March 2008 Archives

One of the common patterns in Here Comes Everybody is lightweight collaboration, not "Let's lock ourselves in a room for 5 days to work together" but "Let's make it easy for an individual to make a meaningful contribution with little effort." This patterns shows up in Linux and Wikipedia, where most of the contributors have made only one addition or emendation.

And now it's come to the book. Alan Connor has put up a Flickr page documenting typos in the first edition:

Now I know where to start for the second edition. As Eric Raymond might say, "Given enough eyeballs, all typos are shallow." Thanks Alan!

In the book, and in presentations since, I've talked a lot about the Coalition for a Passenger's Bill of Rights, the group founded by Kate Hanni in early 2007 that lobbied for better treatment of passengers stuck on grounded airplanes. There have been several of these incidents in recent years, including the American Airlines diversions to Dallas in December of 2006 and the JetBlue JFK meltdown on Valentine's Day in 2007, and there is no question how the majority of the flying public feels about the issue.

What was remarkable about the Coalition's work last year is that they achieved a remarkable success in a legislative eyeblink, convincing the NY State legislature to pass a law creating passenger's rights in less than 8 months, with little staff or budget, and after a decade in which the airline industry simply fought off every previous attempt to create passenger's rights. And now the big test comes -- yesterday, the 2nd Circuit struck down the NY State law, saying that only the FAA can regulate passenger treatment. So now the issue goes to the US Congress, and maybe to the Supreme Court.

I've argued that the Coalition succeeded where early efforts at either lobbying or class action suits failed because the Coalition is ad hoc, amateur, and surprising. They didn't set up a big institution. They have a very specific and targeted goal. They attract people from across a political spectrum -- their members didn't need to agree about any other issue besides passenger's rights. And they appeared out of nowhere, getting the attention of legislators before the airline industry had time to frame a reaction.

However, the risk is that protest movements that rely on surprises simply get waited out by institutions. Once you get a tactic that works well, it can't be surprising anymore. (I speculated about this problem at Berkman about a month ago, and now here it is.)

So the test case here is: can a pressure group that doesn't have an institutional structure prevail in a situation where the airline lobby in the US Congress is well defended against citizen complaint? The next phase of the drama will be slower moving the first phase, but will ultimately matter more in what it tells us about protest culture in the current era.

About to go on Ross Reynolds long-form radio interview, The Conversation, to talk about the book. The stream and podcast is here.

Penguin, the publisher of Here Comes Everybody, has invited me to guest post this week on the Penguin blog, and I'm using the space to talk about how transitions in communications tools affect media.

First up, the comparison between the internet and the printing press:

It's worth noting that most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient. Readily available translations of scripture did destroy the Church as a pan-European institution. Most of the material produced by the new class of publishers was flyweight. Scribes did lose their social function. And so on, through a battery of transformations including public scrutiny of elites, the international spread of political foment, and even literate women. (The book to read on these transitions is Elizabeth Eisenstein's two-volume work The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.)

All of which brings me to the internet. It too democratizes both production and consumption of media. It too is producing a staggering volume of new material, some good but most flyweight. It too is upending the role of traditional gatekeepers and destroying the older economics of scarcity. And it too is leading to a cottage industry of hand-wringing: "Why can't we just get a little bit of internet, but keep most things the way they were?"

Read the whole thing here. There's also a podcast interview about the book.

I'm pleased to say "Here Comes Everybody" has been getting good coverage in the blogosphere. (Technorati, Google Blog Search, Summize. Not that I'm checking...)

My favorite review so far is from Radar, a magazine whose normal coverage tends towards the "Ashton Kutcher's Oscar Gown malfunction!" variety. (Actually, I made that up. Maybe Ashton Kutcher is a boy. I'm not really in the Radar demographic...)

The reviewer, Elizabeth McKenna, starts off saying "The mere mention of technology or sociology makes me want to run to The Hills and hide." But she goes on: "All it took was peppering social-networking theory with a little blogging, Facebook, and Paris Hilton context [...] Shirky makes convoluted theories such as Power Law Distribution and Nash Equilibrium accessible through colorful pop-culture references and real-life examples. He efficiently straddles two worlds and satisfies the needs of two seemingly opposite groups: the seasoned sociologist and the easily distracted." (Emphasis hers, btw, and a hat tip for finding literally the only bold-face name in the book and bold-facing it.)

More substantively, Jerry Brito wrote up my talk yesterday at the New America Foundation, and there are interviews up with Farhad Manjoo at Salon and Brooke Gladstone at On The Media. These kind of interviews are my favorite part of this phase, as I finally get to start mixing stories in the book with current events, which if of course the point of the book -- to provide a platform for talking about all this stuff.

Last week I gave a book talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and they've posted a video of the talk (40 mins).

WikiLeaks.org, a website for anonymous individuals to report illegal or unethical behavior, was briefly and famously shut down by Judge Jeffrey White of San Francisco. Or rather, it was half-way shut down -- Judge White ordered that the WikiLeaks.org web address be de-activated, though the site itself remained intact. Judge White took this step because a former VP of Bank Julius Baer & Co., a Swiss bank with a branch in the Cayman Islands, leaked internal documents about the banks' practices in Cayman, documents the leaker claimed showed the banks' strategies for money laundering and tax evasion.

Judge White's action was a little like shutting down a newspaper, sports section and all, for a libelous article in the business section, and he eventually realized this, reversing his own ruling with the rueful observation that "Maybe that's just the reality of the world that we live in. When this genie gets out of the bottle, that's it."

Between the injunction and reversal, it was widely observed that the technical approach of revoking the Wikileaks domain name was ineffective, as the content could still be accessed through its IP address, as well as on other web sites and file sharing services. It's easy to mock Judge White for getting both the law and the technology so wrong, but underneath these seemingly simple issues, the WikiLeaks case exposes a much broader issue.

There is a tension between freedom of speech in general, and restriction of certain kinds of speech; how can society let people say what they like, while still restricting things like libel or publication of trade secrets? And although the law around these issues hasn't changed, the economics of media have been so transformed that the old legal bargains between freedom and restriction are breaking, and we have no easy way of replacing them.

The current way we have structured this bargain relies on the motivations of media professionals. Since media outlets are costly and complex to set up and run, every such outlet has a natural constituency, the professional publishers and editors and engineers who have a long-term commitment to the business. Because these professionals have a long-term commitment, it is possible to balance broad freedom of speech with specific classes restrictions, with laws that punish media professionals for publishing libelous material or trade secrets. The threat of these punishments motivate them to act as filters, not publishing such material in their newspapers or airing it on their stations. And because there are so few media outlets, society can rein in certain kinds of speech with very little little legal leverage.

Except none of those things are true anymore. Creating media is no longer costly or complex as an absolute case, it doesn't require trained professionals, and it doesn't require long-term commitment. Amateurs now have direct access, without going through a professional bottleneck.

Media, in its most elemental form, is the means of repeating a message thousands or millions of times, a capability that has become vanishingly cheap and held in common by amateurs and professionals. This mass amateurization is an end to the scarcity of media outlets. Now, if you have something to say in public, you don't need to ask anyone for help or permission. We can try to find you and punish you, but this will always be post hoc -- the self-interest of media professionals in keeping their jobs is no longer a way of preventing the amateurs from speaking out.

The motives of the Julius Baer VP were doubtless impure, but it didn't matter. He got the documents out anyway, and he could do it again tomorrow. Judge White could have gone a lot further in shutting down the WikiLeaks site, but even if he had, it is but one site of many, in but one country of many.

The question here is not whether we want to increase the ability of every employee able to violate trade secrets. Thats the situation we have today, and short of wholesale internet censorship it is the situation we will have from now on. The question is how (or whether) we can continue to carve out an exception to free speech for cases like Julius Baer without doing more harm than good. So many of our legal traditions around media assume scarcity, commercialization, and professionalization that our sudden lurch to a world of abundant, free, amateur media is going to threaten many existing social bargains, not just the the ones around trade secrets. Judge White's original injunction was a particularly bad solution, but that's no guarantee that there is a good solution to be easily had.

(Also published at HuffingtonPost.com)