Jason’s Calvacade of Related Books: Facebook Uber Alles
Email, blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook... These are more than just buzzwords. They're communications tools that enhance the power of the little guys. They let the non-elite group together, create and compete.
The three books discussed below all focus on how internet technology has made organizing, for whatever purpose, vastly easier, with dramatic consequences for politics, culture and business.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
"Here Comes Everybody", by Clay Shirky, is the best of the bunch. It contains many fascinating stories of online collective action, starting with an incident in 2006 where a global coalition spontaneously formed to help a New York women recover a stolen cell phone. It continues with interesting details of the development of Wikipedia. And, most fascinating to me, the inspiring story of the laity successfully combating the Catholic Church's effort to downplay the magnitude of its sexual abuse scandals.
What distinguishes "Here Comes Everybody" from the two books below is that Shirky never loses sight of the theory that explains this new power. It's called Coase's Law. Essentially, as groups get larger, the costs of coordinating the members increases. This applies to all groups, from friends trying to decide what movie to see all the way to governments, corporations and large non-profits. For instance, as a company expands, more and more layers of middle management are needed to structure communication from the CEO down to the guys on the assembly line. Eventually, as groups grow past a certain size, these coordination costs increase faster than the efficiencies of scale that drive the growth in the first place. At that point an equilibrium is reached, and growth stops.
What's changed in the recent past is that internet tools - email, Twitter, Facebook, blogs - have lowered coordination costs nearly to zero. Suddenly groups can arise and grow in a vastly easier fashion. This can overthrow governments, in the case of Smartmobs in the Philippines, or just allow Coney Island Mermaid Parade participants to archive their photos on Flickr. Once communication is free, Coase's Law becomes basically irrelevant. That's the world we live in today.
Of course, nothing is all positive. The same tools that help the good guys can also be harnessed by the bad. Terrorists, organized criminals, human traffickers - they also benefit from free communication and we all pay the price. Shirky discusses these problems to a small extent, but his book would have been stronger if it paid more than lip service.
Nonetheless, "Here Comes Everybody" is an excellent tour guide through our new world.
The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, by Matt Mason
Ironically, The Pirate's Dilemma, by Matt Mason, came out just when piracy - the real kind, involving boats and guns - was back in the headlines. But actually, rather than focus on Somali hijackers, it's all about how the intermingling of youth culture and technology has revolutionized society and business.
The Pirates's Dilemma has a chip on it's shoulder. From an unabashedly leftist perspective it revels in stories of anyone who's ever stuck it to the man.
It overuses the word 'pirate' until it becomes a synonym for 'different'. According to Mason, any group that's ever tried a new way of doing anything is a pirate. For instance, he classifies the business plan of iTunes as 'pirate'. It really was different than the model of selling cds in retail stores. It really was revolutionary. But it was completely legal and done with the cooperation of the record labels. There was nothing 'pirate’ about it. (As opposed to Napster or Bit Torrent.)
The book is at it's strongest when it tells the stories of the evolution of different types of niche cultures. Punk, reggae, disco, hip hop. Mason's joy in the different genres is infectious. I'm not sure how old he is, but it's all colored with a middle-aged nostalgia that's hard not to smile at.
An extended discussion of graffiti is particularly enjoyable, if overly sympathetic to the artists who, whatever their pretensions of self-expression and revolutionary activism, really did have a profoundly negative effect on the quality of urban life. That said, it was fascinating to read about the violent tagging of the seventies and eighties evolving into the playful, peaceful, but even more subversive, street art of today.
Of course, like everything else in modern culture, it all ends up digitized and online. The book proceeds inexorably to the 'pirate' encyclopedia Wikipedia and the 'pirate' operating system Linux, both of which are covered much better in Here Comes Everybody.
In the end, The Pirate's Dilemma suffers from a hipper than thou attitude and an overabundance of extended and painful analogies. Mason knows he often piles in on and several times he jokingly comments on his strained metaphors. But this just gives the impression of a clever child, standing back and saying 'Oh, look how clever I am!'
In the final part of the book, Mason finally grapples with what it really is that makes today's pop culture so unique: The sheer fragmentation and ephemerality of it.
Mason seems to get this intellectually, but emotionally he's still living in the past when music genres were at the center of personal identity. But the true experience of today's cultural world is that we're all free to pick and choose from a vast smorgasbord of sounds and styles and no one bats an eye. Mason says 'today we all live in a hip hop world'. Well, not really. We all live in the tiny, personalized worlds we want to.
Oh, and by the way... If sampling is illegal, record your own damn sounds!
Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, by Seth Godin
I'm sorry to say that Tribes, by Seth Godin, defeated me. I couldn't get past the first thirty pages.
I know it's all about how YOU can lead us into the new world of EMPOWERMENT and that the INTERNET gives YOU the POWER to be the LEADER the planet needs! It goes on like that.
The book is essentially a collection of bite-sized, superficial mini-essays that flit from one trendy buzzword to another. If you want to be exhorted about your personal power to change society, then Tribes is the book for you. Otherwise: Avoid.
