IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO FIND A PHONE

Human beings are social creatures—not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities, and it shows up in almost every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect. Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups. The aggregate relations among individuals and groups, among individuals within groups, and among groups forms a network of astonishing complexity. We have always relied on group effort for survival; even before the invention of agriculture, hunting and gathering required coordinated work and division of labor. You can see an echo of our talent for sociability in the language we have for groups; like a real-world version of the mythical seventeen Eskimo words for snow, we use incredibly rich language in describing human association. We can make refined distinctions between a corporation and a congregation, a clique and a club, a crowd and a cabal. We readily understand the difference between transitive labels like “my wife’s friend’s son” and “my son’s friend’s wife,” and this relational subtlety permeates our lives. Our social nature even shows up in negation. One of the most severe punishments that can be meted out to a prisoner is solitary confinement; even in a social environment as harsh and attenuated as prison, complete removal from human contact is harsher still.

The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion. One obvious lesson is that new technology enables new kinds of group-forming.

When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants. The hive is a social device, a piece of bee information technology that provides a platform, literally, for the communication and coordination that keeps the colony viable. Individual bees can’t be understood separately from the colony or from their shared, co-created environment. So it is with human networks; bees make hives, we make mobile phones.

To put it in economic terms, the costs incurred by creating a new group or joining an existing one have fallen in recent years, and not just by a little bit. They have collapsed. (“Cost” here is used in the economist’s sense of anything expended—money, but also time, effort, or attention.) One of the few uncontentious tenets of economics is that people respond to incentives. 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.

We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change. These communications tools have been given many names, all variations on a theme: “social software,” “social media,” “social computing,” and so on. Though there are some distinctions between these labels, the core idea is the same: 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.

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. We haven’t had all the groups we’ve wanted, we’ve simply had all the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation; the difficulties that kept self-assembled groups from working together are shrinking, meaning that the number and kinds of things groups can get done without financial motivation or managerial oversight are growing. The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.

SHARING ANCHORS COMMUNITY

Groups of people are complex, in ways that make those groups hard to form and hard to sustain; much of the shape of traditional institutions is a response to those difficulties. New social tools relieve some of those burdens, allowing for new kinds of group-forming, like using simple sharing to anchor the creation of new groups.

This complexity means, in the words of the physicist Philip Anderson, that “more is different.” Writing in Science magazine in 1972, Anderson noted that aggregations of anything from atoms to people exhibit complex behavior that cannot be predicted by observing the component parts. Chemistry isn’t just applied physics—you cannot understand all the properties of water from studying its constituent atoms in isolation. This pattern of aggregates exhibiting novel properties is true of people as well. Sociology is not just psychology applied to groups; individuals in group settings exhibit behaviors that no one could predict by studying single minds. No one has ever been bashful or extroverted while sitting alone in their room, no one can be a social climber or a man of the people without reference to society, and these characteristics exist because groups are not just simple aggregations of individuals.

An organization will tend to grow only when the advantages that can be gotten from directing the work of additional employees are less than the transaction costs of managing them. Coase concentrated his analysis on businesses, but the problems of coordination costs apply to institutions of all sorts.

When an organization grows very large, it reaches the limit implicit in Coase’s theory; at some point an institution simply cannot grow anymore and still remain functional, because the cost of managing the business will destroy any profit margin. You can think of this as a Coasean ceiling, the point above which standard institutional forms don’t work well.

Coase’s theory also tells us about the effects of small changes in transaction costs. When such costs fall moderately, we can expect to see two things. First, the largest firms increase in size. (Put another way, the upper limit of organizational size is inversely related to management costs.) Second, small companies become more effective, doing more business at lower cost than the same company does in a world of high transaction costs. These two effects describe the postwar industrial world well: Giant conglomerates like ITT in the 1970s 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. At the same time there has been an explosion of small- and medium-sized businesses, because such businesses were better able to discover and exploit new opportunities.

But what if transactions costs don’t fall moderately? What if they collapse? This scenario is harder to predict from Coase’s original work, and it used to be purely academic. Now it’s not, because it’s happening, or rather it has already happened, and we’re starting to see the results. Anyone who has worked in an organization with more than a dozen employees recognizes institutional costs. Anytime you are faced with too many meetings, too much paperwork, or too many layers of approval (shades of McCallum), you are dealing with those costs. Until recently, such costs have been little more than the stuff of water-cooler grumbling—everyone complains about institutional overhead, without much hope of changing things. In that world (the world we lived in until recently), if you wanted to take on a task of any significance, managerial oversight was just one of the costs of doing business. What happens to tasks that aren’t worth the cost of managerial oversight? Until recently, the answer was “Those things don’t happen.” Because of transaction costs a long list of possible goods and services never became actual goods and services; things like aggregating amateur documentation of the London transit bombings were simply outside the realm of possibility. That collection now exists because people have always desired to share, and the obstacles that prevented sharing on a global scale are now gone. Think of these activities as lying under a Coasean floor; they are valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way, because the basic and unsheddable costs of being an institution in the first place make those activities not worth pursuing.

Our basic human desires and talents for group effort are stymied by the complexities of group action at every turn. Coordination, organization, even communication in groups is hard and gets harder as the group grows. That difficulty means that whatever methods help coordinate group action will spread, no matter how inefficient they are, so long as they are better than nothing. Small groups have several methods for coordinating action, like calling each group member in turn or setting up a phone tree, but most of these methods don’t work well even for dozens of people, much less for thousands. For large-scale activity, the methods that have worked best have been those pioneered by McCallum—hierarchical organization, managed in layers. The most common organizational structures we have today are simply the least bad fit for group action in an environment of high transaction costs. Our new tools offer us ways of organizing group effort without resorting to McCallum’s strategies.

This is where Coasean logic gets strange. Small decreases in transaction costs make businesses more efficient, because the constraints of the institutional dilemma get less severe. 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. So long as the absolute cost of organizing a group is high, unmanaged groups will be limited to undertaking small efforts—a night out at the movies, a camping trip. Even something as simple as a potluck dinner typically requires some hosting institution. Now that it is possible to achieve large-scale coordination at low cost, a third category has emerged: serious, complex work, taken on without institutional direction. Loosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure, because they lay under the Coasean floor. 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. We didn’t notice how many things were under that floor because, prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.

You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action.

Sharing creates the fewest demands on the participants. Many sharing platforms, such as Flickr, operate in a largely take-it-or-leave-it fashion, which allows for the maximum freedom of the individual to participate while creating the fewest complications of group life.

Cooperation is the next rung on the ladder. Cooperating is harder than simply sharing, because it involves changing your behavior to synchronize with people who are changing their behavior to synchronize with you. Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity—you know who you are cooperating with.

Collaborative production is a more involved form of cooperation, as it increases the tension between individual and group goals. The litmus test for collaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many. Structurally, the biggest difference between information sharing and collaborative production is that in collaborative production at least some collective decisions have to be made.

Collective action, the third rung, is the hardest kind of group effort, as it requires a group of people to commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members. All group structures create dilemmas, but these dilemmas are hardest when it comes to collective action, because the cohesion of the group becomes critical to its success. Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user’s identity to the identity of the group.

EVERYONE IS A MEDIA OUTLET

Our social tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals.

The change isn’t a shift from one kind of news institution to another, but rather in the definition of news: from news as an institutional prerogative to news as part of a communications ecosystem, occupied by a mix of formal organizations, informal collectives, and individuals.

Two things are true about the remaking of the European intellectual landscape during the Protestant Reformation: first, it was not caused by the invention of movable type, and second, it was possible only after the invention of movable type, which aided the rapid dissemination of Martin Luther’s complaints about the Catholic Church (the 95 Theses) and the spread of Bibles printed in local languages, among its other effects. Holding those two thoughts in your head at the same time is essential to understanding any social change driven by a new technological capability. Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A through a long period of chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before new ones become stable. In the late 1400s scribes existed side by side with publishers but no longer performed an irreplaceable service. Despite the replacement of their core function, however, the scribes’ sense of themselves as essential remained undiminished.

Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary ones, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession. In most cases, those threats are also threats to society; we do not want to see a relaxing of standards for becoming a surgeon or a pilot. But in some cases the change that threatens the profession benefits society, as did the spread of the printing press; even in these situations the professionals can be relied on to care more about self-defense than about progress. What was once a service has become a bottleneck. Most organizations believe they have much more freedom of action and much more ability to shape their future than they actually do, and evidence that the ecosystem is changing in ways they can’t control usually creates considerable anxiety, even if the change is good for society as a whole.

The pattern here is simple—what seems like a fixed and abiding category like “journalist” turns out to be tied to an accidental scarcity created by the expense of publishing apparatus. Sometimes this scarcity is decades old (as with photographers) or even centuries old (as with journalists), but that doesn’t stop it from being accidental, and when that scarcity gets undone, the seemingly stable categories turn out to be unsupportable. This is not to say that professional journalists and photographers do not exist—no one is likely to mistake Bob Woodward or Annie Liebowitz for an amateur—but it does mean that the primary distinction between the two groups is gone. What once was a chasm has now become a mere slope.

PUBLISH, THEN FILTER

The media landscape is transformed, because personal communication and publishing, previously separate functions, now shade into one another. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact.

When people talk about user-generated content, they are describing the ways that users create and share media with one another, with no professionals anywhere in sight. Seen this way, the idea of user-generated content is actually not just a personal theory of creative capabilities but a social theory of media relations.

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. It turns out that the difference between conversational tools and broadcast tools was arbitrary, but the difference between conversing and broadcasting is real. Even in a medium that allowed for perfect interactivity for all participants (something we have a reasonable approximation of today), the limits of human cognition will mean that scale alone will kill conversation. In such a medium, even without any professional bottlenecks or forced passivity, fame happens.

Traditional media have a few built-in constraints that make the filtering problem relatively simple. Most important, publishing and broadcasting cost money. Any cost creates some sort of barrier, and the high cost of most traditional media creates high barriers. As a result, there is an upper limit to the number of books, or television shows, or movies that can exist. Since the basic economics of publishing puts a cap on the overall volume of content, it forces every publisher or producer to filter the material in advance.Simply to remain viable, anyone producing traditional media has to decide what to produce and what not to; the good work has to be sorted from the mediocre in advance of publication. Though the filtering of the good from the mediocre starts as an economic imperative, the public enjoys the value of that filtering as well, because we have historically relied on the publisher’s judgment to help ensure minimum standards of quality. Where publishing is hard and expensive, every instance of the written word comes with an implicit promise: someone besides the writer thought this was worth reading. Every book and magazine article and newspaper (as well as every published photo and every bit of broadcast speech or song or bit of video) had to pass through some editorial judgment.

The old ways of filtering were neither universal nor ideal; they were simply good for the technology of the day, and reasonably effective. We were used to them, and now we have to get used to other ways of solving the same problem. Mass amateurization has created a filtering problem vastly larger than we had with traditional media, so much larger, in fact, that many of the old solutions are simply broken. The brute economic logic of allowing anyone to create anything and make it available to anyone creates such a staggering volume of new material, every day, that no group of professionals will be adequate to filter the material. Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move. Filter-then-publish, whatever its advantages, rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means that the only working system is publish-then-filter.

Every webpage is a latent community. Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another, too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak (any two users of Google are not likely to have much else in common) or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf of time, and so on. But things like the comments section on Flickr allow those people who do want to activate otherwise-latent groups to at least try it. The basic question “How did you do that?” seems like a simple request for a transfer of information, but when it takes place out in public, it is also a spur to such communities of practice, bridging the former gap between publishing and conversation.

Life teaches us that motivations other than getting paid aren’t enough to add up to serious work. And now we have to unlearn that lesson, because it is less true with each passing year. People now have access to myriad tools that let them share writing, images, video—any form of expressive content, in fact—and use that sharing as an anchor for community and cooperation. The twentieth century, with the spread of radio and television, was the broadcast century. The normal pattern for media was that they were created by a small group of professionals and then delivered to a large group of consumers. But media, in the word’s literal sense as the middle layer between people, have always been a three-part affair. People like to consume media, of course, but they also like to produce it (“Look what I made!”) and they like to share it (“Look what I found!”). Because we now have media that support both making and sharing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption. We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love.

Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.

PERSONAL MOTIVATION MEETS COLLABORATIVE PRODUCTION

Collaborative production, where people have to coordinate with one another to get anything done, is considerably harder than simple sharing, but the results can be more profound. New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of contribution.

Wikis avoid the institutional dilemma. Because contributors aren’t employees, a wiki can take a staggering amount of input with a minimum of overhead. This is key to its success: it does not need to make sure its contributors are competent, or producing steadily, or even showing up. Mandated specialization of talent and consistency of effort, seemingly the hallmarks of large-scale work, actually have little to do with division of labor itself. A business needs employee A and employee B to put in the same effort if they are doing the same job, because it needs interchangeability and because it needs to reduce friction between energetic and lazy workers. By this measure, most contributors to Wikipedia are lazy. The majority of contributors edit only one article, once, while the majority of the effort comes from a much smaller and more active group.

Since no one is being paid, the energetic and occasional contributors happily coexist in the same ecosystem.

In a system where anyone is free to get something started, however badly, a short, uninformative article can be the anchor for the good article that will eventually appear. Its very inadequacy motivates people to improve it; many more people are willing to make a bad article better than are willing to start a good article from scratch. In 1991 Richard Gabriel, a software engineer at Sun Microsystems, wrote an essay that included a section called “Worse Is Better,” describing this effect. He contrasted two programming languages, one elegant but complex versus another that was awkward but simple. The belief at the time was that the elegant solution would eventually triumph; Gabriel instead predicted, correctly, that the language that was simpler would spread faster, and as a result, more people would come to care about improving the simple language than improving the complex one. The early successes of a simple model created exactly the incentives (attention, the desire to see your work spread) needed to create serious improvements. These kinds of incentives help ensure that, despite the day-to-day chaos, a predictable pattern emerges over time: readers continue to read, some of them become contributors, Wikipedia continues to grow, and articles continue to improve. The process is more like creating a coral reef, the sum of millions of individual actions, than creating a car. And the key to creating those individual actions is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.

Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate, or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another. Never have so many people been so free to say and do so many things with so many other people. The freedom driving mass amateurization removes the technological obstacles to participation. Given that everyone now has the tools to contribute equally, you might expect a huge increase in equality of participation. You’d be wrong.

Fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users. And among those contributors, no effort is made to even out their contributions. The spontaneous division of labor driving Wikipedia wouldn’t be possible if there were concern for reducing inequality. On the contrary, most large social experiments are engines for harnessing inequality rather than limiting it. Though the word “ecosystem” is overused as a way to make simple situations seem more complex, it is merited here, because large social systems cannot be understood as a simple aggregation of the behavior of some nonexistent “average” user.

Any system described by a power law, where mean, median, and mode are so different, has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average. This sounds strange to many ears, as we are used to a world where average means middle, which is to say where average is the same as the median. You can see this “below average” phenomenon at work in the economist’s joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar, and suddenly everyone inside becomes a millionaire, on average. The corollary is that everyone else in the bar also acquires a below-average income. The other surprise of such systems is that as they get larger, the imbalance between the few and the many gets larger, not smaller. As we get more weblogs, or more MySpace pages, or more YouTube videos, the gap between the material that gets the most attention and merely average attention will grow, as will the gap between average and median.

Coase’s logic in “The Nature of the Firm” suggests that in organizing any group, the choice is between management and chaos; he assumes that it’s very difficult to create an unmanaged but nonchaotic group. But lack of managerial direction makes it easier for the casual contributor to add something of value; in economic terms, an open social system like Wikipedia dramatically reduces both managerial overhead and disincentives to participation.

Yochai Benkler, a legal scholar and network theorist and author of The Wealth of Networks, calls nonmarket creation of group value “commons-based peer production” and draws attention to the ways people are happy to cooperate without needing financial reward. Wikipedia is peer production par excellence, set up to allow anyone who wants to edit an article to do so, for any and all reasons except getting paid.

Wikipedia invites us to do the following disorienting math: a chaotic process, with unpredictable and wildly uneven contributions, made by nonexpert contributors acting out of variable motivations, is creating a global resource of tremendous daily value. A commercial producer of encyclopedias has to be efficient about finding and fixing mistakes, since things like process and deadlines and salaries are involved. Wikipedia, with none of those things, does not have to be efficient—it merely has to be effective. If enough people see an article, the chance that an error will be caught and fixed improves with time. Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process: if enough people care enough about an article to read it, then enough people will care enough to improve it, and over time this will lead to a large enough body of good enough work to begin to take both availability and quality of articles for granted, and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.

COLLECTIVE ACTION AND INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES

Collective action, where a group acts as a whole, is even more complex than collaborative production, but here again new tools give life to new forms of action. This in turn challenges existing institutions, by eroding the institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination.

The social urge to share information isn’t new. Prior to e-mail and weblogs, we clipped articles and published family newsletters. Recalling these older behaviors, it’s tempting to conclude that our new tools are merely improvements on existing behaviors; this view is both right and wrong. The improvement is there, but it is an improvement so profound that it creates new effects. Philosophers sometimes make a distinction between a difference in degree (more of the same) and a difference in kind (something new). What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind.

In a world where group action means gathering face-to-face, people who need to act as a group should, ideally, be physically near one another. Now that we have ridiculously easy group-forming, however, that stricture is relaxed, and the result is that organizations that assume geography as a core organizing principle, even ones that have been operating that way for centuries, are now facing challenges to that previously bedrock principle.

It is a curiosity of technology that it creates new characteristics in old institutions. Prior to the spread of movable type, scribes didn’t write slowly; they wrote at ordinary speed, which is to say that in the absence of a comparable alternative, the speed of a man writing was the norm for all publishing. After movable type came in, scribes started to write slowly, even though their speed hadn’t changed; it was simply that they were being compared to something much faster.

The communications tools broadly adopted in the last decade are the first to fit human social networks well, and because they are easily modifiable, they can be made to fit better over time. Rather than limiting our communications to one-to-one and one-to-many tools, which have always been a bad fit to social life, we now have many-to-many tools that support and accelerate cooperation and action.

FASTER AND FASTER

As more people adopt simple social tools, and as those tools allow increasingly rapid communication, the speed of group action also increases, and just as more is different, faster is different.

The military often talks about “shared awareness,” which is the ability of many different people and groups to understand a situation, and to understand who else has the same understanding. If I see a fire break out, and I see that you see it as well, we may more easily coordinate our actions—you call 911, I grab a fire extinguisher—than if I have to call your attention to the fire, or if I am in some confusion about how you will react to a fire. Shared awareness allows otherwise uncoordinated groups to begin to work together more quickly and effectively. This kind of social awareness has three levels: when everybody knows something, when everybody knows that everybody knows, and when everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows.

Social tools create what economists would call a positive supply-side shock to the amount of freedom in the world. The old dictum that freedom of the press exists only for those who own a press points to the significance of the change. To speak online is to publish, and to publish online is to connect with others. With the arrival of globally accessible publishing, freedom of speech is now freedom of the press, and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly. Naturally, the changes occasioned by new sources of freedom are most significant in less free environments. Whenever you improve a group’s ability to communicate internally, you change the things it is capable of. What the group does with that power is a separate question.

The power to coordinate otherwise dispersed groups will continue to improve; new social tools are still being invented, and however minor they may seem, any tool that improves shared awareness or group coordination can be pressed into service for political means, because the freedom to act in a group is inherently political.

SOLVING SOCIAL DILEMMAS

There are real and permanent social dilemmas, which can only be optimized for, never completely solved. The human social repertoire includes many such optimizations, which social tools can amplify.

We all face the Prisoners’ Dilemma whenever we interact with people we could take advantage of, or people who could take advantage of us, yet we actually manage to trust one another often enough to accomplish things in groups. The shadow of the future makes it possible for me to act on your behalf today, even at some risk or cost to me, on the expectation that you will remember and reciprocate tomorrow.

When Robert Putnam, a Harvard sociologist, published Bowling Alone in 2000, it was an immediate sensation. His account of the weakening of community in the United States, based on a huge number of indicators from the decline of picnicking to the abandonment of league bowling, offered two provocative observations. First, much of the success of the United States as a nation has had to do with its ability to generate social capital, that mysterious but critical set of characteristics of functioning communities. When your neighbor walks your dog while you are ill, or the guy behind the counter trusts you to pay him next time, social capital is at work. It is the shadow of the future on a societal scale. Individuals in groups with more social capital (which is to say, more habits of cooperation) are better off on a large number of metrics, from health and happiness to earning potential, than those in groups with less social capital. Societies characterized by a high store of social capital overall do better than societies with low social capital on a similarly wide range of measurements, from crime rate to the costs of doing business to economic growth. This is the shadow of the future at work: direct reciprocity assumes that if you do someone a favor today, that person will do you a favor tomorrow. Indirect reciprocity is even more remarkable—it assumes that if you do someone in your community a favor today, someone in your community will be around to do you a favor tomorrow, even if it isn’t the same person. The norms and behaviors that instantiate the shadow of the future is social capital, a set of norms that facilitate cooperation within or among groups.

It was Putnam’s second observation, however, that generated the real reaction. Across a remarkably broad range of measures, participation in group activities, the vehicle for creating and sustaining social capital, was on the decline in the United States. Putting the two observations together, he concluded that one of the greatest assets in the growth and stability of the United States was ebbing away. One cause of the decline in social capital was a simple increase in the difficulty of people getting together—an increase in transaction costs, to use Coase’s term. When an activity becomes more expensive, either in direct costs or increased hassle, people do less of it, and several effects of the last fifty years—including smaller households, delayed marriage, two-worker families, the spread of television, and suburbanization—have increased the transaction costs for coordinating group activities outside work.

We gather together because it is useful but also because we like to. Assuming that videophones or e-mail or virtual reality will reduce the overall amount of travel is like assuming that liquor stores will kill bars, since liquor stores sell drinks much more cheaply than bars do. In fact, the reason people go to bars is not simply to get a drink, but to do so in a convivial environment. Similarly, cities don’t exist just because people have had to be nearby to communicate; cities exist because people like to be near other people, and it is this fact, rather than the mere trading of information, that creates social capital. (Anyone who predicts the death of cities has already met their spouse.) This obvious human preference was overlooked during the early public spread of the internet, in large part because the average user interacted with different people online and offline.

Meetup didn’t end up recreating the old model of community, because it provided a different set of capabilities; the groups that took first and best advantage of those capabilities were the groups with a latent desire to meet but had faced previously insuperable hurdles. These groups aren’t the classic American interest groups of yore; many of the most popular groups tell us surprising things about what our society is like right now.

Groups like Ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Pro-Ana girls no longer need social support to gather; they all operate under the Coasean floor, where lowered transaction costs have made gathering together so simple that anyone can do it. Recording, searching, and transmitting information, including especially information about ourselves, is something our communications networks are effortlessly good at. The enormous visibility and searchability of social life means that the ability for the like-minded to locate one another, and to assemble and cooperate with one another, now exists independently of social approval or disapproval. The gathering of the Pro-Ana girls isn’t a side effect of our social tools, it’s an effect of those tools. When society is changing, we want to know whether the change is good or bad, but that kind of judgment becomes meaningless with transformations this large.

Falling transaction costs benefit all groups, not just groups we happen to approve of. The thing that kept phenomena like the Pro-Ana movement from spreading earlier was cost. The transaction costs of gathering a group of like-minded individuals, especially in an anonymous fashion, has historically been large, and self-funded and socially approved groups like AA were the only ones that could take on those costs. Once the transaction costs fell, however, the difficulties of putting such groups together disappeared; the potential members of such a group can now gather and set their own goals without needing any sort of social sponsorship or approval.

Our new freedoms are not without their problems; it’s not a revolution if nobody loses. Improved freedom of assembly is creating three kinds of social loss. The first and most obvious loss is to people whose jobs relied on solving a formerly hard problem. This is the effect felt by media outlets challenged by mass amateurization. The basic problem of copying and distributing information, previously an essential service of the music and newspaper industries among others, is now largely solved thanks to digital networks, undermining the commercial logic of many industries that relied on previous inefficiencies. Andrew Keen, in Cult of the Amateur, describes a firm that ran a $50,000 campaign to solicit user-generated ads. Keen notes that some professional advertising agency therefore missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees. This loss is obviously a hardship for the ad agency employees, but were they really worth the money in the first place if amateurs working in their spare time can create something the client is satisfied with? The spread of cheap and widely available creative tools is sad for people in the advertising business in the same way that movable type was sad for scribes—the loss from this kind of change is real but limited and is accompanied by a generally beneficial social change.

The second kind of loss will damage current social bargains. Many countries place restrictions on the media in the run-up to elections, but this raises the question of who “the media” is today and what controls should be put on them. Different countries are coming up with different answers—Singapore banned blogging during the last few weeks before a 2005 election but couldn’t control Singaporeans blogging overseas; the Thai government forbade blogging on all political matters, to little effect; and the U.S. election commission decided not even to try to apply its media coverage rules to blogging. The provisional and variable nature of these restrictions suggests that the old relations between the media and the state, even where they are broadly supported by the citizenry, are going to be as impossible to sustain as the old definitions for journalism, which is now less a profession than an activity.

The third kind of loss is the most serious. Networked organizations are more resilient as a result of better communications tools and more flexible social structures, but this is as true of terrorist networks or criminal gangs as of Wikipedians or student protesters. This third loss, where the harms are not merely transitional, leads to a hard question: What are we going to do about the negative effects of freedom? It’s easy to tell the newspaper people to quit whining, because the writing has been on the wall since the internet became publicly accessible in the early 1990s—their response has been inadequate in part because they waited so long to grapple with the change. It’s harder, though, to say what we should be doing about Pro-Ana kids or about newly robust criminal networks.

FITTING OUR TOOLS TO A SMALL WORLD

Large social groups are different from small ones, but we are still understanding all the ways in which that is true. Recent innovations in social tools provide more explicit support for a pattern of social networking called the Small World pattern, which underlies the idea of Six Degrees of Separation.

In 1998 Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz published their research on a pattern they dubbed the “Small World network.” Small World networks have two characteristics that, when balanced properly, let messages move through the network effectively. The first is that small groups are densely connected. In a small group the best pattern of communication is that everyone connects with everyone. In a group of friends Alice knows Bob, Carol, Doria, and Eunice, and each of them knows the others. In a cluster of five people there would be ten connections (by Birthday Paradox math), so each person could communicate directly with any of the others. If anyone drops out of the group, temporarily or permanently, none of the other links between people would be disrupted. (This highly connected pattern appears, among other places, in tightly connected clusters of friends using social networks like MySpace and Facebook, or weblogging platforms like LiveJournal and Xanga.)

The second characteristic of Small World networks is that large groups are sparsely connected. A larger collection of people—one that ran from Alice to Zephyr, say—would have many more potential connections. As the size of your network grew, your small group pattern, where everyone connected to everyone, would become first impractical, then unbuildable. By the time you wanted to connect five thousand people (not even the size of a small town) you’d need half a million connections (Birthday Paradox math again). On the other hand, if you let everyone continue to maintain a handful of connections, then as the network grew, any two people pulled at random would have a long chain of links between them, far longer than six links, in fact. Such a network would be unusable, since the people in it would hardly be connected together.

So what do you do? You adopt both strategies—dense and sparse connections—at different scales. You let the small groups connect tightly, and then you connect the groups. But you can’t really connect groups—you connect people within groups. Instead of one loose group of twenty-five, you have five tight groups of five. 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 efficient and robust.

A Small World network cheats nature by providing a better-than-random trade-off between the number of links required to connect a network, and that network’s effectiveness in relaying messages. It occupies a sweet spot between the unbuildable and the unusable, and as a side effect, it is highly resistant to random damage, since the average person doesn’t perform a critical function. (By contrast, in a hierarchy almost everyone is critical, since the loss of any one person’s connections disrupts communication to everyone connected through that person.) A handful of people are extremely critical to holding the whole network together, because as the network grows large, the existence of a small number of highly connected individuals enables the very trade-off between connectivity and effectiveness that makes the Small World pattern work in the first place.

Small World networks operate as both amplifiers and filters of information. Because information in the system is passed along by friends and friends of friends (or at least contacts and contacts of contacts), people tend to get information that is also of interest to their friends. The more friends you have who care about a particular piece of information—whether gossip or a job opening or a new song they like—the likelier you are to hear about it as well. The corollary is also true: things that none of your friends or their friends care about are unlikely to get to you.

Small Worlds networks mean that people don’t simply connect at random. They connect in clusters, ensuring that they interact with the same people frequently, even in large networks. This in turn reduces the Prisoners’ Dilemma and helps create social capital. One reason the phrase “social capital” is so evocative is that it connotes an increase in power, analogous to financial capital. In economic terms, capital is a store of wealth and assets; social capital is that store of behaviors and norms in any large group that lets its members support one another. When sociologists talk about social capital, they often make a distinction between bonding capital and bridging capital. Bonding capital is an increase in the depth of connections and trust within a relatively homogenous group; bridging capital is an increase in connections among relatively heterogeneous groups. Think of the difference by considering the number of people to whom you’d lend money without asking when they’d pay you back. An increase in bridging capital would increase the number of people you’d lend to; an increase in bonding capital would increase the amount of money you’d lend to people already on the list.

Bonding capital tends to be more exclusive and bridging capital more inclusive. In Small World networks bonding tends to happen within the clusters, while bridging happens between clusters.

Perhaps the most significant effect of our new tools, though, lies in the increased leverage they give the most connected people. The tightness of a large social network comes less from increasing the number of connections that the average member of the network can support than from increasing the number of connections that the most connected people can support.

FAILURE FOR FREE

The logic of publish-then-filter means that new social systems have to tolerate enormous amounts of failure. The only way to uncover and promote the rare successes is to rely, yet again, on social structure supported by social tools.

Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another. There are hundreds of thousands of Meetup users, and each is presented with many possible Meetups that they could attend. In a midsize city the potential combinations among people interested in Meetup groups are overwhelming. The only sensible way to solve this problem is to turn it over to the users.

Meetup is a giant information-processing tool, a kind of market where the groups are the products and where the market expresses its judgment not in cash but in expenditure of energy. Failure is free, high-quality research, offering direct evidence of what works and what doesn’t. Groups that people want to join are sorted from groups that people don’t want to join, every day. By dispensing with the right to direct what its users try to create, Meetup sheds the costs and distorting effects of managing each individual effort. Trial and error, in a system like Meetup, has both a lower cost and a higher value than in traditional institutions, where failure often comes with some employee’s name attached. From a conventional business perspective, Meetup has no quality control, but from another perspective Meetup is all quality control. All that’s required to take advantage of this sort of market are passionate users and an appetite for repeated public failure.

The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something.

Because the open source ecosystem, and by extension open social systems generally, rely on peer production, the work on those systems can be considerably more experimental, at considerably less cost, than any firm can afford. Why? The most important reasons are that open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea.

Open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost of failure; it essentially gets failure for free. This reversal, where the cost of deciding what to try is higher than the cost of actually trying them, is true of open systems generally. As with the mass amateurization of media, open source relies on the “publish-then-filter” pattern. In traditional organizations, trying anything is expensive, even if just in staff time to discuss the idea, so someone must make some attempt to filter the successes from the failures in advance. In open systems, the cost of trying something is so low that handicapping the likelihood of success is often an unnecessary distraction. Even in a firm committed to experimentation, considerable work goes into reducing the likelihood of failure. This doesn’t mean that open source communities don’t discuss—on the contrary, they have more discussions than in managed production, because no one is in a position to compel work on a particular project. Open systems, by reducing the cost of failure, enable their participants to fail like crazy, building on the successes as they go.

Cheap failure, valuable as it is on its own, is also a key part of a more complex advantage: the exploration of multiple possibilities. Imagine a vast, unmapped desert with a handful of oases randomly scattered throughout. Traveling through such a place, you would be likely to stick with the first oasis you found, simply because the penalty for leaving it and not finding another oasis would be quite high. You’d like to have several people explore the landscape simultaneously and communicate their findings to one another, but you’d need lots of resources and would have to be able to tolerate vastly different success rates between groups. This metaphorical environment is sometimes called a “fitness landscape”—the idea is that for any problem or goal, there is a vast area of possibilities to explore but few valuable spots within that environment to discover. When a company or indeed any organization finds a strategy that works, the drive to adopt it and stick with it is strong. Even if there is a better strategy out there, finding it can be prohibitively expensive. For work that relies on newly collapsed transaction costs, however, providing basic resources to the groups exploring the fitness landscape costs little, and the failure of even a sizable number of groups also carries little penalty.

The cost of trying things is where Coasean theory about transaction costs and power law distributions of participation intersect. Institutions exist because they lower transaction costs, relative to what a market could support. However, because every institution requires some formal structure to remain coherent, and because this formal structure itself requires resources, there are a considerable number of potentially valuable actions that no institution can afford to undertake. For these actions, the resources invested in trying them will often cost more than the outcome. This in turn means that there are many actions that might pay off but won’t be tried, even for innovative firms, because their eventual success is not predictable enough. It is this gap that distributed exploration takes advantage of: in a world where anyone can try anything, even the risky stuff can be tried eventually. If a large enough population of users is trying things, then the happy accidents have a much higher chance of being discovered. This presents a conundrum for business. Coasean economics being what they are, a firm cannot try everything. Management overhead is real, and the costs of failures can’t simply be laid at the feet of the employees; the firm has to absorb them somehow. As a result, peer production must necessarily go on outside of any firm’s ability to either direct or capture all of its value. This happens in part because the respective costs of filtering versus publishing have reversed. In the traditional world, the cost of publishing anything creates not just an incentive but a requirement to filter the good from the bad in advance. In the open source world, trying something is often cheaper than making a formal decision about whether to try it.

What the open source movement teaches us is that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial. For any given piece of software, the question “Do the people who like it take care of each other?” turns out to be a better predictor of success than “What’s the business model?” As the rest of the world gets access to the tools once reserved for the techies, that pattern is appearing everywhere, and it is changing society as it does.

PROMISE, TOOL, BARGAIN

There is no recipe for the successful use of social tools. Instead, every working system is a mix of social and technological factors.

Every story in this book relies on a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The promise is the basic “why” for anyone to join or contribute to a group. The tool helps with the “how”—how will the difficulties of coordination be overcome, or at least be held to manageable levels? 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? The interaction of promise, tool, and bargain can’t be used as a recipe, because the interactions among the different components is too complex. Like the weather, the complex interaction of the various forces makes the results only partially predictable.

The order of promise, tool, and bargain is also the order in which they matter to the success of any given group. Making a promise that enough people believe in is the basic requirement; the promise creates the basic desire to participate. Then come the tools. After getting the promise right (or right enough), the next hurdle is figuring out which tools will best help people approach the promise together. Wikis make arriving at shared judgment easier than hosting a discussion, while e-mail has the opposite set of characteristics, so getting the tools right matters to the kind of interactions the group will rely on. Then comes the bargain. Tools don’t completely determine behavior; different mailing lists have different cultures, for example, and these cultures are a result of an often implicit bargain among the users. One possible bargain for a mailing list is: “We expect politeness of one another, and we rebuke the impolite.” Another, very different bargain is: “Anything goes.” You can see how these bargains would lead to very different cultures, even among groups using the same tools, yet both patterns exist in abundance. A successful bargain among users must be a good fit for both the promise and the tools used. Taken together, these three characteristics are useful for understanding both successes and failures of groups relying on social tools.

The problem of getting the promise right is unlike traditional marketing, because most marketing involves selling something that will be made for the listeners rather than by them. “Buy Cheesy Poofs” is a different message from “Join us, and we will invent Cheesy Poofs together.” This second kind of message is more complicated, because of something called the paradox of groups. The paradox is simple—there can be no group without members (obviously), but there can also be no members without a group, because what would they be members of? Single-user tools, from word-processing software to Tetris, have a simple message for the potential user: if you use this, you will find it satisfying or effective or both. With social tools, the group is the user, so you need to convince individuals not just that they will find the group satisfying and effective but that others will find it so as well; no matter how appealing the promise, there’s no point in being the only user of a social tool. As a result, users of social tools are making two related judgments: Will I like using this tool or participating in this group? Will enough other people feel as I do to make it take off?

The larger the number of users required, the harder the group is to get going, because the potential users will (rightly) be more skeptical that enough users will join to make it worth their while. (An empty restaurant has the same catch-22 in attracting diners.) There are several strategies for handling this problem. The most obvious one is to make joining easy, in order to make the promise seem within reach. Other strategies include creating personal value for the individual users, allowing the social value to manifest only later.

Another common strategy is to subdivide the community, in a Small World pattern, so that small but densely connected clusters of people have value even before the service grows large.

Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, said she’d learned from the early days that “you have to greet the first ten thousand users personally.” When the site was small, she and the other staffers would not just post their own photos but also comment on other users’ photos, like a host circulating at a party. This let the early users feel what it would be like to have an appreciative public, even before such a public existed.

After the complexity of the question of figuring out the promise of a given group, the question of determining which tools to use seems as if it should be easy. Here again context complicates things. There is no such thing as a generically good tool; there are only tools good for particular jobs. Contrary to the hopes of countless managers, technology is not an infinitely elastic piece of fabric that can be stretched to cover any situation. Instead, a good social tool is like a good woodworking tool—it must be designed to fit the job being done, and it must help people do something they actually want to do. If you designed a better shovel, people would not rush out to dig more ditches. One surprising ramification of this “goodness of fit” argument is that when you improve the available tools, you expand the number of plausible promises in the world.

By understanding these two basic constraints of group action—number of people involved and duration of interaction—any given tool, new or familiar, can be analyzed for goodness of fit. And of course a single service can offer more than one tool and thus support more than one form of interaction.

The bargain comes last, because it matters only if there is a promise and a set of tools that are already working together. The bargain is also the most complex aspect of a functioning group, in part because it is the least explicit aspect and in part because it is the one the users have the biggest hand in creating, which means it can’t be completely determined in advance. The need for a bargain gets back to the most basic issues of group effort—transaction costs. A bargain helps clarify what you can expect of others and what they can expect of you.

The essential aspect of the bargain is that the users have to agree to it. It can’t be instantiated as a set of contractual rules, because users don’t read the fine print. (When was the last time you read through one of those “By clicking here, you agree to... ” pages on the Web?) Instead, the bargain has to be part of the lived experience of interaction.

The observations about how tightly the groups need to coordinate with one another also affect how these kinds of social bargains are constructed. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” In the physical domain cities tend to have more rules that address the vagaries of group life than rural areas do, simply because the number of ways urban life can create social intersections among people is much larger than in rural life. This connection between social density and complexity of bargain is true of technologically mediated groups as well; the more members have to interact with one another, and the more they have to agree to act in concert, the more complex the rules governing their relations have to be. Bargains for sharing can be quite simple while the bargains that have to be worked out for collaboration or collective action are necessarily more complex, because the frequency, complexity, and duration of user interaction are higher. In Holmes’s terms, the more integrated a group, the greater the risk of a virtual fist hitting a virtual nose.

A basic truth of social systems: no effort at creating group value can be successful without some form of governance. The groups now adopting social tools form the experimental wing of political philosophy, a place where hard questions of group governance are being worked out. One remarkable aspect of harnessing social value is that social groups tend to be homeostatic, which is to say resistant to external pressures.

People are basically good, when they are in circumstances that reward goodness while restraining impulses to defect. The rewards and restraints can be quite simple and small, but in big groups with relatively anonymous actors, they need to be there or behavior will decay over time.

Any experiment of any importance will always have people who want it to fail. Only the systems that have defenses against such users can thrive; the assumption that those users won’t appear is an inadequate defense.

EPILOGUE

Increased options for communication in groups don’t just mean we will get more of the patterns we already recognize; they also mean we will also get more new kinds of patterns. More is different, even for people who understand that more is different, which explains in part our persistent difficulties in getting technology predictions right.

The transistor and the birth control pill are quite unlike one another, but they do have one thing in common: they are both human-scale inventions that were pulled into society one person at a time, and they mattered more than giant inventions pushed along by massive and sustained effort. They changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom. That is happening again today. A million times a day, someone tries some new social tool; someone in Mozambique gets a mobile phone, someone in Shanghai checks out the Chinese version of Wikipedia, someone in Belarus hears about the flash mob protests, someone in Brazil joins a social networking service.

One fitting name for the way more is different is “the network effect,” the name given to networks that become more valuable as people adopt them. Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet networking protocol, gave his name to a law that describes this increase in value. Metcalfe’s Law is usually stated this way: “The value of the network grows with the square of its users.” When you double the size of the network, you quadruple the number of potential connections. This is Birthday Paradox math, recast as a source of value instead of cost.

The internet, of course, adds group forming as a possibility, not just person-to-person connections. David Reed, one of the early designers of the internet, has also formulated an eponymous law, which says that the value of group-forming networks actually grows exponentially with the number of users. The logic here is that in a group of four people, there are six ways to set up a two-way conversation (A to B, A to C, etc.), but with a group-forming tools, there can also be four different sets of three-way conversations, or all four in one conversation. With ten people, there are forty-five pairs (Metcalfe’s Law), but a thousand possible subgroups (Reed’s Law). Reed’s Law also relies on the potential of communication; the vast majority of possible subgroups will never actually form. The number of potential million-person networks that could theoretically exist on the internet beggars description, but almost none of them actually will, because there’s not much a million-person network could do. Most of the action in Reed’s Law comes from the formation to human-scale groups—dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, rather than millions or billions. As with Metcalfe’s Law, the growth of the networked population increases the number of potential groups, but the value from Reed’s Law grows much faster than Metcalfe’s Law, because there are many more potential groups than potential pairs.

Metcalfe and Reed’s Laws conceive of value to individuals and to groups from all these new options, but what is likely to happen to society as a whole with the spread of ridiculously easy group-forming? The most obvious change is that we are going to get more groups, many more groups, than have ever existed before. Is this a good thing? Is the explosion of new groups pursuing new possibilities with new tools a gain for society? Even accepting that it is painful for many existing organizations and that it produces negative effects as well as positive ones, there are two arguments that suggest that the changes we are living through will be beneficial. The first argument is based on net value, and the second is based on political assumptions.

The net value argument is simple—increased flexibility and power for group action will have more good effects than bad ones, making the current changes, on balance, positive.

A subtler weakness to the argument from net value, however, even outside the “lump of labor” fallacy, is that the good and bad changes created by newly flexible groups are incommensurable, which is to say that there is no way of measuring, say, the value of new forms of collaborative action like the kids in Belarus versus the increased resilience of networked terrorist groups. For anyone inclined to see the good effects of the coming changes, a positive value to society can be assured by simply deciding to weigh the benefits more heavily than the disadvantages, while for anyone who believes that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, that conclusion can also be supported by the evidence, simply by deciding that the new bad things are worse or more numerous than the new good things. The measurement of net value, as appealing as it is, runs aground on this incommensurability, and arguments about whether new forms of sharing or collaboration are, on balance, good or bad reveal more about the speaker than the subject. Net value is a fine tool to use when discussing mere technological improvement—unleaded gasoline is better than leaded, fast trains are better than slow ones, and so on. When there is a real revolution going on, however, net value is useless, since the society before and after the revolution are too different to be readily compared.

The second argument on behalf of new capabilities for groups dispenses with descriptive value, and instead concentrates on political value. In this view, the current changes are good because they increase the freedom of people to say and do as they like. This argument does not suffer from the problems of incommensurability, because an increase in various forms of freedom, and especially in freedom of speech, of the press, and of association, are assumed to be desirable in and of themselves.

This does not mean there will be no difficulties associated with our new capabilities—the defenders of freedom have long noted that there are problems peculiar to freer societies. Instead, it assumes that the value of freedom outweighs the problems, not based on a calculation of net value, but because freedom is the right thing to want for society.

Even the pro-freedom argument, though, risks overstating the degree of control we have over the change in group capabilities. To ask the question “Should we allow the spread of these social tools?” presumes that there is something we could do about it were the answer “No.” This hypothesis is suspect, precisely because of the kind of changes involved.

To put it metaphorically, society’s control over nuclear power is like driving a car, with gas, brakes, a reverse gear. We have a good deal of control over both the route and speed with which nuclear power progresses, including the option to simply pull over (as several countries have done by banning the building of new plants). The dramatic improvement in our social tools, by contrast, means that our control over those tools is much more like steering a kayak. We are being pushed rapidly down a route largely determined by the technological environment. We have a small degree of control over the spread of these tools, but that control does not extend to being able to reverse, or even radically alter, the direction we’re moving in. Our principal challenge is not deciding where we want to go, but rather in staying upright as we go there. The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is less like ordinary technological change, and more like an event, something that has already happened. As a result, the important questions aren’t about whether these tools will spread or reshape society, but rather how they do so.

One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction, described in relation to the Pro-Ana girls in chapter 8, but fast becoming a more general case. Society simply has less control over what kind of groups can form, and what kind of value they can confer on their members, and this in turn means a loss of prevention as a strategy for reducing harm. Because this change is being brought about by media, there is a good analogy with freedom of speech. In the United States, the First Amendment enjoins the government from limiting the speech of the citizens. There are of course classes of speech that are nevertheless illegal, from shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater to divulging trade secrets, but the legal interpretation of the First Amendment has meant that controls on these illegal classes of speech can’t hand the government overly broad powers to restrict speech in advance (a condition called prior restraint) or to create restrictions so broad that the general public feels nervous speaking in public (a condition called a chilling effect). The interaction of these interpretations means that many of the kinds of harm that come from speech are simply allowed to happen, with punishment adjudicated after the fact.

Small communities with long-time residents have the necessary social density and continuity to build up enough mutual favors to be a fertile ground for reciprocal altruism. Large and transient communities do not—favors “leak” out of the community too quickly. So here’s a hypothesis about the near future, based on little more than a hunch and some tantalizing examples: we’re about to experience a revolution in collective action, and the driver of that revolution will be new legal structures that will support productive collective action.

The act of incorporation, literally “embodiment,” is the way the government recognizes the work of groups, analogous to copyright being the way it recognizes creators. So why don’t more groups using social media for long-term goals incorporate? At least part of the answer seems to be that the current corporate structures require things like paper filings, physical headquarters, in-person board meetings, hierarchical management structures, and so on. None of these barriers is fatal by itself, but anything that raises the cost of doing something reduces what gets done. (Coase again.) If there were a structure that allowed for internet-friendly incorporation, we might see an increase in collective action directed at creating and sustaining things, instead of being protest dominated, as it is today.

the future belongs to those who take the present for granted. One of the reasons many of the stories in this book seem to be populated with young people is that those of us born before 1980 remember a time before any tools supported group communication well. For us, no matter how deeply we immerse ourselves in new kinds of technology, it will always have a certain provisional quality. Our considerable real-world experience usually confers an advantage relative to young people, who are comparative novices in the way the world works. Novices make mistakes from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of error a thousand times before they learn better. In times of revolution, though, the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When a real, once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad, as with the grown-ups arguing over the pocket calculator in my local paper. What they should have been arguing about instead was how to prepare students to take advantage of the new tools, but they got distracted by assuming that because calculators were new additions to society, they were also provisional ones, when in fact they were new but permanent.