[iDC] Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and Leadbeater's We-Think - "social tools" and the state

[pat kane]

Hi all

A general, not-too-technical review for mainstream paper in the UK of  
Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, and Leadbeater's We-Think, but it may  
be a departure point for the IDCcommunity.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/here- 
comes-everybody-by-clay-shirky-wethink-by-charles- 
leadbeater-798702.html?service=Print

One thing I would add: the tension between these books' approach to  
the same phenomenon - what Shirky calls 'social tools', what  
Leadbeater calls 'mass collaboration' - lies in the role of the state  
as having an input into internet governance.

Shirky takes a largely hands-off line - these are historical rapids,  
made turbulent by a Gutenberg-level of social transformation, in  
which the best we can do is to 'stay upright on our kayak'.  
Leadbeater believes that there are elements of mass collaboration -  
open source biology? 'we-think' between terrorists or criminal  
networks? - that politicians and citizens need to try and police,  
through some intervention in the enabling network infrastructures.  
(Lessig's update of Code 2.0 - which I also reviewed in the  
Independent  (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/ 
reviews/code-version-20-by-lawrence-lessig-439385.html) addresses  
this issue too.)

I'm no clearer from reading both of these powerful, comprehensive  
books what the right model for legal/political internet governance  
should be.

Any thoughts? On this, and on other issues that these books raise?


best, Pat Kane
patkane at theplayethic.com
http://theplayethic.typepad.com
http://www.theplayethic.com

Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. We-Think, by Charles Leadbeater

On the road to Wikitopia

Reviewed by Pat Kane
Friday, 21 March 2008



Have you noticed how much of a nethead you are these days? As one of  
these writers puts it, the internet gets socially interesting when it  
becomes technologically boring – when its tools become as banal to us  
as pen, paper, TV or telephone. Both these essential guides to web  
society could easily gather under the title (with a nod to Richard  
Hoggart), "the uses of techno-literacy". But those uses turn out to  
be more important than serving the narcissism of the connected classes.



In Clay Shirky's account, the power of the web is that its networks  
make it "ridiculously easy" to form groups. In the UK, this might  
sound familiar: the "little platoons" of civil society, as outlined  
by Smith, Ferguson and Burke in the 18th century. The cheaply printed  
and distributed pamphlet or journal drove "gentlemen of ideas" to  
coffee-houses in Edinburgh and London, as a blog forum can enable  
devotees of a cause to turn up in a front room in Hampstead or Halifax.

What Shirky is claiming as revolutionary is the combination of power  
and cheapness that social software offers – greatly amplifying our  
natural desire to create associations. If traditional organisations  
want to get large groups acting together, they usually need a costly  
hierarchy of management to orchestrate their thousands, or tens of  
thousands, of employees. And organisations, particularly commercial  
ones, will only do those (profitable) things that justify the expense  
of all that managerial structure.

What the fecund social chaos of the net reveals is that so much group  
activity can easily happen, if the "transactional costs" of  
organising it (as the jargon has it) are brought close to zero. Which  
is exactly what Web 2.0 does. Take the exemplar of this new world,  
Wikipedia. This extraordinary resource exists because the web allows  
it: those who have an idealism about education and knowledge  
(remember the Enlightenment?) can easily come together, mutually  
monitoring their contributions to a global encyclopedia. They can  
take their own time, too: when there are no institutional overheads,  
"you don't have to be efficient, just effective".

However, when the LA Times turned its op-eds into "wikitorials" in  
2005 – open to emendation by all – it was an abuse-ridden disaster.  
Many suppressed voices finally got their chance to rail at editorial  
pomposity. Wikis work "when people are committed to the outcomes...  
when they augment community, not replace it". Our social tools, says  
Shirky without a hint of a blush, "are turning love and care into a  
renewable building material". If people stopped believing in the  
Wikipedian ideal, and used its tools for vandalism, "it's unlikely  
the whole enterprise would survive a week".

Shirky attempts to be as usable as the technology he writes about. He  
provides the clearest explanation I have yet read of why Microsoft is  
being challenged by open-source software communities like Linux. In  
an echo of Beckett's "fail again, fail better", it turns out that the  
costs of perpetual innovation in open-source are amazingly low. It  
might look an uneven and erratic process from a Microsoft manager's  
perspective, but all this perpetual tinkering ("more like accreting a  
coral reef, than building a car") is enough to produce an operating  
system immensely cheaper but just as robust as Bill Gates's offering.

Here Comes Everybody has a refreshing interest in activism, rather  
than yet more digital pabulum for worried CEOs. Shirky is interested  
in how social software can help human-rights protesters in Belarus,  
the Philippines or Egypt raise a stink; how it can allow Catholics to  
protest against Church corruption, or help frequently-stranded flyers  
demand a bill of consumer rights from aviation behemoths.

He evinces a Tom-Paine-ish belief in the power of informed grassroots  
democracy, but effectively throws his hands up faced with the  
flipside of US politics – how these social tools can also "increase  
the resilience of networked terrorist groups". The spread of the web  
is like "steering a kayak" in an unstoppable technological stream.  
"Our principle challenge is not to decide where we want to go but  
rather to stay upright as we go there."

To Charles Leadbeater, who used to advise Tony Blair and quotes both  
the young Milibands in his acknowledgements, such a hands-off  
approach to steering social development is anathema. Covering many of  
the same case studies as Shirky, the tone of We-Think is more like a  
benign guardian looking over the playground of the web, hoping gently  
to encourage or discourage particular behaviours.

Leadbeater raises some useful questions. No one could object to  
sprawling processes of "mass innovation" creating public  
encyclopedias and seed banks for developing countries, turning cities  
into giant learning spaces and citizens into journalists.  
Leadbeater's mantra "we are what we share" could conceivably become  
"an economy's motive force", particularly if consumerism begins to  
hit the limits of ecological sustainability hard. A vision of living  
as an active, creative player-with-others has inspired this  
particular reviewer for many years.

But, as he reminds us, some areas – such as care services – won't be  
affected by We-Think: "you cannot change a wet nappy with a text  
message". Nor harvest food, nor extract minerals, nor generate  
energy. Although the participatory structure of the web was founded  
by a singular mix of values ("the academic, the hippie, the peasant  
and the geek"), there's no guarantee that happy ethos will guide all  
behaviour within its halls.

Are we ready for open-source biology, for example – a process of mass  
innovation based on our "sharing" of the genomic code? Do we want pro- 
ams in their garages fooling around with viruses and proteins, or  
accredited professionals? There are under-theorised questions of  
governance and control (and, maybe more importantly, self-control) in  
web culture. Leadbeater is right to alert us to them.

We-Think concludes, correctly, that the message about the developed  
world that web culture delivers – trust, collaboration and shared  
goods, in pursuit of better ideas, based on solid evidence – is much  
more attractive than the "Coke and carbines" that too much of the  
planet has been used to from the West. He holds out the tantalising  
prospect that these soft, pliable new tools from the master might be  
more enthusiastically grasped and applied by developing countries  
than by our own. If that happens, then the daily banality of the web  
may herald the most exciting of historical processes. There's more  
than YouTube, Facebook and viagra spam to come down those wires yet.



Pat Kane (www.patkane.com) is the author of 'The Play Ethic', and one  
half of Hue and Cry

  
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