|  |
 |
|
OPINION: End of the World as We Know It, Part Two |
Teddy Herzog | 10/17/08
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Read Part One
The future we are heading into may not be fully informed by the past.
Clay Shirky writes about the internet and talks about a growing distinction between “institutions” and “collaboration”. The historical, classic way to get something done in the world is to start an institution. You get resources together, you start an institution (either public or private), and you use the institution to coordinate the activities of the group.
But as Shirky points out, most recently the costs of communicating with other people -- of coordinating activity -- has become vastly cheaper. The internet now allows us to communicate and to coordinate activity easily and cheaply without the need for classical institutional structures.
 Equally as important, the internet allows the general public to participate and cooperate with projects without becoming hired professionals and without the limitations of traditional institutions. Shirky provides the example of the website Flicker which allows total strangers to provide photos of an event that they have all attended and to have them tagged in such a way that a collection of photos taken by many, “unorganized”, unprofessional photographers can be viewed by anyone on the planet.
Similarly, the lack of “institution” can be observed in today’s use of cell phones which reduces the need for established planning in exchange for something like “I’ll just call you after work and we’ll figure out how to hook up then”. Shirky says that this is a replacement of “planning” with “coordination“. “We are now able to do that kind of thing with groups.” Instead of having a five year plan for the website Wikipedia, we can now just say that we will coordinate the effort as we go. We are now well enough coordinated that we don’t have to decide in advance what to do.
As Shirky notes, “the tension is between institution as enabler and institution as obstacle. Institutions hate being told that they are obstacles. One of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem -- the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to preservation. So, when institutions are told that they are obstacles and that there are other ways of coordinating the value, they go through something like the Kubler-Ross stages: denial, anger, bargaining, and acceptance.”
A good example is how Microsoft develops operating system hardware and how Linux develops operating system hardware. Microsoft is a closed private institution. Linux is an “open source” collaboration model. The fact that a single programmer can move into a non-professional relationship with Linux, offer one software improvement, and then never be heard from again, is the kind of value that is unreachable in classic institutional systems.
“This is a revolution. This is a really profound change in the way human systems are organized. It is a revolution in that it is a change in equilibrium. It is a whole new way of doing things. As with the printing press, if it is really a revolution, it doesn‘t take us from point A to point B. It takes us from point A to chaos.” The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the organizing political force to a new world order in 1648 of the nation state with the Treaty of Westphalia. (Shirky)
Yochai Benkler, a professor of entrepreneurial legal studies, has additional insights into the value of “open source” economics. Benkler notes that in the year 1835, James Gordon Bennett created the first mass circulation newspaper in New York City for a cost of about $10,000. in today’s money. By 15 years later in 1850, doing the same thing would come to cost 2.5 million dollars in today’s dollars. This is the critical change that is being inverted by the internet today -- the emergence of “social production“.
The contrast is that previously, classical producers had to be able to raise substantial money to initiate a new product -- they were market-based or publicly-owned. But with the rise of the internet we have a radical change in the way that information, production, and exchange is capitalized. The way that the capitalization now happens is radically distributed instead of concentrated into a few hands.
What this means is that for the first time since the industrial revolution, the most important components of our information economy are now in the hands of the population at large. Communications and computations capability are now in the hands of the entire population. And human creativity is encouraged. Rather than the institution deciding who gets “hired” and which ideas get promoted, all individuals can promote their own ideas.
The internet server software Apache was created by a loose collection of volunteer writers. Again, the institutionalized competitor was Microsoft. But now the "open source" Apache software controls 70% of the market and the private institution Microsoft software controls only 20% of the Web server market.
This sort of open source collaborative, cooperative approach to projects on the Web has become a dominant means of getting things done. For example, search engine Google “outsources” to the Web community as a whole to decide which websites are the most relevant which, in turn, directs other people to those so chosen websites.
It used to be too expensive to have decentralized social production out in society. What we are seeing now is the emergence of this economic system of “social sharing and exchange”, according to Benkler.
“A new social phenomenon is emerging. It is creating a new form of competition. Peer to peer networks are assaulting the recording industry. Free/open source software is taking market share from Microsoft. Skype potentially threatens the telecomms. Wikipedia competes with on-line encyclopedias. But it also opens new sources of opportunities for businesses.” (Benkler)
Economic structures determine political structures. New technology is creating tools for a “collaborative” economy in direct competition with the historical, “closed” institutions.
The traditional high cost to enter the market place is being replaced by the internet which makes the tools of communication, coordination and marketing potentially available to anyone.
While the United States' political structure is clearly experiencing pressure to become less “democratic” and less “free”, the competing force of “open source”, social production via the internet could ultimately lead us towards a more free worldwide economy with possibilities for a revival of true democracy.
For more information on the people cited as sources for this story, visit my website. |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|