Here Comes Everybody

Here Comes Everybody Plot Summary

Introduction

The digital revolution has fundamentally transformed how humans coordinate collective action, creating unprecedented possibilities for group formation and collaboration without traditional organizational structures. This transformation challenges our fundamental understanding of social organization by dramatically reducing the transaction costs that previously necessitated formal institutions for large-scale coordination. When anyone can create a group or mobilize collective action with minimal resources, the very nature of social power shifts in profound and sometimes unpredictable ways. The significance of this shift extends far beyond technological innovation to reshape core social dynamics across politics, business, media, and civil society. By examining how digital tools enable new forms of sharing, cooperation, and collective action, we gain insight into both the opportunities and challenges of our networked age. These changes don't simply accelerate existing processes but enable entirely new organizational forms that bypass traditional gatekeepers and power structures, creating both democratizing possibilities and potential disruptions to established social orders.

Chapter 1: How Digital Tools Transform Group Coordination

The digital revolution has fundamentally transformed how groups form and coordinate action. Traditional organizations require significant overhead costs to manage collective efforts, creating what economists call transaction costs. These costs have historically limited what groups could accomplish without formal institutional support. Social tools like email, text messaging, and social media platforms dramatically reduce these transaction costs. When Evan Guttman's friend lost her Sidekick phone in a New York taxi in 2006, he created a simple webpage documenting the thief's refusal to return it. Within days, thousands of people were following the story, offering expertise, and pressuring authorities. This collective effort eventually led to the phone's recovery and the thief's arrest - all without any formal organization directing the process. The fundamental shift is that groups can now self-assemble and coordinate complex actions without traditional management structures. This capability extends beyond trivial matters to significant social and political movements. The key insight is that our social tools don't create new motivations, but they remove obstacles that previously prevented motivated individuals from finding each other and working together effectively. These tools enable three increasingly complex forms of group activity: sharing, cooperation, and collective action. Sharing creates the fewest demands on participants - as with photo-sharing on Flickr, where users can contribute individually without coordinating with others. Cooperation, like Wikipedia editing, requires participants to change their behavior to synchronize with others. Collective action, the most difficult form, requires a group to make decisions that bind all members. The power of these new coordination tools comes from their ability to work with human motivations rather than against them. They allow people to act on existing desires to share information, work together, and create change - desires that were previously frustrated by the high costs of coordination. This represents a profound shift in how society organizes itself, with implications for every institution from governments to corporations to religious organizations.

Chapter 2: The Collapse of Traditional Coordination Costs

The media landscape has undergone a radical transformation. Historically, media production required significant resources - printing presses, broadcast equipment, distribution networks - creating a clear distinction between media producers and consumers. This scarcity necessitated professional gatekeepers who determined what information reached the public. Digital technology has collapsed this distinction by making the tools of media production and distribution available to everyone. When anyone with an internet connection can publish globally at virtually no cost, the question shifts from "Why publish this?" to "Why not?" This represents what might be called the mass amateurization of publishing - not because amateurs produce inferior content, but because production is no longer restricted to professionals. The consequences of this shift became evident in 2002 when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott made comments praising Strom Thurmond's segregationist presidential campaign. Traditional media initially ignored the story, but bloggers kept it alive until mainstream outlets could no longer ignore it, eventually leading to Lott's resignation. This demonstrated how the professional judgment that once determined what constituted "news" had been supplemented by a broader ecosystem of voices. This transformation extends beyond journalism to any field where scarcity of production tools created professional categories. Photography, music production, video creation - all have seen similar democratization. The definition of "photographer" was once tied to access to darkrooms and specialized equipment; now anyone with a smartphone can take and distribute photos globally. The key insight is that many professional categories weren't defined by inherent qualities but by the accidental scarcity of production tools. As these tools become universally accessible, the distinction between professionals and amateurs blurs. This doesn't mean professionals disappear, but it does mean they no longer have exclusive control over their domains.

Chapter 3: From Sharing to Cooperation to Collective Action

Wikipedia exemplifies how collective intelligence can produce remarkable results through distributed collaboration. Founded in 2001 as an experimental offshoot of Nupedia (a more traditionally edited encyclopedia), Wikipedia quickly surpassed its parent project by embracing a radically open editing model. Anyone could contribute, regardless of credentials or expertise. This open approach enables a spontaneous division of labor that would be impossible in traditional organizations. Consider the Wikipedia article on asphalt, which began as a seven-word stub: "Asphalt is a material used for road coverings." Over time, 129 different contributors expanded this into detailed articles on asphalt and asphalt concrete, covering chemistry, history, and applications. No central authority assigned these tasks; contributors simply improved what interested them. The effectiveness of this model depends on several factors. First, Wikipedia allows for incremental improvement - it's easier to improve a mediocre article than create a good one from scratch. Second, it embraces what software engineer Richard Gabriel calls "worse is better" - simple but imperfect solutions spread faster and ultimately improve more than complex but elegant ones. Third, it relies on a diversity of motivations, from intellectual curiosity to vanity to altruism. Participation in Wikipedia follows a power law distribution - a small percentage of users make the majority of edits, while most make only occasional contributions. This imbalance isn't a flaw but a feature; it allows for varying levels of commitment without requiring everyone to contribute equally. The system works not despite this imbalance but because of it. The most surprising aspect is how Wikipedia handles disagreement and vandalism. Because enough people care about maintaining quality, vandalism is typically reverted within minutes. Controversial topics may generate heated debates, but the requirement to provide sources and maintain a neutral point of view creates a framework for resolving disputes. Wikipedia isn't an experiment in anarchy but in pragmatic collaboration, adding technological fixes only when community processes prove insufficient.

Chapter 4: Mass Amateurization and the Professional Filter

The velocity of group formation and action has increased dramatically with modern communication tools. This acceleration creates qualitatively different outcomes, not merely faster versions of traditional group activities. Consider the protests in Leipzig, East Germany in 1989. Initially small demonstrations gradually grew as citizens realized the government wasn't cracking down. This "information cascade" eventually led to protests of hundreds of thousands and the collapse of the East German government. The key factor was shared awareness - when everyone knows something, when everyone knows that everyone knows, and when everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows. Modern tools accelerate this process. In Belarus, where the government restricts political expression, activists use "flash mobs" organized through blogs and text messages to stage brief, symbolic protests. The government faces a dilemma: they can't prevent the coordination because it happens through public channels, and cracking down on innocuous activities like eating ice cream in public squares only generates more international attention when documented and shared online. This acceleration affects commercial contexts too. When American Airlines stranded passengers on the tarmac for eight hours in 2006, passenger Kate Hanni used online tools to quickly form a passenger rights organization that gained thousands of members within weeks. Similarly, when HSBC bank changed its overdraft policy for student accounts, students organized on Facebook and forced the bank to reverse its decision within days. The critical insight is that these tools don't just speed up existing processes - they fundamentally alter the balance of power between institutions and ad hoc groups. Organizations that could previously wait out public outrage now face sustained pressure from rapidly forming coalitions. Groups that previously couldn't coordinate quickly enough to be effective can now mobilize before opportunities pass. The tools enabling this acceleration aren't particularly sophisticated - email, text messaging, blogs, social networks - but their widespread adoption means that coordination can happen at unprecedented speed and scale, creating new possibilities for collective action.

Chapter 5: Institutional Challenges in a Networked World

Social dilemmas - situations where individual and collective interests conflict - have always challenged human societies. The Prisoners' Dilemma illustrates this tension: two suspects would collectively benefit from cooperation, but individually benefit from betraying each other, resulting in mutual betrayal as the rational outcome. Social capital - the norms and networks that enable cooperation - helps societies overcome these dilemmas. When people expect ongoing relationships (what game theorists call "the shadow of the future"), they're more likely to cooperate today in anticipation of reciprocity tomorrow. This explains why communities with strong social bonds can solve problems that atomized groups cannot. However, modern life has eroded traditional sources of social capital. Suburbanization, delayed marriage, two-income households, and other trends have made spontaneous community interaction less common. Activities that once happened naturally now require explicit coordination. This insight led Scott Heiferman to create Meetup, a platform that helps people with shared interests find each other locally. Interestingly, the groups that thrived on Meetup weren't traditional civic organizations but previously marginalized communities: witches, pagans, ex-Jehovah's Witnesses, and fans of niche cultural phenomena. These groups had always wanted to gather but lacked the social support or coordination mechanisms to do so. By lowering transaction costs, Meetup enabled these latent communities to form. This pattern extends to all kinds of groups, including those society might prefer not to exist. When teenage girls used online forums to share tips on maintaining anorexia (the "Pro-Ana" movement), magazine publishers could shut down discussions on their own sites, but couldn't prevent the girls from finding other platforms. The ability to form groups now exists independently of social approval. The key insight is that new social tools don't eliminate social dilemmas, but they do change how we can address them. They enable new forms of coordination that bypass traditional gatekeepers, allowing both socially beneficial and potentially harmful groups to organize more effectively. The challenge for society isn't to prevent this coordination but to develop new norms and structures that channel it constructively.

Chapter 6: The Balance Between Freedom and Structure in Collaboration

Traditional institutions now face unprecedented challenges from networked groups. The Catholic Church's handling of sexual abuse cases illustrates this dynamic. In 1992, when the Boston Globe reported on priest James Porter's abuse of children, Cardinal Bernard Law criticized the coverage and the scandal eventually subsided. But when similar revelations about Father John Geoghan emerged in 2002, the outcome was dramatically different. What changed wasn't the nature of the abuse or the church's response, but the ability of laypeople to share information and coordinate action. Voice of the Faithful, a group formed by concerned Catholics, grew from 30 people in a church basement to 25,000 members in just six months. This rapid growth would have been impossible without digital communication tools that allowed Catholics to organize across parish boundaries - something the church hierarchy explicitly tried to forbid. Similar challenges face many established institutions. Businesses find customers organizing to demand better treatment, as with airline passengers forming coalitions for passenger rights. Governments face citizens who can document abuses and coordinate protests with unprecedented speed. Media companies struggle as their monopoly on information distribution evaporates. These challenges aren't merely about technology but about fundamental shifts in coordination capabilities. Institutions have historically maintained control partly by managing information flows and raising the costs of group formation. When these costs collapse, the institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination disappears. The most profound implication is that many institutional structures weren't designed based on optimal function but on the limitations of previous coordination technologies. As these limitations disappear, we're discovering that many institutional forms were responses to constraints that no longer exist. This doesn't mean institutions will vanish, but it does mean they must adapt to a world where their traditional advantages have eroded. For centuries, the basic pattern of human organization has been that small groups could self-organize while large groups required formal management. That pattern is now breaking down as large groups can coordinate complex activities with minimal formal structure. This represents not just a challenge to specific institutions but to our fundamental understanding of how human society organizes itself.

Chapter 7: Implications for Social and Political Power Dynamics

The digital revolution has fundamentally transformed collective action by dramatically reducing the costs of group coordination. This shift enables people to organize without formal institutional structures, creating new possibilities for collaboration and challenging established power centers. The key insight is that these changes aren't simply accelerating existing processes but enabling entirely new forms of social organization. These transformations manifest across society - from Wikipedia's collaborative knowledge production to political protests organized via text message to consumer movements formed through social media. In each case, the pattern is similar: groups that previously couldn't coordinate effectively can now do so, while institutions that relied on coordination costs as a barrier to competition now face unprecedented challenges. The result isn't utopian or dystopian but complex and multifaceted, empowering both socially beneficial movements and potentially harmful ones. Understanding these dynamics is essential for anyone seeking to navigate or influence our rapidly evolving social landscape.

Summary

The digital revolution has fundamentally transformed how humans organize collective action by dramatically reducing the costs of coordination. This shift enables entirely new forms of collaboration that bypass traditional institutional structures, creating both opportunities and challenges across society. The key insight is that these changes don't merely accelerate existing processes but fundamentally alter power dynamics between established institutions and networked groups. These transformations manifest in diverse contexts - from collaborative knowledge production to political protests to consumer movements - following a similar pattern: groups that previously couldn't coordinate effectively can now do so, while institutions that relied on coordination costs as barriers to competition face unprecedented challenges. The result is neither utopian nor dystopian but complex and multifaceted, empowering both socially beneficial movements and potentially harmful ones. By understanding these dynamics, we gain crucial insight into how power operates in our networked age and how we might harness these capabilities for positive social change while mitigating potential harms.

About Author

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Clay Shirky

Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology -- how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.Mr. Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist's Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his "After Darwin" column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O'Reilly's bioinformatics series. He helps program the "Biological Models of Computation" track for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conferences.Mr. Shirky frequently speaks on emerging technologies at a variety of forums and organizations, including PC Forum, the Internet Society, the Department of Defense, the BBC, the American Museum of the Moving Image, the Highlands Forum, the Economist Group, Storewidth, the World Technology Network, and several O'Reilly conferences on Peer-to-Peer, Open Source, and Emerging Technology.Prior to his appointment at NYU, Mr. Shirky was a Partner at the investment firm The Accelerator Group in 1999-2001, an international investment group with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London. The Accelerator Group was focused on early stage firms, and Mr. Shirky's role was technological due diligence and product strategy.Mr. Shirky was the original Professor of New Media in the Media Studies department at Hunter College, where he created the department's first undergraduate and graduate offerings in new media, and helped design the current MFA in Integrated Media Arts program.Prior to his appointment at Hunter, he was the Chief Technology Officer of the NYC-based Web media and design firm Site Specific, where he created the company's media tracking database and server log analysis software. Site Specific was later acquired by CKS Group, where he was promoted to VP Technology, Eastern Region.Before there was a Web, he was Vice-President of the New York chapter of the EFF, and wrote technology guides for Ziff-Davis, including a guide to email-accessible internet resources, and a guide to the culture of the internet. He appeared as an expert witness on internet culture in Shea vs. Reno, a case cited in the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Communications Decency Act in 1996.Mr. Shirky graduated from Yale College with a degree in art, and prior to falling in love with the internet, he worked as a theater director and designer in New York. His company, Hard Place Theater, staged "non-fiction theater", theatrical collages of found documents.Mr. Shirky's writings are archived at shirky.com, and he currently runs the N.E.C. mailing list for his writings on networks, economics, and culture.

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