The Law of Relational Projection
Creating safe boundaries around online relationships
Creating safe boundaries around online relationships
The Law of Relational Projection
My previous posts on laws of relation describe the dynamics of parties within a relation. But how do discrete relations combine to form complex structures, such as cultures and societies? In this post, I propose the Law of Relational Projection — a postulate on how relations relate to each other. For relations to inter-relate, there must be some notion of a boundary between relations and a theory for how loosely connected relations can coordinate activities.
The Law or Relational Projection
The law of relational projection distinguishes between parties directly involved in a relation from parties with only informational interest — let’s call the latter “observers” for now. Inter-relational dynamics are primarily based on informational projection, by externalizing information about the state, nature, longevity, and outcome of the relation. So the law of relational projection is this:
Any party with more than an informational interest in a relationship is a participant in the relationship
Why does this distinction between observers and participants matter? Is the role of the observer so different from the roles of participants? After all, observers can influence the relation they’re observing, too — so why not treat them as the same class as the participants? The answer is that observers and participants present vastly different risks to the relation. The law of relational risk states that participants lose their contribution to a relation if the other parties don’t respond in kind. But this dynamic doesn’t hold true for observers. Because relations can exist with only loose dependencies on observers, the costs of observation are low and don’t require observers to ante up or participants to match relational contributions. But note that the law of relational projection requires that, to be an observer, a party must maintain only informational interest in the proceedings; conversely, at the moment parties interact with other participants they transition from an observer role to a participant role.
To draw a cryptic analogy to atomic theory, relational mechanics involve a kind of strong force (which governs the behavior of particles in very close proximity to one another, such as within the nucleus of an atom) whereas inter-relational bodies, such as observers, are influenced by something analogous to the electromagnetic force (which applies to particles outside the grasp of the strong force). For completeness sake, perhaps the gravitational force is something on a macro scale — such as how societies interact — but that’s beyond the scope of this post. Relations, like elements, therefore have a way to influence each other and to combine to form complex structures through projection of information.
This interplay of relations between immediate participants and observers also plays out in everyday experience. In a game between two teams in the National Basket Association (NBA), the teams on the court are in an immediate relationship. The referees are also in that relationship, and by extension the NBA is also a direct participant in the relationship. Almost everyone else, including teams not playing in that game and the media, has only an informational interest in the relationship. These observers can cheer, cajole, and check the scores, statistics, and the outcome of the relationship — and plan accordingly — but their connection to the game is as an observer not as a participant. Of course, when a fan gets in a fight with one of the players on the court, the law of relational projection states that that person is now a direct participant — welcome or not — in the relation. In an NBA game (unlike on the Internet), barging onto the court has significant cost to the perpetrator. The person would be kicked out of the game, publicly humiliated, and possibly fined and sued. Accordingly, the NBA has found a stable equilibrium among observers and participants.
Relationships play out in a similar fashion in financial transactions. The immediate participants assume predefined roles, such as buyer, seller, and financer. The outcome of the relationship can be projected in terms of credit scores and seller ratings.
Making Child’s Play Out of Transactions
In online environments, the infrastructure for setting up and playing such games is woefully sparse outside the gaming community. But a general infrastructure that would be a valuable asset for improving trust online. The infrastructure should enable people and organizations to create a playing field, define the roles that are necessary for the relationship to function, and provide transparency to would-be-participants about the degree of symmetry among roles. And during the progression of the game and after its completion, there must be some way to project information about its status and outcome. Such an infrastructure would allow for stronger and widely diverse relationships, while allowing successful games (relational patterns) to be efficiently replicated on a grand scale.
On Participants and Interlopers
The law of relational projection qualifies a party as a participant whenever the party’s involvement is more than passive (informational). The law is objective, without regard for participants’ intentions in the relation or whether the party is even welcome. Where most people prefer to think of an evil doer, interloper, or criminal as a party outside the relationship, the law of projection states that the party is actually a participant regardless of how the other participants feel about it. In this model, then, evildoers are always insiders and play a role in the relation.
Resilient relations acknowledge the role of the evil insider and put controls in place to make attempts at exploitation costly to the perpetrator. Online systems must alert participants to the presence of new participants, for example. And entering a relationship should require some degree of cost to the perpetrator / participant; defection from the relation should be met with loss of contributions.
Projection and Federation
The law of relational projection helps clarify some confusion over federation approaches. One problem is that IT organizations usually don’t strongly type federated connections as purely informational (observer) or relational (direct participant). In so doing, they straddle a fine line between projecting the status of a relationship and attempting to control others’ resources and security infrastructure. Informational federations require almost no trust framework (such as contracts, collateral, social protocol), because the parties exchange information but provide no assurance of action. Relational federations are based on the dynamics of relational mechanics (such as relational risk and relational symmetry) and require highly structured or ceremonial interactions. Where these differences aren’t appreciated, organizations may over-engineer informational federations or create confusion by mixing styles.
Federation standards also differ in the types of federations they provide. OpenID 1.0 is, I believe, at its root an informational, observational protocol. In contrast, protocols such as OpenID Connect and SAML are meant to facilitate relational interactions.
Projection and Privacy
Projecting relational information rather than personal information offers important privacy benefits, because the true identities of direct participants can be replaced by information about the relationship itself. In the example of two basketball teams playing a game, information about individuals takes second place to information about the teams and result of the game. Identification of the individual, as it were, fades into the background; what matters is the outcome of the game. Yes, the NBA tracks personal statistics and rewards players for various accomplishments. But those statistics are projections of another relationship (the players’ relationship to the NBA) and are designed to reward good citizenship among the players. And of course the NBA doesn’t generally post personal information such as their players’ personal phone numbers and social security numbers in the course of reporting on a game.
Similarly, individuals and organizations can play “games” with predetermined roles, rules, and playing fields without committing much personal information to the relationship or its informational projection.
The Relational Association Theorem
At the heart of every identity federation scheme to date is the notion of an identity provider (IdP) that generates assertions about a party. Some of the identerati [a term I coined, just btw] have prognosticated on the emergence of third-party identity brokers that enable identity transactions for individuals and businesses. But in practice, a generic third-party IdP has proven difficult to sustain. Bob Blakely called into question the business model of such an idea in a previous post.
The Law of Relational Projection provides further tools for evaluating the effectiveness of an identification broker. If a broker does more than “gossip” (that is, simply exchange information about data subjects), the law says the broker is a party to the relation and not just an observer. But it’s unreasonable for a single broker to be a participant in all of an individual’s (or an organization’s) relations. This line of reasoning leads to a theorem on aggregating identifications, which is:
It is impossible to manage all of a party’s relational associations (identities) externally from the party
Microsoft Passport didn’t fail for lack of trust in the Microsoft brand as a credential broker. Identity brokers fail when they are automatically pulled into relations in which they are unwelcome. The best a third-party IdP can hope for is enabling relations for individuals within a functional domain. The important quality for any wallet technology to succeed is to enable users to aggregate their relational artifacts while verifiably maintaining the integrity of claims they didn’t create.
Note: this article originally appeared May 3, 2007