant at every stage to be recorded, encouraging sustained engagement. Even if a project fails, its accumulated record can serve as the foundation for rebuilding. Individuals and companies offering intangible services can use credits to gather the voices of those they have served into a compelling portfolio.
  3. Working people who use social credits can have their experience and competence genuinely attested—beyond salary or job title. Organizations can access a long-accumulated record at any time to assess talent, rather than relying on the expensive, cumbersome, and imprecise instruments of résumés and interviews.

More and more ordinary people are producing meaningful and distinctive work. More brands will emerge, and more quickly. These brands will not merely influence one another—they will be mutually constitutive. The path forward requires meeting users, sustaining rapid feedback loops through exploration and imagination, and continuously pushing past current limits; only through this can real-world achievement become possible.

A retrospective on credit design

The credit was chosen as the tool for interfacing the democratic mode of life that seems necessary for organizing an organic human society. Until now, that democratic mode has been understood primarily as the kind of direct deliberation seen in civil society—discussion that shapes the direction of legislation and administration. The problems I find there are as follows.

This is the problem that capitalism has addressed effectively in the economic sphere. The distinctive advantages found in capitalism are:

The credit emerged from the intuition that it is far more efficient to recognize and participate in existing social value than to construct excellent social value from the ground up through exhausting deliberation. If exchange generates value as a byproduct of equivalent transactions (+/−), recognition can detonate value through mutual solidarity (+/+).

Even so, a vacuum from which traditional political action—debate, deliberation—has been entirely evacuated cannot exist. Code must carry the content of social interaction, shared and versioned in libraries; credits must underwrite practice; together, they must help organizations experiment with the micro-social institutions that suit them.

Data as socius

Human society begins with the desire for food. But according to the principles by which society organizes itself, this desire is coded into countless forms of wanting, and flows according to those rules into every corner of social life. This is a story about human desire—about what we want.

Body without organs:

  1. Territory
  2. The body of the despot
  3. Capital

The land gives birth to human beings; human beings form tribes. A tribe belongs to the territory where food is plentiful. The tribesperson who has internalized the land becomes a farmer. The failed farmer seizes the land of another, and the farmer who wins that fight becomes a sovereign. The farmer is the territory; the territory belongs to the sovereign. To protect himself, the sovereign deterritorializes the serf, codes him, and sets him flowing. The merchant who circulates at the edges of the kingdom’s order internalizes not conquest but exchange and reinvestment—the art of taking without fighting—and becomes a capitalist. The capitalist, having transcended armed struggle, deposes the sovereign and internalizes those rights, becoming a citizen. The citizen wants rights; rights belong to capital. Capital deterritorializes the citizen, codes them, and sets them flowing.

Next: what deposes capital?

Capital originally came to serve as the socius—the social body—by virtue of its role in revealing what people want and how much they want it. My conjecture is that impact data will take on that role going forward. The force mixing the codes and driving the change, at every stage, is the schizophrenics who defy the existing socius—that is, the framework of capital.

At every stage, desire is coded by the socius and flows. How does impact data flow? How is it reflected in the app? Perhaps the idea of an impact network that was already latent in the project needs to be made more concrete.

The conclusion of Anti-Oedipus is this: how can we help those who wish to produce value in society and grow independently, without depending on capital?