Here Comes Everybody
Page 1
Table of Contents
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright Page
CHAPTER 1 - IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO FIND A PHONE
CHAPTER 2 - SHARING ANCHORS COMMUNITY
CHAPTER 3 - EVERYONE IS A MEDIA OUTLET
CHAPTER 4 - PUBLISH, THEN FILTER
CHAPTER 5 - PERSONAL MOTIVATION MEETS COLLABORATIVE PRODUCTION
CHAPTER 6 - COLLECTIVE ACTION AND INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES
CHAPTER 7 - FASTER AND FASTER
CHAPTER 8 - SOLVING SOCIAL DILEMMAS
CHAPTER 9 - FITTING OUR TOOLS TO A SMALL WORLD
CHAPTER 10 - FAILURE FOR FREE
CHAPTER 11 - PROMISE, TOOL, BARGAIN
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Praise for Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody
“A fascinating survey of the digital age . . . [Shirky has] a knack for converting sociological concepts into easy-to-understand prose. . . . An eye-opening paean to possibility.”
—The Boston Globe
“From blogs and Wikipedia to Facebook and Twitter, each new wave of digital communications generates more upheaval for businesses. In his recent book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky explores the ramifications of a world in which people can find each other and collaborate with increasing ease.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Shirky convincingly argues that online communication tools are transforming everything from airlines to the Catholic Church. And the fun’s only just begun.”
—Wired
“So brilliant and fun and provocative it stays with you for a while.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“Amateur circles of ordinary people are wresting power and creativity back from the oligarchs. . . . [Clay Shirky] offer[s] incisive analysis of the new day as it dawns. . . . Precise and intellectually fresh . . . Here Comes Everybody is more than a simple celebration of our happy, busy mobs; it offers frameworks by which to better understand them. By doing so, Shirky proves that, in the end, credentialed, knowledgeable, and clear-headed media and technology critics haven’t been rendered obsolete by the crowds they love. At least not yet.”
—The Village Voice
“Mr. Shirky writes cleanly and convincingly about the intersection of technological innovation and social change; he makes both the science and the sociology accessible.”
—New York Observer
“Shirky’s book makes a great contribution by clearly explaining what is happening today. His methodical analysis is illuminating, jargon-free and comprehensive, extracting insights from a wide array of seemingly dissimilar ventures. . . . The times they are a-changin’, and Shirky has written a lucid exposition on how people are starting to celebrate the internet’s true potential. It’s tough to write a profound book that is also a great read but Shirky has done exactly that. This book will help groups of every shape and size harness the new power of collaboration.”
—Focus
“Shirky calls for readers to acknowledge the new reality and look to the future. . . . His book is a compendium of smartly analyzed, real-world examples of just that, and it provides a good foundation for those looking to get a handle on the new ways of the world.”
—BusinessWeek
“Fascinating anecdotes and smart writing.”
—Fortune Small Business
“Drawing from anthropology, economic theory, and keen observation, [Shirky] makes a strong case that new communications tools are making once-impossible forms of group action possible. . . . Shirky’s range of examples is exciting. . . . [An] extraordinarily perceptive new book.”
—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“[Shirky] looks at self-organization with an academic’s eye, tinged by an appreciation of the commerce that underlies a fair amount of the Internet.”
—The Seattle Times
“A terrific new book.”
—Kansas City Star
“Shirky . . . has a novel response to the question of quality control: we will have to move to a publish-then-filter model, the opposite of today’s ‘gatekeeper’ structure.”
—Columbia Journalism Review
“I don’t think you’ll find a smarter, more articulate writer on the topic of internet community than Clay Shirky. . . . If you’re developing social software of any kind, this book should be required reading.”
—D: All Things Digital
“Meat and potatoes anecdotes about communication tools.”
—statesman.com
“Seriously, Clay Shirky’s new book is really good. (For once, no irony or snark: it’s just very well done.) Each time someone as insightful as Clay Shirky starts writing for the Web, the internet will get 1 percent better. Send 99 more Shirkys.”
—hotdogsladies.com
“Remarkable.”
—politico.com
“Terrifically clever.”
—Stuart Jeffries, Guardian (London)
“A primer for the Information age.”
—Jain Finlayson, The Times (London)
“[Shirky] provides the clearest explanation I have yet read of why Microsoft is being challenged by open-source software communities like Linux.”
—Pate Kane, The Independent (London)
“Here Comes Everybody is as crisply argued and as enlightening a book about the internet as has been written. It might even cure your wikiphobia.”
—Telegraph Review (UK)
“Shirky astutely discerns the implications of people acting on their own. . . . A perceptive appraisal of the contemporary technology-society interface.”
—Booklist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clay Shirky writes, teaches, and consults on the social and economic effects of the internet, and especially on those places where our social and technological networks overlap. He is on the faculty of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and has consulted for Nokia, Procter and Gamble, News Corp., the BBC, the United States Navy, and Lego. Over the years, his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, and IEEE Computer, and he is a regular keynote speaker at tech conferences. Mr. Shirky lives in Brooklyn.
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Copyright © Clay Shirky, 2008
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Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations / Clay Shirky. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-440-63224-2
1. Information technology—Social aspects. 2. Computer networks—Social aspects.
3. Internet—Social aspects. 4. Online social networks. I. Title.
HM851.S5465 2008
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CHAPTER 1
IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO FIND A PHONE
On an afternoon in late May 2006 a woman named Ivanna left her phone in the backseat of a New York City cab. No surprise there; hundreds of phones a year show up in the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission’s offices, and more than that are actually lost, since some unknown number are simply taken by the next passenger. That was the fate of Ivanna’s phone, a fairly expensive multifunction version called a Sidekick, which came with a screen, keyboard, and built-in camera. Sadly for her, the Sidekick was the sole repository of much of the information for her upcoming wedding, from contact information for the catering company to the guest list.
When she realized what she’d done, Ivanna asked Evan Guttman, a friend who worked as a programmer in the financial industry, to offer a reward for its return, via an e-mail message that would show up on the phone. Getting no response after a couple of days, she shelled out more than $300 to buy a new one. Ivanna’s phone company had stored copies of her information on its servers and transferred it to her new phone. Once the information had been transferred to her new phone, she discovered that her original one had ended up in the hands of a girl in Queens. Ivanna knew this because the girl was using it to take pictures of herself and her friends and e-mail them around; the photos taken on her old phone had also been transferred to her new one. Ivanna and Evan couldn’t be sure who had taken the phone from the cab, but they knew who had it now, or rather they had her picture and her e-mail address, Sashacristal8905@aol.com (since disabled, for reasons that will become apparent).
Evan immediately e-mailed Sasha, explaining the situation and asking for the phone back. Sasha replied that she wasn’t stupid enough to return it, a view punctuated with racial invective, saying that Evan’s “white ass” didn’t deserve it back. (She inferred Evan and Ivanna’s race from pictures on the phone; Sasha is Hispanic.) The back-and-forth went on for some time. During the conversation Sasha said her brother had found it in a cab and given it to her; Evan continued to ask for it back, on the grounds that Sasha knew who its rightful owner was. Sasha finally wrote that she and her boyfriend would meet Evan, saying, in the spelling-challenged manner of casual e-mails, “i got ball this is my adress 108 20 37 av corona come n do it iam give u the sidekick so I can hit you wit it.”
Evan declined to go to the listed address, both because he assumed it was fake (it was) and because of the threatened violence. Instead, he decided to take the story public. He created a simple webpage with Sasha’s photos and a brief description of the events so far, with the stated rationale of delivering a lesson on “the etiquette of returning people’s lost belongings,” as he put it. He titled the page StolenSidekick, added it to his personal website at EvanWasHere.com, and began telling his friends about what had happened.
The original page went up on June 6, and in the first few hours it was up, Evan’s friends and their friends forwarded it around the internet, attracting a growing amount of attention. Evan first updated the page later that day, noting that his friends had done some online detective work and had found a page on MySpace, the social networking website, that had photos of Sasha and a man they surmised was her boyfriend. Evan’s second update provided more background on how the phone was lost and on who had it now. His third update, later that afternoon, reported that an officer from the NYPD had seen the story and had written explaining how to file a claim with the police.
That evening, two things happened. First, a man named Luis sent Evan mail, saying he was Sasha’s brother and a member of the Military Police. He said that Sasha had bought the phone from a cabbie. (This story, as Evan pointed out on the webpage, directly contradicted Sasha’s earlier account of her brother finding the phone.) Luis also told Evan to stop harassing Sasha, hinting violence if Evan didn’t lay off. The other event that evening was that Evan’s story appeared on Digg. Digg is a collaborative news website; users suggest stories, and other users rate them thumbs up or thumbs down. The Digg front page, like all newspaper front pages, is made up of stories that are both timely and important, except on Digg timeliness is measured by how recently a story was added, and importance is measured by user votes rather than by the judgment of editors. The front page of Digg gets millions of readers a day, and a lot of those readers took a look at the StolenSidekick page.
The story clearly struck a nerve. Evan was getting ten e-mails a minute from people asking about the phone, offering encouragement, or volunteering to help. Everyone who has ever lost something feels a diffuse sense of anger at whoever found and kept it, but this time it was personal, since Evan, and everyone reading StolenSidekick, now knew who had the phone and had seen her insulting refusals to return it. When the barrier to returning something is high, we make peace with “Finders, keepers. Losers, weepers,” but when returning something becomes easier, our sympathies ebb. Finding a loose bill on the street is different from finding a wallet with ID in it, and the case of the missing Sidekick was even worse than a lost wallet. Using someone’s own phone to refuse to return it to them crossed some barrier of acceptability in the eyes of many following the saga, and the taunts and threats from Sasha and her friends and family only added insult to injury.
Evan, clearly energized by the response from his growing readership, continued posting a running commentary on his webpage. He wrote forty updates in ten days, accompanied by a growing frenzy of both local and national media attention. There was a lot to update: he and the people tuning in posted more MySpace profiles of Sasha, her boyfriend Gordo, and her brother. Someone reading the StolenSidekick page figured out Sasha’s full name, then her address, and drove by her house, later posting the video on the Web for all to see. Members of Luis’s Military Police unit wrote to inquire about allegations that an MP was threatening a civilian and promised to look into the matter.
Evan also created a bulletin board for his readers, a place online where they could communicate with one another about the attempts to recover Ivanna’s phone. Or rather, he tried to create a bulletin board, but the first such service he selected simply couldn’t cope with the crush of excited users all trying to log in at the same time. Seeing this, he selected a second bulletin board service, but that too crashed under the sudden shock of demand, as did the third. (These kinds of failures, sometimes called “success crises,” bring to mind Yogi Berra’s famous observation about a New York restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”) He finally found a service that could accommodate the thousands of people following the Sidekick saga, and those readers settled in, discussing every aspect of the events, from general speculation about Sasha’s moral compass to a forum inviting members of the military to talk about Luis, the MP, and his involvement in the events. (As is usual with these kinds of communities, much of the conversation was off-topic; the military section of the bulletin board included a conversation about whether Luis was taking sufficient care of the uniform he was wearing in the pictures Sasha had taken.)
During this period Sasha’s family and friends kept communicating with Evan about the phone, offering several inconsistent stories: her mom had bought the phone from someone, Sasha didn’t have the phone, she had sold the phone, she would sell him the phone back for $100. Luis announced they were going to sue for harassment; her friends wrote in with more threatening e-mail. Evan and Ivanna filed a rep
ort with the police, who classified the phone as lost rather than stolen property, meaning they would take no action. Several people in the New York City government wrote in offering to help get the complaint amended, including a police officer who shared internal NYPD paperwork and explained how the complaint should have been handled. (Possession of this paperwork almost got Evan arrested when he later tried to get the complaint reclassified.) By this point millions of readers were watching, and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story. The public airing of the NYPD’s refusal to treat this case as theft generated so many public complaints that the police later reversed their stand and, after dispatching two detectives to talk with Ivanna, agreed to treat the phone as stolen rather than lost.
Then on June 15 members of the NYPD arrested Sasha, a sixteen-year-old from Corona, New York, and recovered the stolen Sidekick, which they returned to its original owner, Ivanna. As Sasha’s mother memorably told a reporter the day her daughter was arrested, “I never in my life thought a phone was gonna cause me so many problems.” It wasn’t the phone that caused the problems, though. It was the people at the other end of the phone, people who had come together around Evan’s page, who found the MySpace profiles and the family’s address and helped pressure the police department, all in a busy ten days, and all of it leading to Sasha’s arrest. Having achieved their stated goals of publicly calling out Sasha and retrieving the phone, Evan and Ivanna declined to press charges, and Sasha was released. Ivanna’s wedding went off without a hitch, and Evan, in light of his ability to gather a crowd, began getting freelance work doing PR.