Jon Lebkowsky Interviews Clay Shirky

Posted on April 3, 2008
Filed Under Ideas |

It’s worth reading every word when Jon Lebkowsky and Clay Shirky come together and publish a conversation. This happened last month, and promises to continue next month.

Clay Shirky, inveterate thinker and writer about the Internet, fresh from launching his book, Here Comes Everybody, is the person to talk to about how social groups organize themselves and take action that brings results, using the Web platform to do the heavy lifting.

Jon Lebkowsky, co-player in everything since dirt became digital, and deeply steeped in sustainability issues and today’s bright-green economic advances, is a man who works with the ways in which we’re changing our world.

The conversation is ripe with the promise of action, and change.

There was a basic assumption, both in capitalist and communist theories of large scale action, that the complexities of ordinary life would defeat the ability of groups to come together and do things on their own.

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One of the things I think is happening, is that the pattern of groups being able to come together and do things for themselves is now spreading outside of the technical and geek communities, and is becoming a general social capability.

But it wasn’t always like this. The conversation lays out very simply the history of what has happened to turn the Internet from a prime publishing medium into an key activist gathering.

In that period, ‘95 to 2000, the template for the social use of the web was really under-optimized. Everybody was excited about using it to distribute information, and everybody was excited about ecommerce. We were basically recapitulating these older patterns: point to point transactions, replicating newspapers, magazines and so forth on the web.

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There’s a big difference between having some people online and having most people online. That’s a difference that appeals mainly to businesses, now the audience is larger. But there’s another difference between having most people online and having everybody online. The advantage of having everybody online is that in your social group, if everybody is online, then you can take it for granted that you can use online tools to coordinate the life of that group.

The tipping point of density seems already to have been passed, at least sufficient for a demonstration effect of change to propagate.

And as the platform becomes ever more proficient at changing from a read-only medium to a read-write situation, so too is our human and institutional faculty of discrimination reshaping itself:

What we don’t yet have is a set of social norms for figuring out - in a medium like the web, which scales from intimate personal address all the way to full publication - which messages we should be paying attention to and which messages we should be ignoring.

The world is turning into a landscape filled with communities of practice. The community of practice is the new village, and arises when people find each other through their common interests and causes.

The dynamics of community, based as they seem to be primordially on love and altruism, rather than greed and self-interest, slip a knifeblade of subversion into the established world economy.

Communities of practice is one of these great patterns of demonstrating, to the consternation of many neoclassical economists, the degree to which people will go out of their way to help each other with no obvious return.

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HDR photography went from being something that a handful of people knew how to do to a general technique that any photographer who’s willing to spend an afternoon on Flickr could pick up and understand. And the speed of that spread wouldn’t work if money were involved.

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The awareness and the growth in expertise actually happened faster because people weren’t asking for payment in return for value. They were asking to participate in a community that loved this stuff.

The conversation, by the way is styled as an interview, so Clay Shirky does most of the talking. But here’s a key contribution from Jon Lebkowsky on the power of the new organizing:

One thing we’ve been talking about recently, that I had been thinking about for a while, is the idea that you could potentially do the larger things that people normally grow monolithic corporations to do… that you could cluster and aggregate networks of smaller companies to collaborate to do these larger things. Instead of having a big company with departments, you just have a network of companies that have figured out how to organize so that they can really depend on each other

To which Clay Shirky responds:

What you just said is, in my mind, the key piece of economic analysis, which is when the transaction costs are down, then the ability of smaller groups to find one another and bind themselves to one another as needed goes up. And once you get those two things happening at the same time, you can actually start figuring out when you’d be better off decreasing the size of the group and increasing the discoverability of the interface.

So if all this is happening now, at the emerging edge, what does the future look like? It seems to me that subversion looms larger, and the world power structure will be changed.

The pattern that strikes me as being most radically different from what we’ve had before is collective action, the pattern where the group comes together, and stands or falls depending on the actions of the entire group. Every member of the group is affected by the action of the group as a whole

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It seems to me that the collective action model, where the group isn’t just a loose collection of individuals, it’s actually a unit, has not yet seen a lot of traction. There have been some interesting experiments, but most of the interesting work there is still in the future.

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The biggest impact will be if we find some way to defer to groups, to allow groups to come together and make some choices for themselves that the government defers to. Or, if we start regarding the output of groups as being legitimate expressions of the will of the people.

Many people have floated this idea of a policy wiki, or the notion of doing the national budget using the wisdom of crowds. Those experiments would be, I think, the most radical. On the way to that, even before the really radical stuff, I think the big change is going to be just the number of times that people start to pull together and have success…

So. A great conversation, and I want to hear more about where we go from here. Jon interviewed Clay in March, and worldchanging.com published the transcript on March 31st. Jon says they’ll follow up with an asynchronous conversation on the WELL for two weeks starting May 28.

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