Platforms for Pariahs: A new governmental system and a dream come true for ex-cons, activists, and other outsiders

 

In 2012, journalist and activist Barrett Brown was arrested for reporting on and sharing emails leaked by Stratfor – a company that touts itself as a “ private global intelligence company” but others have claimed is little more than a standard research company or media firm. Regardless, the emails (obtained by Anonymous hackers and technically spread through Wikileaks) between Stratfor employees or between Stratfor employees and their clients, raised a lot of questions about shady collaborations between private companies and government agencies, hidden international affairs, and the government targeting of activist or dissident groups around the world. Basically, things that governments don’t want their citizens to know. Someone had to pay for blowing the lid off, and that’s why, supporters of Brown and free press speculate, Barrett Brown was arrested, given a ridiculous sentence of about 100 years and sent to jail until he was released 2016.

Technically Barrett was sent to jail for sharing an email he believed contained leaked documents but instead contained the credit card information of strangers. But Barrett and his supporters felt his only real crime (in the eyes of the government) was passing along already leaked information and reporting on it, like tens of other publications did. So you can see why, post-release, Barrett might want urgently to do something that would not only prevent the silencing he experienced but would push further the work he was doing before he went to jail. Hence, Pursuance, Barrett’s complicated but conceptually cool new platform that he hopes will allow people, especially journalists and activists, to organize in a secure way. Almost entirely a “screw you” to the FBI agents that attempted to track and perhaps intimidate donors to Brown’s legal defense fund, Pursuance’s main goal is to allow for structured organization against government opaqueness, the national security state or surveillance state, the drug war, and the police state.

 

 

What Makes Pursuance Different

Pursuance’s real selling point is that, as of now, it is the only platform for secure (encrypted) task-management. Additionally, it has a few main features: 1) a decentralized but organized system 2) a community value system meant to prevent splintering and in-fighting 3) and a secure channel for passing documents between organizers and to the press. If you’re an activist who has seen or witnessed the many ways activists have been targeted on social media platforms like Facebook, you might be ready to dump all of that and hop on the Pursuance train, but before you go crafting your petition to Barrett Brown, let’s consider how these well-intentioned features might not be ALL that you hoped for.

A decentralized but organized and transparent organizational structure is one of the key components of Pursuance. At first, the platform will be populated by a few organizers centered around the causes mentioned above and either personally invited by Barrett and his small team or vetted and accepted by them. You too can apply to gain access to Pursuance for the organization of your team and tasks. Just fill out a form on the website explaining what you plan to use Pursuance for and any credentials you have and see if you make the cut. Unfortunately, the exact parameters of the vetting system are not apparent but Barrett said in a recent interview on Youtube that beyond opposing the police state and drug war and the other aforementioned grievances, there was little more that Pursuance users (hereby “pursuers”)  had to agree on. In fact, while at first Pursuance will be available to groups that actively espouse and organize against these specific issues, in the future, Pursuance will probably be opened up to other causes. Brown seems wary of recreating the same blind allegiances that lead to many of the issues societies already face, which seems to be the reason he is avoiding establishing a detailed ethics code.

From the first chosen users, networks will start to grow; Pursuance’s existing users will create a pursuance node in the system based on a particular cause and they will begin to invite others who they trust to dole out tasks to. The relationships will be fairly peer-to-peer and Barrett and team hope this will limit access to potential spies or sabotagers, at least in the beginning. Additionally, all Pursuance users in a single pursuance will be able to see the hierarchy and structure of the entire group. This is supposed to keep Pursuance from falling through the same trap door Anonymous fell through: a lack of apparent organizational structure. Without one, we saw Anonymous lose control of its many independent and unaccounted-for actors leading to its eventual delegitimization. Indeed, the Anonymous platform has been known to be swarming with informants who have sent other users to jail. With Pursuance, as long as you are a part of a particular pursuance node, you can see your connections to others and their connection to each other and there may also be a “credit score” based on the number tasks a Pursuer has completed; Everyone’s role and duties are clear.

Another Anonymous pitfall that Pursuance hopes to avoid is in-fighting. Anonymous networked, remote, and self-claimed members don’t have to pledge allegiance to much to participate. They had a wide range of grievances that only sometimes coincided. In contrast, Pursuance members are invited in and will agree on a limited set of shared values and priorities. As I discuss later, this conduct code hasn’t been publicly fleshed out by the Pursuance team which has the potential to land Pursuance a spot in the corner next to Reddit or 4Chan. The last and maybe most crucial component of the Pursuance project is on-boarding head technologist Steve Philips and his encrypted messaging software so that the platform’s users can safely pass messages back and forth to one another without fear they will be intercepted by external parties.

 

What Makes it the Same

It’s clear that Pursuance is a direct response to the trapdoors that Barrett, and the journalists and activists like him, have fallen through. Still, there are a few snares that Pursuance still hasn’t worked out that I want to address here with hopes that the platform will respond. The first is the Pursuance’s vetting process and limited ethics code. I get that Brown and partners want to make sure they aren’t overbearing, but at the same time, we all know how conduct codes can make or break platforms. 4Chan’s young leader quit as head of the platform when his responsibilities as head admin became too heavy. Even on mainstream platforms like YouTube and Instagram, hate speech thrives and proliferates. I listened to the recent interviews and watched recorded appearances that Pursuance has broadcast on youtube and Reddit, and I haven’t found a sufficient solution to these sorts of issues. At the very least, Phillips notes that permissions will be controlled by each individual Pursuance, so that a particular group’s leader or leaders can choose to give limited access to certain participants until they have proven they are positive contributors to their cause. And if a pursuer were to turn against their group, they would only be able to sabotage their own network, not any of the other Pursuance nodes.

Ethical Agreements on the Platform

Still, it’s worth considering how malicious individuals, hate-groups disguised and rebranded as “alt-right” or “incel”, or even just those groups that lie outside of Barrett’s own interests will challenge the platform once it becomes sizable. As Facebook has taught us, issues that are manageable on a small scale become impossible to handle when multiplied by millions of users. So far Barrett’s most declarative statements (besides the three main tenets I listed above) have been that Pursuance is not a “content-neutral system. It’s not Facebook”  and that Brown and team don’t want anyone opposed to gay marriage involved. Brown says the tenets he named are “…pretty basic…agreements that all reasonable people who… intellectually curious people all kind of agree on those things”. What “intellectually curious” people agree on is already murky water and many of the borders are obscure. But in a Max Morgen interview, Brown said Pursuance had already broken off with members of the New Zealand Internet Party because of disagreements that he did not elaborate on. In the end, Barrett realizes he and the team will be responsible for defining the culture in the beginning but doesn’t believe he and the other founders will get to decide much as it evolves. He seems overly optimistic that certain safeguards will prevent the platform from “going horribly wrong”, but so many other projects have begun with similar optimism.

The Right Kind of Power

Secondly, Barrett says an important principle that sets the Pursuance project apart from our current governmental system, is that it will be based on process democracy instead of institutional democracy. Within our current institutional democracy, power and authority are often bestowed arbitrarily, but Brown hopes to cultivate a process democracy. That means everyone has the same right to start or delegate tasks within a pursuance and therefore the power individuals have will be legitimate because they are the actual founders of their own body which individuals opt into as opposed to entering by birth or some other passive means. While I like the idea of “legitimate power”, I’m not sure Barrett’s definition of ownership will suffice. Should those that have started something always have authority over that thing? What if the values of the initial leader change over time and no longer correspond to the initial values set by said leader and held by their constituents. Also, the ways in which power is distributed and applied can be sneaky and near invisible. We all have unconscious biases that affect who we see as powerful or demanding, full of charisma or attitude, bossy or assertive. A Black woman starting a pursuance on Brown’s platform may have amazing capabilities and ideas but may not gain the same amount of support as a white male. Without thoughtful built-in mechanisms, there’s nothing to stop Pursuance from mimicking the already prominent power dynamics in our society and the current government.

Who Owns it?

Speaking of current power dynamics, anyone living above a rock is beginning to understand the degree to which huge platforms like Facebook and Google have exploited users’ lack of ownership of their data. Other platforms are quickly rushing to cover their own trails, rolling out privacy regulations and regulatory controls. Pursuance completely avoids grappling with this unavoidable issue; It optimistically relies on social contracts rather than legal ones that might outline users rights, ownership of their creation, and paths to recourse should they disagree with the platform on any of those points. In lieu of the American justice system, which could get tricky for a covert platform like Pursuance, there is no designed governing or judicial body to settle disagreements between platform and user, creating an inherent power imbalance.

Who’s Paying for It?

Lastly, Pursuance, fortunately, won’t rely on the same sorts of targeted advertisements that have landed Google and Facebook in the hot seat. However, instead of relying on advertising the Pursuance team is looking to monetize their project by selling the platform to nonprofits and NGOs. While Brown seems smart in acknowledging that if the Pursuance network is stored across servers, it will be harder to corrupt or destroy, the number of ways in which sharing could go horribly wrong are too many to list. Still, I’ll name a few: for one, all projects become harder to maintain once they scale up. A number of the things the Pursuance project relies on like trust and adherence to certain values will be really difficult to enforce with organizations that are overseas. Secondly, large institutions are simply prone to corruption and they may not share the same initial values (once they are named) that Barrett and his team share. Lastly, selling and buying products implies there are buyers and sellers rights and ownership of property, none of which have yet been outlined by Brown and his team.

 

Despite the loose ends, I can’t help but be a supporter of Brown’s vision for a new governmental structure, organizing disparate groups of people united towards the same cause, especially when you look at our current one. We just have to make sure this Utopian dream doesn’t end up in the bin next to SecondLife, but it’s better than not having one at all.

 

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