by Clay Shirky
The pro-freedom argument does not imply a society with no regulations. Two acts of civil disobedience in the twentieth-century history of the United States demonstrate this. The decisions of much of the population to ignore the constitutional prohibition on alcohol consumption in the 1920s, and the fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit in the 1980s, ultimately destroyed those restrictions. The restrictions failed because the cost of enforcement, especially the level of surveillance, was incompatible with a free society. The failure of those regulatory regimes, though, didn’t mean that anyone can now drink, or that there is no speed limit. The results of the protests were simply a change to less restrictive regulations. The fundamental tension in the pro-freedom argument is in understanding when freedom can be acceptably limited, within a framework that assumes that the bias should be toward increasing freedom. The basic tenet here is that the unforeseeable effects of freer communication will benefit society, as with the unanticipated rise of an international community of scientists and mathematicians after the invention of the printing press.
Even the pro-freedom argument, though, risks overstating the degree of control we have over the change in group capabilities. To ask the question “Should we allow the spread of these social tools?” presumes that there is something we could do about it were the answer “No.” This hypothesis is suspect, precisely because of the kind of changes involved.
Nuclear power is a technology that society can, for the moment, make a decision about. Because of the cost and regulatory strictures implicit in nuclear power in most nations of the world, a country can decide how many nuclear power plants, if any, it wants on its soil. This degree of choice at the national level, though, is tied to the cost of saying “Yes”—billions of dollars of investment and endless vigilance in monitoring its safety. The spread of our social tools is nothing like that—every time someone buys a mobile phone, one of the most routine technological choices possible today, they plug into the grid of social tools and, as we saw after the Sichuan quake, the effects of membership in that grid can be both swift and global. The Chinese parents have both the means and expectation that they can participate in a global conversation, not just because news of the world is rushing in, but because news from the locals is also rushing out.
To put it metaphorically, society’s control over nuclear power is like driving a car, with gas, brakes, a reverse gear. We have a good deal of control over both the route and speed with which nuclear power progresses, including the option to simply pull over (as several countries have done by banning the building of new plants). The dramatic improvement in our social tools, by contrast, means that our control over those tools is much more like steering a kayak. We are being pushed rapidly down a route largely determined by the technological environment. We have a small degree of control over the spread of these tools, but that control does not extend to being able to reverse, or even radically alter, the direction we’re moving in.
Our principal challenge is not deciding where we want to go, but rather in staying upright as we go there. The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is less like ordinary technological change, and more like an event, something that has already happened. As a result, the important questions aren’t about whether these tools will spread or reshape society, but rather how they do so.
One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction, described in relation to the Pro-Ana girls in chapter 8, but fast becoming a more general case. Society simply has less control over what kind of groups can form, and what kind of value they can confer on their members, and this in turn means a loss of prevention as a strategy for reducing harm. Because this change is being brought about by media, there is a good analogy with freedom of speech. In the United States, the First Amendment enjoins the government from limiting the speech of the citizens. There are of course classes of speech that are nevertheless illegal, from shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater to divulging trade secrets, but the legal interpretation of the First Amendment has meant that controls on these illegal classes of speech can’t hand the government overly broad powers to restrict speech in advance (a condition called prior restraint) or to create restrictions so broad that the general public feels nervous speaking in public (a condition called a chilling effect). The interaction of these interpretations means that many of the kinds of harm that come from speech are simply allowed to happen, with punishment adjudicated after the fact.
This shift from prevention to reaction is continuing to spread. The Chinese government is losing the ability to shape media coming out of China, a challenge far more serious than censoring inbound information. The French are finding it hard to police hate speech, long illegal but now carried via media increasingly outside their control. The United States can’t keep its citizens from gambling online. Governments everywhere are having to increase both surveillance and punishment of pedophiles, now that the pedophiles are able to gather online and trade tips on earning the trust of children. This doesn’t mean that these harms will overwhelm us, but it does mean we will have to restructure society, from a strategy of prevention to one of monitoring and reaction, as a side effect of more control of media slipping into the hands of the citizens.
A Possible Future for Collective Action
Here is a brief account of a scene in a movie theater lobby in a Dallas mall after a showing of Michael Moore’s Sicko:
Outside the restroom doors . . . the theater was in chaos. The entire Sicko audience had somehow formed an impromptu town hall meeting in front of the ladies’ room. I’ve never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus. [ . . . ] The talk gradually centered around a core of ten or twelve strangers in a cluster while the rest of us stood around them listening intently to this thing that seemed to be happening out of nowhere. The black gentleman engaged by my redneck in the restroom shouted for everyone’s attention. The conversation stopped instantly as all eyes in this group of thirty or forty people were now on him. “If we just see this and do nothing about it,” he said, “then what’s the point? Something has to change.” There was silence, then the redneck’s wife started calling for e-mail addresses. Suddenly everyone was scribbling down everyone else’s e-mail, promising to get together and do something . . . though no one seemed to know quite what.
Those observations, made by Josh Tyler on the film review site CinemaBlend.com, demonstrate our changed social environment. This group of people, from various backgrounds and brought together only by the accident of a matinee showing at the mall, were able to exchange e-mail, knowing that unlike exchanging addresses or phone numbers, this would let them take the moment of collective inspiration in the lobby and save some part of it for later. These kinds of efforts are unlikely to be long-lived or self-sustaining—no office in D.C., no budget from donations—but the unpredictability of that kind of effort makes it a signal of a kind of commitment that is hard for any ordinary membership organization to produce effectively.
The story of the rapidly coordinated protest by ordinary citizens is one of the most durable stories we have about social media. Since Howard Rheingold’s descriptions of the political protest in the Philippines coordinated by text message, we’ve had countless examples, from the Belarusian flash mob kids to the Latino high school students in LA to the HSBC protesters in the UK. Despite the number of stories about collective action, though, they have one thing in common: they all rely on “stop energy,” on an attempt to get some other organization or group to capitulate to the demands of the collected group.
Why is so much collective action focused on protest, with its emphasis on relatively short-term and negative goals? One possible explanation is that it is simply easier to destroy than to create; getting things started in a group takes a lot more energy than trying to stop them. That explanation is hard to support, though, given the fecundity of other kinds of social media. Once you know what to look for, evidence of group creativity is everywhere. I
recently came across a site put up by one NickGreat, a member of the Lego figurine-modding community, which consists of pictures of ordinary Lego figurines modified (“modded”) with ink and added attachments, so that they resemble various characters in movies or mythology. Viewing the site, you can get some sense of how to mod a Lego figurine yourself so that it will look like characters from a variety of anime cartoons, such as Dragonball Z. This may seem like a trivial example, but triviality is the point—social media is so ubiquitous and cheap that even members of the Lego figurine-modding community find it worthwhile to share. Compare people sharing cute pictures of their cats, sometimes after adding cute captions to the photos. Or the Tax Almanac, a wiki for U.S.-based tax advice. Or the home schooling textbook resale network. Everywhere we look, social media makes creativity not just possible but desirable enough that these examples and millions of others are all out there, with more added every day. Everywhere, that is, except collective action.
Perhaps collective action is more focused on protesting than creating because collective action is simply harder than sharing or collaborating. This at least has the ring of truth about it—collective action is harder to get going because all the participants stand or fall together. The Lukashenko government isn’t going to collapse just for some of the flash mob protesters; it’s either going to collapse or it’s not going to collapse, and everyone in the country will benefit, or not, in the same way. As a result, collective action requires a much higher commitment to the group and the group’s shared goals than things like sharing of pictures or even collaborative creation of software.
Even given this difficulty, though, we have examples of people coming together and engaging in collective action that is both long term and creative. The canonical example is a barn raising, where the members of a farming village all turn out to help a neighbor build a new barn, often raised in a single day. A barn raising requires a group; thirty people can raise a barn in a day, but one person can’t build the same barn in a month. Barns need groups to do the assembling.
Like open source software and wikis, barn raisings don’t involve commercial transactions, and yet they happen. Why would I show up at your farm to help you build your barn when I’ve got my own work to do? There are two basic answers to that question: either I owe you a favor, or I want you to owe me one. And if either of those things are true of enough individuals, a whole group can enter a state called “reciprocal altruism.” With reciprocal altruism, favors are exchanged without formal bookkeeping—if Alice does a favor for Bob, who does a favor for Carol, who does a favor for Doria, and so on, it all comes out in the wash. Instead of each member of the group tracking favors from each other member directly, certain kinds of help simply become social norms.
Barn raisings, though, have one significant limitation—they only work in relatively small communities. Cities don’t have anything that feels like a barn raising—certain neighborhoods can achieve something like the necessary social density, but not the city as a whole. And here we have the issue of scale again—the condition of reciprocal altruism is dependent on two things: social density and continuity. Density is required to make reciprocal altruism a strong social norm. Anyone I do a favor for has to know other people who also know me, and this pattern has to be common enough that favors can be passed around the community without formal bookkeeping. When the community is small, that can happen; when it’s large, it’s easy for free riders to collect favors they simply don’t return. The other requirement, continuity, is simply social density in time. Reciprocal altruism requires a kind of communal memory, so that anyone I do a favor for is likely to be around long enough to repay it to me or anyone else in the community.
Small communities with long-time residents have the necessary social density and continuity to build up enough mutual favors to be a fertile ground for reciprocal altruism. Large and transient communities do not—favors “leak” out of the community too quickly. So here’s a hypothesis about the near future, based on little more than a hunch and some tantalizing examples: we’re about to experience a revolution in collective action, and the driver of that revolution will be new legal structures that will support productive collective action.
All the current examples we have of large-scale, long-lived creativity, like Wikipedia or Linux, are in the realm of intellectual property; Wikipedia and Linux and a million other co-created projects are, in an almost literal way, frozen ideas. What makes most such collaborative efforts work is copyright law, where some form of license is created that allows people to come together and share their work freely, without fear of having that work taken from them later. There are dozens of such licenses, like Richard Stallman’s original GPL, currently used by Linux and a host of other collaborative projects, or Creative Commons licenses, which allow the sharing of written work in an analogous manner.
In its twenty-five years of existence, the GPL and its cousins have transformed software development, precisely because they provided assurance to groups of programmers who wanted to pool their efforts, but they are also transforming much of the rest of the software industry as well, because GPL-licensed tools have become such a large part of the ecosystem. In the last ten years, Microsoft has moved from being an implacable foe of Open Source efforts to adopting a position of grudging but genuine accommodation. Similarly, Wikipedia has forced Encyclopedia Britannica to explore opening itself up to both free access for some users, and to taking suggestions from outside contributors. Instead of this kind of change, imagine that Linus Tovalds, originator of Linux, had been limited to protesting Microsoft in order to get a free, high-quality operating system, or that the only way Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger could get the encyclopedia they wanted was to petition Encyclopedia Britannica to make theirs free. Imagine, in other words, that they had been limited to the tools of protest culture we see in so much of the political sphere. They would have expended far more effort, while accomplishing far less, if anything. What the GPL and related licenses allowed these groups to do was not simply to protest against existing structures, but to compete against them.
This is one of the most interesting differences between social media when it’s used for creative and collaborative work, like Wikipedia, compared to its use to coordinate collective action. There is no license for collective action analogous to the GPL, no way a group of people can secure the freedom to work together in ways the government respects. To see what this means in practice, imagine you and a group of five friends walk into a bank, and say, “We’re all pitching in together to accomplish something, and we’ve agreed among ourselves how we want to work together. Please give us a bank account, so our group can start taking, raising, and spending money.” You’d be laughed out of the room. The best you could do is have one of you could open a bank account, and add the others as cosigners, and if the original member disappears, the account disappears with her.
Now imagine you and those five friends go off and form a company, and then return to that bank saying, “We’ve incorporated. Please give us a bank account.” The bank would say, “Sign here.” An incorporated group can do a number of things an unincorporated group can’t, like drafting contracts and bylaws that have legal standing, raising and spending money, hiring and firing employees, and so on. These things are possible in part because incorporation creates both social density and continuity.
The act of incorporation, literally “embodiment,” is the way the government recognizes the work of groups, analogous to copyright being the way it recognizes creators. So why don’t more groups using social media for long-term goals incorporate? At least part of the answer seems to be that the current corporate structures require things like paper filings, physical headquarters, in-person board meetings, hierarchical management structures, and so on. None of these barriers is fatal by itself, but anything that raises the cost of doing something reduces what gets done. (Coase again.) If there were a structure that allowed for internet-friendly incorporation, we might see an increase i
n collective action directed at creating and sustaining things, instead of being protest dominated, as it is today.
There are several interesting examples today of just this sort of experimentation. The governor of the state of Vermont recently signed a law that allows for the creation of virtual companies, which allow groups who coordinate mainly or entirely through social media to apply for legal status in Vermont. The new rules governing these virtual companies were designed by David Johnson and his students at New York Law School, with their goal being to allow groups who pool attention and labor and meet online, to have the same kind of legal recognition as companies who pool capital and meet in the real world.
Another approach to the same issue is the Meetup Alliance. The Meetup Alliance grew out of a sense that various Meetup groups in various locales might get value out of associating at a regional, national, or even global level. Meetup provides the infrastructure to allow such a “group of groups” to form, with event listings and discussion areas. In the future, Meetup might also supply fund-raising tools and help creating bylaws. (One unusual decision by Meetup is to allow such alliances to be joined by non-Meetup groups as well, such as mailing lists, Facebook groups, and LiveJournal communities.) It is then up to the groups themselves to decide whether to gather together and what tasks to take on in such an alliance.
