Anyone who is familiar with Clay's writing won't be surprised to hear that he does a very nice job of discussing how recent technological innovations are allowing for more and more "organizing without organization". The book is a great mix of engaging descriptions about examples of how people come together in the pursuit of various goals and interests, and a deeper more conceptual examination of how such phenomena are changing in light of recent advances in technology.

I am sorry to come to the conversation so late due to some travel. I regret missing out on much interesting back-and-forth. Nonetheless, I wanted to add a bit to the conversation.

The issue I want to raise has to do with questions of inequality like much of the earlier discussion, although I approach this from a somewhat different angle than what's been presented. While there is no question that new opportunities are allowing more folks to organize and more voices to be heard, they seem to privilege those already in more advantageous positions. I'd like to see more discussion of what circumstances in particular allow those with fewer resources to benefit from these new opportunities.

Read more »

I've been so interested in reading the various posts this week that I completely forgot my core goal, which is to shill for my book, so here's a message from our sponsor: Buy a copy of Here Comes Everybody, at fine booksellers near you.

Now, on to a point I wanted to make about Tim's post on Norms of Reciprocity in Free Software and the Blogosphere. He says "One of the things that I think is really interesting about the GPL is that formal legal enforcement is practically irrelevant."

This is true in a numerical sense; the amount of fighting about GPLed code is legendary, and very little of that fighting has taken place in the courts. However, I think the key element of contract law is operative here, even in an arena as socialized as Open Source software: One thing that keeps a contract from needing to be legally enforced is that it is obvious that it could be enforced.

Read more »

The last place I want to find myself is in the middle of an intellectual firefight between Clay Shirky and Henry Farrell, two of the smartest people I know! And I'm sorry to enter the discussion so late. In my defense, I started this post three days ago and then got swamped.

I don't have much to say about the question that's consumed most of this discussion, which is whether the near-infinite number of communities in which one can acquire status changes the "zero-sum positional conflict" of status. Henry is skeptical that being famous in, say, World of Warcraft is comparable to being a famous soccer star, as measured by money, attractiveness to members of whichever sex or sexes one wants to be attractive to, etc. That may be, but it seems reasonable that the kind of person who is today a legend within WoW (pretty much the only thing I know about World of Warcraft is that that's the shorthand for it!) would have had, in 1970, far fewer outlets for that particular kind of satisfaction and status. And status is hardly the only source of satisfaction: these zones create more ways for people to find the satisfaction that comes with active engagement in creation, cooperation or competition.

Read more »

I don't want to get too far away from the topic of Clay's book - but the basic questions about inequality in status and income that we are talking about are important to his chosen themes. Two quick points in response to Julian.

First, I'm not actually making a materialist argument that everything reduces down to money. My original post, which spurred Clay to invite me to participate in this seminar, had a title riffing on a famous Max Weber essay which is all about how Karl Marx is wrong, and status distinctions can't be reduced down to material benefits. Good lefty that I am, I think that material forces are incredibly important, but they don't explain everything. Here, I'm relying on Bourdieu, who argues for a variety of different forms of 'capital' without saying that they can be reduced down to material benefits or to anything else (this causes some real problems for his theory, but since this is already sounding too much like a graduate seminar, I won't go into them here). So my argument doesn't really rely on everything depending on the cash nexus.

Read more »

Here comes Everybody has so many interesting ideas that I hope no one will object if I change the subject to another part I thought was really good: the "bargain" section of the "Promise, Tool, Bargain" chapter. It talks about the growing pattern of complex online organizations governed by norms of reciprocity rather than formal legal rules. One example is the GNU General Public License, a popular free software license (From page 273):

Sometimes contracts are an essential part of the bargain, not because of the direct language of the contract but because of what it says about the service. Linus Torvalds offered Linux under the GPL because that was a way of assuring the developers that their work could never be taken away from them. This was an important way he communicated his bona fides years before Linux was valuable enough to appropriate; Torvalds took this step early on to forego any possibility in the future that he could change his mind and patent or sell Linux. It became valuable precisely because he offered a bargain that limited his future freedom; adoption of the GPL was a serious token of commitment.

One of the things that I think is really interesting about the GPL is that formal legal enforcement is practically irrelevant. After almost two decades in existence, the enforcibility of the GPL has yet to be tested in US courts. Yet it has proven a remarkably popular and durable agreement.

Read more »

At the risk of taking us further afield from our assigned topic, I think that in light of the latest exchange between Tim and Henry, it may be helpful to step back for a moment and distinguish between the types of inequalities we're discussing, the potential objections to them, and how they're related.

We began with a question about status inequalities, which has blended into a discussion of economic inequality. This makes a certain amount of sense, since wealth is one dimension of status. This is one reason that's offered for objecting to income inequalities as such: Even apart from whatever concern we have about the absolute welfare of those at the lower end of the distribution, it's suggested that there are psychological harms from recognizing that one is in a poor relative position. This is the kind of harm Clay suggests may be ameliorated by a growing number of diverse status hierarchies. Henry and others have pointed to a relationship that runs in the other direction--focusing, so to speak, on the exchange rather than the use value of status--by pointing out the ways that some forms of status are more easily parlayed into cash than others. (Though I should note in passing here that some folks do indeed turn their Night Elf skills into real world cash by auctioning items or characters.)

Read more »

I feel like grandma here, wanting to say of Henry and Tim's positions on social status and the internet "You're both right", which is tricky since they disagree so directly.

Let me quote Henry: "People can opt out of status races where they are likely to lose, and opt in to status races that they are likely to win. Given a near infinity of possible status hierarchies, they can choose the ones that they do well in. But this argument presupposes that these different possible status hierarchies are disconnected from each other."

Henry is right that they are not disconnected, but I'd argue that they used to be tightly coupled (I think Tim's observation that "until recently, the national media provided something like a uniform yardstick for status" is spot on) but now they are increasingly loosely coupled.

Read more »

Henry Farrell and I seem to be talking at cross-purposes on the question of power laws and inequality, which I take as a sign that my initial post was muddled. Let me see if I can do better. I entirely agree with the following:

Even if we did know that US income was distributed according to a power law, we still wouldn't know all that much. There is a very wide variety of mechanisms that can produce power laws. Without further investigation as to which mechanism is in play (which can't be discerned just from noodling the observed distribution), we may have a Nature publication, if the editors are dozing off again, but we haven't gotten very much closer to an understanding of what is causing the observed data.

This, indeed, was entirely my point: the skewed distribution of income likely arose from a variety of factors. Some of them are related to past policy decisions. Others are the inevitable consequence of having a complex market economy. My ideologically-colored guess is that the latter factors dominate, but I don't know, and I doubt anyone else does either.

Given this, I found Farrell's framing of his final point puzzling:

Read more »

Tim Lee's post on power laws and inequality is interesting, but seems to me to be quite wrongheaded. The putative existence of power laws just can't be taken as evidence that income inequality is somehow inevitable and "simply a natural characteristic of complex social systems" that we have to live with, for a number of reasons.

Read more »

I'm happy that Clay is using my disagreement with Will to extend the argument that he makes in Here Comes Everybody. The book (which is great) is all about how lower transaction costs make it much easier to form groups. The question then is how does this change society.

Here, I'd like to clarify the argument that I made in the original post. What I said there sort-of-suggests that there are fixed cultural hierarchies, which isn't really true. A much better way to think about what is happening is to look at the struggles over how hierarchies are defined. Here, dead French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had some very interesting things to say. To simplify his argument, social life is a continual struggle between people with different kinds of cultural, economic and social capital over how different kinds of capital should be valued and exchanged. Thus, for example, when impoverished academics sneer at the 'vulgar' taste of rich people, they are semi-consciously trying to improve the exchange rate between the kind of cultural capital that they have lots of ('good taste' as they themselves define it) and the kind of economic capital that rich people have lots of (money).

Read more »

Danah is surely correct to say that, for most people, status in some online niche space will never be as important as validation from the people in your neighborhood--the people that you meet each day. But I think her focus on teens, whose social milieu is to a great extent given by their parents' choices, may obscure one of the phenomena Clay highlights in his book: The collapse of the '90s meatspace/cyberspace dichotomy.

As I noted previously, Tim and I are friends in the "real world," but we met physically only after years of corresponding electronically via Adult Friend Finder a now-defunct chat forum we both frequented long ago. As I type this, I'm sitting at a café with a friend who (like many people with whom I socialize) I originally got to know because we were both blogger-journalists. Later tonight, I'm going to play poker with a some friends from my college debate circuit, who I'd have lost touch with years ago if not for e-mail and spaces like the league's Facebook group. Some of the other players are members of a double-secret DC mailing list for liberal writers and activists, named after the pub where they often congregate. I may be geekier than the modal American, but social patterns of this sort are increasingly common.

Read more »

Speculating on social status in an age of networked participation, Clay Shirky accurately points out the ways in which metrics for status have become diversified. It is possible to gain satisfaction from achieving high status in World of Warcraft, even if popularity there is quite niche. In our ethnographic study of new media and youth culture, the Digital Youth group at Berkeley and USC also found that many youth involved in interest-driven digital practices rejected traditional status markers in preference for those that could be achieved in subcultures. Becky Herr and Mimi Ito examined different aspects of fan communities; Patricia Lange and Sonja Baumer looked at vid practices; Matteo Bittanti observed gaming culture. In all of their studies, they found diverse ways in which people marked and negotiated status, confirming Clay's suspicion that networked participation can alter the markers of status.

Now, here's the caveat...

Read more »

Just in case the methodological questions that have been raised about Stanley Milgram's original "six degrees" experiment have led anyone to doubt the reality of the small world phenomenon, let me begin by noting that Tim and I once lived in the same group house, and Will Wilkinson's girlfriend was at a neighborhood rock show I attended last night.

Turning to our own ad hoc community, Clay asks:

The question it leaves me with is this: if we have a way of increasing people's satisfaction with their activities in flexible social spaces, is that a net gain, because it increases satisfaction, or is it a net loss, because blissing out on our local social contexts lowers our sense of injustice, in a way that makes us less likely to fight against it?

Aside from endorsing my erstwhile roomie's remarks, I think the best I can do here is to paraphrase, from memory, a scene from the '80s sitcom Who's the Boss:

Read more »

One of my favorite passages in Here Comes Everybody is the discussion of power law distributions that begins on page 122. Power law distributions are ubiquitous in social systems. For example, we can see power law distributions at work in the blogosphere. The most popular bloggers get millions of readers, while there are millions of bloggers who get hardly any traffic at all. You will find power law distributions in almost any complex social system: the popularity of books or music, the number of contributions to Wikipedia or free software, the popularity of programming languages, university endowments, and so forth. Shirky makes a really interesting observation about the imbalances inherent in a power law distribution:

The imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users. And among those contributors, no effort is made to even out their contributions. The spontaneous division of labor driving Wikipedia wouldn't be possible if there were concern for reducing inequality. On the contrary, most large social experiments are engines for harnessing inequality rather than limiting it...

Read more »

Will Wilkinson is both a friend and a colleague, so it will surprise no one that I find Will's perspective on status competition to be congenial. I also wholeheartedly agree with Shirky's take on the subject. It requires little imagination to think of status hierarchies whose "implicit meta-ranking" are completely unclear. Will's comparison of Chief Justice Roberts with Peyton Manning is a great example.

What I think lends Farrell's claim of "implicit meta-rankings" some plausibility is the fact that, until recently, the national media provided something like a uniform yardstick for status. In 1970, whoever appeared on national television and in national magazines on a regular basis was a celebrity by definition. And because there were only three television networks and a dozen or so national magazines, the top end of the status hierarchy really was close to zero-sum. If you appeared on Johnny Carson, you displaced somebody else.

Read more »

I'm going to open with something quite speculative. Since finishing Here Comes Everybody, which outlines many of the observations I'm comfortable making about social software, I've been left with the observations I'm not comfortable making -- things where I don't have a good enough sense of what's going on to say much with any certainty.

One of those observations concerns cultural vs. sub-cultural membership and satisfaction. There's an interesting argument between Henry Farrell and Will Wilkinson about various status games being played on the internet, and whether they are all ranked on one big social scale, or whether individuals can now choose to participate in only those status games that make them happy.

Read more »

Greetings Cafe-ers!

So, Clay is in a conference this morning and his first Book Club post will be going up later this afternoon. In the meantime, I wanted to write all of you to introduce myself and say hi. (Hi!) I've taken over editorship of TPM Cafe (though Andrew is still by my side-- my girl Friday, as it were). I started out as an intern at TPM Cafe this past March (working on mostly news and video for the front page), and this is a really exciting transition for me.

One of the things that sets me off a little from the rest of the TPM crew is that I came to my love of politics-- specifically the breaking news of politics-- a bit later in life. I went to The University of Chicago, and I've always been a great books person-- since I was a little kid, literature came first, everything else came second. It wasn't until I'd graduated from college and started working for Bill Moyers, on his 2006 documentary Buying the War, that I really got turned on to the political scene.

Read more »