by Clay Shirky
But mere tools aren’t enough. The tools are simply a way of channeling existing motivation. Evan was driven, resourceful, and unfortunately for Sasha, very angry. Had he presented his mission in completely self-interested terms (“Help my friend save $300!”) or in unattainably general ones (“Let’s fight theft everywhere!”), the tools he chose wouldn’t have mattered. What he did was to work out a message framed in big enough terms to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence. (This sweet spot is what Eric Raymond, the theorist of open source software, calls “a plausible promise.”) Without a plausible promise, all the technology in the world would be nothing more than all the technology in the world.
As we saw in the saga of the lost Sidekick, getting the free and ready participation of a large, distributed group with a variety of skills—detective work, legal advice, insider information from the police to the army—has gone from impossible to simple. There are many small reasons for this, both technological and social, but they all add up to one big change: forming groups has gotten a lot easier. To put it in economic terms, the costs incurred by creating a new group or joining an existing one have fallen in recent years, and not just by a little bit. They have collapsed. (“Cost” here is used in the economist’s sense of anything expended—money, but also time, effort, or attention.) One of the few uncontentious tenets of economics is that people respond to incentives. If you give them more of a reason to do something, they will do more of it, and if you make it easier to do more of something they are already inclined to do, they will also do more of it.
Why do the economics matter, though? In theory, since humans have a gift for mutually beneficial cooperation, we should be able to assemble as needed to take on tasks too big for one person. If this were true, anything that required shared effort—whether policing, road construction, or garbage collection—would simply arise out of the motivations of the individual members. In practice, the difficulties of coordination prevent that from happening. (Why this is so is the subject of the next chapter.)
But there are large groups. Microsoft, the U.S. Army, and the Catholic Church are all huge, functioning institutions. The difference between an ad hoc group and a company like Microsoft is management. Rather than waiting for a group to self-assemble to create software, Microsoft manages the labor of its employees. The employees trade freedom for a paycheck, and Microsoft takes on the costs of directing and monitoring their output. In addition to the payroll, it pays for everything from communicating between senior management and the workers (one of the raisons d’être for middle management) to staffing the human resources department to buying desks and chairs. Why does Microsoft, or indeed any institution, tolerate these costs?
They tolerate them because they have to; the alternative is institutional collapse. If you want to organize the work of even dozens of individuals, you have to manage them. As organizations grow into the hundreds or thousands, you also have to manage the managers, and eventually to manage the managers’ managers. Simply to exist at that size, an organization has to take on the costs of all that management. Organizations have many ways to offset those costs—Microsoft uses revenues, the army uses taxes, the church uses donations—but they cannot avoid them. In a way, every institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort. Call this the institutional dilemma—because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those institutions are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs.
Here’s where our native talent for group action meets our new tools. Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, lots of new groups, and not just more groups but more kinds of groups. We’ve already seen this effect in the tools that Evan used—a webpage for communicating with the world, instant messages and e-mails by the thousands among his readers, and the phone itself, increasingly capable of sending messages and pictures to groups of people, not just to a single recipient (the historical pattern of phone use).
If we’re so good at social life and shared effort, what advantages are these tools creating? A revolution in human affairs is a pretty grandiose thing to attribute to a ragtag bunch of tools like e-mail and mobile phones. E-mail is nice, but how big a deal can it be in the grand scheme of things? The answer is, “Not such a big deal, considered by itself.” The trick is not to consider it by itself. All the technologies we see in the story of Ivanna’s phone, the phones and computers, the e-mail and instant messages, and the webpages, are manifestations of a more fundamental shift. We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change. These communications tools have been given many names, all variations on a theme: “social software,” “social media,” “social computing,” and so on. Though there are some distinctions between these labels, the core idea is the same: we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations. Though many of these social tools were first adopted by computer scientists and workers in high-tech industries, they have spread beyond academic and corporate settings. The effects are going to be far more widespread and momentous than just recovering lost phones.
By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management (and its attendant overhead), these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort (the limits that created the institutional dilemma in the first place). They haven’t removed them entirely—issues of complexity still loom large, as we will see—but the new tools enable alternate strategies for keeping that complexity under control. And as we would expect, when desire is high and costs have collapsed, the number of such groups is skyrocketing, and the kinds of effects they are having on the world are spreading.
The Tectonic Shift
For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven’t had all the groups we’ve wanted, we’ve simply had all the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation; the difficulties that kept self-assembled groups from working together are shrinking, meaning that the number and kinds of things groups can get done without financial motivation or managerial oversight are growing. The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.
George W.S. Trow, writing about the social effects of television in Within the Context of No Context, described a world of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity:
Everyone knows, or ought to know, that there has happened under us a Tectonic Plate Shift [. . .] the political parties still have the same names; we still have a CBS, an NBC, and a New York Times; but we are not the same nation that had those things before.
Something similar is happening today. Most of the institutions we had last year we will have next year. In the past the hold of those institutions on public life was irreplaceable, in part because there was no alternative to managing large-scale effort. Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms for getting things done, those institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise.
This is not to say that corporations and governments are going to wither away. Though some of the early utopianism around new communications tools suggested that we were heading into some sort of posthierarchical paradise, that’s not what’s happening now, and it’s not wh
at’s going to happen. None of the absolute advantages of institutions like businesses or schools or governments have disappeared. Instead, what has happened is that most of the relative advantages of those institutions have disappeared—relative, that is, to the direct effort of the people they represent. We can see signs of this in many places: the music industry, for one, is still reeling from the discovery that the reproduction and distribution of music, previously a valuable service, is now something their customers can do for themselves. The Belarusian government is trying to figure out how to keep its young people from generating spontaneous political protests. The Catholic Church is facing its first prolonged challenge from self-organized lay groups in its history. But these stories and countless others aren’t just about something happening to particular businesses or governments or religions. They are about something happening in the world.
Group action gives human society its particular character, and anything that changes the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole. This change will not be limited to any particular set of institutions or functions. For any given organization, the important questions are “When will the change happen?” and “What will change?” The only two answers we can rule out are never, and nothing. The ways in which any given institution will find its situation transformed will vary, but the various local changes are manifestations of a single deep source: newly capable groups are assembling, and they are working without the managerial imperative and outside the previous strictures that bounded their effectiveness. These changes will transform the world everywhere groups of people come together to accomplish something, which is to say everywhere.
CHAPTER 2
SHARING ANCHORS COMMUNITY
Groups of people are complex, in ways that make those groups hard to form and hard to sustain; much of the shape of traditional institutions is a response to those difficulties. New social tools relieve some of those burdens, allowing for new kinds of group-forming, like using simple sharing to anchor the creation of new groups.
Imagine you are standing in line with thirty-five other people, and to pass the time, the guy in front of you proposes a wager. He’s willing to bet fifty dollars that no two people in line share a birthday. Would you take that bet?
If you’re like most people, you wouldn’t. With thirty-six people and 365 possible birthdays, it seems like there would only be about a one-in-ten chance of a match, leaving you a 90 percent chance of losing fifty dollars. In fact, you should take the bet, since you would have better than an 80 percent chance of winning fifty dollars. This is called the Birthday Paradox (though it’s not really a paradox, just a surprise), and it illustrates some of the complexities involved in groups.
Most people get the odds of a birthday match wrong for two reasons. First, in situations involving many people, they think about themselves rather than the group. If the guy in line had asked, “What are the odds that someone in this line shares your birthday?” that would indeed have been about a one in ten chance, a distinctly bad bet. But in a group, other people’s relationship to you isn’t all that matters; instead of counting people, you need to count links between people. If you’re comparing your birthday with one other person’s, then there’s only one comparison, which is to say only one chance in 365 of a match. If you’re comparing birthdays in a group with two other people—you, Alice, and Bob, say—you might think you’d have two chances in 365, but you’d be wrong. There are three comparisons: your birthday with Alice’s, yours with Bob’s, and Alice’s with Bob’s. With four people, there are six such comparisons, half of which don’t involve you at all; with five, there are ten, and so on. By the time you are at thirty-six people, there are more than six hundred pairs of birthdays. Everyone understands that the chance of any two people in a group sharing a birthday is low; what they miss is that a count of “any two people” rises much faster than the number of people themselves. This is the engine of the Birthday Paradox.
This rapidly rising number of pairs is true of any collection of things: if you have a bunch of marbles, the number of possible pairs will be set by the same math. The growing complexity gets much more wretched in social settings, however; marbles don’t have opinions, but people do. As a group grows to even modest size, getting universal agreement becomes first difficult, then impossible. This quandary can be illustrated with a simple scenario. You and a friend want to go out to a movie. Before you buy the tickets, you’ll have to factor in your various preferences: comedy or romance, early show or late, near work or near home. All of these will have some effect on your mutual decision, but with just two of you, getting to some acceptable outcome is fairly easy.
Now imagine that you and three friends decide to go out to a movie. This is harder, because the group’s preferences are less likely to overlap neatly. Two of you love action films, two hate them; one wants the early show, three the late one, and so on. With two people, you have only one agreement to make. With four, as Birthday Paradox math tells us, you need six such agreements. Other things being equal, coordinating anything with a group of four is six times as hard as with two people, and the effect gets considerably worse as the group grows even moderately large. By the time you want to go to a movie in a group of ten, waiting for forty-five separate agreements is pretty much a lost cause. You could sit around discussing the possible choices all day, with no guarantee you’ll get to an agreement at all, much less in time for the movie. Instead you’ll vote or draw straws, or someone will just decide to go to a particular movie and invite everyone else along, without trying to take all possible preferences into account. These difficulties have nothing to do with friendship or movie-going specifically; they are responses to the grim logic of group complexity.
Figure 2-1: Three clusters, with all connections drawn. The small cluster has 5 members and 10 connections; the middle one has 10 members and 45 connections; and the large one has 15 and 105. A group’s complexity grows faster than its size.
This complexity means, in the words of the physicist Philip Anderson, that “more is different.” Writing in Science magazine in 1972, Anderson noted that aggregations of anything from atoms to people exhibit complex behavior that cannot be predicted by observing the component parts. Chemistry isn’t just applied physics—you cannot understand all the properties of water from studying its constituent atoms in isolation. This pattern of aggregates exhibiting novel properties is true of people as well. Sociology is not just psychology applied to groups; individuals in group settings exhibit behaviors that no one could predict by studying single minds. No one has ever been bashful or extroverted while sitting alone in their room, no one can be a social climber or a man of the people without reference to society, and these characteristics exist because groups are not just simple aggregations of individuals.
As groups grow, it becomes impossible for everyone to interact directly with everyone else. If maintaining a connection between two people takes any effort at all, at some size that effort becomes unsustainable. You can see this phenomenon even in simple situations, such as when people clink glasses during a toast. In a small group, everyone can clink with everyone else; in a larger group, people touch glasses only with those near them. Similarly, as Fred Brooks noted in his book The Mythical Man-Month, adding more employees to a late project tends to make it later, because the new workers increase the costs of coordinating the group. Because this constraint is so basic, and because the problem can never be solved, only managed, every large group has to grapple with it somehow. For all of modern life, the basic solution has been to gather people together into organizations.
We use the word “organization” to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing—“Our organization organizes the annual conference.” We use one word for both because, at a certain scale, we haven’t been able to get organization without organizations; the former seems to imply the latter. The typical organization is hierarchical, with workers answering to a manager, and that manager
answering to a still-higher manager, and so on. The value of such hierarchies is obvious—it vastly simplifies communication among the employees. New employees need only one connection, to their boss, to get started. That’s much simpler than trying to have everyone talk to everyone.
Running an organization is difficult in and of itself, no matter what its goals. Every transaction it undertakes—every contract, every agreement, every meeting—requires it to expend some limited resource: time, attention, or money. Because of these transaction costs, some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of. As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. The problems inherent in managing these transaction costs are one of the basic constraints shaping institutions of all kinds.
This ability of the traditional management structure to simplify coordination helps answer one of the most famous questions in all of economics: If markets are such a good idea, why do we have organizations at all? Why can’t all exchanges of value happen in the market? This question originally was posed by Ronald Coase in 1937 in his famous paper “The Nature of the Firm,” wherein he also offered the first coherent explanation of the value of hierarchical organization. Coase realized that workers could simply contract with one another, selling their labor, and buying the labor of others in turn, in a market, without needing any managerial oversight. However, a completely open market for labor, reasoned Coase, would underperform labor in firms because of the transaction costs, and in particular the costs of discovering the options and making and enforcing agreements among the participating parties. The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs, as in the movie example above.
