Here Comes Everybody

by Clay Shirky

  “Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.”

  The loss and return of the Sidekick is a story about many things—Evan’s obsessive tendencies, Ivanna’s good fortune in having him for a friend, how expensive phones have gotten—but one of the themes running through the story is the power of group action, given the right tools. Despite Evan’s heroic efforts, he could not have gotten the phone returned if he had been working alone. He used his existing social network to get the word out, which in turn helped him find an enormous audience for Ivanna’s plight, an audience willing to do more than just read from the sidelines. This audience gave Evan remarkable leverage in dealing with Sasha, and with the NYPD, leverage he wouldn’t have had without such an engaged group following along. Indeed, the nature of that engagement puts many of the visitors to Evan’s webpage in a category that Dan Gillmor, a journalist and the author of We the Media, calls “the former audience,” those people who react to, participate in, and even alter a story as it is unfolding.

  Consider the story from Sasha’s point of view. She’s a teenager in a media-saturated culture, she gets a very expensive, very cool phone that someone found in the back of a cab, and she decides to keep it rather than try to track down the owner. This isn’t the most ethical behavior in the world, but neither is it premeditated theft, and in any case, what could go wrong? She’s got her friends and family backing her up, and she surmises, correctly, that Evan isn’t in any hurry to come out to Corona. Given all this, the combination of stories and threats from Sasha and her friends and family should have worked. After all, the phone was expensive, but it wasn’t that expensive, and it’s not like $300 would buy Evan a lot of help. If what Evan wanted was to save Ivanna the price of the phone, spending more than $300 retrieving it wouldn’t make any sense.

  Evan wasn’t in it for the money, though. He was in it to satisfy his sense of justice. Because his commitment to the task at hand was emotional rather than financial, and because he was well-off enough, he was able to invest considerably more in the recovery effort than the phone was actually worth. His decision to present those motivations in public also helped draw people in. “This is not a religious endeavor or a moral endeavor . . . . [sic] this is a HUMANITY endeavor,” Evan wrote at one point. The story of righting a wrong is a powerful one and helped him generate the involvement of others that finally led to the recovery of the phone.

  Sasha and her friends didn’t just want Evan to fail—they assumed that he would fail. The threats from Luis and Gordo had a kind of “You and what army?” quality about them, because they were certain that the police weren’t going to get involved. (Luis made this very point in his first message to Evan: “dont give me that bullshit about you going to the cops over a lost phone the nypd has better things to do then to worry about your friend losing her phone.” [sic]) The turning point in Evan’s quest was the moment when the police agreed to amend the complaint from “lost property” (about which they would have done nothing) to “stolen property” (which led to Sasha’s arrest). The NYPD is not an easy organization to browbeat, yet days after they’d tried to close the case, there they were, sending two detectives to spend half an hour with Ivanna on the matter, then sending more officers out to Corona to collar Sasha and retrieve the Sidekick. Imagine how disorienting it must have been for Sasha to learn that the owner of the phone actually did have an army of sorts, including lawyers and cops, along with an international audience of millions.

  Thanks to the Web, the cost of publishing globally has collapsed. That raw publishing capability, Evan’s existing social contacts, the unusual nature of his story, and the fact that the audience could find Sasha’s MySpace page all combined to create a kind of positive reinforcement of attention. People became interested in the story, and they forwarded it to friends and colleagues, who became interested in turn and forwarded it still further. This pattern of growth was both cause and effect for mainstream media getting involved—it’s unlikely that The New York Times or CNN would have covered the story of a lost phone, but when it was wrapped in the larger story of national and even global attention, they picked it up, which led to still more visitors to Evan’s site and still more media outlets tuning in. The story ended up in more than sixty newspapers and radio and TV stations and more than two hundred weblogs. From the humble beginnings of Ivanna’s plight and a handful of snapshots of Sasha and her friends, the StolenSidekick page went on to get over a million viewers.

  Having the attention of this audience changed the conditions for Evan’s relations with the police, and he knew it. He even said in one of his updates that the function of the StolenSidekick page was to put pressure on the NYPD. It also emboldened him. When he went down to the Ninth Precinct to get the complaint upgraded from lost to stolen property, Evan was stymied by the desk officer, who told him in no uncertain terms that it was up to the NYPD to determine what was a crime and what wasn’t. Evan’s update later that day read, in part, “All I want to do is report a crime. This is ridiculous. Have no fear though. I have many surprises for the NYPD tomorrow. They WILL listen to me and the thousands of you who have written me and the millions of you who are reading this page.” The surprise that he knew was coming was the appearance of the story in The New York Times the following morning. Later, when the police indicated a willingness to pursue the case, Evan posted an explicit request to the site: “I ask that EVERYONE come back to visit this page for updates to make sure that the NYPD stay true to what they said.” Faced with the opacity of the NYPD bureaucracy, Evan had the information-age equivalent of being able to see through walls: he got insider advice, and he was able to walk into a confrontation with a New York City cop knowing that the story would be front-page news the following morning.

  You can see Evan coming to accept his part of the bargain with his users—they would provide the attention that kept him going and made the story attractive to traditional media, and he would channel that attention, reporting on his every move. Many of the viewers of the StolenSidekick page were not just readers but operated as one-person media outlets, members of the former audience, and they discussed the situation on weblogs, on mailing lists, and on various electronic discussion groups Evan set up. He had lawyers, policemen, online detectives, journalists, and even his own ad hoc pressure group working on his behalf, without belonging to any organization responsible for providing those functions.

  Evan’s updates included mention of constant encouragement and offers of help from more people in the city government who thought he was getting a raw deal from the NYPD. Hours after he posted the first version of the page, an NYPD officer contacted him to explain how to file a complaint. Four days later another officer from the NYPD wrote Evan wanting to meet; when they did, the officer gave Evan copies of internal NYPD paperwork to show him the kind of form he needed to file to get it treated as a theft. Finally, when Sasha’s family began threatening legal action, someone from Legalmatch .org, a legal advice site, offered to help Evan get free advice.

  Obviously, much about this story is unrepeatable. It isn’t a worldwide media event every time someone loses a phone. The unusualness of the story, though, throws into high relief the difference between past and present. It’s unlikely that Evan could have achieved what he did even five years ago, and inconceivable that he could have achieved it ten years ago, because neither the tools he used nor the social structures he relied on were in place ten years ago. Equally obviously, much about this story depends on the angle you are viewing it from. For Ivanna, the story is mostly good. She benefited from Evan’s obsessive behavior and the way it was fed by the attention he received, and she had to expend little effort to get her phone back. For Evan himself, the exhilaration of fighting for what he thought was right was balanced against the investment of time and expense. And for Sasha, of course, the story was mostly bad. Of all the telephones in all the towns in all the world, the one she got had a million people at the other end of the line.

>   And what about us? What about the society in which this tug-of-war was happening? For us the picture isn’t so clear. The whole episode demonstrates how dramatically connected we’ve become to one another. It demonstrates the ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public. It demonstrates that the old limitations of media have been radically reduced, with much of the power accruing to the former audience. It demonstrates how a story can go from local to global in a heartbeat. And it demonstrates the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause.

  But who defines what kind of cause is right? Evan’s ability to get help can be ascribed either to a strong sense of injustice or to a petty unwillingness to lose a fight, no matter how trivial and no matter the cost to his opponent. And for all the offensiveness of Sasha’s taunting, race and class do matter. Evan is a grown-up doing work that lets him take countless hours off to work on the retrieval of a phone. Sasha is an unwed teenage mother. The recovery of the phone wasn’t the only loss she suffered—Evan’s bulletin board quickly became host to public messages disparaging Sasha, her boyfriend and friends, single mothers, and Puerto Ricans as a group. One conversation, headed with the subject line “[D]o something already!,” noted that other people following the story had already uncovered her address, and advocated physical confrontation (though the author didn’t offer to participate). Another thread, with the charming title “[W]ould you tap that?,” involved discussion by the male participants as to whether Sasha was attractive enough to sleep with.

  One could blame Evan for letting these kinds of racist and sexist conversations take place, but the number of people interested in talking about the stolen phone (as evidenced by the inadequacy of most software to handle the volume of users), and the standard anonymity of internet users, made the conversations effectively impossible to police. Furthermore, though Evan was clearly benefiting from having generated the attention, he was not entirely in control of it—the bargain he had crafted with his users had him performing the story they wanted to see. Had he shut down the bulletin boards or even edited the conversations, he would have been violating his half of what had quickly become a mutual expectation. (Whether he should have taken this step is a judgment call; the point is that once a group has come together, those kinds of issues of community control aren’t simple. Any action Evan took, either letting the conversation go or stifling it, would have created complicated side effects.)

  A larger question transcends the individual events. Do we want a world in which a well-off grown-up can use this kind of leverage to get a teenager arrested, as well as named and shamed on a global platform, for what was a fairly trivial infraction? The answer is yes and no. Millions of people obviously wanted to follow the story, in part because of its mix of moral and visceral struggle. Furthermore, what Sasha did was wrong, and we want misdeeds to be punished. At the same time, though, we want the punishment to fit the crime. It’s easy enough to say that Sasha shouldn’t have gotten off just because other people take lost property without returning it, but that logic starts to look different if we imagine that the roles were reversed. Poor people lose phones too, and the loss hits them far harder; why should Evan have been able to browbeat the NYPD into paying attention to this of all lost property?

  A few years ago Evan wouldn’t have been able to get the story heard either. Before the Web became ubiquitous, he wouldn’t have been able to attract an audience, much less one in the millions, and without that audience he would not have been able to get the police to change the complaint. Given how much of our lives is spent in thrall to unresponsive bureaucracy, Evan’s eventual victory seems like a shining success, but it came at a cost. Policing time is finite, yet the willingness of humans to feel wronged is infinite. Do we also want a world where, whenever someone with this kind of leverage gets riled up, they can unilaterally reset the priorities of the local police department?

  Those kinds of questions are rhetorical, since that’s the world we’ve already got. The real question is, What happens next? The story of the lost Sidekick is an illustration of the kinds of changes—some good, some bad, most too complex to label—that are affecting the ways groups assemble and cooperate. These changes are profound because they are amplifying or extending our essential social skills, and our characteristic social failings as well.

  New Leverage for Old Behaviors

  Human beings are social creatures—not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities, and it shows up in almost every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect. Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups. The aggregate relations among individuals and groups, among individuals within groups, and among groups forms a network of astonishing complexity. We have always relied on group effort for survival; even before the invention of agriculture, hunting and gathering required coordinated work and division of labor. You can see an echo of our talent for sociability in the language we have for groups; like a real-world version of the mythical seventeen Eskimo words for snow, we use incredibly rich language in describing human association. We can make refined distinctions between a corporation and a congregation, a clique and a club, a crowd and a cabal. We readily understand the difference between transitive labels like “my wife’s friend’s son” and “my son’s friend’s wife,” and this relational subtlety permeates our lives. Our social nature even shows up in negation. One of the most severe punishments that can be meted out to a prisoner is solitary confinement; even in a social environment as harsh and attenuated as prison, complete removal from human contact is harsher still.

  Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social. (Indeed, among people who design software for group use, human social instincts are sometimes jokingly referred to as the monkey mind.) But humans go further than any of our primate cousins: our groups are larger, more complex, more ordered, and longer lived, and critically, they extend beyond family ties to include categories like friends, neighbors, colleagues, and sometimes even strangers. Our social abilities are also accompanied by high individual intelligence. Even cults, the high-water mark of surrender of individuality to a group, can’t hold a candle to a beehive in terms of absolute social integration; this makes us different from creatures whose sociability is more enveloping than ours.

  This combination of personal smarts and social intuition makes us the undisputed champions of the animal kingdom in flexibility of collective membership. We act in concert everywhere, from tasks like organizing a birthday party (itself a surprisingly complicated exercise) to running an organization with thousands or even millions of members. This skill allows groups to tackle tasks that are bigger, more complex, more dispersed, and of longer duration than any person could tackle alone. Building an airplane or a cathedral, performing a symphony or heart surgery, raising a barn or razing a fortress, all require the distribution, specialization, and coordination of many tasks among many individuals, sometimes unfolding over years or decades and sometimes spanning continents.

  We are so natively good at group effort that we often factor groups out of our thinking about the world. Many jobs that we regard as the province of a single mind actually require a crowd. Michelangelo had assistants paint part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Thomas Edison, who had over a thousand patents in his name, managed a staff of two dozen. Even writing a book, a famously solitary pursuit, involves the work of editors, publishers, and designers; getting this particular book into your hands involved additional coordination among printers, warehouse managers, truck drivers, and a host of others in the network between me and you. Even if we exclude groups that are just labels for shared characteristics (tall people, red-heads), almost everyone be
longs to multiple groups based on family, friends, work, religious affiliation, on and on. The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.

  One obvious lesson is that new technology enables new kinds of group-forming. The tools Evan Guttman availed himself of were quite simple—the phone itself, e-mail, a webpage, a discussion forum—but without them the phone would have stayed lost. Every step of the way he was able to escape the usual limitations of private life and to avail himself of capabilities previously reserved for professionals: he used his site to tell the story without being a journalist, he found Sasha’s information without being a detective, and so on. The transfer of these capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal, built on what the publisher Tim O’Reilly calls “an architecture of participation.”

  When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants. The hive is a social device, a piece of bee information technology that provides a platform, literally, for the communication and coordination that keeps the colony viable. Individual bees can’t be understood separately from the colony or from their shared, co-created environment. So it is with human networks; bees make hives, we make mobile phones.