Interview with Mark Burgess (Promise Theory) – NGI Assure beneficiary

Can you introduce yourself and your project?
My name is Mark (Burgess). I’m not related to the famous spy!

For the past thirty or so years, I’ve been a theoretical physicist, a computer science professor, and later a network and system management startup entrepreneur. Now, I advise and consult as a sort of odd job man in technology.

I’ve written a few books on various topics related to that, too.‌

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to be involved with solving some of the significant challenges in cloud computing, from configuration to networking and edge computing. As Troy McClure would say, you may know me from such movies as “CFEngine for Home Improvements” and “The Return of Promise Theory.“

‌I try to maintain a sense of humour about it and have been involved in fundamental research and Free and Open Source Software development all that time.

‌Quite a mess, really! (Laughs) 😂

What are the key issues you see with the state of the Internet today?
The Internet is an incredible phenomenon, isn’t it? We know a lot about certain aspects—mostly the technology—but almost nothing about others.

In particular, I think we tend to focus just on building whatever we feel like, pressing ahead with technical issues, and generally disparaging attempts to understand the impact of what we make on human society.

People want to make money, get rich or famous, and so on, and social impact gets swept aside in the gold rush. This has been a kind of hobby horse for me. Around the millennium, I wrote a book called Slogans, which predicted the rise of social media and how instantaneous access to information would undermine democracy, law, and order in society on a basic level.

​I wouldn’t say I’m happy about predicting all that, but we see it happening before our eyes.

The race to develop what we call “AI” is a similar story. Too few who make technology care to think about its impact on the world. For instance, money has been a network technology since ancient times. The Internet is now an extension of the money network. If we want to understand the Internet, we need to look at things like the history of money, too.

How does your project contribute to correcting some of those issues?
For many years now, I’ve been—at least trying—to develop an understanding of how individual “agents” (whether people or software systems) behave when they get together in numbers, building from the bottom up, along with the implications of how it all works. It’s more or less what’s called Promise Theory today.

It started with me wanting to understand computer networks, but I quickly realised that it’s also a way to put the social sciences on a more theoretical basis too. One issue that pops up in both cases is the role of trust and how trust and promises relate to one another.

Some years ago, I wrote a position paper suggesting that trust might work as a common currency for social systems, just as energy is a currency for physical phenomena. I’ve seen how the concept of trust is used and abused in Computer Security, for instance. Technologists realise that too much trust could lead to risk, so they invoke that old binary ploy of saying—okay, it’s either yes or no, one or zero; let’s get rid of trust and have zero.

So, Zero Trust became a marketing slogan. But that’s nonsense, obviously.

First, it’s just saying don’t trust them; trust me instead. Trust is absolutely necessary for something to work, so I wanted to see if we could apply Promise Theory to the trust issue. What could we learn from it, and how could we test the ideas it raises?

I realised we could use Wikipedia as a data source for answering (at least a few) questions about trust because it’s an open platform that traces the human interactions around editing pages. It’s an excellent opportunity to learn something important from an ideological project that’s already greatly benefited humanity.

What do you like most about (working on) your project?
I like understanding how things work. When I started, I imagined I might find something like the usual feel-good story we want to tell about human cooperation.

​🎶​We come together to help if we trust one another, Kumbayah​🎶​

It’s rosy and romantic and very politically correct. But interestingly, that wasn’t the picture that came out of the study at all.

It showed that people come back to something because they actually mistrust it, which sounds upside down, but it makes a lot of sense if you think about what grabs your attention. If you trust something too much, you need to pay attention. If you’re not sure, you invest effort in watching everything more carefully, and that’s costly.

But then there are also people we avoid entirely because we don’t trust them. So how can that work?

The clue is that trust isn’t just one thing; it has two components. You can call one part trustworthiness, and the other is our ongoing assessment of how reliable things are.

Suppose we overcome a basic threshold of this probable reliability, which is informed by how well people and things keep promises we’re interested in. In that case, the attention part of trust comes into play, and it’s driven by residual mistrust. So, there has to be some kind of `seed’ that attracts our attention first, which is an alignment of interests. Then, we determine how carefully we want to watch that ongoing relationship. There’s a scale of semantics from attentiveness to basic curiosity to invasive body searches.

Mistrust is the prerequisite for learning. So, when people talk about zero trust, they really mean the second part of it: paying greater attention to detail. There’s clearly a role for trusting less or investing greater attention in quality inspection and so on, but mistrust can’t be infinite. Trust can’t be zero.

The implications of this are essential for the bigger picture, not only the Internet. It’s a bit like H.G. Wells’ Time Machine. In the future, their society has become these two groups of beings:

The Morlocks, who do all the work underground.
The Eloi, trust everything to be provided for them and are pretty indolent.
Given our reliance on smartphones to give us more and more at the push of a button, we could easily fall into that trap. The Internet of Finance tends to push us deeper into this divide between `have’ and `have not’.

The changing demographics and the challenges around the future of human employment are all a big destabilising force on society around the globe—we don’t feel we can trust enough. It makes people shut out the less familiar and become more tribal. I think we could easily underestimate the dangers of that.

🙏​I hope we’ll look back on it all with some circumspection and, apart from a few mistakes, we’ll find a way to return to something more open and stable.🙏​

Trust and Promise Theory ultimately suggest that our limited human faculties are the bottleneck. Trying to supplement ourselves with AI or machinery is an obvious answer, but it will only work for a few specialised purposes.

The core of what keeps us together has to be constrained by our human capacity for relating to the world. Trust isn’t a transitive thing. You must trust technology if it will take over the job of mistrusting or monitoring something else.

So you don’t escape trust. It’s trust all the way down.

Where will you take your project next?
Something interesting popped out of the study unexpectedly. That was that the editing of Wikipedia was bursty. It wasn’t a continuous marathon but more like several shorter episodes.

These episodes involved about the same number of people regardless of what they were working on. People would come, tussle a bit over some details, and then get tired of it and leave, which suggests there is something intrinsic to all humans limiting their tolerance for mistrust.

It’s draining—expensive, after all, to argue with others.

This reminded me of Robin Dunbar’s work on social group sizes and our cognitive capacity, and it gave the same numbers that he and his colleagues had found for conversational groups elsewhere. I realised that the key to understanding human social group numbers must lie in the dynamics of how people pay attention—meaning trust. Perhaps the cognitive capacity of our brains evolved to sustain mistrust in our interactions with the world.

I contacted Robin, and we’ve since written a couple of papers together showing how this argument predicts the group sizes in Wikipedia exceptionally well.

My work on Promise Theory has been slow going, partly because it’s hard to find time for research unless someone sponsors it. Over the years, it’s taken me in unexpected directions. One of the things I enjoyed the most was being invited into the Agile Leadership community to apply promises to leadership issues: trust, authority, services, and so on.

We can put these loose ideas into a more formal framework and understand them quantitatively. For example, why do specific figures end up becoming leaders? Where does authority come from?‌

My colleague Jan Bergstra, who helped to develop Promise Theory, has also applied it to study accusations, a growing issue in social media and politics:

An accusation immediately reduces trust, so it’s a weaponised form of communication that social media is only amplifying. As long as people only did it in small circles, it was manageable. Now, we’re broadcasting accusations across the planet, and the consequences are enormous.

🔥​We probably thought social media would be harmless gossip, but no. David Bowie correctly identified it years ago when he told a sceptical interviewer that it would change everything🔥​

How did NGI Assure help you reach your project goals?
I find it very hard to ask for money from people, but a friend who had already applied and gotten funding recommended NLnet.

What impressed me straight away was two things:

First, how bright and genuinely interested Michiel Leenaars and the NGI Assure team were about the proposal. It wasn’t just a box-ticking exercise. They cared about what it was about and wanted to know.
The second was how helpful they were in getting started with the project. I’ve been through the mill a lot with research proposals over the years, and the primary goal of most programs seems to be to force applicants to jump through hoops testing their stamina rather than their skill.
This wasn’t like that at all. NLnet people understand that this is a significant issue for the future of the Internet.

✨They want to see it done, and they want it done right. That matters a lot.✨