Here are my notes from Clay Shirky's presentation at PDF2008 today. Much of the talk was actually inspired by a blog post of mine two years ago about the Belarus Ice Cream Flash Mob. -andy
I just finished a book called Here Comes Everybody. Group action just got easier. The transaction costs of getting people together to accomplish anything has been historically high. Now we have tools that lower those transaction costs. There's an explosion of what people are doing with it.
Politics isn't governance. The hard work of governance takes away from the political arena. So I'm gonna talk about how to harness. In Belarus, they organized a flash mob to walk around eating ice cream. They took pics of themselves enjoying ice cream. But then they got arrested. The president had made just assembling as a group illegal, so these kids wanted to launch a political protest got arrested. There was no secrecy: they organized it on livejournal.
Media is no longer just a source of information; it's a site of action. It's not just telling you what's going on. It holds out the possibility of people coordinating. Media leads to action, action leads to media. The kids in Belarus got the state to react as expected, then got the pictures to circulate around the world.
Most types of collective action organize around "stop energy." Stop this, stop that - capitulate. But why is that? Is it because it's easier to stop something that start something? Maybe not. Lego figuring modders is the place to go to mod your lego figurines. Homeschool Buyers Co-Op gave homeschool families a back office. The amount of stop and start energy online is astonishing.
Barnraisings take a community; they're not a commercial action. Why do it? Either because I owe you a favor or want you to owe me. There's a density of mutual favors in barn raisings that acts as a catalyst for collective action. But it doesn't happen in fast moving societies. That's where the net can help.
In 1980, Xerox created the most famous printer to MIT. They delivered it without the source code, and gave it to Richard Stallman. Stallman thought it was an ugly future, so he started the Free Software Foundation. Takes copyright law to increase the freedom of the users, not restrict them. That structure is perhaps what's missing with collective action.
So how might you license collective action? I don't know for sure, but I think there's experimental work going on. One example is the virtual company project in Vermont. It removes all the disadvantages of incorporation. VT will allow virtual filings, no physical HQ. You can work differently now.
In the UK: community interest companies. They take the bug out of companies that want to have social goals. The law makes it hard for them to be socially responsible. Now you can put inalieanable social goals into your articles of incorporation. Will help support group action.
Meetup is launching Meetup Alliance, associating your groups at a regional or national level. Individual action and raise the geographic level in which it operates.
Imagine if the only way Jimmy Wales could get a free encyclopedia was to protest Brittanica until they freed their encyclopedia? No way. Take that energy and online tools, and put it into the worlds of collective action. How do we take that energy seen for production and sharing, and bring it into the real world? If we don't address that, then we've only participated in a partial revolution.
