Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Clay Shirky on the economics of sociability
The first session is a conversation with Clay Shirky.
Kathi Vian intro: Recent experiences with connective technologies and global networks have suggested that networks are the new competitors to markets and firms. (This is an argument made by the likes of Woody Powell, Yochai Benkler, and others.)
Light infrastructures. Our surveys have revealed the growth of smart networkers, who are really into DIY-- who are potential wranglers, to use Bruce Sterling's term-- and who are starting to learn how to cannibalize legacy technological systems for new purposes: to use these systems for the aims of connectivity and sociability.
Social value. There's plenty of excitement about light infrastructures leapfrogging old heavy ones in the Third World. The big question may be whether these can succeed as social projects, not just technological ones: whether habits and social behaviors developed in the old tech world turn out to be critical for the new.
Social cities. Social cities-- often smaller, more autonomous, and with a higher standard of living-- are the urban equivalent of light infrastructure. The question is whether, in a more sociable world, these cities will have advantages that megacities do not.
Clay Shirky: "The current threat is not that old institutions are lined up against new ones. It's that the old ones are lined up against a new ecosystem."
Discussion with Andrea Saveri and Jerry Michalski
JM: Is the modern corporation doomed?
CS: The Internet drives down coordination and distribution costs, allowing networking to morph into an activity whose purpose is to create social capital, and proximate and significant value. You can now have organizations with organization (in the classic managerial and logistical sense).
AS: This also lowers barriers for contribution.
CS: It lets you gather vastly larger numbers of small contributions from a wide variety of people. A company can't hire someone who has only one good idea; but an open source project can incorporate one idea from a person, without any problem.
JM: What about failure?
CS: In networks, risk is free, in the sense that there's no downside to the collective. In companies, on the other hand, risk can be expensive in a variety of ways. In mission-critical enterprises-- open heart surgery or running a nuclear power plant, for example-- a networked model isn't going to be trustworthy; but in areas where the real costs of failure are small, networks will dominate. You can be profligate with experimentation and not worry so much about failure, because 1) the cost of failure is incredibly low, and 2) the successes can be really significant.
Questions
Q: What'll be the balance between self-organizing versus benign hierarchy?
CS: Good example of failure is the Howard Dean campaign, because it was better about bonding capital than bridging capital. Goal directed activity in networks will always be problematic. When you can use love-- of others, or goals-- as a motivation, you'll be able to create something sustaining.
Q: Are self-organizing communities politically stabilizing or destabilizing? You can rapidly organize advocacy groups, but what do you do about those who don't or can't participate? Will there be a new digital divide?
CS: Best when you've got large problems that affect a wide range of people, countering the special interest issue. re: digital divide. The technology is less the sisue,g iven the low cost of the interfaces. Time is the big divide: busy people, maringally economic people working two jobs, lack the time to participate.
Q: Will these networks evolve into companies or governments?
CS: I don't think so in most cases: managing the transition and taking on those costs could be tricky (Why mess with success?)
JM: Do they evolve to have the power of other kinds of institutions?
CS: Sure.
Q: How's this model translate to the developing world? How can it be used to address the needs of development?
CS: This infrastructure to do this isn't expensive: cell phones are a lot more important than high-end computers.
JM: Not having infrastructure can be a benefit: the Internet was slow to come to France because of Minitel.
AS: Look at social capital infrastructures as the ones to build off of, not technological ones.
Q: Opportunities for big business to harvest goods from networks?
CS: Harvest is a funny word. Craigslist has succeeded because, as Craig Newark says, "I leave a lot of money on the table." "Extractive logic for organic systems tends to shorten their lifespans.... The more you know what your goals are, the less valuable networks are going to be to you." Having said that, splitting out those parts of decision-making that can be decisive, versus those that can be collectively decided, is the way to go: the Sci-Fi Channel, for example, had its fans decide which Star Trek episodes to air in a season.