Clay Shirky: Cognitive Surplus

1. Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus (pp. 2-5):

Industrialization didn't just create new ways of working, it created new ways of living, because the relocation of the population destroyed ancient habits common to country living, while drawing so many people together that the new density of the population broke the older urban models as well. In an attempt to restore London's preindustrial norms, Parliament seized on gin. Starting in the late 1720s, and continuing over the next three decades, it passed law after law prohibiting various aspects of gin's production, consumption, or sale. This strategy was ineffective, to put it mildly. The result was instead a thirty-year cat-and-mouse game of legislation to prevent gin consumption, followed by the rapid invention of ways to defeat those laws. Parliament outlawed "flavored spirits"; so distillers stropped adding juniper berries to the liquor. Selling gin was made illegal; women sold from bottles hidden beneath their skirts, and some entrepreneurial types created the "puss and mew," a cabinet set on the streets where a customer could approach and, if they knew the password, hand their money to the vendor hidden inside and receive a dram of gin in return.

What made the craze subside wasn't any set of laws. Gin consumption was treated as the problem to be solved, when in fact it was a reaction to the real problem -- dramatic social change and the inability of older civic models to adapt. What helped the Gin Craze subside was the restructuring of society around the new urban realities created by London's incredible social density, a restructuring that turned London into what we'd recognize as a modern city, one of the first. Many of the institutions we mean when we talk about "the industrialized world" actually arose in response to the social climate created by industrialization, rather than to industrialization itself. Mutual aid societies provided shared management of risk outside the traditional ties of kin and church. The spread of coffeehouses and later restaurants was spurred by concentration populations. Political parties began to recruit the urban poor and to field candidates more responsive to them. These changes came about only when civic density stopped being treated as a crisis and started being treated as a simple fact, even an opportunity. Gin consumption, driven upward in part by people anesthetizing themselves against the horrors of city life, started falling, in part because the new social structures mitigated these horrors. The increase in both population and aggregate wealth made it possible to invent new kinds of institutions; instead of madding crowds, the architects of the new society saw a civic surplus, created as a side effect of industrialization.

And what of us? What of our historical generation? That section of the global population we still sometimes refer to as "the industrialized world" has actually been transitioning to a postindustrial form for some time. [ . . . ] During this transition, what has been our gin, the critical lubricant that eased our transition from one kind of society to another?

The sitcom. Watching sitcoms -- and soap opera, costume dramas, and the host of other amusements offered by TV -- has absorbed the lion's share of the free time available to the citizens of the developed world. [ . . . ]

We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watched Malcolm in the Middle. We watched Desperate Housewives. We had so much free time to burn and so few other appealing ways to burn it that every citizen in the developed world took to watching television as if it were a duty. TV quickly took up the largest chunk of our free time: an average of over twenty hours a week, worldwide.

(pp. 8-9):

A TV producer who was trying to decide whether I should come on her show to discuss the book [Here Comes Everybody] asked me, "What interesting uses of social media re you seeing now?"

I told her about Wikipedia, the collaboratively created encyclopedia, and about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. Back in 2006, Pluto was getting kicked out of the planet club -- astronomers had concluded that it wasn't enough like the other planets to make the cut, so they proposed redefining planet in such a way as to exclude it. As a result, Wikipedia's Pluto page saw a sudden spike in activity. People furiously edited the article to take account of the proposed change in Pluto's status, and the most committed group of editors disagreed with one another about how best to characterize the change. During this conversation, they updated the article -- contesting sections, sentences, and even word choice throughout -- transforming the essence of the article from "Pluto is the ninth planet" to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

I assumed that the producer and I would jump into a conversation about social construction of knowledge, the nature of authority, or any of the other topics that Wikipedia often generates. She didn't ask any of those questions, though. Instead, she sighedand said, "Where do people find the time?" Hearing this, I snapped and said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from." She knew, because she worked in the industry that had been burning off the lion's share of our free time for the last fifty years.

Imagine treating the free time of the world's educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus. How big would that surplus be? To figure it out, we need a unit of measurement, so let's start with Wikipedia. Suppose we consider the total amount of time people have spent on it as a kind of unit -- every edit made to every article, and every argument about those edits, for every language that Wikipedia exists in. That would represent something like one hundred million hours of human thought, back when I was talking to the TV producer. (Marvin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher who has spent time studying Wikipedia, helped me arrive at that figure. It's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude.) One hundred million hours of cumulative thought is obviously a lot. How much is it, though, compared to the amount of time we spend watching television?

Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year. That represents about two thousand Wikipedias' projects' worth of free time annually.

(p. 11):

But now, for the first time in the history of television, some cohorts of young people are watching TV less than their elders. Several population studies -- of high school students, broadband users, YouTube users -- have noticed the change, and their basic observation is always the same: young populations with access to fast, interactive media are shifting their behavior away from media that presupposes pure consumption. Even when they watch video online, seemingly a pure analog to TV, they have opportunities to comment on the material, to share it with their friends, to label, rate, or rank it, and of course, to discuss it with other viewers around the world.

Milkshake Mistakes (p. 14):

It's also easy to assume that the world as it currently exists represents some sort of ideal expression of society, and that all deviations from this sacred tradition are both shocking and bad. Although the internet is already forty years old, and the web half that age, some people are still astonished that individual members of society, previously happy to spend most of their free time consuming, would start voluntarily making and sharing things.

More Is Different (pp. 20-21):

People asking Where do people find the time? aren't usually looking for an answer; the question is rhetorical and indicates that the speaker thinks certain activities are stupid. In my conversation with the TV producer, I also mentioned World of Warcraft, an online game set in a fantasy realm of knights and elves and evil demons. Many of the challenges in Warcraft are so difficult that they cannot be undertaken by individual players; instead, the players have to band together into guilds, complex, in-game social structures with dozens of members, each performing specialized tasks. As I described these guilds and the work they require of their members, I could tell what she thought of Warcraft players: grown men and women sitting in their basements pretending to be elves? Losers.

The obvious response is: at least they're doing something.

(p. 23):

Expanding our focus to include producing and sharing doesn't even require making big shifts in individual behavior to create enormous changes in outcome. The world's cognitive surplus is so large that small changes can have huge ramifications in aggregate.

(p. 25):

Any human event, however improbable, sees its likelihood grow in a crowd. Big surpluses are different from small ones.

In the words of the physicist Philip Anderson, "More is different." When you aggregate a lot of something, it behaves in new ways, and our new communications tools are aggregating our individual ability to create and share, at unprecedented levels of more. Consider this question, one whose answer has changed dramatically in recent years: What are the chances that a person with a camera will come across an event of global significance?

A New Resource

2. Means: Protests in South Korea in 2007 when they agreed to relax the ban on US beef imports; persistent long-term protests emerged, largely teenage girls communicating via websites, including one run by a prominent boy band (p. 35):

It's not clear what South Korea's policy on U.S. beef should be. But the change Lee negotiated upset many citizens who wanted to be consulted and hadn't been. When kids who are too young to vote are out in the street protesting policies, it can shake governments used to a high degree of freedom from public oversight. In this case, the giant, continual protest around the hot-button issue of food safety (and, as the protest went on, education policy and national identity) eroded Lee's popularity. He had entered office in February 2008 with close to a 75 percent approval rating. But during the month of May, that figure plummeted to less than 20 percent.

As May turned to June, and the protesters didn't go away, Lee's government finally decided enough was enough and ordered the police to break up the protest -- a task it set about with gusto. Instantly, websites were filled with images of policemen with water cannons and batons attacking the largely peaceful protesters; thousands of people watched online videos of police clubbing or kicking teenage girls in the head. The crackdown had the opposite effect of the one Lee intended. Condemnation of the police was widespread, even international, and both the Asian Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International began investigations. As a result of the violence and subsequent publicity, the protest grew bigger.

Preserving Old Problems (pp. 39-40):

PickupPal.com is one of those new information channels, a carpooling site designed to coordinate drivers and riders planing to travel along the same route. The driver proposes a price for the ride, and if the passenger agrees, the system puts them in touch with each other. [ . . . ]

PickupPal also faces the problem of scale -- below a certain threshold number of potential drivers and riders, the system will hardly work at all, while above that threshold more is better. Someone using the system and finding a match one time out of three will have a very different attitude toward it than someone who finds a match nine times out of ten. One in three is a backup plan; nine in ten is infrastructure.

Gutenberg Economics (pp. 43-45):

Movable type introduced something else to the intellectual landscape of Europe: an abundance of books. Prior to Gutenberg, there just weren't that many books. A single scribe, working alone with a quill and ink and a pile of vellum, could make a copy of a book, but the process was agonizingly slow, making output of scribal copying small and the price high. At the end of the fifteenth century, a scribe could produce a single copy of a five-hundred page book for roughly thirty florins, while Ripoli, a Venetian press, would, for roughly the same price, print more than three hundred copies of the same book. [ . . . ]

Movable type removed that bottleneck, and the firs thing the growing cadre of European printers did was to print more Bibles -- lots more Bibles. [ . . . ] And then in a historical eyeblink, books started appearing in local languages, books whose text was months rather than centuries old, books that were, in aggregate, diverse, contemporary, and vulgar. (Indeed, the word novel comes from this period, when newness of content was itself new.)

The radical solution to spare capacity -- produce books that no one had ever read before -- created new problems, chiefly financial risk. [ . . . ] Their answer was to make the people who bore the risk -- the printers -- responsible for the quality of the books as well. There's no obvious reason why people who are good at running a printing press should also be good at deciding which books are worth printing. But a printing press is expensive, requiring a professional staff to keep it running, and because the material has to be produced in advance of demand for it, the economics of the printing press put the risk at the site of production. [ . . . ] It's expensive to own the means of production, whether it is a printing press or a TV tower, which makes novelty a fundamentally high-risk operation. If it's expensive to own and manage the means of production or if it requires a staff, you're in a world of Gutenberg economics. And wherever you have Gutenberg economics, whether you are a Venetian publisher or a Hollywood producer, you're going to have fifteenth-century risk management as well, where the producers have to decide what's good before showing it to the audience. In this world almost all media was produced by "the media," a world we all lived in up until a few years ago.

The Button Marked "Publish" (p. 46):

Publishing used to be something we had to ask permission to do; the people whose permission we had to ask were publishers. Not anymore. Publishers still perform other functions in selecting, editing, and marketing work (dozens of people besides me have worked to improve this book, for example), but they no longer form the barrier between private and public writing.

(p. 47):

There have always been people willing to argue that an increase in freedom to publish isn't worth the decrease in average quality; Martin Luther observed in 1569, "The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure of limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name; others for the sake of mere gain." [ . . . ]

Luther and Poe both relied on the printing press, but they wanted the mechanics of publishing, to which they had easy access, not to increase the overall volume of published work: cheaper for me but still inaccessible to thee. Economics doesn't work that way, however. The easier it is for the average person to publish, the more average what gets published becomes. But increasing freedom to participate in the public conversation has compensating values.

(p. 51):

The low-quality material that comes with increased freedom accompanies the experimentation that creates the stuff we will end up prizing. That was true of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and it's true of the social media today. In comparison with a previous age's scarcity, abundance brings a rapid fall in average quality, but over time experimentation pays off, diversity expands the range of the possible, and the best work becomes better than what went before. After the printing press, publishing came to matter more because the expansion of literary, cultural, and scientific writing benefited society, even though it was accompanied by a whole lot of junk.

The Connective Tissue of Society

Three Amateurs Walk Into a Bar

The Shock of Inclusion (p. 63):

The people surprised at our new behaviors assume that behavior is a stable category, but it isn't. Human motivations change little over the years, but opportunity can change a little or a lot, depending on the social environment. In a world where opportunity changes little, behavior will change little, but when opportunity changes a lot, behavior will as well, so long as the opportunities appeal to real human motivations.

The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes. The raw material of this change is the free time available to us, time we can commit to projects that range from the amusing to the culturally transformative. [ . . . ]

Our new tools haven't caused those behaviors; but they have allowed them. Flexible, cheap, and inclusive media now offers us opportunities to do all sorts of things we once didn't do. In the world of "the media," we were like children, sitting quietly at the edge of a circle and consuming whatever the grown-ups at the edge of a circle and consuming whatever the grown-ups in the center of the circle produced. That has given way to a world in which most forms of communication, public and private, are available to everyone in some form.

3. Motive

Love Over Gold (pp. 72-74):

Receiving sufficient payment can make otherwise undesirable activity desirable and worthwhile. (Thus is society able to employ garbage collectors.) But Deci's experiment suggested that extrinsic motivations aren't always the most effective ones and that increasing extrinsic motivations can actually decrease intrinsic ones. He concluded that an extrinsic motivation like being paid can crowd out an intrinsic one like enjoying something for its own sake. (This idea of one motivation's crowding out another also appears in the literature on TV watching, where TV crowds out social interactions.) [ . . . ]

The idea that people behave differently if they are doing something for love or for money won't seem terribly surprising to anyone who's ever had both a job and a hobby, but many in the world of academic psychology regarded Deci's findings as perverse. In 1970, theories of human motivation, as well as the practical use of rewards in the schoolroom and the workplace, were often based on simple ideas of stimulus -- adding any new reward to an existing activity would make people do more of it. This framework made little distinction among different kinds of motivation, and the most general-purpose motivator available has always been cash. Deci's conclusion that payment can crowd out other kinds of motivation flew in the face of both existing theory and practice.

Autonomy and Competence (pp. 77-78):

At the time it was launched, I was running the production department for a web design firm in New York, and I was certain Geocities was going to fail. I'd seen the amount of work that went into designing a usable website, from the navigation to the design to the layout, and I knew that a bunch of amateurs could not even approximate the quality of what professional designers were creating. No one would want to have their own mediocre page, when there was all of this professional work being put on the web at the same time.

I was right about the design quality of the average Geocities page, but I was completely wrong about the popularity of Geocities; it quickly became one of the most popular sites of its day. What I hadn't understood was that design quality wasn't the sole metric for a webpage. Webpages don't have just quality; they have qualities, plural. Clarity of design is obviously good, but other qualities, like the satisfaction of making something on your own or leaning while doing, can trump it. People don't actively want bad design -- it's just that most people aren't good designers, but that's not going to stop them from creating things on their own. Creating something personal, even of moderate quality, has a different kind of appeal than consuming something made by others, even something of high quality.

Membership and Generosity

Amateur Motivation, Public Scale

Feedback Loops (pp. 87-88):

Indeed, as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam documented exhaustively in his 1995 book Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital, postwar America saw a general decline in social connections in an incredibly broad array of areas, from number of close friends to participation in hobbyist groups to participation in amateur sports leagues (as suggested by Putnam's title). Putnam argued that this reduction in social capital was driven by suburbanization, longer commute times, and increased television watching.

If the only thing our new communications tools allowed was the release of pent-up desires, the effect would have been like a cork popping; satisfaction of our latent needs for autonomy and competence would pour out quickly and then stabilize at some new level. But that's not what's happening. The flow of amateur production and organization, far from stabilizing, continues to increase, because the social media rewards our intrinsic desires for membership and sharing as well.

Broadcast media, like television, clearly filled some human needs, but those needs that they couldn't fill well became harder to see and, ultimately, harder to imagine. Now those desires are starting to reappear because the social media has made them both expressible and visible, and also because personal motivations and social ones amplify each other in a feedback loop. Indulgence in feelings of membership and sharing can increase our desire for more connectedness, which increases its expression, and so on. [ . . . ]

Social media also drives discovery costs through the floor: web access allows you to find other people who like building model trains and doing macramé, or designing paper airplanes, or dressing up as anime characters, or practicing jnana yoga, or knitting socks, or photographing pay phones, or cooking Catalan food, on and on, at any hour of the day or night, worldwide. As my NYU colleague Nicholas Mirzoeff has remarked, the reason the web continues to astonish is simple: "The web means we're finally being exposed to the full crazy range of what people are actually interested in."

Intrinsic Motivation, Public Action

4. Opportunity (pp. 100-101):

Many of the stories we tell ourselves about the tools we use are really stories about human motivation. We grossly overestimated the degree to which e-mail would always seem futuristic and hard to use, we grossly underestimated the technical talents of older people, and we simply ignored the basic truth of technology: if a tool is useful, people will use it. (Surprise.) They will use it even if the tool is very different from what existed before, provided it lets them do things they want to do. The mystery isn't why older people started e-mailing each other; the mystery is how we could have convinced ourselves that e-mail use was mainly about technological novelty rather than social continuity. [ . . . ]

Many of our behaviors are like memorizing phone numbers, held in place not by desire but by inconvenience, and they're quick to disappear when the inconvenience does. Getting news from a piece of paper, having to be physically near a television at a certain time to see a certain show, keeping our vacation pictures to ourselves as if they were some big secret -- not one of these behaviors made a lick of sense. We did those things for decades or even centuries, but they were only as stable as the accidents that caused them. And when the accidents went away, so did the behaviors.

Skateboards and Easels

Ultimatum Game (p. 109):

Far from being incompatible with communal sharing, exposure to market logic actually increases our willingness to transact generously with strangers, in part because that's how markets work. When I am selling something, the economic nature of the transaction actually erodes my interest in how (or whether) I know the buyer. The market acquaints people with the utility of making transactions with people you don't know and with the idea, however implicit, that those transactions are an appropriate way of interacting with strangers.

Combinality (pp. 110-111):

Information can now be made globally available, in an unlimited number of perfect copies, at zero marginal cost. As a result, every mode of communication that once had to rely on market pricing can now have an alternative that relies on open sharing. (Access to Encyclopaedia Britannica uses market pricing, while access to Wikipedia is open; software has undergone a similar shift between commercial and open source versions.) Similarly, the old limitations of TV, radio, and print created a class of media professionals with privileged access to public speech, but public speech can now rely on wide participation. (You have to be hired to be on the nightly news, but not to blog every night.) Many coordination hurdles that required professional managers to direct paid workers can now have an alternative that relies on massively distributed cooperation among amateurs. (Microsoft has to hire and manage the people who create Windows; the group of programmers that created Linux doesn't.)

The change is a matter of simple fact -- digital networks make sharing cheap and potential participation nearly universal. But the reaction to that simple fact has often been disbelief or horror, at least from the beneficiaries of market pricing and authority ranking.

(pp. 111-112):

As the economist and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom has shown, when we assume people are principally selfish, we design systems that reward selfish people. [ . . . ] Assumptions that people are selfish can become self-fulfilling prophecies, creating systems that provide lots of individual freedom to act but not a lot of public value or management of collective resources for the greater public good. Systems designed around assumptions of selfishness can also crowd out solutions that could arise when people communicate with one another and enter into agreements that they jointly monitor and enforce. Conversely, systems that assume people will act in ways that create public goods, and that give them opportunities and rewards for doing so, often let them work together better than neoclassical economics would predict.

Social Production: People You Don't Know, Making Your Life Better for Free: mostly on Apache, more generally free software.

Generation X, Y, Z (pp. 121-122):

Generations do differ, but less because people differ than because opportunities do. Human nature changes slowly but includes an incredible range of mechanisms for adapting to our surroundings. Young people born in the decades after the baby boom ended were labeled Generation X, and they began entering the workforce in real numbers in the late 1980s. Gen Xers were said to be lazy -- "slackers" in the parlance of the time -- who didn't exhibit the straightforward work ethic of their predecessors. (As someone born at the tail end of the baby room, I loved this reasoning.) Commentators wrung their hands about the slackers in our midst, further evidence that society was going to hell in a handbasket. (Remember the Gin Laws?)

Then in the early 1990s a funny thing happened: Gen Xers started founding companies, joining start-ups, and working around the clock in pursuit of new opportunities. Gen Xers weren't slackers at all -- they were entrepreneurial! How could we have gotten it so wrong?

It's simple: we didn't factor in the environment in which the then-twentysomethings were living. The market crash of 1987 was followed by a fitful performance in the U.S. economy that, by the early 1990s, had tipped into a full-blown recession. In a recession, taking a dead-end job and conserving costs by hanging out with friends and drinking cheap beer are perfectly sensible responses. Maybe this generation wanted to be go-getters even in the depths of the recession, but people don't behave in ways they don't have the opportunity to behave in. Once the recession was over, the landscape of opportunity changed dramatically: it became easier to find a well-paying job, to start a company, or to join a start-up, all activities that the former slackers dove into with gusto.

(pp. 125-126):

Napster spread among the young not because they were more criminally minded than their elders, nor because they were possessed of a greater spirit of sharing. Napster spread for three much more prosaic reasons: (1) digital data is infinitely and perfectly copyable at zero marginal cost; (2) people will share if sharing is simple enough, and we generally resist being spiteful under the same conditions; and (3) Shawn Fanning designed a system to link (1) to (2) via the right incentives. That's it. That's what turned the recording industry upside down. Similarly, Napster's original model was destroyed when the recording industry's legal actions raised the cost of sharing high enough to unlink (1) and (2) for a significant number of people.

Collaborative Spirals (p. 129):

Social production is not a panacea; it is just an alternative. Although we are better off being able to use it when it is valuable, it brings its own challenges, just as production via firms and governments does. Even the simplest pooled effort or voluntary participation can be fraught with tension among the individual participants, and between those individuals and the group. Like many aspects of social life, this problem has no solution; the dilemma can be addressed only by various compromises, none of them wholly satisfactory. One way to help a group of participants improve their ability to function together is the creation and maintenance of shared culture.

5. Culture

Culture as a Coordinating Tool (pp. 138-140):

Alchemical methods were hoarded rather than shared, passed down from master to apprentice, and when the alchemists did describe their experiments, the descriptions were both incomplete and vague. [ . . . ]

This was hardly a recipe for success; even worse, no two people working with alchemical descriptions could reliably even fail in the same way. As a result, alchemical conclusions accumulated only slowly, with no steady improvement in utility. Absent transparent methods and a formal way of rooting out errors, erroneous beliefs were as likely to correct ones to be preserved over generations. In contrast, members of the Invisible College described their methods, assumptions, and results to one another, so that all might benefit from both successes and failures. [ . . . ]

Culture -- not tools or insights -- animated the Invisible College and transmuted alchemy into chemistry. The members accumulated facts more quickly, and were able to combine existing facts into new experiments and new insights. By insisting on accuracy and transparency, and by sharing their assumptions and working methods with one another, the collegians had access to the group's collective knowledge and constituted a collaborative circle. Their cultural norms transformed the alchemists' slow accumulation of personal and idiosyncratic beliefs into a set of methods and results that could be observed, understood, and recombined by any scientifically literate participant.

Combinability makes knowing something different from having something. If you have a stick, and someone gives you another one, you have two sticks. It's better than having just one, but it's still not much. If, on the other hand, you have a piece of knowledge -- that rubbing the two sticks together in a certain way can make fire -- you can do something of value that you couldn't do before. Increasing the number of things you have can be useful, but increasing the amount of knowledge you have can be transformative. This is what makes the ways a society shares knowledge so critical, and what helped give the Invisible College such a dramatic edge over the alchemists. Even when working with the same tools, they were working in a far different, and better, culture of communication.

The Economics of Sharing (p. 142):

Increases in community size, decreases in cost of sharing, and increases in clarity all make knowledge more combinable, and in groups where these characteristics grow, combinability will grow. These three conditions are all magnified by a medium that is global and cheap, and that lets unlimited perfect copies of information spread at will, even among large and physically dispersed groups. Our technological tools for making information globally available and discoverable, by amateurs, at zero marginal cost, thus represent an enormous and positive shock to the combinability of knowledge.

College Professors and Brain Surgeons (p. 151):

When things that used to be inconvenient stop being inconvenient, though, the old accommodations have to be renegotiated, including the role of those workers: when you can get advice about a restaurant from the aggregate view of people who've actually eaten there, the value of the critic as a source of recommendation is reduced. Other functions of the critic, such as interpreting its chef's intentions or relating it to the history of a particular cuisine remain, but the overall value of the reviewer's work shrinks because the world has changed around him.

Patients Like Us

6. Personal, Communal, Public, Civic (pp. 161-162):

The dramatically reduced cost of public address, and the dramatically increased size of the population wired together, means that we can now turn massive aggregations of small contributions into things of lasting value. This fact, key to our current era, has been a persistent surprise. At every turn, skeptical observers have attacked the idea that pooling our cognitive surplus could work to create anything worthwhile, or suggested that if it does work, it is a kind of cheating, because sharing at a scale that competes with older institutions is somehow wrong. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft denounced the shared production of software as communism. Robert McHenry, a former editor in chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, likened Wikipedia to a public rest room. Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, compared bloggers to monkeys. These complaints, self-interested thought hey were, echoed more broadly held beliefs. Shared, unmanaged effort might be fine for picnics and bowling leagues, but serious work is done for money, by people who work in proper organizations, with managers directing their work.

Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith. In earlier eras, when amateur groups were small and organization costs were high, sharing wasn't terribly effective at creating large-scale or long-lasting value; groups were hard to coordinate, and the fruits of amateur efforts were hard to preserve, discover, or disseminate. These limits of size and longevity also limited sharing's metaphorical radius and half-life -- its social radius was historically quite small, and its half-life was quite short. But social production can now be dramatically more effective than it used to be, both in absolute terms and relative to more formally managed production, because the radius and half-life of shared effort have moved from household to global scale.

Women and Men

Individuals, Groups, and Freedom (pp. 175-176):

It's hard to imagine a future where someone asks himself, "Where, oh where can I share a picture of my cute kitten?" Almost by definition, if people want that kind of value, it will be there. It's not so simple with public and especially civic value. As Gary Kamiya has noted of today's web, "You can always get what you want, but you can't always get what you need." The kinds of things we need are produced by groups pursuing public value.

We should care more about public and civic value than about personal or communal value because society benefits more from them, but also because public and civic value are harder to create. The amount of public and civic value we get out of our cognitive surplus is an open question, and one strongly affected by the culture of the groups doing the sharing, and by the culture of the larger society that those groups are embedded in. As Dean Kamen, the inventor and entrepreneur, puts it, "In a free culture, you get what you celebrate." Depending on what we celebrate in one another, we can get a few pieces of public and civic value, like those we see today in Wikipedia and open source software and the Responsible Citizens, or we can celebrate people who create civic value, making it a deep part of the experience of users everywhere.

Groups and Governance (p. 178):

There is no one-size-fits-all set of rules for governing groups that create public value. Working software projects like Apache tend to be brutal technical meritocracies, while groups coordinated via social networks, like the Responsible Citizens, tend to have a more supportive culture, and so on. Thee are two universals, however: to succeed in creating and sustaining public value, a group must defend itself against external threats (like eBay defending itself against fraud) and against internal threats (like the members of the Apache project defending themselves against getting sidetracked by arguments or inertia).

7. Looking for the Mouse (p. 185):

The earliest visibly successful uses of cognitive surplus were in technical communities of computer programmers, where collaborative behaviors are well understood and where cultural barriers to participating are few. Programmers who work on open source projects like Apache and Linux are by definition people who view participation in a positive light. Steve Weber, a Berkeley political scientist and one of the great chroniclers of the open source movement, notes in his book The Success of Open Source that neither the reduced costs of collaboration nor the eventual technical quality of the output can fully explain a person's choice to work on an open source project. Instead, a critical mass of core programmers have to have "a positive normative or ethical valence toward the process," which is to say, to have made a deep judgment that social production is the right way to create software.

(p. 186):

Such a conversation will never happen. If you do a web search for "we as a society," you will find a litany of failed causes, because society isn't the kind of unit that can have conversations, come to decisions, and take action. Civic value rarely comes from sudden social conversations; nor does it bubble up from individual actions. It comes, instead, from the work of groups, small groups at first that grow in size and importance, the pattern of collaborative circles, communities and practice, and many other group patterns. If you want to create new forms of civic value, we need to improve the ability of small groups to try radical things, to help the inventors of the next PatientsLikeMe or the next set of Responsible Citizens get up and going. It's from groups trying new things that the most profound uses of social media have hitherto come and will come in the future.

Paradox of Revolution

Improving the Odds: subsection list:

Starting
--Start Small
--Ask "Why?"
--Behavior Follows Opportunity
--Default to Social
Growing
--A Hundred Users Are Harder Than a Dozen and Harder Than a Thousand
--People Differ. More People Differ More.
--Intimacy Doesn't Scale
--Support a Supportive Culture
Adapting
--The Faster You Learn, the Sooner You'll Be Able to Adapt
--Success Causes More Problems Than Failure
--Clarity Is Violence
--Try Anything. Try Everything.

(p. 194):

Projects that will work only if they grow large generally won't grow large; people who are fixated on creating large-scale future success can actually reduce the possibility of creating the small-scale here-and-now successes needed to get there. A veritable natural law in social media is that to get to a system that is large and good, it is far better to start with a system that is small and good and work on making it bigger than to start with a system that is large and mediocre and working on making it better.

(p. 198):

The key transition is around culture. A small group where everyone knows everyone else can rely on personality to arrange its affairs, while a large group will have some kind of preexisting culture that new users adopt. In the transition between those two scales is where culture gets established. (By aligning members' actions and assumptions, even when they don't know each other, culture is a way to keep the growing complexity of large groups at bay.) Once a culture is established, whether it's helpful or suspicious, accepting or skeptical, it is very hard to change.

The key is to recruit as the first dozens of users people who will embody the right cultural norms, with the caveat that what makes a set of norms right differs from place to place.

(p. 199):

In broadcast systems, the bigger the group, the more behavior converges on some kind of average; in participatory systems, "average" is an almost useless concept. The behaviors of the most active and least active members diverge sharply as the population grows.

Three Ways to Manage a Revolution (p. 210):

Meanwhile, even in the "As Much Chaos as We Can Stand" scenario, the radicals won't be able to create any more change than the members of society can imagine. We've had the internet for forty years now, but Twitter and YouTube are less than five years old, not because the technology wasn't in place earlier but because society wasn't yet ready to take advantage of those opportunities. The upper limit of "As Much Chaos as We Can Stand" is thus the time and energy required for social diffusion.

Looking for the Mouse (p. 212):

For those of us over forty, exercising this kind of imagination requires conscious effort, because it's so different from what we grew up with. At NYU, where I teach, I get to see the world through my students' eyes by listening to them talk, reading what they write, and watching what they do. This gives me some sense of the world as twenty-five-years-olds see it, and it looks very different from (and mostly better than) the world I grew up in.

Some books and essays referenced by Shirky:

• Chris Anderson: Free: The Future of a Radical Price (2009, Hyperion)
• Wilfred Bion: Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (1991, Routledge)
• Nicholas Christakis/James Fowler: Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (2009, Little Brown)
• Elizabeth Eisenstein: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980, Cambridge University Press)
• Dominique Foray: The Economics of Knowledge (2004, MIT Press)
• Uri Gneezy/Aldo Rustichini: "A Fine Is a Price" (2000, Journal of Legal Studies 29.1)
• Nik Gowing: "Skyful of Lies" and Black Swans: The New Tyranny of Shifting Information Power in Crisis (2009, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism)
• Dave Hickey: "Romancing the Looky-Loos", in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997, Foundation for Advanced Critical Studies)
• Gary Kamiya: "The Death of the News" (2009, Salon) [link]
• Andrew Keen: The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today's User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values (2007, Broadway)
• Kevin Kelly: "Triumph of the Default" (2009, The Technium) [link]
• Melissa McEwan: "The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck" (2009, Shakesville) [link]
• Robert Putnam: Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital (2000, Simon & Schuster)
• Steven Shaw: "The Zagat Effect" (2000, Commentary)
• Steve Weber: The Success of Open Source (2005, Harvard University Press)

Websites referenced:

• BeExtra.org
• Care2.com
• CouchSurfing.org
• Current.com
• Delicious.com
• DonorsChoose.org
• FanFiction.net
• FictionAlley.org
• Firstgiving.com
• Flickr.com
• Grobanitesforcharity.org
• HarryPotterFanFiction.com
• ICanHasCheezburger.com
• Kiva.org
• NetSquared.org
• PatientsLikeMe.com
• PickupPal.com
• Ushahidi.com