One of the newly posted talks to the TED website this week is one by Clay Shirky, author of here comes everybody. In it Mr. Shirky discusses the impact of how we organize ourselves and our efforts and the way that is effected by the fact that the internet drops the cost of communication to virtually nil. What's fascinating about this talk is that he discusses the subject matter in a kind of ideologically agnostic way that makes it clear how many debates this phenomena pops up in. He only explicitly discusses three: photography, journalism/blogging, and software development, but he makes clear that he believes that the impact will be of similar magnitude to the invention of the printing press.
Follow me over the fold for the embedded version of the talk, a little background on TED, and my own commentary on the talk.
Let me open my own commentary by stating that I think that this way of looking at ourselves is brilliant. Not necessarily this particular model but the way that looking at the problem as a question of how we organize ourselves instead of approaching it from a perspective of ideologies permits for clearer thinking. This is so because it reduces emotional reactions and thus improves our ability to focus on only what is relevant to the question at hand. It's the sort of perspective that really appeals to the theoretical physicist in me.
Good, that's out of the way, now on to the meat.
Watching Shirky present the power law graph of the Iraq photographers and discussing the differences of how an institution approaches the situation versus how a collaborative infrastructure approaches the situation, I couldn't help but return to the perennial political debate of capitalism vs communism. It is the obvious extreme parallel in the economic and political world to what he is discussing where the former is (supposed to be) decentralized collaboration through the design of the system and the latter is a top down managed economy.
Shirky mentioned while describing the graph that power laws like that pop up in all sorts of "unconstrained social networks." I couldn't help but conclude based on that statement that the wealth distribution of the U.S. would look like a power law graph if it weren't for things like: progressive taxation, social programs, etc. See a completely laissez-faire economy is one of the unconstrained networks that Shirky mentioned if you grant the Capitalist's ideal case (no stealing or law breaking, etc). It is an irony that is, perhaps, lost on many of those who are dogmatic on the subject that their ideal economic system is one that would create such widespread grinding poverty. They also seem to miss that under such conditions it is impossible for any reasonable idea of political equality to prevail - political power would largely mirror the economic power graph. I grant that there are those who know exactly what the result of such a system would be and still support it, but I firmly believe that those have to be in the minority of even that minority.
Point being, anyway, that institutions are definitely not always bad or undesirable. They aren't the Snidely Whiplash lording over us until the Dudly Do-Right internet can save us. It's more like this: we have a choice about how we organize ourselves as a society and the best solution is neither completely institutional (top down) nor completely collaborational (bottom up), but different mixes of the two for different situations. We just need time to figure out what the appropriate mixes are.
At least, that's how I see the matter.
For those who were wondering: TED is short for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It's a conference that happens in Feb every year in Monterey, California. The conference was originally for those industries but has since expanded it's mission, somewhat, to include a larger swath of what is interesting to humanity. Some of the past speakers at TED include: Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Larry Lessig, Nicholas Negroponte, and many others.
Edit: I couldn't get the embed code to work for the talk, so I'll have to stick with a good old fashioned link to the talk.