Here Comes Everybody | Clay Shirky | Talks at Google

All right, welcome everyone. Just wanted to introduce our author here, Clay Shirky.

Very nice to meet you.

So, earlier today I was searching on Google for our esteemed Clay Shirky here, and he's one of the few lucky individuals to appear at the top of the search results with his very own Wikipedia page. And it's appropriate because he's an expert on all things wiki. Mr. Shirky is a professor, as you may have read, at NYU's Graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, lecturing on how the networks that people work to shape can shape them back. He has appeared in a variety of Publications, Business 2.0, the New York Times, Wired Magazine, Wall Street Journal, writing on the effects of our Internet becoming an ever more social and connecting force in our lives. With that, it's a pleasure for authors at Google to to present this expert in technopsychology and what makes our computers and minds tick together in harmony, Mr. Clay Shirky.

Thanks very much. Thank you all. Thank you all for coming. There's the book. I want to start by talking a little bit about why I wrote this as a book. I've been writing for a technical audience for about a dozen years, but over the last few years, two things have happened and that made me think, all right, now's the time to do this as a book. The first is I've changed my mind about enough things that the essay form stopped working. The essay is mainly about picking an idea and then getting rid of all the rest of the complexity around it. And that wasn't working anymore. And the second thing is that this is, although it's a book with technology in it, it's not a book about technology. It seems to me that the social tools we've got, the group forming tools we've got, have spread so completely into society that the social effects that are being manifest on top of them no longer require you to explain the technology under the hood to make those effects clear. And I'll make an analogy there to how that essentially what that social transition feels like, a historical analogy. There's a famous story in my family about my parents first date. My father wanted to take my mother to the drive in, but he didn't have anything to drive into the drive in in. So he borrowed my Uncle Virgil's car. And my mother, when they got there, decided to try and impress my father by ordering the most sophisticated drink she knew, which is a root beer float. And my mother hates root beer. She always has. And so she proceeded to throw up on the floor of my Uncle Virgil's car during Their first day. So my dad had to clean this up, drive my mom home, then clean it up some more and drive it home and apologize to Virgil and so forth. And fortunately for me, there was a second day. So what part of that story is about the internal combustion engine? None of it in any obvious way, but all of it in another way. No internal combustion engine, no cars. No cars, no dates in cars. No dates in cars, no drive in movies. By the 1940s, the entire structure of society had become automotive without needing to understand what was under the hood. So effectively this book is for a non technical audience. It's written at least to be understandable by a non technical audience. The letters TCPIP appear nowhere, in that order, in order to talk instead about the social effects. What's the big deal about the network and the tools we have now? The book in one bullet point is this group action just got easier there. Now you don't have to go buy it. I'm sorry. So saved Amazon some server load. It is essentially about the ways in which all of our tools that rely on the Internet and increasingly mobile phones as a social platform are making it easier for groups to find each other and to take a kind of collective action that we were previously locked out of doing just because of the complexity of coordination. In the book, I walk through four kinds of collective action. Sharing, conversation, collaboration, and finally collective action. I want to take a couple of examples now and walk through each of them here to illustrate that overall principle. Three of those examples are, I think, widely manifest in the world today. It's easy to look around and find examples of sharing, of conversation and of collaboration. Collective action is the thing that is the most nascent. You can find some examples of it today. I think that that is the thing that is. That is essentially the group theme that's developing most consistently. I borrowed from Seb Peke, who's a computer science social scientist, this phrase, ridiculously easy group. For me, this is the underlying change. The idea that when you want to get a group of people together now to accomplish any of these tasks, this is what you rely on. So Ancient History, 1974, the first piece, the first real social application on the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. They had by 1974 got file sharing up and running, they'd gotten remote login to computers up and running FTP and Telnet, and then they ported email over from the 10x system at MIT. Now the big deal about email wasn't point to point communication. We had a lot of ways of doing that and it wasn't the ability to take one thing and send it to a lot of people. There were a lot of broadcast patterns as well. Email did some of those things better, but it essentially amplified existing patterns. The really big deal was this reply all, first social feature ever. The ability not just to receive a message that was targeted at a lot of people, but the ability to take that message and turn it into a group conversation. The file that was written became a platform for creating a group. This is the beginning, this is the first example of ridiculously easy group forming. A lot of what's happened between then and now isn't about the change in the technical logic. The underlying logic of the Internet is a group forming network. A lot of what's changed is the social adoption, right? As with the automotive example, it's very often when technologies get boring that they get technologically boring, that they get socially interesting. And that's what's happening now. So I want to walk through the, as I said, the first three patterns, sharing, conversation and collaboration, which are, I think, widely supported today. So we'll start with sharing. Sharing is the simplest pattern because it requires the least from the individual in terms of synchronizing themselves with the group. You have to give up the least amount of your own personal structure. You have to do the least coordinating with other people in order to share. Great example of how little you can get away with when you're sharing is Delicious. The URL and tagging platform Delicious has. And for people who've been using Delicious a long time, this is an incredibly colorful and jazzy interface compared to how it used to look. It used to look like something that would have been rendered in the original mosaic browser in 1994. But for all of this, right, Delicious has really only three primitives. There's a URL, there's a set of tags, freeform labels, and there's a set of users. The intuition here wasn't that you'd like to be able to share your URLs online. Backflip did that in 1996. The intuition here wasn't even that you'd like to label them. Tags are nice, but we had folders before. Certainly a non hierarchical method of labeling them is better than a hierarchical method. The intuition here isn't even that you might like to share them. Backflip could let you share. The intuition here was make sharing the default case. Let people remove themselves from sharing. But by making the social aggregation of these links the default case. With very little extra work, Delicious managed to create a Profound amount of social value. This is the same pattern as Flickr, the same pattern as YouTube. The assumption is that you would like to share these things widely. And that assumption plus people operating out of purely personal motivation creates a huge amount of social value. The other thing Delicious does is it reverses the old pattern of gather and then share. Before, if you had a group of people who you wanted to have share things, you'd have to get them together first and try to arrange to have them share things. Here the pattern is share and then gather. You can discover after the fact who else is looking at something that you're looking at. I convinced O'Reilly, the publisher, to release a single chapter of a book on web services. They'd done a chapter talking about rest, the representational state transfer pattern for web services, and I convinced them to release that chapter as a free PDF. So they said, here it is, and they sent me the URL and I said, well, great, what do I do with this? Now I've got to turn around and figure out how to lobby the REST community to be aware of this and make people aware of this. And then I realized I don't have to do anything of the kind. I'm just going to bookmark it and I'll tag it with REST and I'll find the community. So in fact, I didn't have to do the social work in advance, right? This makes a standing wave of attention. And that pattern means that you can now create profound value out of sharing with very little advanced communal infrastructure. Very often sharing is linked to conversation. In Delicious case, it isn't, but in a lot of other cases it is. Here's an example from Flickr. Flickr is the photo sharing service, obviously. And this is an example of a kind of photograph called high dynamic range photography. High dynamic range photography is where you take three photos of the same scene at different exposures, and then you use software to take the brightest brights from the bright exposure, the darkest darks from the darkest exposure to the greenest greens and so on, and you smash it all together. You get something done, right? You get something that's midway between a photograph and a pre Raphaelite painting. It's actually quite a striking effect. Now, in the old days, it would have taken about five years for that way of working to go from a handful of professionals to something the average photographer could do. First, it would have to be documented. It would show up in photo magazines. It would move very slowly through the community. On Flickr, it took about three months. A photo would go up and because every URL is a latent community, which is to say every URL is at least potentially a site where you can coordinate the people who are looking at it to create additional value. When the photo went up on Flickr, people could come in and say, hey, I really like that. And then, how did you do that? And immediately a community of practice can form around the photo trading techniques, right? So this is what. Right? This is what this page looks like. That photo is there. You can see for a while there's just conversation about how to do it, and suddenly it turns into a how to. Other people posting photos, decomposing it. This is how I do it. And it goes on and on and on. So the site of sharing also becomes the site of learning. And that pattern of turning things into a community of practice, when people have shared interest, means that Flickr, with no effort from corporate headquarters, with no effort on the part of the engineers or the designers at Flickr, has created a platform for an enormous amount of conversational value. And this is an example, right? Every one of these falls into this communities of practice pattern where people are able to take all of this stuff, everything they're looking at, and break it down into very specific, here's step one, here's step two, here's step three. It works better, it works faster, and it works with less involvement by Flickr than the old method of moving the same information through the community. Sometimes the conversational pattern obviously sits by itself. This is the oldest pattern. This is the email pattern. One of the points I make in the book and one of the points I especially want to make here, is that a lot of what's going on, isn't it? Not only is it about fancy technology, it's actually about avoiding, in many cases, too much technology, about having a very simple technical substrate and a relatively rich social superstructure. So this is a conversation on a bulletin board, web bulletin board called Bronze Beta. This is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan board. And Bronze Beta is interesting because early in the life of the community, they had a crisis. Warner Brothers was selling the show, was selling Buffy. And the new owner said, we're not going to keep that site up. We're not going to pay to keep Bronze up any longer, Bronze being the name of the original site. And so the user community rallied together and they raised enough money to pay programmers to build them a new bulletin board. And when they went to those programmers, they said, for God's sake, whatever you do, don't give it any features, right? Don't give it any Reputation system, don't give it any. Ranking systems, don't give it any. Star this, flag that, none of that, right? Our community has grown up around this crappy CGI script that somebody put up in 1995. And that's exactly what we want. So this is from a few days ago. And this is what Buffy looks like today. This is the Buffy page. And at the very top is a form which you could go to now and fill out, right? You fill out your username, password, optional. You fill out your optional email address, 0. Security. Anything you put in this box appears here. It's a push down stack. And this isn't off to the side. This isn't the conversation on the site. This is the site. The entirety of this design is around keeping these people in conversational touch with one another. And rather remarkably, they have survived the death of their object of veneration. Right? Despite Buffy being off the air low these many years, this group is still together, often trading birthday greetings and so forth. So there are ways in which too much technology actually can weigh a community down. And there are ways in which, when a community is in sync with the kind of technology that's supporting it, they can create social norms that actually make it healthy and long lived. Then there's the collaboration pattern. We're moving up the stack in terms of how much the individual has to give up in order to synchronize with the group. Collaboration requires even more synchronization in conversation, because now they're shared output. The famous examples of collaboration, obviously, open source software everywhere, Wikipedia. One of the ones that most interested me is the anime community that did fan subbing. What these guys said essentially was Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon. We're sick of Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon is all anybody knows about in the West. We want to find the good stuff and we want to bring it over, because the people doing the distribution aren't translating the interesting work. So they wrote their own software to do fan subbing, which is essentially you play back the anime and you do your own either subtitling or you do your own voiceovers. This is the mark of a serious software effort. They ported it to FreeBSD. This is some hardcore coding. And then they set up bulletin boards where they said, essentially this is the title, this is what we've got. We're going to ship it to you on vhs. This is how much it would cost to ship it to you. It's basically the cost of media we will or will not ship internationally and so forth. And you can see here, it's all distributor group name. This had to be a collaborative effort in some cases. Someone who's good at translating but wasn't good at doing the voiceover, someone who's good at spotting interesting stuff but wasn't good at translating, someone who's writing the software but not doing the spotting and so forth. And, and so they came together in clans essentially and then engaged in this kind of competitive collaborative environment. You'll notice over here, most of the dates are years old. Interestingly, this group wasn't out to stick it to the man. They would put up one of these animes and then if the company that owned this did their own translation, they'd take this down. They didn't actually want to destroy a market, they just wanted to address a market failure, which is many more people in the west wanted to see a wide range of anime than the distributors understood. And once the distributors clued into what these guys were showing them, they actually went and filled the market need themselves. So this is a truly incredible labor of love. And it is the kind of collaborative pattern. I focus on some of these patterns instead of Apache and Linux because those stories have been sold so many times. Really every place you look when you find groups of people who really care about something, it turns out they also care about one another in the context of that thing. And they often come together to create stuff that's really, really quite extraordinary. Sharing, conversation, collaboration, all pretty well supported patterns. Now, I now want to tell three quick stories of things that have happened, but which point to a pattern that I think is still largely in the future, which is the collective action pattern. Collective action is the most serious commitment of an individual to a group because effectively you are creating a group outcome where the fate of the group stands or falls based on the work of the whole. So these are three stories from different recent examples of collective action. So number one, here's a plane on a tarmac stuck in the snow, can't get to a gate. Perhaps you've been there. This plane landed in Detroit in early 99 and Detroit had been snowbound the day before. So not enough gates were cleared. And after landing they sat there, ran out of food, they ran out of water. The toilet started to smell, then clog, then break, then leak. The babies were crying. Somebody ran down the aisle threatening to pull the door and just jump off the plane to get off. The only thing that stopped them was a 20 below wind chill. They landed at 2:45 in the afternoon. They got off the plane at 9:30 that night. Lawyers were walking up and down the aisle, canvassing people for the class action lawsuit that they were planning hour by hour. And the press, needless to say, had a field day, right? There was a general sense that passengers needed rights in this kind of dreadful situation, that something had to be done. And then nothing. Nothing happened. Northwest settled out of court. They waited it out. They wrote polite letters to people who complained. They signed themselves up for an absolutely toothless customer service commitment, which, given the line of work they're in, should have been an obvious thing to do. But they presented it as a big deal, and the whole thing blew over because it wasn't like the passengers could organize themselves. Here's another plane, actually several planes stuck on the tarmac in the rain. This is a year ago Christmas happened. This time in Dallas, not Detroit. The planes landed in heavy thunder. There was no gate. American airlines didn't want to get them off the plane and back on the plane. They kept hoping the weather would clear up. They sat there hour after hour. They ran out of food, they ran out of water. Same thing happened to the toilets. Different babies, same crying. These guys were here for eight hours. The media had a field day. There was a sense that this was an intolerable thing to do to passengers, that something needed to be done. And eight months later, it was done. New York state passed a law, passengers bill of rights, first in the nation. And because this is the busiest airspace in the country, it's effectively national policy as of January 1st of this year. What happened? The passengers were as mad, the conditions were as bad. In both 99 and 2006, what happened? That in 99, the whole thing blew over. The airlines could just wait it out. And here, in less than a year, the law got changed. Here's part of what happened. Kate Hanai, Napa Valley real estate agent, got off the plane and she was pissed, and she decided she was going to do something about it. But that's not enough, because that happened in 99, too. She did something that wasn't possible in 99. She went back home. She googled. I know I'm not supposed to use that as a verb, but she did. She went back home and she googled for people writing about this event. And then she'd go to the newspaper sites that had said, oh, you know, all these planes are stuck on the tarmac in Dallas. And then she put in her own comment. I was on that plane. This is really terrible. This is what it was like. Her comments were, in some cases, twice as long as the article she was commenting on. Right. So up till now, we're just dealing with Internet kook. At the bottom of her comments, though, she said, anybody else on this flight contact me. Here's my contact information. And you can find in the Austin paper people who were doing exactly the same thing now home in Missouri, right? So we're dealing with three states here saying, oh, we were on that flight. We have a lot of other email addresses. And she bootstrapped mainstream media's comment function, which is generally a sort of. Right. Only dumping ground for. I agree, I disagree. And actually turned it into a site of social coordination. And with that small group of angry passengers who could now stay in touch. Well, after the event, she created this coalition for an airline passengers bill of rights. Right. It is now 2007. Must have LeBlanc. And so here we go. And on that big fat button that says, sign our petition. So we're one click away from being able to collect signatures. She gets tens of thousands of signatures in a few weeks, and suddenly legislators are returning her calls. And in less than eight months, with no budget or staff to speak of, she gets the law rewritten in her favor. Now, you'll note that not one bit of this technology is at all complicated. In fact, all of this technology was readily available in 1999. What wasn't available in 1999 was the attention. In 99, 15%, maybe 20% of the air traveling public was online. By 2006, it was roughly 100%. Certainly, to first approximation, everyone on that plane could participate. And in fact, everyone in this country who flies has access to these tools. So the social weight finally caught up with the technological capability. William James, the American philosopher, once said, thinking is for doing. By which he meant we don't have brains for abstract cogitation. We have brains to help us figure out what to do next. Something similar is happening to media right now. Increasingly, publishing is for acting. When you put a piece of information out, you at least part of what you're doing is you're synchronizing the minds of the people who go there and consume that information, who read or listen or watch. But we now have a medium where if every URL is a latent community, we can actually do something about that. We can take those people who've been synchronized by that information and put them together and let them work together. And that's what Hanai figured out. And that was the difference between 99 and 2007. Second story about collective action. You guys remember flash mobs, flagpole sitting of 2003. So somebody sends out an email. It's all synchronized watches. We'll show up at the same place at the same time, do something moderately amusing. 100 people on a stone ledge in Central park making pigeon noises or whatever. This is a. A pillow fight that broke out in downtown Toronto on cue. Turns out that in the summer of 2003, when flash mobs were first being seriously promulgated, they were. A lot of the mail was being sent by Bill from New York, turned out to be Bill Wasek of Harper's Magazine. And one of the points he was trying to make with flash mob was a critique of hipster culture. He was essentially trying to show that hipsters were so brain dead that if you told them that what they were doing was going to be even moderately shocking to the bourgeoisie, they would set aside any sense of judgment they had and do any damn fool thing you wrote down in a piece of email. Which indeed is exactly what happened. And so this pattern spreads over and over again, right? You get zombie walks in San Francisco, then it goes to Toronto, goes to France, goes to the UK. By 2006, it arrives in Belarus. Somebody puts up a LiveJournal web page, hey, you guys, let's have a flash mob. We'll all go to downtown Minsk. We'll walk around October Square eating ice cream. What passes for a good time, I guess, in Minsk. And here they are, the flower of Belarusian youth walking around October Square eating ice cream. The requisite documentation for the flash mob. The pictures in this series, though, are different than any picture of any previous flash mob, because the next picture is black clad secret police dragging those kids bodily out of the square. They're dragging them out of square because the problem with the group eating ice cream isn't the ice cream, it's the group. It's illegal to act in concert in October Square. The leader of Belarus is Lukashenko, who is an Eastern European dictator of the old school, widely believed to have stolen the election in March of 2006. And then to forestall public protest, he simply clamped down on group activity. So these kids were looking for a way to protest and they hit on flash mobs, right? You can't penetrate the conspiracy because it's on a weblog, right? There's no conspiracy. It can't get much more public than a LiveJournal. You can't stop the group from entering October Squared because when they enter October Squared, they're not a group, which is the whole design pattern of the flash mob. And so they created a situation in which the state had to react in real time. But they knew this was going to happen. So they didn't just bring their ice cream, they brought their cameras. There's one half of this pattern which is media leading to collective action. The original LiveJournal posted second half of the pattern is collective action leading to media. They didn't just want to provoke this reaction, they wanted to document this reaction and they wanted to show this reaction. And these photos went up shortly after the flash mob because they wanted the rest of the world to, to see what it's like in Belarus, because nothing says dictatorship like arresting people for eating ice cream. And these guys have done this several times. My favorite is let's all go down to October Square and we'll walk around smiling at each other. There's an ontological dilemma for the cops, right? Are you smiling because you're happy or are you smiling because you're part of the conspiracy? Because if you're just a regular happy citizen and I arrest you next time time you're here, maybe you'll be part of the conspiracy. So this is an example, I think, of not just media leading to collective action and collective action leading to media. It's also an example of the difference in these tools between high freedom and low freedom environments. The use of flash mobs in the US is mainly banal. It's mainly for entertainment. In fact, the whole thing was in part driven by this desire to create a kind of self critiquing collective movement. By the time it gets to Belarus though, it has taken on a legitimate political dimension. In high freedom environments, new social tools tend to get used for entertainment because we already have lots of ways of doing these things in low freedom environments. On the other hand, new social tools create real political leverage. A couple of years ago, in fact, I think a couple of years ago this month at south by Southwest, Twitter launched, right? And people were tripping over themselves to denounce it as the most stupidest application ever launched, right? Egyptian pro democracy activists used Twitter to keep track of one another. Who's where, who's where, what are you doing? And they do that partly because they want to know who's in police custody and who's not. If other people know you're in police custody in Egypt, you can end up in custody longer, but you have a much lower likelihood of being tortured. So it's really good to be able to do the kind of group tracking Twitter provides. And so Twitter in a US context is very different than Twitter in an Egyptian context. And that's one of, I Think the key characteristics of these tools is the social environment in which the tool launches has a huge effect completely outside the technology on the kind of uses it's pressed to. Last story in Palermo, 2004, southern Italy, a group ran around stickering the town with stickers that read roughly an entire population, an entire people that pays the piso, that pays payment money to the Mafia. It's a population without dignity. Anonymous stickers all over town. Number one news story the next day, television, radio, newspapers, right? It's an incredible slap in the face of the Mafia. And so the people who did this realized, right, we've used this action to create national media, national attention to this. But they also realized it wasn't enough, just attention. Everybody was already aware they'd heightened the issue, but everybody was already aware that the Mafia was bleeding Palermo dryer. So they needed something else. They needed a coordinating tool. So they put up, adio, piso, goodbye, goodbye to the payment money. And they realized we can actually help businesses coordinate their reaction. When one business person stands up and says, that's it, I'm not paying the Mafia anymore, that's not great. That happened a few times in the 90s. The business was invariably destroyed. The person standing up was often killed. When a whole group of businesses stands up at the same time, on the other hand, the Mafia can't pick them off one at a time. And then they realized after providing the site for businesses to coordinate and announce together that they could provide a search engine. If you are in Palermo and you only want to patronize businesses that have agreed not to pay payment money to the mob, you can then go here, you can make an anonymous credit card donation. They even put up a form that shows you how to fill out your tax returns to make an anonymous donation through the mechanism of income tax to this anti Mafia group. And the pattern is so successful, the Mafia has not been able to react well to this because there is no one obvious target, there's no one to take down to make this go away. So what this site does is it takes a previously dislocated population, all shares an interest in a certain outcome, and it provides a coordinating layer that lets them get something done they couldn't get done in any other way. And the pattern, again, no complicated technology here. The pattern is easy enough to understand that it can be copied from the outside. Other southern Italian cities are doing this same thing, not by getting the same code, but by simply adopting the same pattern of behavior. Social patterns are relatively easy to copy in the manner of wikis. Spreading not by people forking the original code, but by forking the original idea and rebuilding them to try new things. And so this is a case of social spread. So this in summation, ridiculously easy group forming, improved sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action. And as a result, for the first time for the bulk of society, freedom of speech is becoming freedom of the press. And as importantly, freedom of the press is becoming freedom of association. Media is increasingly not just a source of information, but is also a site of action. Very little mainstream media gets this, but a great deal of user created media operates in this pattern. And there's some degree of hybridization. The book is Here Comes Everybody. I'm also blogging about it at here comes everybody.org, because of course, the minute the manuscript went in, I kept seeing stories and thinking, oh, oh, I wish that was in the book. So these stories are going up here. In fact, the story of Adiopisa was something that I discovered after the book. So in fact that's not there, that's going to be here, but that's what I've done. So thank you very much. See if there's any questions. Yeah.

I have a question with. To do with. You're talking about the fan subbing. One of the issues there is copyright.

Yes.

And what they were doing was technically illegal and a lot of people worried a great deal about that. And other things that you mentioned here also tend to be breaking existing laws, it seems.

Yes.

The most interesting reading I did for the book was actually Elizabeth Eisenstein's two volume history on Social Change after the Invention of Movable Type. And what it made me realize is that when we really, really want to believe as a society that we're the way we are, mainly because we've chosen to be that way. But in fact, so much of the structure of contemporary society is accidental. Right. And it is clear to me that copyright is one of those accidental things that however much we might want to imagine that copyright expresses some transcendent social virtue, in fact, copyright law is only conceivable in a world of reproductive bottlenecks. Right. Copyright law is only possible in a world where making copies is hard.

So.

In the short run, law trumps culture, but in the long run, culture trumps law. When the will of the people and the legal structure diverge too strongly for too long. At least in a democracy, it's the law that changes. And the capabilities being expressed here are now so fundamental that I am betting that even if there are legal victories in the current narrow construction of copyright law, that the people with the wind in their sails are going to be the people who are promulgating copies rather than restricting them. And there are certain things to be pessimistic about about that. For example, the thing I'm worried about is investigative journalism. Everybody's worried about the newspaper going away. I don't really care about the physical artifact. The thing that worries me is who's going to pay for that person to go down to city hall again today and watch out for corruption on the city council. So this isn't an entirely good news story, but I do think that the change is so fundamental that obstacles like copyright law are going to be, in the historical scheme of things, relatively minor. So what sort of technology, what sort of changes do you see leading to even easier group formation, collective action taking, what sort of platforms should we be creating? What sort of steps can be take to make this even more of a trend? So here's one of the things that's really hard about collective action. It's just, it's right now, almost all the examples of collective action I've seen have been groups of people trying to stop things from happening. There are fewer examples of collective action where people are trying to start things from happening or keep things happening. We have a lot of collective action that fills the sort of protest movement model, I think, I think because those groups don't require society to defer to them. Our model for deferring to a group, our classic model for deferring to a group is if you get together and you call yourself a corporation and you do these certain legal tricks, all of a sudden, a huge amount of decision making power that's habitually resided in society as a whole, we hand over to you, right? As long as you had a board meeting, you get to decide what you're going to do about X. There is no equivalent lightweight structure analogous to the GPL or the Creative Commons license for a group of people to come together and say we're binding ourselves together with shared purpose, we're sharing resources, we're sharing outcome. Now, to fur to us, it seems to me that there is a partly technological and partly legal structure, again analogous to GPL and Creative Commons, which would let a group say essentially this group is going to potentially outlast all of the individual members, but keep existing as a whole, like a knife whose blade has been replaced three times and handled twice. If I had to pick any one thing that I think would accelerate this, and not just accelerate it, but actually let groups start to start to build Things and not just try and tear things down or stop them. It would be that. It would be the ability to tear. In a way. The GPL is the perfect example because it uses copyright law to disable the aims of copyright law. If there was a way for a group to incorporate and take on that kind of social deference that didn't require that group to be a for profit corporation or a not for profit corporation in the way we understand them, I think that would be huge wind in the sails of exactly, of exactly the collective action pattern. There is some work going on right now in Vermont around a kind of, you know, corporate deferential structure. But there's really like that's the only experiment I know of. There's really very little experimentation with that. And that I think is a big missing piece of this. There's a microphone.

Sorry. Yes, hi, thank you for coming.

Thanks very much.

So I have to. One comment. I guess there's this site icare2.com they email petitions every day. You get like you subscribe to the site, they make it one click sign process. And I'm just wondering if this gets people in large numbers. What do you see in the political process? And I mean, is this sort of because of the saturation with petition signing?

Yes.

Is there value going to drop? Because it's suddenly much easier to do. And the second thing is I'm still stuck there on that mafia example. What prevents the mafia actually to telling their shopkeepers, hey, I want you to register to this site because we want customers to go to your shop as well because you need to pay us the bribe.

Yeah. No, no.

There are the polluting effect.

There are huge system gaming efforts and it's a complicated thing to study because the group behind it is anonymous for obvious reasons. I believe, and I'll offer this as a hypothesis without certainty, that there is a vetting process to keep known collaborators. Now it would be possible to infiltrate the database to some degree by setting up a new shop or whatever. It is certainly not system gaming proof. And in fact almost no social systems are system gaming proof. The remarkable thing about the Audio Piso Group is simply that they've been operating in one way or another in this mode for over two years and no one's been killed yet. So at least something they're doing is working. Whether or not in the fullness of time they managed to kill, keep free of infiltration. I don't know. To your first question. Yes, absolutely. It's funny, I've actually just started. I said something quite offhand in an interview with Salon magazine about exactly the problem you've described, which is that the value of a political email on Capitol Hill has plummeted exactly because of essentially the spamming sites. In the old days, if you're in the House of Representatives and somebody found a piece of paper and a pen and an envelope and the address and a stamp and wrote out what they said, that was enough work, that that was predictive of about 2,000 voters worth of sentiment, right? If you got a piece of email, you could say back of the envelope, no pun intended. About 2,000 people in my district feel this way. And so I asked some people recently, some congressional staffers, what's the value of equivalent electoral predictive value of, of a piece of email? And they said zero. It's zero, right? We get so much email, and in particular we get so much email from people who want to influence the way Congress as a whole operates that they lie to us about where they live, right? People faking zip codes and so forth. It turns out, in fact, that the protests that are working well now are the protests that use hard to fake signals, not easy to fake signals like email. So if you look at Jericho, right, the science fiction show, they canceled in trying to convince people to bring Jericho back, there was a reference to Battle of the Bulge. And nuts being one of the final words in the last episode of last show, they started sending nuts to cbs, like actual peanuts, right? In bags. And nuts online saw all of these credit card orders coming in and they realized what was happening and they set up a page that allowed groups to syndicate so you could just put in two bucks, but then they would send a 50 pound bag of peanuts in their shells in the CBS loading dock. Now, the loading dock of a network is pretty much optimized for taking boxes about this big, right? Betamax tape, right? There's a picture of the guy standing on the CBS loading dock next to 20 tons of peanuts. So they got the message, right? And you can see in the discussion boards people saying essentially if we just email them, they're not going to pay attention to us. They're just going to delete these emails. So a lot of the, a lot of in protest culture right now, a lot of the game is essentially how do you create a thematically appropriate and hard to fake signal? Because email campaigns are increasingly done for the press release value, right? We had 3 million people do X, right? Nobody on Capitol Hill PS paid attention to those emails. But the 3 million thing got us some press. But if you're really Trying to target people, changing their mind. You have, you have to do something that demonstrates the people participating in the campaign spent some money, spent some time, took some effort, and that, funnily enough, in some social settings it can be too easy to send a message and email and click here to sign the petition. Forms are exactly that. What Kate Hana had was not millions of people, she had tens of thousands, but she had herself as a spokesperson person and she had a non partisan issue. Right. Lawmakers were worried because it wasn't just, you know, a lot of move on who comes from an obvious part of the political spectrum. The people signing Kate Hanai's petition were all over the map. And so that gave her a degree of leverage that the traditional email campaign doesn't have. Sorry, so you had a follow up, different question.

Take an example of a protest that failed. It was the Iraq war protest. Also the media failed. And I'm wondering was that because it's too early, they did the wrong things. If you have any comments to make.

About that, I mean, that, that one is so. The American political system is so set up for isometric tension, right. Where any amount of force to move in, particularly the executive branch, is counterbalanced by, you know, I mean, you've got a Republican and Democratic party who were having elections decided where the margin of victory is less than the margin of error. Right. So this system right now is like this. All of which is a way of saying that the fiasco of the Iraq war is so over, so over determined in a way. The shock to the system from the attacks of 9, 11, the profundity of the Republican election. Weirdly, had Katrina and the 2004 elections happened in the opposite order, it would be a very different world today. So the historical record is hard to unpack. That having been said, it seems to me that the problem with the protest movement around the Iraq war is that there weren't enough elections in which essentially the way you get legislators to change, change the way they behave is to threaten to throw them out of office. And there weren't enough elections essentially timed in the same cycle as the protests would need to have happened. It also took a while for rank and file Americans to become tired of the war. And so there was a degree of partisanness to the protests which didn't characterize the Vietnam protests in their later days. Right. Vietnam was actually. The Vietnam protests were actually a case of a partisan group moving outwards to include everybody by the time everybody was sick of the war. Indeed, the 2006 elections were as radical A change. Right. As you could get in a midterm election. But, and there's actually, there's a really interesting debate about this. Robert Dahl is a great scholar of democracy, has argued that the, the great flaw in the American political system is that it's too difficult to change that. The original design of the Constitution was so terrified about having the edifice torn down because there were so few examples like it that they over defended it. And now we have a political system that's actually too well defended from the desires of its own citizens.

Right, but you're talking about people taking on dictators. So I'm asking, is this a counterexample to your thesis about the, the Internet media being more effective for protests? That was.

Oh, yes, I'm sorry, yes, that is a counterexample. Certainly it is by no means the case that this is automatically more effective. Right. And in fact, it seems to me that the nonpartisan surprises are working much better than standard partisan complaints. What's interesting about Lukashenko is that any evidence of discontent is a threat to a dictatorship. Whereas again, in a relatively freedom rich environment like the US evidence of public discontent is par for the course. And so like any arms race, there is no point at which one side wins completely. It'll never be the case that any protest can topple any government at any point. What I think we have yet to see is a large nonpartisan movement, a large nonpartisan political movement in this country. Large nonpartisan political protest. We've seen small ones like the air, like the air traffic, the air traffic rights thing. It's not clear to me what it will take to get really large scale protest that cuts across partisan lines. But in the American context, that I think is what, what would be required. But I don't want to present this as secret sauce that if you sprinkle it on an otherwise unhappy populace, things start to happen. It's just, it's a new set of tools that didn't exist even five years ago, in part because of the social density. Very good. Yep. Or sign some books now. All right, thank you very much.