The Inevitable Read online

  The power of sharing is not just about the nonprofit sector. Three of the largest creators of commercial wealth in the last decade—Google, Facebook, and Twitter—derive their value from unappreciated sharing in unexpected ways.

  The earliest version of Google overtook the leading search engines of its time by employing the links made by amateur creators of web pages. Each time an ordinary person made a hyperlink on the web, Google calculated that link as a vote of confidence for the linked page and used this vote to give a weight to links throughout the web. So a particular page would get ranked higher for reliability in Google’s search results if the pages that linked to it were also linked to pages that other reliable pages linked to. This weirdly circular evidence was not created by Google but was instead derived from the public links shared by millions of web pages. Google was the first to extract value from the shared search results that customers clicked on. Each click by an ordinary user represented a vote for the usefulness of that page. So merely by using Google, the fans themselves made Google better and more economically valuable.

  Facebook took something that few people thought was valuable—the web of our friends—and encouraged us to share it, while making it easy for us to share notes and gossip with our newly connected circles. This was a minor benefit to individuals—but immensely complex to accomplish in aggregate. No one had anticipated how powerful this unappreciated sharing would be. Facebook’s most powerful asset turned out to be the persistent online identity it needed to create for us in order for this sharing scheme to work. While futuristic products such as Second Life’s virtual reality made it easy to share an imaginary version of yourself, Facebook made a lot more money by making it easy to share the authentic version of yourself.

  Twitter took a similar tack in exploiting the underappreciated power of simply sharing a 140-character “update.” It built a surprisingly huge business in enabling people to share quips, and to collect loose acquaintances. Before then, this level of sharing was not considered worthwhile, let alone valuable. Twitter proved that what was merely common glitter to an individual could be made into shared gold when collected and processed in the aggregate, and then organized and disseminated back to the individual and sold in analytic clumps to corporations.

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  The shift from hierarchy to networks, from centralized heads to decentralized webs, where sharing is the default, has been the major cultural story of the last three decades—and that story is not done yet. The power of bottom up will still take us further. However, the bottom is not enough.

  To get to the best of what we want, we need some top-down intelligence too. Now that social technology and sharing apps are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: The bottom alone is not enough for what we really want. We need a bit of top-down as well. Every predominantly bottom-up organization that lasts for more than a few years does so because it becomes a hybrid of bottom up plus some top down.

  I came to that conclusion through personal experience. I was a co–founding editor of Wired magazine. Editors perform a top-down function—we select, prune, solicit, shape, and guide the results of writers. We launched Wired in 1993, before the web was invented, and so we had a unique privilege to shape journalism as the web emerged. In fact, Wired originated one of the first commercial editorial websites. As we experimented with newly possible ways to create and disseminate news on the web, a key unanswered question was: How much influence should editors wield? It was obvious that new online tools made it easier for the audience not only to contribute writing, but also to edit content as well. The recurring insight was simple: What happens if we turn the old model inside out and have the audience/customers in charge? They would be Toffler’s prosumers—consumers who were producers. As innovation expert Larry Keeley once observed: “No one is as smart as everyone.” Or as Clay Shirky puts it: “Here comes everybody!” Should we simply let the “everyone” in the audience create the online magazine themselves? Should editors step back and just approve what the wisdom of the crowd creates?

  Howard Rheingold, a writer and editor who had been living online for a decade before Wired, was one of many pundits who argued that it was now possible to forget the editor. Go with the crowd. Rheingold was at the forefront of the then totally radical belief that content could be assembled entirely from the collective action of amateurs and the audience. Rheingold would later write a book called Smart Mobs. We hired him to oversee HotWired, Wired’s online content site. HotWired’s original radical idea was to harness the crowd of readers to write the content that other readers would read. But it was even more radical. The shouts from the back of the bus grew loud declaring that finally an author no longer needed editors. No one needed to ask permission to publish. Anyone with an internet connection could post their work and gather an audience; it was the end of publishers controlling the gates. This was a revolution! And since it was a revolution, Wired published “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” announcing the end of old media. New media was certainly spawning rapidly. Among them were the link aggregators such as Slashdot, Digg, and later Reddit that enabled users to vote up or down items and to work together as a collaborative consensus filter, making mutual recommendations based on “others like you.”

  Rheingold believed that Wired would get further faster by unleashing people with strong voices, lots of passion, and the willingness to write without any editors to thwart them. Today we’d call those contributors “bloggers.” Or tweeters. In this sense Rheingold was right. The entire content that fuels Facebook and Twitter and all the other social media sites is created by users without editors. A billion amateur citizens unleash libraries of text every second. In fact, the average person online today writes more words in a year than many professional writers of the past. This torrent is unedited, unmanaged, completely bottom up. And the attention given to this immense corpus of prosumer content is significant—it was sold to advertisers for $24 billion in 2015.

  I was on the other side of this revolt. My counterargument at the time was that the work of most unedited amateurs was simply not that interesting or consistently reliable. When a million people were writing (or blogging or posting) a million times a week, some intelligent guidance to this flood of available text would be worth a lot. The need for some top-down selection would only increase in value as the amount of user-generated content expanded. Over time, the companies that served user-generated content would have to start to layer bits of editing, selection, and curation to their ocean of material in order to maintain quality and attention to it. There had to be something else beside the pure anarchy of the bottom.

  This is true for other types of editors as well. Editors are the middle people—or what are called “curators” today—the professionals between a creator and the audience. These middle folk work at publishers, music labels, galleries, or film studios. While their roles would have to change drastically, the demand for the middle would not go away. Intermediates of some type are needed to shape the cloud of creativity that boils up from the crowd.

  Yet, in 1994, who knew? In the spirit of a great experiment, we launched HotWired, our online magazine, as a primarily user-generated content site. It didn’t work. We quickly began adding some editorial oversight and editorially commissioned articles. Users could submit material, but it needed to be edited before publishing. Every decade since then a few commercial news organizations tried this experiment again. The Guardian tried to harness readers’ reports on a news blog, but it died after two years. OhMyNews in South Korea did better than most and ran a reader-written news organization for years before it was returned to editors in 2010. The veteran business magazine Fast Company signed up 2,000 blogging readers to report articles sans editors, but closed the experiment after a year and now relies again on readers to suggest ideas for editors to assign. This hybrid of user-generated and editor-enhanced is quite common. Facebook has already started to filter, via
intelligent algorithms, the bottom-up flood of news to your feed. It will only continue to add layers of intermediation, as will other bottom-up services.

  If one looks hard and honestly, even the supposed paragon of user-generated content—Wikipedia itself—is far from pure bottom-up. In fact, Wikipedia’s open-to-anyone process contains an elite in the back room. The more articles someone edits, the more likely their edits will endure and not be undone, which means that over time veteran editors find it easier to make edits that stick, which means that the process favors those few editors who devote lots of time over many years. These persistent old hands act as a type of management, supplying a thin layer of editorial judgment and continuity to this open ad hocracy. In fact, this relatively small group of self-appointed editors is why Wikipedia continues to work and grow into its third decade.

  When a community cooperates to write an encyclopedia, as it does in Wikipedia, no one is held responsible if it fails to reach consensus on an article. That gap is simply an imperfection that may or may not get fixed in time. These failures don’t endanger the enterprise as a whole. The aim of a collective, on the other hand, is to engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by all participants. Throughout history, countless small-scale collectivist groups have tried this decentralized operating mode in which the executive function is not held at the top. The results have not been encouraging; very few communes have lasted longer than a few years.

  Indeed, a close examination of the governing kernel of, say, Wikipedia, Linux, or OpenOffice shows that these efforts are a bit further from the collectivist nirvana than appears from the outside. While millions of writers contribute to Wikipedia, a smaller number of editors (around 1,500) are responsible for the majority of the editing. Ditto for collectives that write code. A vast army of contributions is managed by a much smaller group of coordinators. As Mitch Kapor, founding chair of the Mozilla open source code factory, observed, “Inside every working anarchy, there’s an old-boy network.”

  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some types of collectives benefit from a small degree of hierarchy while others are hurt by it. Platforms like the internet, Facebook, or democracy are intended to serve as an arena for producing goods and delivering services. These infrastructural courtyards benefit from being as nonhierarchical as possible, minimizing barriers to entry and distributing rights and responsibilities equally. When powerful actors dominate in these systems, the entire fabric suffers. On the other hand, organizations built to create products rather than platforms often need strong leaders and hierarchies arranged around timescales: Lower-level work focuses on hourly needs; the next level on jobs that need to be done today. Higher levels focus on weekly or monthly chores, and levels above (often in the CEO suite) need to look out ahead at the next five years. The dream of many companies is to graduate from making products to creating a platform. But when they do succeed (like Facebook), they are often not ready for the required transformation in their role; they have to act more like governments than companies in keeping opportunities “flat” and equitable, and hierarchy to a minimum.

  In the past, constructing an organization that exploited hierarchy yet maximized collectivism was nearly impossible. The costs of managing so many transactions was too dear. Now digital networking provides the necessary peer-to-peer communication cheap. The net enables a product-focused organization to function collectively by keeping its hierarchy from fully taking over. For instance, the organization behind MySQL, an open source database, is not without some hierarchy, but it is far more collectivist than, say, the giant database corporation Oracle. Likewise, Wikipedia is not exactly a bastion of equality, but it is vastly more collectivist than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The new collectives are hybrid organizations, but leaning far more to the nonhierarchical side than most traditional enterprises.

  It’s taken a while but we’ve learned that while top down is needed, not much of it is needed. The brute dumbness of the hive mind is the raw food ingredients that smart design can chew on. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins for the food. You don’t need much of them, just a trace even for a large body. Too much will be toxic, or just flushed away. The proper dosage of hierarchy is just barely enough to vitalize a very large collective.

  The exhilarating frontier today is the myriad ways in which we can mix large doses of out-of-controlness with small elements of top-down control. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all top down. Now it can contain both control and messiness. Never before have we been able to make systems with as much messy quasi-control in them. We are rushing into an expanding possibility space of decentralization and sharing that was never accessible before because it was not technically possible. Before the internet there was simply no way to coordinate a million people in real time or to get a hundred thousand workers collaborating on one project for a week. Now we can, so we are quickly exploring all the ways in which we can combine control and the crowd in innumerable permutations.

  However, a massively bottom-up effort will take us only partway to our preferred destination. In most aspects of life we want expertise. But we are unlikely to get the level of expertise we want with no experts at all.

  That’s why it should be no surprise to learn that Wikipedia continues to evolve its process. Each year more structure is layered in. Controversial articles can be “frozen” by top editors so they can no longer be edited by any random person, only designated editors. There are more rules about what is permissible to write, more required formatting, more approval needed. But the quality improves too. I would guess that in 50 years a significant portion of Wikipedia articles will have controlled edits, peer review, verification locks, authentication certificates, and so on. That’s all good for us readers. Each of these steps is a small amount of top-down smartness to offset the dumbness of a massively bottom-up system.

  Yet if the hive mind is so dumb, why bother with it at all?

  Because as dumb as it is, it is smart enough for a lot of work.

  In two ways: First, the bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than we imagine. Wikipedia, though not ideal, is far, far better than anyone believed it could be. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Netflix’s personal recommendations derived from what millions of other people watch succeeded beyond what most experts expected. In terms of range of reviews, depth, and reliability, they are more useful than the average human movie critic. EBay’s swap meet of virtual strangers was not supposed to work at all, but while not perfect, it is much better than most retailers believed was possible. Uber’s peer-to-peer on-demand taxi service works so well it surprised even some of its funders. Given enough time, decentralized connected dumb things can become smarter than we think.

  Second, even though a purely decentralized power won’t take us all the way, it is almost always the best way to start. It’s fast, cheap, and out of control. The barriers to start a new crowd-powered service are low and getting lower. A hive mind scales up wonderfully smoothly. That is why there were 9,000 startups in 2015 trying to exploit the sharing power of decentralized peer-to-peer networks. It does not matter if they morph over time. Perhaps a hundred years from now these shared processes, such as Wikipedia, will be layered up with so much management that they’ll resemble the old-school centralized businesses. Even so, the bottom up was still the best way to start.

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  We live in a golden age now. The volume of creative work in the next decade will dwarf the volume of the last 50 years. More artists, authors, and musicians are working than ever before, and they are creating significantly more books, songs, films, documentaries, photographs, artworks, operas, and albums every year. Books have never been cheaper, and more available, than today. Ditto for music, movies, games, and every kind of creative content that can be digitally copied. T
he volume and variety of creative works available have skyrocketed. More and more of civilization’s past works—in all languages—are no longer hidden in rare-book rooms or locked up in archives, but are available a click away no matter where you live. The technologies of recommendation and search have made it super easy to locate the most obscure work. If you want 6,000-year-old Babylonian chants accompanied by the lyre, there they are.

  At the same time, digital creation tools have become so ubiquitous that it requires very few resources, or special skills, to produce a book, or a song, or a game, or even a video. Just to prove a point, recently an ad agency shot a very slick TV commercial using smartphones. Legendary painter David Hockney created a popular set of paintings using an iPad. Famous musicians use off-the-shelf hundred-dollar keyboards to record hit songs. More than a dozen unknown authors together have sold millions of self-published ebooks, using nothing more than a dirt-cheap laptop. Speedy global interconnection has produced the largest mass audience yet. On the internet the biggest hits keep getting bigger. The Korean pop dance video “Gangnam Style” has been watched 2.4 billion times and is still going. This size audience has never been seen on the planet before.

  While the self-made bestsellers get all the headlines, the real news lies in the other direction. The digital age is the age of non-bestsellers—the underappreciated, the forgotten. Because of sharing technologies, the most obscure interest is no longer obscure; it is one click away. The fast-flowing penetration of the internet into all households, and recently into all pockets via a phone, has put an end to the domination of the mass audience. Most of the time, for most creations, it’s a world of niche fulfillment. Left-handed tattoo artists can find each other and share stories and esoteric techniques. People who find whispering sexy (and it turns out many do) can watch whispering videos produced and shared by like-minded whispering folks.