The Inevitable Read online

  Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing picks and shovels, we share scripts and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of free government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free commercial goods and services.

  I recognize that the word “socialism” is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms “communal,” “communitarian,” and “collective.” I use “socialism” because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely on social interactions for their power. We call social media “social” for this same reason: It is a species of social action. Broadly speaking, social action is what websites and net-connected apps generate when they harness input from very large networks of consumers, or participants, or users, or what we once called the audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organizations under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available in this realm of sharing, so we might as well redeem this most direct one: social, social action, social media, socialism. When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that new socialism.

  What they have in common is the verb “to share.” In fact, some futurists have called this economic aspect of the new socialism the “sharing economy” because the primary currency in this realm is sharing.

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  In the late 1990s, activist, provocateur, and aging hippy John Perry Barlow began calling this drift, somewhat tongue in cheek, “dot-communism.” He defined dot-communism as a “workforce composed entirely of free agents,” a decentralized gift or barter economy without money where there is no ownership of property and where technological architecture defines the political space. He was right about the virtual money since the content that Twitter and Facebook distribute is created by unpaid contributors—that is, users like you. And Barlow was right about the lack of ownership, as explained in the previous chapter. We see sharing economy services such as Netflix and Spotify move audiences away from owning anything. But there is one way in which “socialism” is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology, not an “ism.” It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.

  In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements, ranked by the increasing degree of coordination employed. Groups of people start off simply sharing with a minimum of coordination, and then progress to cooperation, then to collaboration, and finally to collectivism. At each step of this socialism, the amount of additional coordination required enlarges. A survey of the online landscape reveals ample evidence of this phenomenon.

  1. Sharing

  The online public has an incredible willingness to share. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, and other sites is an astronomical 1.8 billion per day. It’s a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of these digital photos are shared in some fashion. Then there are status updates, map locations, half-thoughts posted online. Add to this the billions of videos served by YouTube each day and the millions of fan-created stories deposited on fanfic sites. The list of sharing organizations is almost endless: Yelp for reviews, Foursquare for locations, Pinterest for scrapbook pieces. Sharing content is now ubiquitous.

  Sharing is the mildest form of digital socialism, but this verb serves as the foundation for all the higher levels of communal engagement. It is the elemental ingredient of the entire network world.

  2. Cooperation

  When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it produces results that emerge at the group level. Not only have amateurs shared billions of photos on Flickr and Tumblr, but they have tagged them with categories, labels, and keywords. Others in the community cull the pictures into sets and boards. The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that in a sense your picture is my picture. Anyone can use an uploaded photo, just as a communard might use the community wheelbarrow. I don’t have to shoot yet another photo of the Eiffel Tower, since the community can provide a better one than I can take myself. That means I can make a presentation, a report, a scrapbook, a website much better because I am not working alone.

  Thousands of aggregator sites employ a similar social dynamic for threefold benefit. First, social-facing technology aids a site’s users directly by letting them individually tag, bookmark, rank, and archive a found item for their own use. Community members can manage and curate their own collections easier. For instance, on Pinterest, plentiful tags and categories (“pins”) enable a user to make very quick and specific scrapbooks that are super easy to retrieve and add to. Second, other users will benefit from an individual’s tags, pins, and bookmarks. It makes it easier for them to find similar material. The more tags an image gets in Pinterest, or likes in Facebook, or hashtags on Twitter, the more useful it becomes for others. Third, collective action can create an additional value that can come only from the group as a whole. For instance, a pile of tourist snapshots of the Eiffel Tower, each taken from a different angle by a different tourist at a different time, and each one heavily tagged, can be assembled (using software such as Microsoft’s Photosynth) into a stunning 3-D holistic rendering of the whole structure that is far more complex and valuable than the individual shots. In a curious way, this proposition exceeds the socialist promise of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” because it betters what you contribute and delivers more than you need.

  Community sharing can unleash astonishing power. Sites like Reddit and Twitter, which let users vote up or retweet the most important items (news bits, web links, comments), can steer public conversation as much, and maybe more, than newspapers or TV networks. Dedicated contributors keep contributing in part because of the wider cultural influence these instruments wield. The community’s collective influence is far out of proportion to the number of contributors. That is the whole point of social institutions: The sum outperforms the parts. Traditional socialism ramped up this dynamic via the nation-state. Now digital sharing is decoupled from government and operates at an international scale.

  3. Collaboration

  Organized collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of ad hoc cooperation. Just look at any of hundreds of open source software projects, such as the Linux operating system, which underpins most web servers and most smartphones. In these endeavors, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members. In contrast to the previous category of casual cooperation, collaboration on large, complex projects tends to bring the participants only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the end product. An enthusiast may spend months writing code for a subroutine when the program’s full utility is several years away. In fact, the work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective—the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid—that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism.

  Adding to the economic dissonance, we’ve become accustomed to enjoying the products of these collaborations free of charge. Half of all web pages in the world today are hosted on more than 35 million servers running free Apache software, which is open source, community created. A f
ree clearinghouse called 3D Warehouse offers several million complex 3-D models of any form you can image (a boot to a bridge), created and freely swapped by very skilled enthusiasts. Nearly 1 million community-designed Arduinos and 6 million Raspberry Pi computers have been built by schools and hobbyists. Their designs are encouraged to be copied freely and used as the basis for new products. Instead of money, the peer producers who create these products and services gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience.

  Of course, there’s nothing particularly new about collaboration per se. But the new tools of online collaboration support a communal style of production that can shun capitalistic investors and keep ownership in the hands of the producers, who are often the consumers as well.

  4. Collectivism

  Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market national economies have socialized education and policing, while even the most extremely socialized societies today allow some private property. The mix varies around the world.

  Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, technological sharing can be seen as a new political operating system that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of sharing technology is this: to maximize both the autonomy of the individual and the power of people working together. Thus, digital sharing can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant a lot of the old conventional wisdom.

  The notion of a third way is echoed by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who has probably thought more about the politics of networks than anyone else. “I see the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based closed, proprietary systems,” he writes, noting that these activities “can enhance creativity, productivity, and freedom.” The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted selfish chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.

  Hybrid systems that blend market and nonmarket mechanisms are not new. For decades, researchers have studied the decentralized, socialized production methods of northern Italian and Basque industrial co-ops, in which employees are owners who select management and limit profit distribution independent of state control. But only since the arrival of low-cost, instantaneous, ubiquitous online collaboration has it been possible to migrate the core of those ideas into diverse new realms, like coding enterprise software or writing reference books. More important, the technologies of sharing enable collaboration and collectivism to operate at much larger scales than ever before.

  The dream is to scale up this third way beyond local experiments. How big can decentralized collaboration go? Black Duck Open Hub, which tracks the open source industry, lists roughly 650,000 people working on more than half a million projects. That total is three times the size of the General Motors workforce. That is an awful lot of people working for free, even if they’re not full-time. Imagine if all the employees of GM weren’t paid, yet continued to produce automobiles!

  So far, the biggest online collaboration efforts are open source projects, and the largest of them, such as Apache, manage several hundred contributors—about the size of a village. One study estimates that 60,000 person-years of work have poured into the release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that self-assembly and the dynamics of sharing can govern a project on the scale of a town.

  Of course, the total census of participants in online collective work is far greater. Reddit, the collaborative filtering site, has 170 million unique visitors per month and 10,000 daily active communities. YouTube claims 1 billion monthly users; they are the workforce that produces the videos that now compete with TV. Nearly 25 million registered users have contributed to Wikipedia; 130,000 of them are designated active. More than 300 million active users have posted on Instagram, and more than 700 million groups participate in Facebook Groups each month.

  The number of people who belong to collective software farms or work on projects that require communal decisions still fall short of a nation. But the population of people who live in socialized media is gigantic and still increasing. More than 1.4 billion citizens of Facebook freely share their lives in an informational commune. If it were a nation, Facebook would be the largest country on the planet. Yet the entire economy of this largest country runs on labor that isn’t paid. A billion people spend a lot of their day creating content for free. They report on events around them, summarize stories, add opinions, create graphics, make up jokes, post cool photos, and craft videos. They are “paid” in the value of the communication and relations that emerge from 1.4 billion connected verifiable individuals. They are paid by being allowed to stay on the commune.

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  One might expect a lot of political posturing from folks who are constructing an alternative to paid labor. But the coders, hackers, and programmers who design sharing tools don’t think of themselves as revolutionaries. The most common motivation for working without pay (according to a survey of 2,784 open source developers) was “to learn and develop new skills.” One academic put it this way (paraphrasing): “The major reason for working on free stuff is to improve my own damn software.” Basically, overt politics is not practical enough. The internet is less a creation dictated by economics than one dictated by sharing gifts.

  However, citizens may not be immune to the politics of a rising tide of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism. The more we benefit from such collaboration, the more open we become to socialized institutions in government. The coercive, soul-smashing system that controls North Korea is dead (outside of North Korea); the future is a hybrid that takes cues from both Wikipedia and the moderate socialism of, say, Sweden. There will be a severe backlash against this drift from the usual suspects, but increased sharing is inevitable. There is an honest argument over what to call it, but the technologies of sharing have only begun. On my imaginary Sharing Meter Index we are still at 2 out of 10. There is a whole list of subjects that experts once believed we modern humans would not share—our finances, our health challenges, our sex lives, our innermost fears—but it turns out that with the right technology and the right benefits in the right conditions, we’ll share everything.

  How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society can this movement take us? Every time that question has been asked, the answer has been: closer than we thought. Consider Craigslist. Just classified ads, right? Craigslist is far more than that. It amplified the handy community swap board until it reached a regional audience, then enhanced the ads with pictures. It let the customers do all the work of inputting their own ads and, more important, kept the ads in real time with real-time updates, and to top it off it made them free. National classifieds for free! How could debt-laden corporate newspapers compete with that? Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, globally, daily, this mostly free marketplace achieved social good at an efficiency (at its peak it had only 30 employees) that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, peer-to-peer classified undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

  Every public health care expert declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, proves
that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what you’re thinking (Twitter), what you’re reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Motley Fool Caps), your everything (Facebook) is becoming a foundation of our culture. Doing it while collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don’t know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step.

  A similar thing happened with free markets over the past century. Every day someone asked: What can markets do better? We took a long list of problems that seemed to require rational planning or paternal government and instead applied marketplace logic. For instance, governments traditionally managed communications, particularly scarce radio airways. But auctioning off the communication spectrum in a marketplace radically increased the optimization of bandwidth and accelerated innovation and new businesses. Instead of a government monopoly distributing mail, let market players like DHL, FedEx, and UPS try it as well. In many cases, a modified market solution worked significantly better. Much of the prosperity in recent decades was gained by unleashing market forces on social problems.

  Now we’re trying the same trick with collaborative social technology: applying digital socialism to a growing list of desires—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn’t solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. We’ve had success in using collaborative technology in bringing health care to the poorest, developing free college textbooks, and funding drugs for uncommon diseases. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the sharing is bigger than we imagined.