by Clay Shirky
they’ve arrested ikhwani blogger monem (http://ana-ikhwan.blogspot.com) we must organize a campaign 10:07 AM April 13
turns out Monem did not turn himself in yet, he is hiding from police until lawyers find out more details, but they did break into his home 03:31 PM April 13
In case you dont know momen got arrested early today at cairo airport 04:17 PM April 15
monem appeared before shobra prosecutor and he will be detained for 15 days. 07:50 PM April 15
Monem and co start hunger strike due to maltreatment 03:36 PM May 07
Abd El Fattah and Mahmoud do not see eye to eye politically—Abd El Fattah is a secular blogger, while Mahmoud is a member of the conservative Muslim Brotherhood—but both have an interest in free speech, and these tools allow citizens to report the news when they see it, without having to go through (or face delay and censorship by) official news channels. Twitter also offers an ability to coordinate these users’ reactions to the state. As El Fattah describes Twitter, “We use it to keep a tight network of activists informed about security action in protests. The activists would then use twitter to coordinate a reaction.” Because prodemocracy activists are watched so carefully, Twitter allows them a combination of real-time and group coordination that helps tip the balance of action in their favor. One early use of Twitter had El Fattah and a dozen or so of his colleagues coordinating movements to surround a car in which their friend Malek was being held by the police, to prevent it and him from being towed away. Knowing they were being monitored, they then sent messages suggesting that many more of them were coming. The police sent reinforcements, surrounding and thus immobilizing the car themselves. This kept Malek in place until the press and members of Parliament arrived. The threat of bad publicity led to Malek’s release, an outcome that would have been hard to coordinate without Twitter.
The power to coordinate otherwise dispersed groups will continue to improve; new social tools are still being invented, and however minor they may seem, any tool that improves shared awareness or group coordination can be pressed into service for political means, because the freedom to act in a group is inherently political. The progression from Leipzig to increasingly social and real-time uses of text messaging from Beijing to Cairo shows us that we adopt those tools that amplify our capabilities, and we modify our tools to improve that amplification.
CHAPTER 8
SOLVING SOCIAL DILEMMAS
There are real and permanent social dilemmas, which can only be optimized for, never completely solved. The human social repertoire includes many such optimizations, which social tools can amplify.
Let’s say, for the sake of illustration, that you and I went out for a few drinks last Saturday night, and at around 2 a.m. one of us said, “Hey, I know! Let’s steal a car!” (I think it was you who said that.) So we steal a car, one thing leads to another, mistakes are made, and half an hour later we crash right through the window of a store. We barely have time to jump out and pretend to be bystanders before the police arrive.
Now the police aren’t really buying the bystander alibi, but they don’t have any other witnesses, so they take us off into separate rooms for questioning. Once we are separated, they make each of us this offer: “Look, we think you’re innocent, but we suspect the other person in the car was responsible. If you tell us what you know about them, we’ll give you a big reward, and file charges against them. But you gotta tell us right now, and if you don’t, we’re going to hold you overnight.” Since each of us is getting this offer, it creates four possibilities:
1. We each stick to our stories, they’ve got no evidence, and they keep us both overnight.
2. I stick to the bystander story and you turn me in. You get a reward, while I get charged.
3. I turn you in while you stick to the story. I get a reward, while you get charged.
4. We turn each the other in. We both get charged.
So knowing that I face the same choice as you—sticking to my story or turning you in—what do you do?
The worst outcome would clearly be getting charged with a crime, and the best outcome would be getting the reward. You know that I know that too, and if we both try to get the reward, we both get charged. The second best outcome is spending the night in jail, but you know that I know that too, and if you stick to your story in an attempt to get this outcome, I can go for the reward by turning you in. Similarly, if I stick to my story in an attempt to get the night in jail, you can turn me in to try to get the reward, but if we both try to get the reward, we both get charged—back to the worst outcome again.
This is a simplified version of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, a social science thought experiment about how people make decisions. (The payoff matrix is bit more complex in the standard version, but the dilemma is the same.) Assuming that the two people can’t communicate with each other and don’t trust each other (about which more in a moment), the worst outcome—number four—is the rational one, an outcome called a Nash equilibrium. The dilemma of the Prisoners’ Dilemma is that, because it is a one-off transaction in which you and I can’t communicate with each other, we can’t coordinate any outcome better than the dismal Nash equilibrium. (This is the same math underlying the Tragedy of the Commons, where the Nash equilibrium encourages individual defection, even as it damages the group.) Things change, though, when the prisoners interact with each other repeatedly, a version called an iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma.
Robert Axelrod, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studied the iterated version extensively, staged tournaments for different software programs emulating the prisoners. Each program was given a strategy for when to cooperate and when to defect (the same two choices you and I faced in our notional interrogation rooms). These strategies were measured by adding or deducting points for the various outcomes. After running the tournament with many different participating strategies, ranging from “always defect” to “cooperate or defect at random,” Axelrod found that a single strategy, called Tit-for-Tat, was most successful against every other strategy tried. Tit-for-Tat started by trying to cooperate the first time it was paired with any other program. If that program also cooperated, then Tit-for-Tat would offer to cooperate in the next round, and so on. As long as another program offered to cooperate, Tit-for-Tat would continue to do so as well. If the other program defected, though, taking advantage of Tit-for-Tat’s trusting behavior, then Tit-for-Tat would defect against that program in the next round, effectively punishing the other program as a way of communicating that its trusting nature extended only to those who reciprocate.
This strategy is a highly simplified version of real life—the more general lesson is that people who interact with one another repeatedly communicate through their actions, introducing what Axlerod calls “the shadow of the future.” We all face the Prisoners’ Dilemma whenever we interact with people we could take advantage of, or people who could take advantage of us, yet we actually manage to trust one another often enough to accomplish things in groups. The shadow of the future makes it possible for me to act on your behalf today, even at some risk or cost to me, on the expectation that you will remember and reciprocate tomorrow.
New Tools to Create Social Capital
Over on University Place in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from my office, is the local bowling alley. Bowling often conjures up an era of picket fences and twenty-five-cent Cokes, and our local bowling emporium even has a name reminiscent of that time—Bowlmor Lanes. On any given Friday night, though, Bowlmor is very much an institution of the moment, catering to martini-sipping twentysomethings instead of factory workers unwinding with a beer. Through the decades bowling has been persistently reinvented, and it remains a durably popular activity. But between the 1950s and now there has been one significant change—a precipitous decline in league bowling, with its memberships and seasons and uniforms and all the rest. Though plenty of groups bowl at Bowlmor Lanes, they are mainly people who already know one another; the bowling is more a conseq
uence of group interaction than a source of it. The gradual disappearance of bowling leagues is one of many reductions in social mechanisms whereby people may be introduced to one another as a consequence of shared activity. This doesn’t matter much for the fate of Bowlmor Lanes—a customer is a customer, league or no—but it may matter for the country.
When Robert Putnam, a Harvard sociologist, published Bowling Alone in 2000, it was an immediate sensation. His account of the weakening of community in the United States, based on a huge number of indicators from the decline of picnicking to the abandonment of league bowling, offered two provocative observations. First, much of the success of the United States as a nation has had to do with its ability to generate social capital, that mysterious but critical set of characteristics of functioning communities. When your neighbor walks your dog while you are ill, or the guy behind the counter trusts you to pay him next time, social capital is at work. It is the shadow of the future on a societal scale. Individuals in groups with more social capital (which is to say, more habits of cooperation) are better off on a large number of metrics, from health and happiness to earning potential, than those in groups with less social capital. Societies characterized by a high store of social capital overall do better than societies with low social capital on a similarly wide range of measurements, from crime rate to the costs of doing business to economic growth.
This is the shadow of the future at work: direct reciprocity assumes that if you do someone a favor today, that person will do you a favor tomorrow. Indirect reciprocity is even more remarkable—it assumes that if you do someone in your community a favor today, someone in your community will be around to do you a favor tomorrow, even if it isn’t the same person. The norms and behaviors that instantiate the shadow of the future is social capital, a set of norms that facilitate cooperation within or among groups.
It was Putnam’s second observation, however, that generated the real reaction. Across a remarkably broad range of measures, participation in group activities, the vehicle for creating and sustaining social capital, was on the decline in the United States. Putting the two observations together, he concluded that one of the greatest assets in the growth and stability of the United States was ebbing away. One cause of the decline in social capital was a simple increase in the difficulty of people getting together—an increase in transaction costs, to use Coase’s term. When an activity becomes more expensive, either in direct costs or increased hassle, people do less of it, and several effects of the last fifty years—including smaller households, delayed marriage, two-worker families, the spread of television, and suburbanization—have increased the transaction costs for coordinating group activities outside work. For most people the only possible reaction to Putnam’s conclusion was nostalgia for a lost world of Rotary clubs and ice cream socials. One person, though, took it as an opportunity. In the 1990s Scott Heiferman had founded and sold a successful web business in New York City, and he was looking for his next business idea when he read Bowling Alone. Instead of regarding it as news of an inevitable decline, he set about trying to reinvigorate the creation of social capital through real-world interaction. The solution he came up with was surprisingly simple.
First Heiferman assumed that people knew what they were missing and would want it back if they could get it; in an era of declining social capital, people would take steps to increase their communal participation if someone could make it easy again. Second, he recognized that treating the internet as some sort of separate space—cyberspace, as it was often called—was part of the problem. That word, coined by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer, refers to a kind of alternate reality mediated by the world’s communications networks. The cyberspace of Neuromancer is a visual representation of all the world’s data; John Perry Barlow, a digital rights activist, later used the word to refer to the social spaces of the internet. Whether visual or social, though, the basic sense of cyberspace was that it was a world separate and apart from the real world. The predicted end point of this process was a progressive disassociation of social life from real space, leading to the death of cities as the population spread out to more bucolic spots.
The assumption that communications tools are (or will someday be) a good substitute for travel assumes that people mainly gather together for utilitarian reasons of sharing information. Companies have been selling us this idea since the invention of the telegraph, and AT&T’s famous Picturephone, first launched at the 1964 World’s Fair, was pitched as a way to reduce the need for travel. This reduction did not happen, not in 1964 or ever. If communication were a substitute for travel, then the effects would have shown up by now, but they haven’t. In 1978 President Carter deregulated the airlines, causing travel prices to fall, but telecommunications stocks didn’t collapse; they rose. Similarly, in 1984 Judge Harold Greene broke up AT&T, leading to a rapid decrease in long-distance phone call costs; airline customers increased that year. Communication and travel are complements, not substitutes. Chris Meyer, a globe-trotting consultant for the Monitor Group, observes that “better communications make it easier for me to keep in touch with the office, so I spend more time on the road, talking to clients.”
We gather together because it is useful but also because we like to. Assuming that videophones or e-mail or virtual reality will reduce the overall amount of travel is like assuming that liquor stores will kill bars, since liquor stores sell drinks much more cheaply than bars do. In fact, the reason people go to bars is not simply to get a drink, but to do so in a convivial environment. Similarly, cities don’t exist just because people have had to be nearby to communicate; cities exist because people like to be near other people, and it is this fact, rather than the mere trading of information, that creates social capital. (Anyone who predicts the death of cities has already met their spouse.) This obvious human preference was overlooked during the early public spread of the internet, in large part because the average user interacted with different people online and offline.
What seemed like a deep social change in the 1990s was revealed to be a temporary accident by the year of Meetup’s founding. The idea of cyberspace made sense when the population of the internet had a few million users; in that world social relations online really were separate from offline ones, because the people you would meet online were different from the people you would meet offline, and these worlds would rarely overlap. But that separation was an accident of partial adoption. Though the internet began to function in its earliest form in 1969, it was not until 1999 that any country had a majority of its citizens online. (Holland was first, but that condition now applies to most countries in the developed world.) In the developed world, the experience of the average twenty-five-year-old is one of substantial overlap between online and offline friends and colleagues. The overlap is so great, in fact, that both the word and the concept of “cyberspace” have fallen into disuse. The internet augments real-world social life rather than providing an alternative to it. Instead of becoming a separate cyberspace, our electronic networks are becoming deeply embedded in real life.
Heiferman realized that if enough people are online, you don’t have to group them solely by affinity (pug lovers, White Stripes fans, libertarians, whatever). Instead you can group them by affinity and proximity (pug lovers in Poughkeepsie, White Stripes fans in Walla Walla). He designed Meetup to help people find each other online and then meet in the real world, taking the burden of coordination off the hands of the potential users. Meetup users can search by interest (Are there any relevant Meetups in my town?) or they can look by area (I live in Milwaukee, what Meetups are nearby?)
By registering people’s interests and location, Meetup can identify latent groups and help them come together. Heiferman bet that all over the United States (and later, the world) latent groups would be happy to get together if someone solved the coordination problem. Armed with this intuition (and the work of a talented group of programmers and designers), he launched the service. In early talks to potent
ial users or investors he sometimes presented Meetup as a kind of time machine, reinvigorating classic American interest groups—people who shared an interest in bowling, cars, or Chihuahuas. (He talked about people who liked Chihuahuas so often, in fact, that it became a trademark bit of his spiel.)
The groups that actually ended up using Meetup didn’t look anything like Heiferman expected. Here’s the list of the fifteen most active Meetups the year after the site launched:
This list is unlike any list of American groups ever assembled. It measures something important (or rather it collates several different important things) because it demonstrates that Meetup’s convening power lies nor in recreating older civic groups but in creating new ones.
The groups represented here can be divided into three broad categories. The first, including Witches, Pagans, Ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Atheists, are people who share some religious or philosophical outlook but have no support from the broader U.S. culture. There are many more Presbyterians than pagans in the United States, but the Presbyterians aren’t on this list because they don’t need Meetup to figure out when and how to assemble; they meet every Sunday morning at the Presbyterian church. Because they are both internally organized and externally supported, Presbyterians suffer less than pagans from transaction costs, who have no culturally normal place and time to meet and no ready way to broadcast their interests without censure. Jehovah’s Witnesses enjoy advantages similar to those of other Christian sects, but ex-Witnesses turn to Meetup because they don’t enjoy that kind of socially supported coordination.
