Building New Conventions for a New World

In the AI Story

Becker would have been the first to insist this process cannot be designed from above. Conventions are not policies. They cannot be imposed by fiat and expected to work, because their effectiveness depends on voluntary adoption. A convention experienced as external imposition will be violated, circumvented, or ignored. The labor laws that eventually improved nineteenth-century factory conditions worked because they codified conventions already partially formed — they did not create shared understandings from nothing.

Several domains require particular attention in the AI world. Conventions of credit must expand to acknowledge the cooperative network — not listing every contributor comprehensively, but developing standard practices for disclosing the nature and extent of AI assistance. Conventions of quality must move beyond default metrics of speed and volume toward mechanisms that detect editorial discipline, depth, and the capacity to reject plausible-but-hollow output.

Conventions of access must address the support personnel problem. Data annotators, content moderators, and open-source developers are currently outside the convention-setting process entirely. Bringing them in is not charity but self-interest: a cooperative network that systematically under-compensates essential participants is fragile, vulnerable to the kinds of labor conflicts that disrupted industrial art worlds in earlier centuries.

Segal's image of the beaver resonates with Becker's framework. The beaver's work is not a project with a completion date — it is an ongoing relationship between builder and river. The dam requires constant maintenance. The conventions of the AI world are the dam; building them is work; maintaining them is more work. The convention-builders and convention-maintainers are themselves a kind of support personnel — essential to the world's functioning but unlikely to appear in any triumph narrative about the solo builder.

Origin

Becker's framework for convention change emerged from studies of how art worlds transform — the Impressionist revolt against the Salon, the emergence of jazz conventions from blues and ragtime, the development of cinema conventions from theater and photography. None of these transformations were designed; all were shaped by deliberate action within the transformative period.

The framework for AI-world convention building has been extended by scholars studying platform governance, open-source community development, and the emergence of norms around AI-assisted work in publishing, academia, and professional practice.

Key Ideas

Conventions form whether or not they are deliberately established. The question is not whether to have conventions but who shapes them.

The market default serves whoever has the most power. Default conventions are not neutral; they codify existing power relations.

Conventions require voluntary adoption. They cannot be imposed by fiat; they must be accepted as shared understandings.

Multiple domains need attention. Credit, quality, access, editing, and evaluation each require distinct conventions.

Convention-building requires ongoing maintenance. Like the beaver's dam, conventions must be continuously tended; they do not persist automatically.

Debates & Critiques

Some argue that conventions will develop adequately through normal social processes without deliberate intervention. Becker's framework is skeptical: when powerful participants benefit from the default, normal processes favor their interests. Deliberate intervention is required precisely because the default serves power and the alternatives require coordinated effort by those with less of it.