Here Comes Everybody
Clay Shirky
- 12 minutes read - 2541 wordsAuthor: Clay Shirky
Rating: ★★★
I found this book on a sidewalk in Park Slope about four years ago and I just now got to reading it. I’ve seen Shirky quoted in tech media for many years and loved his talk on how the disruption of mass-urbanization during the 19th century occasioned the proliferation of gin-carts and kiosks that characterized the gin-swilling era we see humorously portrayed in “My Fair Lady.”
In any case, I’m sure this book was much more revolutionary closer to its publication date, but I appreciate that several of the central theses held up. Before getting to the content, I want to raise one frustration about the book’s structure.
Form
Non-fiction / pop-technical book are meant to be read and, in my experience, ought give their jewels away quickly so that the audience benefits and can decide when to go deeper (and how deep to go). This is the heart behind the inspectional reading technique: the belief that writers in this genre tell you what they’ll tell you before they tell it, so that you can track the arc before having made the first formal step.
While many parts of the book didn’t need a deeper read by me (someone within the industry), it’s structure left me guessing as to whether there was some important facet within the next paragraph. There was no real benefit in structuring the chapters like 19th century potboiler serials. The unveiling of the structure at the beginning is perfectly fine. To put it cynically, we’ve already bought the book, now it’s about our payoff, not the author’s.
To the content, though.
Content
The Thesis
Shirky, to his credit, never got too-terribly “Ooh” and “Aah” about insurgent technologies or the people behind them. A few of the technical sites used as examples have not aged well (poor Flicker, Dodgeball, etc.), but this is not a tarnish to Shirky’s observations in the least.
Ultimately, the argument that social technology will make it easier for groups to form and do work that could-not and would-not have been done within organizations like corporations and businesses has been borne out. Previously, to do something big, you needed to make sure that the outcome justified the overhead and synchronization costs. The Catholic Church or the US Army are examples of this. But if the costs of collaboration and group-forming don’t just drop, but fall to zero, people can choose to participate in “big things” for reasons like curiosity or interest. That’s the big idea, and it’s correct. Linux remains strong, the open source ethos has flourished, Wikipedia continues to grow.
Dangerous Possibilities for Collaboration
Shirky even points out that forms of undesirable collaboration were blossoming. While he mentions it at only a superficial depth, he’s diagnosing a lump that wound up metastisizing in the Russian interference with the 2016 election.
[media personality that mobilized a horde of collaborators to name, shame, and undermine someone] benefited from having generated the attention, he was not entirely in control of it – the bargain he crafted with his users had him performing the story they wanted to see.
Boy, that sent shivers up my spine. Consider the manufactured outrage through tools like Facebook.
“Do we also want a world where, whenever someone with this kind of leverage gets riled up, they can unilaterally reset the priorities of the local police department?”
Consider the “SWAT-ing” and “doxxing” operations that hijack the tools of civic order to harass and abuse.
Lastly, Shirky warns that the resiliency that social software offers also means that bad memes (Flat Earth, extermism) can find, organize, and deploy uninformed actors (in addition to bad actors) to create disinformation that can be used to undermine legitimate facts, institutions, and science.
It was a good read. A few highlights are below:
{
"title": "Here Comes Everybody",
"author": "Clay Shirky",
"highlightCount": 61,
"noteCount": 1,
"annotations": [
{
"highlight": "He used his existing social network to get the word out, which in turn helped him find an enormous audience for Ivannas plight, an audience willing to do more than just read from the sidelines",
"location": "7"
},
{
"highlight": "This audience gave ...remarkable leverage... ",
"location": "7"
},
{
"highlight": "The threats have a kind of \"You and what army?\" quality about them, because they were certain the police weren't going to get involved ",
"location": "8"
},
{
"highlight": "Thanks to the Web, the cost of publishing globally has collapsed. ",
"location": "9"
},
{
"highlight": "...accept his part of the bargain with his users -- they would provide the attention that kept him going and made the story attractive in the traditional media, and he would channel that attention...",
"location": "10"
},
{
"highlight": "\"former audience\"",
"location": "14",
"annotation": "Referring to those formerly known as those who would have sat idly by"
},
{
"highlight": "[generating outrage communities] benefited from having generated the attention, he was not entirely in control of it -- the bargain he crafted with his users had him performing the story they wanted to see. ",
"location": "13"
},
{
"highlight": "Do we also want a world where, whenever someone with this kind of leverage gets riled up, they can unilaterally reset the priorities of the local police department? ",
"location": "14"
},
{
"highlight": "...new technology enables new kinds of group-forming. ",
"location": "17"
},
{
"highlight": "[he gathered a group] big enough....to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence. This sweet spot it what Eric Raymond...calls \"a plausible promise.\" ",
"location": "18"
},
{
"highlight": "...forming groups has gotten a lot easier...",
"location": "18"
},
{
"highlight": "If you give them more of a reason to do something, they will do more of it, and if you make it easier to do more of something they are already inclined to do, they will also do more of it ",
"location": "18"
},
{
"highlight": "[Big organizations] tolerate [communications costs] because they have to ; the alternative is institutional collapse ",
"location": "19"
},
{
"highlight": "...every institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort. Call this the institutional dilemma....\" ",
"location": "19"
},
{
"highlight": "...we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations ",
"location": "21"
},
{
"highlight": "For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. ",
"location": "21"
},
{
"highlight": "None of the absolute advantages of institutions like businesses or schools or governments have disappeared. Instead what has happened is that most o the relative advantages of those institutions have disappeared ",
"location": "23"
},
{
"highlight": "Group action gives human society its particular character, and anything that changes the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole. ",
"location": "23"
},
{
"highlight": "This pattern of aggregates exhibiting novel properties is true of people...",
"location": "28"
},
{
"highlight": "Because of...transaction costs some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of. ",
"location": "29"
},
{
"highlight": "...Coase...[demonstrated] a completely open market for labor...would underperform labor in firms because of the transaction costs...[and] costs of discovering the options and making and enforcing agreements...",
"location": "30"
},
{
"highlight": "A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing ",
"location": "30"
},
{
"highlight": "[Due to the fixed costs of organizations, some work can't be engaged because it can't generate enough value]...[n]ew social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action",
"location": "31"
},
{
"highlight": "The task of aggregating and making photos available is nothing like...[space program]...what kept photos-sharing from happening wasn't the absolute difficulty but the relative difficulty...[ti] ecsaped those problems...by abandoning hope of...oversight. ",
"location": "39"
},
{
"highlight": "The org chart...was first widely used...in the 1800s...documented by Alfred Chandler in his book The Visible Hand ",
"location": "40"
},
{
"highlight": "Giant conglomerates like ITT in the 70s and GE in recent years used their management acumen to get into a huge variety of businesses, simply because they were good at managing transaction costs",
"location": "44"
},
{
"highlight": "Large decreases in transaction costs create activities that can't be taken on by businesses, or indeed by any institution because no matter how cheap it becomes to perform a particular activity, there isn't enough payoff to support the cost incurred by being an institution in the first place. ",
"location": "46"
},
{
"highlight": "[But now]...[l]oosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure, because they lay under the Coasean floor. ",
"location": "47"
},
{
"highlight": "The cost of all kinds of group activity -- sharing, cooperation, and collective action---have fallen so far so fast that activities previously hidden beneath that floor are now coming to light. ...group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities...in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action. ",
"location": "49"
},
{
"highlight": "\"Tragedy of the Commons,\" biologist Garret Hardin...",
"location": "51"
},
{
"highlight": "...norms are enforced not by the customers, but by other professionals in the same business. The key to any profession is the relation of its members to one another ",
"location": "58"
},
{
"highlight": "A professional is someone who receives important occupational rewards from a reference group whose membership is limited to people who have undergone specialized formal education and have accepted a group-defined code of proper conduct(James Q. Wilson) ",
"location": "58"
},
{
"highlight": "...the problems of production, reproduction, and distribution are much less serious. AS a consequence, control over media is less completely in the hands of the professionals ",
"location": "59"
},
{
"highlight": "Mass amateurization is the is the result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities...",
"location": "66"
},
{
"highlight": "The content of the Abbot's book praised the scribes, while its printed form damned them; the medium undermined the message. ",
"location": "68"
},
{
"highlight": "Professional self-conception and self-defence....becomes a disadvantage in revolutionary times because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession ",
"location": "69"
},
{
"highlight": "The spread of literacy after the invention of movable type ensured not the success of the scribal profession but its end. Instead of mass professionalization,the spread of literacy was a process of mass amateruization. The term \"scribe\" didn't get extended to everyone...it simply disappeared,as it no longer denoted a professional class. ",
"location": "79"
},
{
"highlight": "We misread [publish, then filter; \"inane content\"] because we're so unused to seeing written material in public that isn't intended for us.",
"location": "85"
},
{
"highlight": "The famous are different form you and me, because they cannot return or even acknowledge the attention they get, and technology cannot change that. ",
"location": "94"
},
{
"highlight": "For the last fifty years the two most important communications media in most people's lives were the telephone and television, different media with different functions....the difference between conversational tools and broadcast tools was arbitrary but the difference between conversing and broadcasting is real. ",
"location": "95"
},
{
"highlight": "...communities of practice... ",
"location": "101"
},
{
"highlight": "Every webpage is a latent community. ",
"location": "102"
},
{
"highlight": "The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society. ",
"location": "107"
},
{
"highlight": "[Personal motivation to contribute]...is the same shape across a number of different kinds of behaviors...[and the] imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them....a power law [where] the imbalance becomes more extreme the higher the ranking.",
"location": "128-129"
},
{
"highlight": "Love has a half-life too, as well as a radius, and we're used to both of those being small. ",
"location": "141-142"
},
{
"highlight": "When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love. ",
"location": "142"
},
{
"highlight": "[challenged by institutions that were used to having power] ",
"location": "160"
},
{
"highlight": "The lesson for protesters after Leipzig was that they should protest in ways that the state was unlikely to interfere with and to distribute evidence of their actions widely. If the state didn't react, the documentation would serve as evidence that the protesting was safe. ",
"location": "164"
},
{
"highlight": "The lesson for repressive states was the opposite: don't let even small protests get started, as they an grow, and don't let any documentation get out. ",
"location": "164"
},
{
"highlight": "The ability to turn a collection of takes into a coordinated force rested on two very different kinds of things, on other words. Firs tit required the media with which to coordinate the tanks....it required a strategy that took the new possibilities into account...blitzkrieg was in fact a strategy for using a smaller but more nimble force against a well-provisioned opponent. ",
"location": "173"
},
{
"highlight": "[feedback loops between complaint and response are moving faster and faster] ",
"location": "187"
},
{
"highlight": "[new social tech will help un-\"good\" groups flourish e.g. pro-anorexia] ",
"location": "207"
},
{
"highlight": "[Social losses in this era] [1] those whose jobs relied on solving a hard problem...[2] social bargains and norms [e.g. the media are agreed not to cover the President's infidelity (LBJ) or crippled legs (FDR); many are not \"in on it\"] ...[3 n]etworked organizations are more resilient",
"location": "209-210"
},
{
"highlight": "Small World communication...small groups are densely connected...large groups are sparsely connected [e.g. a group of 5 is full-mesh, but 1 of those 5 links to 2 other full mesh \"cells\"] ",
"location": "215"
},
{
"highlight": "As long as a couple of people in each small group know a couple of people in other groups, you get the advantages of tight connection at the small scale and loose connection at the large scale. The network will be sparse but resilient and robust. ",
"location": "216"
},
{
"highlight": "Bonding capital tends to be more exclusive and birding capital more inclusive. IN Small World networks bonding tends to happen within clusters, while bridging happens between clusters. ",
"location": "230"
},
{
"highlight": "\"The social Origins of Good Ideas,\" Ronald Burt...[observes] most good ideas come from people who were bridging \"structural holes,\"...bridging...was valuable...predicted good ideas ",
"location": "230-231"
},
{
"highlight": "[social model generates] enormous amounts of failure...[to] promote the rare successes...[hinges] on social structure supported by social tools. ",
"location": "233"
},
{
"highlight": "...the open source movement teaches...that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial ",
"location": "258"
},
{
"highlight": "...Good use of social tools....promise....the basic \"why\"...The tool helps with the \"how\"...And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect and what will be expected of you? ",
"location": "260"
}
]
}