Clay Shirky (022)
View the rush: Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky, lecturer at NYU, discusses Ebbsfleet United, leadership and revolutions.
Transcript:
Q. Why are we seeing this increase in participation and particularly in online participation or participation facilitated by the internet in which there is no fundamental benefit to the people. People are giving a lot. Why is this happening now?
A. Right, well the easiest way I find to explain that question -- people are often puzzling over the movement from professional to amateur production, or what have you, and the easiest way I have found to answer that question is to ask those people whether they sing happy birthday to their own children or if they play a CD or hire a professional singer to come over and, of course, they say 'Well, we obviously sing happy birthday to our own children. They are our family, right. We would not put on a CD when we could be singing ourselves.' Anyone who can understand that underastand what is going on. There are spheres where we do things for commercial reasons. We buy professionally produced music to listen to it and then there is the other sphere where we create the music on our own, in part because it is just the pleasure of communicating.
What has happened in the 20th century, I think, is really the anomaly. We are actually seeing a reversion to a very common and deep human pattern of doing things because we like each other, doing things because we care for each other, doing things to get recognition and to get sort reputational capital. The 20th century was remarkable for hiving off the sphere of personal involvement and affection and moving it into the home, the pub and a handful of places and everything that was out in the open and public world was done essentially for commercial reasons. All large scale action essentially had money somewhere at the end of the chain. So what is happening now is not so much that the new tools are causing participation to increase so much as they are allowing participation to increase. We are a participatory species. One of the great examples is that in prison, which is already socially a incredibly attenuated environment, the worst punishment is solitary confinement. Even in that environment, being disconnected from one another is terrible and so these tools have lowered the cost of doing things for free to the point where our desire to engage with one another is is enough to get things now to happen at a very large social scale, rather than just is a smaller family and friends scale.
Q. Why the hell has this happened in the 20th century? What went so wrong with us?
A. I do not think anything went wrong with us so much as the nature of the tools we had and built and constructed were all the easiest way to reach mass scale. Right so the easiest way to reach mass scale in communication is broadcast. The easiest way to reach mass scale in business is the sort of industrialisation and verticalisation of industries and so forth and so the growth of the population and the growth of the econmomy were the sort twin 20th century infrastructure. So I do not think there was any moment in the 20th century where we said, 'We just got this radio thing or we just got television and we have to be careful about it.' It was what it was.
But by the end of 20th century we started inventing tools that were flexible enough to allow real group communication, not just the presenter stands and all of the audience listens, but communication where we are all involved with one another and the invention of those tools has slowly moved into the mainstream, not just in terms of availability but, critically, many of those tools have become boring and it is at the moment that things become technologically boring that they become socially interesting.
Q. What do you think these things prove about either human nature or culture. The success of something potentially so dangerous like couch surfing where you are letting a complete stranger stay in your house, in many cases giving them the keys to their house or something like mums net where you post a question should I use this stuff as an medicine potentially dangers things people are asking and getting answers for and they seem to work what does that prove about human nature?
A. Well, I think what it proves is that, one, society runs on trust. You can -- as good as the rule of law is and I am grateful for it, it can never cover 100 per cent of the cases, right. There are cases where no matter what a contract says, no matter what a regulatory ruling says, you just have to trust someone to do business and for a lot of the last several decades an increasing amount of trust has been placed in experts. Society has gotten more technocratic and more complex. But what we have learned in fact are is that there are ways in which we can trust one another that are different from the kind of trust we put in experts. Critically, the couch surfing site doesn't just work by turning up addresses of random strangers in remote countries. It actually has an number of mechanisms, as many of these services -- Ebay perhaps most famously with the reputation market -- it has a number of mechanisms what Robert Axlerod, the socialologist, calls the shadow of the future. I trust doing business with you if you and I may do business again in the future. I trust sharing sharing things with you if you and I may share again in the future or if we know someone in common, and all of those patterns, which were previously limited by the lack of real group communication tools, have now reappeared. So what it says actually is that the old model of social trust in annointed experts is one of only many, many patterns in which society can both exhibit trust and gain value from those relationships and we are seeing the other patterns re-establish themselves.
Q. So how do these organisations work I mean like couch surfing -- a lot of these things are very light on the ground. The have vastly less employees than traditional le organisations. How does that work? How does that work?
A. (7.24) Well they have a much higher ratio of user head count to user effort. Effectively, what all of these services do is they become not the producer of the value but just the platform for the value and the users create the value for one another, right, and so by making the users much more engageed, much more participatory, much more responsible for creating value for one another, the platforms are able to to operate with very, very low costs, very few formal head counts and so on and so forth. And so the question you have to ask yourself, given how active the users are is is couch surfing a small organisation because it has 7 formal employees or is it a huge organisation because it has this enormous number of collaborators. It is the same for Wikipedia, it is the same question for Flickr, it is the same question for YouTube and I think it is that fusing of the minimal financial characteristics necessary to get a service up and running, coupled with all of the non-financial motivation by which brings the users in to create this value.
Q. If I wanted to achieve something big, some kind of change, is there do I do it differently now to I would have 30 years ago do I set up the whole way I am going to achieve something differently -- depends what it is I suppose?
A. There is two really important caveats. The first is that the tendency when people see how incredible these kinds of participatory networks are is to treat them as a new kind of tool. I have been given a new kind of power saw -- I will be able to to be able to cut through metal with this thing, instead of wood or what have you. But in fact communities resist utilitarian co-opting ing of their work and there have been some cases in fact where there was serious communal work going on that got co-opted for commercial gain, right. Famously users all participated together to annotate CDs so you could tell which songs were which artists in something called CDDB. Then the people who held the CDDB database took it out of the public sphere ad started profiting on it under the name Grey Snout. And the horror on the part of the people that had done the work -- the horror and the anguish -- was palpable and so you often can not start with the utilitarian goal, treating other people as your tools. I want to achieve something, I am are going to recruit this crowd and we are going to do it. They have to want what you want. So the first thing you have to do, when you want to achieve your goals, is that you have to come up with an promise that will attract other people. It can not be enough that it would make you happy. It has to be that it would make them happy, or engaged or satisfied in some way as well.
The second thing, and I think this is missed especially by businesses and government, when businesses -- when I talk to those kinds of organisations and ask me what they should be doing, I say, you know, take your £1million pound idea and your big press release. Throw the press release away and break up the £1million and try ten £100,000 experiments, right that the lesson of these things is that you can not predict in advance often what will work. I have a slide often I show my students which is the first message from Linus Torvolt about what became Linex operating system, the open source operating system, and the first message from from Larry Sanger about what became Wikipedia and they are both incredibly modest. You know, Linus said 'This is a hobby project. I don't have any big goals for this.' Larry Sanger said, 'Look just go log in and try this. It is going to take you all of ten minutes.' Neither of them said, 'We are out to create this world beating tool.' They said, 'You know what? There is enough here that we can get a small group,' and then they grew their way into success and so I think it is a classic mistake to think, if I frame really big goals, I will get there faster. Very often the really big goals can make what you are doing the what you are promising your users in the early days seem less plausible and it will be harder to recruit people to your interest or cause.
Q. It is exciting isn't it just to do that just to line what you are trying to do with other people should not be radical but what happens when you do that there is a big change when you start to do that you have at that to be a good organisation but you have to be?
A. No, you have to be a good organiser. You are exactly right and not a organiser in the sense of right then you do this and you do that and everybody go off. It is much more you have to be able to be a convenor, a listener and tiebreaker. Periodically, you have to know when to go in and say look I am proposing this decision to break this log jam. What do people think? It is a real art and it is a different kind of art than what we think of as management in the classic sense, in part because you don't have salary or job continuity as motivaters and so engagement, and what Charlie Leadbetter who has just done a book called We Think talks a lot about recognition. Recognition is one of the things that creates these positive feedback groups. It is not just that I am participating to the whole and see that my participation has effected the whole. It also has to be that I am participating in the whole and that other people can recognise contribution as well because that kind of social value is a very different kind of thing from 'I am doing this for my salary,' and requires different management skills to both create it and keep it going.
Q. How do you think Liam Daishfield, he is the manager Ebbsfleet he is the manager before my football club came along he is doing very well they seem to like him but what do you think of the organisational STRUGS going on in football as he becomes SUB S*EFRPBT he has started up his own blowing to get his view out there how do you think that?
A. (13.33) I mean that is a kind of beautiful example because everybody in that situation takes orders from an owner. In the US the famous example is Joe Steinbern who owns the Yankees baseball team, beating up on Joe Tory who was the brilliant manager. In a way it is less personal to take advice from 30,000 people than from one arrogant person and if you get it right in the wisdom of crowns pattern, taking your cue from 30,000 people actually creates a much better chance that one person is not going to be making a catastrophic mistake. I am sure it feels very different in the management suite but, ultimately, I assume -- I do not know him obviously -- but I assume that the real proof is in the pudding. If he wins more games he is going to be happier to be in the situation he is in than if he loses a lot of games. So it is the kind of record that, you know, will play out over time. We will see how that football team does but if they are going to Wembley he, has to be pretty happy right now.
Q. Is this you know a profound change for organisations in general? does it mean that that most hierarchical systems in the world are going to have to respond to this in order to be able to compete?
A. We are not going into an world where there is a kind of, you know, the hierarchy and the institutions are going to crumble away and we are all going to live in this anarchic paradise. We have been hearing that rhetoric for a long time. I am pleased to say I was never a party to that. I have certainly made some mistakes but never that one because there are some real advantages to hierarchy, all right. When you are managing things that cost money, when you are managing things that cost money, when you are managing things that need short change and responsibility, it can be quite good, right? You can imagine a team of trained surgeons being preferable to 35,000 people trying to move the knife -- at least in the current model. Who knows that theory may yet be in the future.
I think the big transformation for businesses is not that the hierarchy is going to crumble but that many of the relative advantages of hierarchy are now reduced. You remember the HSBC protest of last summer where HSBC recruited a lot of recent college students and recent graduates by saying, you know, we have got penalty free checking. They sign up thousands of people and then after everybody has dispersed in the summer they say, oh we have changed our minds. Now you owe us £140 if you go over on your checking account or what have you and what HSBC knew was that the students would have a hard time figuring out what other banks to to switch to and they would have a hard time doing anything organized about it. What HSBC did not know is that facebook would get involved and so a Wes Streeting, a Cambridge student, puts up a page called stop the great HSBC rip-off and although the students are spread to the four corners of the globe, the web is also spread to the four corners of the globe and so they all discovered that this is happening and, again, out of affection, right, and a desire for reputational capital among one another, they start to write up instructions about this is how you leave HSBC and go over to Barclays, right. So there goes the informational advantage and then they stage protests online and they threaten a real world protest. The real world protest never happens because HSBC backs down before people can actually assemble down in the city and start pelting them with eggs and what have you, but the habitual 20th century norm is institutions enjoy a relative monopoly on tight management of information and tight coordination of action and that big distributed groups, like your customers, don't have this. So that I think -- that change, realising, you know, my customers can be coordinated. They can act in groups. They can share information laterally with one another without involving me at all. That is just a different environment. There is advantages for businesses there as well as disadvantages but it is certainly a transformed environment.
Q. That is massive for at no time whole way that businesses work maybe the cynical view is businesses get rich they have profit they spend that profit on forcing their products into piece peoples lives rather than necessarily designing what people they want want, they work out what they can sell the most effectively. Isn't this challenging that sort of business model in a way companies now are very vulnerable to the mass organisation of their users that they are forced to be good companies now if they don't do it ...
A. That is a really optimistic scenario. I think, you know, I think -- I do not think we are entering a world where the idea of corporate social responsibility can be handed over entirely to any one way of enforcing it. What I do think is that this increases the both scrutiny and the potential downside for a business not behaving in an ethical manner, ie vis-a-vis its customers or in other parts of its dealings. I think the big changes are going to be in any business that is habitually managed an information bottle-neck, right. Banking is a classic example -- they know a lot more than you do -- but as the HSBC protest showed, that is, you know, that advantage has been some what attenuated. The media, of course, is in the most radical, you know, position of most radical transformation because users are generating a lot of material themselves. They are sharing a lot of material themselves.
So I think the real question right now is not so much how businesses deal with it. They are reactive organisms, right. When the market conditions change, for whatever reason, they will do something. This may lead, one can certainly hope, to behave in more ethical ways vis-a-vis their consumers. But I think right now the real design challenge is on the side of the people making tools to coordinate these groups because we have a lot of good tools of coordinating groups of dozens and in some cases groups of hundreds. We don't yet have a lot of good tools for coordinating groups of thousands, much less millions. Those examples are much rarer and yet there are problems like environmental degradation which are really plant scale. Right? They can not be taken on by individuals in their own homes, no matter how many people tell you to, replace the fluorescent light bulbs, or what have you, unless there is some kind of collective action, some kind of coordinateded action. It is not going to be enough and that is, I think, if you want to look for this transformation to do real profound good in the world, I think it is going to be around coordinating very large groups to take on collective problems, as much as it is going to be holding businesses to current promises.
Q. But the thing about I was telling the story of he went to this very posh shop on a high street in London and it looked all very smart and kitchen TKAOEURPB stuff all very SHREUBG very smart and he is about to sign this £20,000 cheque to make them do the job and he put it into the internet and the third or TPO*URTS fourth hit was a web site called mykitchenhell.com he looked at it and it was thousands of complaints and now he is obviously not going to it was a complete SHAPL this company and it was able to lead a sort of double life?
A. Yes.
Q. Isn't if an company can not do that anymore it forces everyone is much more accountable that must change?
A. Absolutely, it certainly -- I am not arguing that this doesn't transform the business climate, it is just that in a way it makes the idea of the better business bureau work better, right. A friend of mine had a similar experience. A friend of mine told me like I am thinking of doing this house swap with somebody in Amsterdam and we just googled the name of the arranging company and it was exactly the same thing: they never answered the phone mail box is full, they have held my deposit money for weeks now and it is certainly possible to reign that stuff in. But here is the thing: I teach a class in my NYU institution, where I teach every spring, called social facts which are things that are true because everybody believes they are true, like your £5 bills are worth £5 because everybody says it is worth £5.
Q. Is this anorexia?
A. No this is a different observation which is that the -- social facts rely on shared assumptions in society and shared assumptions rely on trust. So we are moving into this environment(?) where people trust one another more. We are also creating new classes of scams and con artists operating. So in an way no system of trust is completely free of people because abusing it, right? That is, trust is essentially another word for future risk, right, you know gauging future risk and so we are bringing to heel these kinds of businesses, like your friend who lost his money on the kitchen, but we are also saving creating a situation in which Nigerian sammers are currently stealing money another way. So in the new environment the real question I think for -- the real business question is, how do we keep this system working well enough that people can feel confident trusting one another? Because the good situation is your friend finds this shoddy company and avoids it. The bad situation the calamity in fact would be if nobody trusted one another on the network anymore to do any kind of exchange and that is something we need to worry about and engage with.
Q. When did that happen? What they seem to be proving is that overall on mums net if someone mosts something that is is bad advice immediately 25 people say?
A. No, advice is different because there is very little profit in bad advice but there are lots and lots of -- for instance we have the situation in the States right now where people are setting up fake IRS websites, Inland Revenue Service, the tax collectors, setting up fake sites and then sending out emails saying you got a refund and so on and so forth and so there are ways in which people are creating these kinds of online scams. They get discovered very quickly, right. If you go on any any bulletin board and ask is this a scam, in a way by the time you are suspicious the scam is already over. But there are enough people doing being addressed at large enough scale that there are these sort of con artist scams going on and no society is ever free of crime, right. This is not going to be a sort of cyber utopian paradise but I think the questions we have to worry about are in a new world, as we transition to producing whatever we can with this kind of social production method, what are the classes of crimes and what are the kinds of down sides that we need to watch out for and defend against because that is -- it seems to me we are past the point of raw optimism and are now trying to work out, okay, these systems are complicated and all complicated systems have down sides. What are they and how we minimize them to take best advantage of the considerable value.
Q. More generally what does this mean for?
A. (25.25) I think in a way it is happening on many different scales and levels right now. It is just is that many of the most vivid examples are kind of one offs. We are not still seeing what is a particular eruption what is a pattern. One of the most remarkable examples in States in 2006, California was on its way to debating an anti-immigration law and there was a protest LA on Friday or Saturday and a bunch of high school students saw that and were inspired. Who as a high school student has not -- 'there is a political issue, I should get involved', right and usually by that evening the thought passes or whatever. But here it was really a significant political slap in the face of the Latino community and so Monday morning, 48 hours later, 50,000 Latino high school students walk down the road blocking traffic to city hall. First of all, getting 50,000 high school students to do anything coordinated is previously just out of reach. Second of all, 48 hours -- this is quite extraordinary and, third, they did it all on my space and using SMS which means the school administrators never saw it coming. They did not take out billboards, they did not take out radio ads, they did not put anything in the newspaper. It was entirely done with social media and so there is an example of a really marginalised part of American culture saying you know what we can act together. We can act out. And in this world there is -- the group level is quite obvious in all these stories. The individual power goes down to that one person or small group of people who can offer the plausible promise in a way that gets people not just to be aware it is possible but excited about it. You know, we talked about Linex operating system and Linus Torvolts. One of his great strengths has been to make other people understand how the software works and so a journalist asks him at the end of last year what is coming in Linex in your operating system in 2008 and he said well it seems to be virtualisation. I do not actually care. Virtualisation is an obscure thing you can do with an operating system but Linus said I actually don't care about virtualisation. I am not working on it but I recognise that, since that is what the community is working on, that is where the software that bears my name is my name is going. And that kind of leadership which says 'I have created a platform and the thing that happen on that platform are so embraced by the people that there that, if something is happening that I don't want to work on, I don't have to work on it and it will still happen and that kind of leadership that kind of value just privileges a different set of skills, a different kind of people. I do not know who it was who kicked off the first handful of messages that got 50,000 people to walk out of school two days later but whoever that person was and whatever, they had vats of 21st century skill.
Q. Will government one day be run like that?
A. (28.35) No (hoohohoo). Parts of government will do but there is no, you know -- the most interesting research I did for the book was on the early history of the printing press, the transformation of the history printing press and it became clear in that reading that obviously with the translation of bibles in Latin, the rise of the reformation and the publication that only five theses(?) and so on and so forth. The catholic church was utterly transformed. Now, to read the history of the church as they tell it, right, this is essentially a period of continuity, right. There has always been a catholic church and in the last 1500 years but in fact, right, you can locate a moment. You can locate a century. The 1500s in which they stopped being a pan Europe been political force and became merely a religion and so they have remained from that day until this. And so you are looking simultaneously at transformation and at forces of continuity. There will always be a government because people never pay their taxes voluntarily, right. There is a tragedy of the commons. People want the roads but the money required to pave the roads is hard to get unless people are all bound by a cause of citizenship.
What I think will happen is there is going to be a much higher degree of hybridisation between government and the people, in particular, the groups of people that that they serve. Right, I mean, basically, the imperative of government is to do more with less where possible. Certainly if there are places where you can gauge the members of the community to create a kind of value that benefits the citizens more and drains the governments coffers less. That has to be an attractive option. There will, of course, be civil servants who object on historical grounds, et cetera, et cetera, but these changes also don't happen over night and I think the attractiveness of engageing the citizens in ways other than extracting their taxes and spending on their behalf is so profound that I think the government will hybridise to take advantage of a lot of these things wherever possible. I do not think that includes all government services. I do not think parliament disappears but I do think there will be greater awareness of a kind of social engagement with the society they representative.
Q. Doesn't it sort of break down that barrier a little bit between them and us?
A. 31.04.
A. Ideally it does and the great tragedy have of that barrier between the government and the citizens is that in many cases the governments have erected those barriers to keep themselves from being hijacked by special interest groups, right, because it is the smaller groups who are better coordinated and have more control of information who have historically been able to bend government to their well. My hope is that as communications patterns make these groups more representative, the rationale for shielding government from communication with the citizens begins to decay because it becomes more representative simply to have that conversation, right. You are engageing a larger swathe of society. Some of the cheques and balances, which have previously been the key part of the design of government, start getting embedded in the population itself, right. Wikipedia, the design of Wikipedia, is really the history of two things: cheques and balances and governor's problems. And the idea that a piece of software plus the community that uses it could take on those problems suggests that the government can hybridise not just the output but in fact the mode of functioning, the way it does its work, in congress with its citizens. My guess is it is that that will happen first and best at the city government level where the natural social density of the population makes it easier to take advantage of but I think it will move up the national scale as people become aware of and comfortable with the possibility on both sides -- both the citizens and the minister.
Q. I think a lot of these things like participatory budgeting people come along because they want to support their friends help their mate get money for his project but they arrive at this see everyone else and actually make a good decision together similarly couch suffering they do that a few times and think shit that is really fun now I want people to TKOPL come to me so once they have given that responsibility to choose TPER themselves so it happens?
A. Absolutely absolutely.
Q. Then also just that that it needs to that offer in the first place?
A. (33.26) The plausible promise. Yes, and I think that the pattern you are describing -- small town budgeting pattern -- the economical version in the US is barn raises, the whole town gets together to create a barn because you know that some day day you may need to create a barn and they will all come out for you. There is enormous temptation, permit temptation. All of these things are deep social patterns. There is permit temptation to get involved in free writing, taking advantage of a resource you don't pay for but I think that, exactly as you have said, when you do it in public and when other people know it is you and your reputation on the line, I can give my mate 10 out of 10 for his project but in fact this business about making the hospital work better in the town I live in, like, I have actually got to pay some attention to that. And the other kind of balancing effect of course is if other people are also bringing their friends along to help them move money when there is a kind of canceling effect as well as a kind of moderating effect but we have been so used to a flavour of media criticism which assumes that people are voluntarily self-anaesthetising and, other things being equal, would choose not to interact with one another that it is often presented as a surprise that people are not just sitting home flipping through channels on the television, when they could be actually down deciding things about their town but in fact that is kind of what we are good at as a species. The surprise is that it went away for as long as it did. The assumption that people will be included is spreading so widely and so deeply that in a way the expectation of the citizens has to be one of the transforming choices.
I heard a fantastic story last night from an friend of mine whose four year old daughter went around behind the television set and he said, 'What are you looking for back there?' And she said 'I am looking for the mouse,' because in her mind, if she was watching something, she ought to be able to to be included. It would be stupid to just sit in front of the screen passively, right. Where is the mouse. I want to interact. I want to be involved. And for a 4 year old to say that, it is her right essentially he has permission to be engaged in the media suggests how deep that pattern of interactivity engagement is and when she grows up as a citizen, she is just going to expect to be included and that, I think, is going to be a big driver of governmental change, it is not just when it becomes an option for the people and people in elected office but also an expect expectation of of their constituents.
Q. I think it goes to what people want no general when I feel best I am excited by this STKAEUGS is because I can see a direct relationship in what I say to you and how you answer that is the core of being alive I think is this right I have done something there we go the world has changed and even though it is very slight?
A. Right anybody who has carved their name into a tree knows the desire to see some reflection back of your effect on the world and now we have just you know we have taken that impulse and we have raised it to global scale. You know, I can go in and improve an article in Wikipedia and in a way -- you know I think everybody who improves something on Wikipedia does this which is I go back and check a couple of days later and then a couple of weeks later to see -- did it survive? Did I do something that passes the review of my peers? And when I write something that survives, I feel great, and when I write something where other people go, you know, that is not the way to do it, I have deleted everything you wrote, I have changed it. This is how you do it, you know -- it makes you feel like oh what did he I do wrong but you know in a way that you can go and re-engage and that I think is new, the ability to take, as you say, that deep human impulse to interact and turn it into something of lasting value for literally the entire English speaking online population. That is quite an extraordinary shift --
Q. But it is also the shift between just Wikipedia and not that that is is a small in any way but it is also the real world now?
A. Right Wikipedia is just an example no in fact one of the reasons I wrote this book is that I started to recognise a pattern that I felt was deep and lasting and true and turned out to be an absolutely temporary accident. In the 90s there was this idea of cyber space, right, and we are all going to be big floaty video heads, floating around in this virtual reality world and that turned out to be absolute claptrap and it was my friend Scot Heifman who I think I first saw recognise this. Scot found a service called 'meet-up' which is designed to get people who share interests in the same locality away from their computers, out of their houses, down to the bar, down to the restaurant, down to the pub to sit around and talk about those ideas face-to-face, right. It reinvigorates real world social capital and when I saw that I thought, right, we had cyber space and our online friends were our imaginary friends because our real friends were not online in the 90s but now if, you know, you are 17 years old and going to school pretty much everyone you know is connected in some way or another. Either the phone or the web or both and you just take it for granted that you can reach out to them and all of this stuff we have been sold about, when some day communications will be a substitute for travel, we will just sit at home in video conference -- no we won't. When people talk to each other after a while, they want to meet and one of the really big changes here is using all of these communication tools not as a replacement for real life but as a coordinating tool for it -- to actually get people out to clean up the park, right. We are all going to go out this Saturday and we are going to clean up the park together and we are going to throw away of garbage, you know, whatever and it is easier to coordinate large groups that way but including easier to coordinate large groups in the real world which is a huge shift and I think one we are just at the beginning of.
Q. It is about taking control instead of sitting back receiving all that information and we are using the technology and receive entertainment. We are now using the technology and to do stuff to the world.
A. Yes yes yes.
Q. People who use the internet are more likely to know the names of other people on their street. How would you some up that change?
A. (40.11) The big shift that is going on is the idea that everyone is available for group action. Doesn't mean that everyone will participate in group action. It doesn't mean that all participation will be equal but it does mean that everybody can get involved and, as I say in the book, the internet is the first thing that really deserves the label media. Right. It is the first general purpose mediating layer we have had, right. Television is a specific example of a kind of media. It does this one thing well. It sends pictures from the centre to the edges in one direction. What the internet does is it says anything you can think of that moves data between points A to B or among members of a group, whether people or machines, you can build and so the real social change that I think is coming are people who figure out how to take advantage of, down at the techy level, having real media for the first time and up at the social level, how to engage people. How to go from the promise of everyone being able to to participate, to actually being able to create the kind of promises that people would come out for. In some cases come out of their shell for and interact online or on the phone and in some cases come out in the real world for -- to go down to the park and clean up, to go down to city hall and protest, what have you. And that era of social experimentation I think only really gets going when, as I said, when the tools get boring. A revolution doesn't happen when a society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviours and most of that change I think is still in the future. We can certainly see fascinating examples of it today but we have not yet seen, I think, the full range of experimentation to tell us this is where the pattern really works and this is where we want to deploy it.
Q. Where do you think we are going? What is your sort of vision of 50 years time?
A. 50 years is much too long to say.
Q. Where are we heading? What sort of world are these tools or this cultural change leading to?
A. I think we are heading for the world of the four year old, where more and more people -- either because they have grown up in that world or they have learned about this world -- take it for granted that they can get involved, that they can interact; take it for granted that there is significant wisdom and value in interacting with other people in groups that are not commercial operations, that are not expertly vetted, that don't have all the kind of classic infrastructure that we associate with value, but are nevertheless tremendously important in engaging and I think that set of assumptions, right -- people just thinking when they get up in the morning 'I know what I could do today. I could go out and try and gather a group or go out and try and join a group or go out and try and find an existing group to learn from.' You know, when Wes Streeting got up in the morning to do that facebook thing, he just realized that a possibility existed in the world that was absolutely available to anybody in his circle but he was the first person to have that intuition and then other people learned from him. So I think 50 years, as I say, is too long to predict but I think as time goes on we will see people increasingly comfortable participating in situations where the social value is really about other people caring enough, rather than someone being paid to provide that value, and what the end point of that is, I do not know. It is, I think, going to be a long period, as I say said, of hybridisation but I do think the end result is going to be quite profound.
Q. A good result?
A. As we have already talked about the con artist right, this is certainly by no means all positive. In any revolution there are down sides but I am optimistic that we are living through what economists have called an positive supply side shock to the amount of freedom in the world. More people can say more thing to more people than ever in history and that is still growing enormously and I think in the times when we have seen enormous increases in intellectual or political freedom the printing press, the rise of the democratic states in the late 1700s, there has certainly been a period of chaos immediately afterwards, but over the long haul the values of those changes have been not just mainly positive but enormously positive for society, even giving the new down sides.
Q. I see it as the 20th century we were we were acting global without knowing it by the things that we use and the objects around us we were affecting millions of people around the WOELD but only now are we starting to develop the tools and communications and now taking up that becoming global HREU responsible as citizens?
A. Yes and there was a interesting out-sourcing (motorbike passing) out-sourcing which we often act as if out-sourcing was vented in the middle of the 1990s when in fact it is an ancient pattern. You know, certainly the conditions of production of the raw materials of the East India company were nothing like the conditions at home. What I think has increased is exactly what you say which is systems thinking has become a general skill and people are realising that their seemingly local actions -- which are these of these two stores do I go to? Which of these two products do I buy? -- even in a purely commercial realm their local actions have global ramifications and I think, the awareness of that and the ability to observe that and to be engaged with that and hopefully increasingly to act on that knowledge is going to transform the way we do a lot of things on a global scale. The greatest challenge, and I do not think there is any shortterm answer to this, but the greatest challenge as we talked about is environmental disgradation and that is a problem where real population scale collaboration is the tantalising answer to the tragedy of the commons, which is the atmosphere and the waters and the temperature of the globe and so on and so forth, and the number of people who have become aware in the last years of the global consequences of local choices is, I think, unparalleled in history. I can not imagine another event that made people aware not of global events like a war but just daily choices about driving your car or using electricity and I think, at least, there is a willingness there, if someone comes up with a plausible promise, to do something about it in a way that is transnational and potentially more effecttive than a lot of the sort of locally targeted efforts we are seeing seeing today.
Q. This is the only thing I suppose that can even attempt to change?
A. Right. It is, as we have seen with the nation states, which are previously the largest kind of sub(?) (inaudible) unit the bug in the nation state is that the incentive for nation states to compete with one another for relative distribution of the resources makes it harder for them to care about global health of the ecosystem as a whole. And it may in fact involve not up to higher levels of the nation state but down to lower levels of the population for whom the environment obviously is of significant concern. So again I do not think anyone is going to launch and environmental Wiki tomorrow and the whole thing will be done in two years. I think this is a decades long battle but for the first time we have both a connected enough population and social enough tools that you can imagine taking a cut at this problem outside the typical battle between governments corporations and NGOs. You can imagine getting the affected population for directly involved.
Q. I do not know lastly what what is are you sort of working towards what is the driver for your work why are you doing this?
A. (49.00) Most of my conversation has been with techies programmers and engineers. This book is for the general public. I tried to write a book with some technology in it but is about social change. But what I work on when I am trying to figure out what to say to the more technical audience is essentially the gap between some interesting possibility and where we are today is X. Right. So when I talk about social software, I try to talk about what it would take to design for group use and not individual use.
Q. It is funny that tension between someone -- in a way a lot of this stuff teaches us not to try and create too much I do not want to set up the whole act I just TWAPBT to out put that there is a interesting tension between that and creating something small and large?
A. Do you want to take another crack at that last question? Or shall I take another crack at the last question? What I'm working on, what my work is now. Because I think I have a --
Q. Yes but I am interested in why and when -- what you think your you are trying to create some sort of change have some sort of effect on the world. What is your approach to that and why have you taken that approach?
A. (50.35) I have taken the approach I have over the years because I am not as good a programmeer as I wish I was. I can write scripts that do basic data analysis of these kinds of questions I am asking but when I recognise people that have real programming talent and create these kind of tools, I realise I am just not good enough -- I have not got there. So my way of effecting change has been to try and describe things that I am seeing clearly enough, that other people can integrate them into the way they are seeing the world. Certainly the writing I have done for programmers and engineers has essentially said, you know, surveying what I am surveying, I think there is a kind of value that can be got at here and absolutely the best mail I ever get from doing an online essay is from some group of programmers who said, 'Hey we read that and this is what we did differently.' Right? That is success for that kind of thing.
In the case of the book, which is for a none technical audience and tries to explain not how the technology works but rather why it matters, my hope is that people, looking at group situations, start to think of them as social situations and start to think, 'Is there a kind of value that the people here could provide for one another, given the right context?' And then go about trying to set that context. That works for government, that works for government, that works for business, that works for social, that works for kids on the street trying to do something interesting together and I hope that more people become aware of that sort of thing and start to experiment with it.
Q. Brilliant?
A. Thank you very much.
