Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed

by Alexis Ohanian

  Debby spent the next twelve days distributing the supplies she’d gathered and showing teachers how to post their own DonorsChoose.org classroom projects online. Amid the work, Debby dashed off another e-mail update for me:

  Tragedy always has a way of revealing human goodness and caring… people here are working around the clock to make sure teachers are ready for their students to return to school Aug. 17. There is a renewed sense of optimism and just about all of the 260 teachers who lost their classrooms are signed up for donorschoose.org training over the next week and a half.

  The connection. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a connection felt between neighbors working hand in hand to rebuild or a connection between complete strangers joined only by the Internet and their desire to help. Debby said it best: “It makes the world smaller because it makes you believe that people really do care and really do want to help each other.”

  Debby saw her hard work pay off when schools reopened on schedule on August 12. By that first day of school, she had raised more than eight hundred thousand dollars for 260 teachers. Half of that was raised on DonorsChoose.org within four months of the storm.

  It gets even better—the team behind DonorsChoose.org was watching along with the rest of us, cheering her on, supporting her where they could. There were no gatekeepers: not the schools, not the government, not the folks at DonorsChoose.org. When superempowered individuals can take advantage of an online platform like DonorsChoose.org, and when they take advantage of social media—the level playing field that enables everyone to compete for people’s attention—they can do big things.

  What’s so wonderful about this idea is that it’s always been anonymous, unheralded individuals who’ve worked together to bring about great change, yet only recently have we had the tools for them to effectively implement their great ideas at scale.

  Success doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but the myth is propagated because only a few of us end up in front of the cameras or talking to reporters. Behind Debby Guardino, who is too modest to take half the credit she deserves, were more than five thousand individual donors who gave whatever money they could to her cause—inspired by her and motivated by the ability to effect real change.

  With Our Powers Combined

  The model developed by Charles Best doesn’t apply just to school supplies or computers. The wild success of the crowdfunding site Kickstarter has validated the model and popularized an entirely new way of fund-raising for the masses. But the essence of crowdfunding should be familiar—it connects backers (not donors; in this case, people aren’t making a donation but rather a commitment to pay a certain amount for a specified reward as long as the total fund-raising goal is met) with creatives to produce awesome things. Replace “backers” with “donors” and “creatives” with “teachers,” and you’re rereading the start of this chapter about DonorsChoose.org.

  Everything is changing, and no one has a clue what’s next or where it’s going to end up—and that’s why it’s so exhilarating. Crowdfunding has given anyone with an Internet connection and a few dollars the chance to support a project he or she believes in. Top hats for everyone!

  Well-stocked public school classrooms, startups founded in dorm rooms, creative projects funded by hipsters—these are just a few examples of the things that can become a reality as a result of the Internet’s potential for facilitating awesomeness in the world.

  I’d like to spend a few moments talking about another crowdfunded project I happen to believe very strongly in. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Erik Martin, general manager of reddit, and I crowdfunded a bus tour across the American heartland so we could meet people and talk about Internet freedom. I’ll explore the politics behind this in chapter 8, but for now, know that our goal was to dispel the myth that only Silicon Valley cares about the Internet. We brought a half dozen journalists and our own film crew to record the journey, which became the documentary Silicon Prairie: America’s New Internet Economy.8

  Along the way, we met some awesome individuals, including Carl Blake, an Iowa pig farmer who spoke to a crowd at our “Internet Uncaucus” about the fact that crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter could help him get seed money for his revolutionary ideas in farming, which traditional investors simply wouldn’t back. He had plans to use the Internet to circumvent traditional access to capital because it could help his business bring home the bacon.9 That event was hosted on a bridge that had been closed to traffic, thanks to an Iowa legend, Dwolla, a startup aiming to be the future of online payment. Their network has already transformed businesses large and small—in fact, I even use it to pay my own independent contractors.

  We attended a high school football game with the founders of Hudl, a company in Lincoln, Nebraska, that builds software enabling coaches and their athletes to share game footage, and saw firsthand how much of a difference their startup was making.10 This platform also allows a talented athlete to put together a professional-looking highlight reel, something that would otherwise be nearly impossible for low-income students to afford. These highlight reels can often be very influential when students are applying for athletic scholarships.

  Two women, Garnet Griebel and Katie Miller, started Scarlett Garnet jewelry through a relationship that began online. They each found success on Etsy, a marketplace for crafts, which was established in Brooklyn but now connects the world. The site has certainly made a difference in these two women’s lives. Scarlett Garnet began as a digital storefront on Etsy and today is a shop in downtown Saint Louis, which we visited when our campaign bus was on the road. Stop by between barbecue tastings if you’re in town.

  An auditorium full of University of Nebraska students watched me call their congressional representative on speed dial to ask if he supported Internet freedom.11 I wanted to make sure they all knew just how easy it was (there’s an app for that!). A trucker at a rest stop offered to join our convoy once he realized what we were up to. Literally every single person we met—once we explained the half red and half blue bus that had INTERNET 2012 written on it—was excited about our campaign.

  Not only did we have a special bus, but the lead car that escorted us on this road trip was built by Local Motors. What’s remarkable about these guys isn’t just that the car was built entirely in the USA. It’s that the design of the car was crowdsourced entirely online. That’s right: people from all over the world contributed designs for a working car that eventually rolled off the assembly line. As a result, the production costs from idea to vroom12 were a fraction of what it’d cost a traditional auto manufacturer. Also, the entire process happened either in cyberspace or in the United States of America.

  The idea for Local Motors came to John “Jay” Rogers while he was a marine serving in Iraq. Frustrated by the inefficient supply line for replacement parts, Jay became convinced there had to be a smarter way to build and maintain vehicles. When he got back to the States he saw the same inefficiencies in the auto industry and realized the old order was long overdue for disruption. So he built a website first, then he built a factory.

  At LocalMotors.com, you’ll find a community of designers who contribute ideas for every element of the car—from the body to each detail of the interior. All submissions are covered by a Creative Commons license that permits noncommercial use with attribution. Should the company’s designers use a community-submitted element, the person who designed it gets paid, but there’s more to it than just money. Sangho Kim, the man primarily responsible for designing what became our escort car, was a college student in Pasadena at the time. Kim got twenty thousand dollars in prizes for his contribution, but his work helped get him a job designing for GM Korea. Local Motors built the factory that made the car in the region where it expected to sell the product—a practice known as microfactory retailing—which meant that the company’s first factory, which produced a desert racer, was built in the American Southwest. From pixels to pavement, this Internet economy knows no bounds.

  Whether it’s
pig farmers in Iowa using a crowdfunding website from New York or an art student in California designing cars for an automaker in Arizona, awesome people are bringing their ideas to fruition using new tools that are emerging all the time. In many cases, these awesome individuals, like Debby Guardino, were able to build great things on the Internet without knowing how to write a line of code. If you’ve made it here via chapter 5, you know how valuable the ability to develop software is, but it’s certainly not a requirement for success online.13

  One of the lessons of going to the crowd is that it’s not just money your contributors give—they’re also evangelists who can spread the word about your project and your mission. Just getting someone to try something you’ve made is a feat unto itself, but to get them to part ways with their hard-earned money is where magic starts happening. A person who gives money to a classroom on DonorsChoose.org or to engineers for a feature on the next Local Motors vehicle is literally and figuratively invested in the project and wants to see it succeed because it validates the chance she took. And it feels pretty awesome, too.

  These are stories about determined and connected individuals who’ve inspired and mobilized people because of a technology that closed the gap between inspiration and action. They never needed to ask anyone’s permission, and neither did their backers, contributors, and donors. Going online from a computer in Chesapeake, Virginia, or Yerevan, Armenia, has never been so easy or so empowering. And what’s more, there are plenty more tools being developed online to help people all over the world, like Debby Guardino and Jay Rogers, identify and solve problems. Want to make the world a better place? Or, as I like to say, just make it suck less? What are you waiting for?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Are You Not Entertained?

  The YouTube video opens rather plainly. In a bare room, you see a young man seated in a wheelchair. He has the classic symptoms of cerebral palsy: the lazy eye, the stiff limbs, the halting speech. Immediately you feel a familiar twinge of sympathy. The guy introduces himself as Zach, from Austin, Texas. It’s unclear where this is going. He insists that you’ve met before and that sparks flew, but now it’s time you got to know one another better. He’s got what he calls “the sexiest of the palsies” and you realize that this isn’t going to be like anything you were expecting.

  That’s how I first met Zach Anner. I met him when so many of his fans did, back when he was just a few hundred pixels tall in our browsers and his video was rocketing up the front page of reddit and very quickly spreading across the Internet. At the time, Oprah Winfrey had launched a competition in which the winner would be rewarded with his or her own talk show on the recently launched Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). All you had to do was submit a video pitch telling the world why you’d be the next great host. Zach Anner certainly didn’t fit the mold of the traditional host, but that’s what made so many of us rally behind him. Here was someone who had an original voice and something to say. His video went relatively unnoticed for the first two weeks—until it hit reddit, went viral, and scored a couple million votes.

  As usually happens when innovation and corporate sponsorships are involved, though, there was controversy. Zach had a commanding lead until suddenly a number of other contestant videos that weren’t even close to Zach’s in number of votes jumped to Zach’s level or higher. His fans alleged conspiracy—that someone was trying to keep Zach from winning—but OWN insisted they would investigate any impropriety.1 Regardless, the Internet public wouldn’t be thwarted. It was like Mister Splashy Pants all over again. Even John Mayer pitched in, announcing via YouTube that he would write and record a theme song for Zach’s show should he win. With the Internet public and the guy who wrote “Your Body Is a Wonderland” on his side, how could Zach lose? Votes poured in for Zach, and ultimately more than nine million people across the country voted to give Zach his own OWN show.2

  But the competition wasn’t over there. When the official numbers came back from OWN, Zach was not in fact among the top five “winners” but was included along with two other “fan favorites.”3 It felt like a bit of a consolation prize—like those “participation trophies” we all got when we were growing up. Along with the nine other winners, he flew out to Harpo Studios to compete in a show about earning a show. How meta.

  Zach rolled over the competition all the way to the final elimination round, where it came down to a choice between him and Kristina Kuzmic-Crocco, an effervescent and attractive mom from California who aspired to host her own cooking show. In an oddly anticlimactic move, OWN decided to give both finalists their own shows. It seemed that Zach was finally going to get some of the recognition he deserved. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that Zach had to do the show his Oprah producers wanted him to do. Even when Zach curbed his creative vision, bigger forces were working against him: OWN was having problems drawing an audience in general, not just an audience for Zach Anner. In the end, Rollin’ with Zach lasted just four episodes on OWN. Not a single full episode was posted online during its short run. In fact, one can hardly find any of its content, beyond a few teasers, anywhere online even today. For another six months, Zach rolled around Austin and was planning on moving back to his parents’ house in Buffalo. Despite having millions of fans around the country, he was now out of work.

  That was the state of things when I met him for a giant doughnut at 4:00 a.m. in a cold drizzle under the awning of a church in Round Rock, Texas. After just a brief conversation, I couldn’t believe someone this awesome wasn’t making a living sharing his unique humor and uncanny affability with the world. Zach remains quite grateful to Oprah, but he was anxious for the chance to make the travel show he really wanted to make. In between sugary bites, we plotted his Internet-fueled comeback. Despite the way his show was handled, Zach doesn’t hold any grudges. Quite the opposite, actually, because well before Oprah gave him a shot, millions of anonymous people online gave him something better:

  It was the greatest feeling I’ve ever experienced. Before that, I’m somebody who has a very limited skill set. I’m talented, I know that, but not all the pieces fit. How am I going to make a difference in the world and do something that affects people in a positive way? For the longest time before that audition video blew up, I didn’t know if that was possible. I spent a lot of time just banging my head against the wall trying to figure it out. I always used to relate to homeless people, thinking about how easy it would be for me to end up that way if I just don’t find a path to make me useful in the world. When that happened, it was the greatest gift because it gave me a way to use what I have and made it clear what my purpose was and why things were the way things were.

  Seriously, Someone Else Needs to Drive—He Can’t

  It’s about time we explained that pig with bread wings who’s been following us around for the last six chapters. That flying porcine superhero is the mascot for my social enterprise that makes and sells geeky things so that the profits can be donated to charity. It’s like a Newman’s Own for nerds.4 None of us at Breadpig had ever produced a show before, and we told Zach Anner as much. But then again, our company had never published a book before xkcd: volume 0 came out. The point is, if you want to do something awesome, you can find a way. Even book publishing and TV production can be learned with some help along the way. Although we didn’t have the technical know-how from day one, we did have something more important: a product that people loved (I trust you remember chapter 5). From there, it was just a matter of finding people with the skills to get our awesome content out into the world.

  Our answer, not surprisingly, was the Internet. Video distribution platforms like YouTube and Vimeo have empowered content creators as well as provided them with additional revenue streams through advertising. In only the last few years, global online properties like YouTube and even Amazon have gotten into the content production business. They’ve built their studio model to be lean, and they make lots of small bets on content that traditional studios simply can’t make. They’ve st
arted writing checks to fund original content that will draw viewers, develop up-and-coming talent, and build the perception that they’re not only a place to watch great online video but also a great place to make it. We went to YouTube first, given Zach’s established audience and YouTube presence. All we did was make an introduction. Six months after his show deal fell through, Zach was back in a style befitting the Terminator.5

  The response from his fans was immediate and clear: “Personal army reporting for duty.”6

  The Internet was thrilled to have him back. Zach found sponsors for Riding Shotgun that paid for portions of his production fee in exchange for campy product placements. No one is sure what’s next. Zach Anner just wants to make a living entertaining people. He’s exploring the possibility of a crowdfunded feature-length film. It could be another online series picked up by another production company. What we do know is that his audience grows every day, along with the ways for them to support him. There’s a pervasive optimism that spills over from the innovators who build the tools onto all the creatives who use it. As Zach says, “No mountain is too high, and no Atlantis is too underwater or fictional!”

  We like to think that real talent always has a way of getting noticed. Harrison Ford was a self-taught professional carpenter when he was hired to build cabinets in the home of George Lucas, who cast him in American Graffiti and set him on a course that led to Indiana Jones.7 If Ford hadn’t picked up the right hammer or taken another job, Solo would’ve ended up saying “I love you, too” instead of “I know.”8 Think about that. There are tons of stories, like Ford’s, of extremely talented individuals who couldn’t catch a break going through the traditional system, whether in music, film, TV, or publishing. And yet somehow, through connections, or persistence, or pure stupid luck, they get “discovered.” This system certainly makes for some romantic stories, but it is actually a terrible business model if what you actually want to do is find smart, talented people and help them make awesome things. The old model probably wouldn’t have put Zach Anner on television, no matter how good he might be with a power sander. It certainly wouldn’t have given him his own travel show to host. Ironically, an old-style network used the Internet to surface the talent, but they ultimately failed to capitalize on it because they shoehorned Zach into a format—television—where he had neither creative freedom nor an existing coterie of fans.