Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations | Clay Shirky

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations | Clay Shirky | Hey Clay, WAZZZZZAAA?

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Here Comes Everybo...

	Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations Clay Shirky Penguin Press HC, The, 2008 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 34 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Perfect Text for the Hyperconnected Era

Brilliant synopsis of what's happening - right now. Features that are important to every individual, every organization, every government, and which can no longer be ignored. Clay lays out the case, example after example, and ties it all together. Highly recommended.

Hey Clay, WAZZZZZAAA?

Hey Clay, WAZZZZZZZZAAA?

I loved the book. Many thanks to Vanessa, Scott and Janet for the work they do. And now for my contribution-- and my only post on Amazon (Farzad a la Mode)

I thought your book was thought provoking all the way to the end. You respected the reader enough not to do what so many authors do today, which is to keep repeating the same thing over and over again in simple words.

I also keep seeing things that echo with the lessons of your book. Did you see the NYT article about the case of the stolen Skyline GT? Another nice example of how if there's love (in this case for a car) then online community action can be intense. www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/automobiles/13STEAL.html

BTW- you scared me with your Deaniac analysis- I sure hope that's not the case w my man Obama- but he's trading at 80c http://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/graphs/graph_DConv08.cfm so I'm still feeling good. (The newspaper headlines after PA should have read: "no new information in Clinton win- markets unmoved").

Throughout the book I kept scribbling stuff down, and thinking- I should send this section on web 2.0 tools for human rights to Saman, or the section on "implicit promise" to Jamie (Heywood), or the piece on loose networks to Les. Unfortunately, it's too much of a drag to scan and email. We need a better tool for this.

How's this for an idea? If while I was reading your book, how about if I could add some marginalia (like my random thoughts above), and other readers could see it too, and rank it. That way, I could choose to read not only your brilliant thoughts, but also the most highly regarded comments from all your readers. Kind of like the Talmud with commentary all around the original text (http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/TalmudPage.htm). Or alternatively, maybe I could only turn on my friends' comments, so reading a book would be social like watching a movie with a bunch of friends and kibitzing is.

Anyway, looking forward to talking to you soon- unless of course, you're too famous to get back to me. Cue "Stan" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_(song)

Farzad

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ready for the National Initiative for Democracy

To me, this book is a signal that we are ready for the National Initiative for Democracy (http://ni4d.org). This proposal would amend the Constitution with a process for allowing direct vote on bills. The powers of Congress remain as they are; the NI4D proposal would not replace Congress. If we can harness a small fraction of the surplus attention of this country for government administration, we will quickly become the best managed country in the world.

Tales from the Long Tail

The effect of the Internet on our culture has been the subject of several interesting books over the last few years: Wikinomics, The Long Tail, etc. Here Comes Everybody is much in the same vein as these, it has the usual requisite topics...six degrees of separation, tragedy of the commons and so forth.

Each author brings their own fresh insights to the discussion, two ideas that stand out for me from this book are the concept of Social Capital, and that of a "Coasian Ceiling" to the size of an organization. Author Shirky utilizes the concept of Social Capital (you scratch my back, I scratch yours) in order to help explain the growth of social networks in light of such obvious challenges such as geography and plain old self-interest. A 1937 paper by Ronald Coase entitled "The Nature of the Firm" is used to explain how The Internet has succeeded in changing the nature of work by reducing the cost of exchanging labor. In other words, people do not have to get together under one roof in order to work efficiently.

These are certainly stimulating ideas and this book has many more examples of the how The Internet is affecting our day to day productivity. Somewhat more disturbing are several examples of group action that result from Internet communication. One example is how The Internet is employed in vigilante, albeit non-violent, justice. Another example is related to flash mobs and civil disobedience. Hopefully these are just tales from the long tail and The Internet will remain more related to the exchange of information than as a tool for achieving political and legal ends.

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Do we really need another bit of tech-prognostication?

If you read enough, you just have to be wary of "Here Comes Everybody" and its ilk. If you're the sort of person thinking of reading Shirky's book, you've probably also read Larry Lessig (Code), Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks, not to mention essays like "Coase's Penguin"), Shapiro and Varian (Information Rules), maybe Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous), and on and on. You've used the Wikipedia. You may well use Linux. You've learned about "the wisdom of the crowds" (Surowiecki). You've got "the long tail" in there somewhere too.

What does Shirky add to this cacaphony? He adds one important special case of all of the above: the Internet lets us form groups effortlessly. Now we can work together on projects that we wouldn't have known about otherwise. We can find other people for fun in the real (non-Internet) world. We can find people with remarkably obscure interests matching our own. Previously these would have taken far too much time and effort. And the payoff is far too low for any company to be interested in connecting, say, lovers of ancient Chinese art. What the Internet has given us is a set of tools that allow us to create and find these groups.

This comes with its downsides. For instance, at the same time that it becomes easier for me to find blogs devoted to 18th-century ship-in-a-bottle designs, it becomes easier for you to find backwoods militias. The example Shirky gives here is a web bulletin board devoted to encouraging anorexia among its teen members. (This was the only part of the book that actually horrified me.) In the real world, these sorts of groups succumb to social pressure and go into hiding. The web makes it possible for them to find one another; they are no longer alone.

Shirky only gives the briefest treatment of these groups, and seems generally in favor of them for the same reason that people favor free speech: it protects the speech we hate as well as the speech we support. I would have liked deeper coverage here. In a lot of senses, the Internet is making us reconsider the foundations of democracy: now we're face to face with the consequences of truly free speech; what do we do about it, if anything? Do we still stand by the free-speech absolutism that we clung to when it was more or less hypothetical? Shirky doesn't really touch on this.

He's quite often a techno-idealist, which is a stance he assumes professionally. As a technologist, he's convinced that the spread of cheap communications technologies will allow protesters to connect and topple ruling elites; he uses protests within Belarus as an example. He doesn't really follow this up with counterexamples: Great Firewall Of China, anyone? More to the point: politics will exist even after text messages amongst flashmobs are a faint memory. I'd have liked this book better had Shirky cowritten it with a political scientist.

Had Shirky dug into this a little more, the whole tone of his book would have changed. Had he scaled out his historical perspective, he might not be as optimistic either. I've been reading about the revolutionary potential of technology at least since I started using PGP; it was supposed to have been used by freedom fighters in the jungles of Burma. This strain continued through O'Reilly's publication of its collection of essays on P2P. Within there were essays on, say, FreeNet, which was explicitly designed to create a censorship-proof peer-to-peer network. Only the occasional voice was brave enough to ask whether FreeNet would even be permitted within a repressive regime. If Shirky were interested in convincing me that technology might topple existing power structures, he'd go ask how those freedom-fighters are doing.

Shirky's is a valuable point of view, but it's a point of view that I've heard too many times. Nowadays, it's more courageous -- and ultimately, I think, more helpful to the world -- to write a book disagreeing with Shirky ("Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge," say, or "The Cult of the Amateur") than it is to write Here Comes Everybody.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7

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