stevenberlinjohnson.com

The GovLab

2013-04-17T17:17:28-07:00

Several years ago, my friend and now collaborator Beth Noveck began developing a program that she called Peer-to-Patent, a software platform that allowed outside experts and informed amateurs to contribute to the prior art discovery phase of patent review, both through tracking down earlier inventions that might be relevant, and through explaining those inventions to the overwhelmed examiner in the patent office. (As late as 2009, the blacklog of unreviewed applications in the US Patent Office had reached 1.2 million.) Based on its success in reducing the backlog (now down to 600,000 applications) and expanding the range of discovery, the U.S. patent office last year launched a full-scale version, "Patent Exchange," that allows citizens to participate in every patent under review. Pilots of Peer-to-Patent have also been launched in the U.K., Japan and Australia. Noveck herself went on to oversee the Open Government Initiative in the first years of the Obama Administration.

Peer-to-Patent stands as one of my favorite examples of peer progressive thinking at work. It brings in outside minds not directly affiliated with the government to help the government solve the problems it faces, effectively making a more porous boundary between citizen and state. Just as Kickstarter widens the network of potential funders for creative work, Peer-to-Patent widens the network of discovery and interpretation, bringing in people who do not necessarily have the time or the talent to become full-time examiners, but who have a specific form of expertise that makes them helpful to some patent cases. Yet it is clearly not some kind of stealth libertarianism: the state function of reviewing and approving patents remains vital; Peer-to-Patent simply creates a channel through which outside experts can help the state do its job better. And its implementation was not just a case of social media me-tooism -- “let’s put the patent office on Facebook!” -- but a carefully crafted program focused on genuine results.

I say all this to explain why I’m excited to be flying to NY tonight to help Noveck with her latest project, the Governance Lab at NYU, an extended, multidisciplinary investigation in new forms of participatory governance, backed by the Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. (They’re holding a two-day conference Thursday and Friday that should be fascinating.) I wrote Future Perfect in large part to capture all the thrilling new experiments and research into peer collaboration that I saw flourishing all around me, and to give those diverse projects the umbrella name of peer progressivism so that they could be more easily conceived as a unified movement. But I also wrote the book with the explicit assumption that we had a lot to learn about these systems. For starters, peer networks take a number of different forms: crowdfunding projects like Kickstarter are quite different from crowd-authored projects like open source software or Wikipedia; prize-backed challenges are a completely different beast altogether. For movement-building, it’s important to stress the commonalities between these different networks, but for practical application, we need to study the distinctions. And we need to avoid the easy assumption that decentralized, peer-based approaches will always outperform centralized ones.

One of the key values of peer progressivism is intellectual and professional diversity; groups that draw on different conceptual frameworks consistently outperform more single-minded groups. I’ve tried to live by those values in my own work -- diving into long-form historical studies, covering contemporary science or popular culture, building web platforms -- and the GovLab has been conceived in very much the same spirit. We need academic research from political science and other disciplines to make sense of these new opportunities, but we also need the invaluable experience of tech-sector innovators who have built these kinds of platforms. And we need a close engagement with political leaders and activists who understand the problems -- and opportunities -- of today’s governance more clearly than anyone. GovLab is going to be the point of intersection between those three essential fields. Beth talks about GovLab triggering a shift from “faith-based” explorations of participatory governance to an “evidence-based” model. That’s a transformation that I think we’re all ready to make. Part of my involvement will be trying to synthesize and share what the group ends up discovering -- and what we end up trying to build. So stay tuned. We may need your help!

What Peer Progressives Really Believe

2013-02-06T10:08:13-08:00

If you have patience for this kind of online debate, The New Republic is now running my extended response to Evgeny Morozov's review (along with a new response from him). It cites a number of the misleading or innacurate quotes that I reviewed yesterday, but the key passages come at the end. I'm quoting them here on their own because, irrespective of Morozov's essay, I think they capture what brought me to write Future Perfect in the first place, and where I see peer progressivism in the spectrum of political thought today:

I can understand why Morozov wants to see Internet-centrism in my work: he’s built his career around debunking that belief system, after all. And yes, I’m glad the Internet and the Web were invented; I think that the world is, on the whole, better off for their existence. I would be surprised if Morozov doesn’t feel that way himself. But Future Perfect goes to great lengths to separate the promise of peer networks from some naive faith in Internet liberation. The main lines of its argument arose in part out of two book-length studies of peer collaboration in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries: The Ghost Map and The Invention Of Air. My last book, Where Good Ideas Come From, ended with a survey of hundreds of peer-produced innovations from the Renaissance to today. The deep roots of the idea date back to reading Jane Jacobs on the “organized complexity” of the city in my twenties, which ultimately led to my arguments for decentralization in my 2001 book Emergence. I’m giving Morozov the benefit of the doubt that he just hasn’t bothered to read any of those books, since he doesn’t mention them anywhere in the review. But if you added up all the words I’ve published on peer network architecture, I wager somewhere around ninety percent of them are devoted to pre-digital forms of collaboration: in the commonplace book or the 18th-century coffeehouse, or urban neighborhood formation, or the traditions of academic peer review, or in the guild systems of Renaissance Florence. If Morozov were only a little less obsessed with the Internet himself, he might have some very interesting things to say about that history. Instead, he has decided to reduce that diverse web of influences into a story of single-minded zealotry. He’s like a vampire slayer that has to keep planting capes and plastic fangs on his victims to stay in business.

The point I tried to make explicit in Future Perfect is one that I’ve been implicitly making for more than a decade now: that peer collaboration is an ancient tradition, with a history as rich and illustrious as the more commonly celebrated histories of states or markets. The Internet happens to be the most visible recent achievement in that tradition, but it is hardly the basis of my worldview. And there is nothing in Future Perfect (or any of these other works) that claims that decentralized, peer-network approaches will always outperform top-down approaches. It’s simply a question of emphasis. Liberals can still believe in the power and utility of markets, even if they tend to emphasize big government solutions; all but the most radical libertarians think that there are some important roles for government in our lives. Peer progressives are no different. We don’t think that everything in modern life should be re-engineered to follow the “logic of the Internet.” We just think that society has long benefited from non-market forms of open collaboration, and that there aren’t enough voices in the current political conversation reminding us of those benefits. For peer progressives, the Internet is a case-study and a role model, yes, but hardly a deity. We would be making the same argument had the Internet never been invented.

Tilting At Windmills, The Internet Edition

2013-02-05T09:11:52-08:00

Evgeny Morozov has written a long and entertaining critique of my book Future Perfect in last week’s issue of The New Republic. It’s mostly an attack on the “quasi-religion” of “internet-centrism” that he sees in my work. I’ve written a longer response that TNR is apparently going to publish momentarily, but I thought it would be illuminating to do a purely cut-and-paste response here: quoting Morozov’s cartoon version of my argument, and then actual passages from Future Perfect. I think that gives the best sense of how much Morozov has to ignore or distort in the book to make his argument stick. Everything attributed to me below is a direct quote from the book that Morozov was allegedly reviewing:

Morozov paraphrasing me: Projects such as Wikipedia are just another reminder that Internet logic is the correct way to run the world

Me in Future Perfect: This is one crucial way in which peer-progressive values are distinct from the stereotype of cyber-utopianism. There is nothing intrinsic to the peer-progressive worldview that says social problems can be wished away with some kind of magical Internet spell.

Morozov paraphrasing me: Now that the costs have fallen, there are no good reasons for hierarchies to exist.

Me: No doubt there will be places where the [non-hierarchical] approach turns out to be less effective. It may well be turn out that certain pressing problems—climate change, or military defense—require older approaches or institutions. The peer-progressive framework is in its infancy, after all. We don’t yet know its limits.

Morozov: For all his talk about political philosophy, Johnson makes no effort to ask even basic philosophical questions. What if some limits to democratic participation in the pre-Wikipedia era were not just a consequence of high communication costs but stemmed from a deliberate effort to root out populism, prevent cooptation, or protect expert decision making?

Me: The American Founders had endless debates about the right balance between federal and state authority, but they were united in the belief that direct democracy would be a mistake. For the most part, that assumption has remained in place for more than two centuries. The few instances in which direct democracy has erupted—most notoriously in California’s proposition system—are generally considered to be disasters. [Then after a long quote from the Federalist papers]: The Founders took the threat of tyrannical majorities very seriously. In the system proposed in the U.S. Constitution, the people are sovereign, but the sovereign has to be protected from its own excesses: the herd mentalities and the subtle (or not so subtle) repressions of minority opinions that inevitably arise when the intermediaries are taken out of the mix. So voters don’t propose or vote on legislation directly—unless you count the ballot initiatives that have drawn so much criticism over the past decade or two. The voters choose the lawmakers, but the lawmakers make the laws. [The discussion goes on for about 5-6 pages.]

Morozov: But Johnson is completely blind to the virtues of centralization. In discussing 311, he lauds the fact that tipsters calling the hotline help to create a better macro-level view of city problems. But this is a trivial insight compared with the main reason why 311 works: Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to centralize—not decentralize—previous models of reporting tips... Johnson’s internet-centric worldview is so biased toward all things decentralized, horizontal, and emancipatory that he completely misses the highly centralized nature of 311.

Me: It should be said that 311 is not a purely decentralized system. There are both literal and figurative headquarters, where the call center is located. In this sense, it is a hybrid form, somewhere between the pure peer network and the older state model. The 311 service vastly increases the number of participants in the system, and gives them the opportunity to set priorities for the city’s interventions. But those interventions are still triggered via a top-down mechanism. To a certain extent, that top-down element may be inevitable.

Morozov: The same criticism applies to his treatment of the Internet. Had Johnson chosen to look closer at any of the projects he is celebrating, he would find plenty of centralization efforts at work.

Me: Facebook is a private corporation; the social graph that Zuckerberg celebrates is a proprietary technology, an asset owned by the shareholders of Facebook itself. And as far as corporations go, Facebook is astonishingly top-heavy: the S-1 revealed that Zuckerberg personally controls 57 percent of Facebook’s voting stock, giving him control over the company’s destiny that far exceeds anything Bill Gates or Steve Jobs ever had. The cognitive dissonance could drown out a Sonic Youth concert: Facebook believes in peer-to-peer networks for the world, but within its own walls, the company prefers top-down control centralized in a charismatic leader.

Morozov: But even assuming that Johnson is right and the idea of the Internet does indeed inform how social movements form and operate these days, it is not immediately obvious why this is a model worth pursuing. Not everyone believes that Occupy Wall Street was a runaway success.

Me: But [Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring] have all proved to be somewhat disappointing at actually proposing new solutions and making those solutions reality. They are brilliant at swarming, building feedback loops of energy and attention. They are less adept at steering. The grand spectacles of Occupy or Arab Spring have turned out to be something of a distraction, averting our eyes from the more concrete and practical successes of peer networks.

Morozov: The totalizers would happily follow Johnson in seeking answers to questions such as “So what does the Internet want?”—as if the Internet were a living thing with its own agenda and its own rights

Me actually quoting Morozov of all people: “Perhaps it was a mistake to treat the Internet as a deterministic one-directional force for either global liberation or oppression, for cosmopolitanism or xenophobia. The reality is that the Internet will enable all of these forces—as well as many others—simultaneously. But as far as laws of the Internet go, this is all we know. Which of the numerous forces unleashed by the Web will prevail in a particular social and political context is impossible to tell without first getting a thorough theoretical understanding of that context.”

Morozov: This anti-institutional bias is most visible in Johnson’s discussion of American politics. He sincerely believes that one way to improve it is to get rid of the hassle that comes with political parties, leaders, and other mediating institutions... Johnson believes that the old party system is bad simply because it is Internet-incompatible.

I don’t actually have a quote for this one, because nowhere in the book do I propose eliminating political parties. Morozov seems to have just conjured this one out of thin air. I think the current parties do not share enough values with the peer progressive worldview, but if someone wanted to start a peer progressive party -- or reform an existing party to make it more compatible with the peer network approach -- I would be delighted.

Bill Clinton On "Creative Networks of Collaboration"

2013-01-16T11:19:47-08:00

Yesterday marked the opening day of the Clinton Foundation’s “Health Matters” conference in Palm Springs. I had heard a bit of advance word about the conference from a friend who was headed down there, and I had armed him with a copy of Future Perfect to give to Clinton if the opportunity arose. But the gift turned out to be unnecessary. Apparently, Clinton had just finished reading Future Perfect on his own, and spontaneously brought up a number of its arguments in an opening conversation with NBC’s Nancy Snyderman. Along the way, he managed to say kind words about three other books of mine.

This is not the first time that Clinton has spoken about my work; he did a series of speeches that discussed The Invention Of Air in 2009, and to this day lists Invention as one of his all-time favorite books his Facebook page. Needless to say, it’s always thrilling to hear a person of Clinton’s stature and intellect riffing on your work. We’ve never actually met, and other than one or two short snail mail letters, we’ve never had a conversation. But somehow this strange, wonderful dialogue has emerged between us, entirely through the mechanisms of my books and his speeches.

This morning I transcribed the relevant passages from his talk yesterday, and I thought it would be good annotate them with a few comments and related reading suggestions, since in several places he is talking about other people’s research that I cited in Future Perfect:

The great thing about the modern world -- and the Internet is both an instrument and a metaphor for it -- is that everybody’s connected and everything is connected. It’s like I said if you look at this precipitous drop in life expectancy among white high-school dropouts, there are clear medical reasons for it but there are also psychological and social reasons that have reinforced it. And if you look at what’s working where the places that are growing economically in America, places that are doing best around the world, you have these creative networks of cooperation. There are some things that governments are really good at, and they have to do that; there are some things that the private sector and NGOs are better at, and they have to do that. And then they have to figure out how to keep changing. We are moving into an era, for example, where the only way you can create enough jobs for people, and to generate enough wealth to have decently rising wages is to have creative networks of cooperation. And I think that’s true of this health challenge. It’s the only thing that works. It works everywhere in the world.

That’s the argument of Future Perfect in a nutshell, the driving principle behind what I call peer progressivism in the book: the power of “creative networks of cooperation.”

And by the way, there’s a lot of research on groupthink which proves that. For example, just last week I saw another study, the third I’ve read about in the last decade, that said if you put a group of people with average IQs together and asked them to work on a problem for a year, and you give the same problem to a genius, the group of average intelligence with great numbers working together will work better than one genius acting alone.

I’m not sure if Clinton is referring to another study that he found, but in Future Perfect, the work I cite is the incredibly important research by Scott E. Page. The key to Page’s various experiments is that the “lower IQ” group is diverse in its perspectives and intellectual background. There’s great material on this in Page’s book The Difference, but here’s the summary from Future Perfect:

Diversity does not just expand the common ground of consensus. It also increases the larger group’s ability to solve problems. The pioneer in this line of research is the University of Michigan professor Scott E. Page. Page has spent the past twenty years building a convincing case for what he calls the “diversity trumps ability” theory, demonstrating the phenomenon in sociological studies and mathematical models. Take two groups of individuals and assign to each one some kind of problem to solve. One group has a higher average IQ than the other, and is more homogeneous in its composition. One group, say, is all doctors with IQs above 130; the second group doesn’t perform as well on the IQ tests, but includes a wide range of professions. What Page found, paradoxically, was that the diverse group was ultimately smarter than the smart group. The individuals in the high-IQ group might have been smarter, but when it came to measuring collective intelligence, diversity matters more than individual brainpower.

A few minutes later in the Clinton interview, the conversation turned to the role of corporations in global change:

I think first of all more of our companies are involved globally, and more of our citizens are involved through non-governmental organizations, even if it’s just through Internet giving, modest amounts of money. But I think that a lot of these companies will continue to lead the way. There’s an interesting book -- if you want to be optimistic about the future -- by Steven Johnson, who’s a great science writer. It’s called Future Perfect. His first two books, one of them is called The Ghost Map, which is about how the cholera epidemic was solved in London; and one’s called The Invention Of Air, which is about the discovery of oxygen. But he’s turned his attention to the modern world. The book points out that companies that branded themselves as being good for their employees and their health and wellness, and their children’s aspirations, good for their customers and communities -- over the last up and down craziness of the last twelve years, [those companies] had a rate of return to their shareholders that was almost ten times as much as companies that had only a quarterly focus on quarterly returns and cared about their shareholders here [raising hand high] and their employees, and customers, and communities here. [lowering hand.] So I think more and more companies are going to adopt this model within the United States and beyond our borders.

This argument draws on the research of Rajendra Sisodia, David Wolfe and Jagdish N. Sheth, original published in their excellent book, Firms of Endearment. The chapter in Future Perfect that deals with it takes its name from a phrase coined by Whole Foods founder, John Mackey: “conscious capitalism.” As it happens, an entire book called Conscious Capitalism--on the movement to make corporations answerable to more diverse networks of stakeholders--was just published this week. I’ve just started reading it myself, and I suspect it will be a great conversation starter this year.

As if those three book mentions weren’t enough, he even squeezed in a nod to Where Good Ideas Come From, when Snyderman asked what he was reading lately:

Well, I just finished -- I’m reading a new book by this guy Steven Johnson, on the history of innovation, and what really makes it work. And I’m looking forward to getting through that...

He’s also reading Nate Silver’s book, like everybody else I know. (Including me.)

The whole session is of course worth watching: some very interesting remarks about progress in the obesity epidemic, along with some revealing (and quite moving) discussion of Hillary’s current health (it’s fine, apparently) and her political future. And now that you’ve read this post, you can fast-forward through all the bits about me...

A Quick Roundup Of Future Perfect News

2012-10-09T12:02:13-07:00

I've been so crazed with the book tour for Future Perfect that I haven't had a chance to put together some account of the response the book is receiving. I've tried to capture at least some of this on Twitter, but I finally got some time this morning to put it all in one place. There's more to come in the next few weeks, but this is a snapshot of how the conversation has developed thus far.

Two weeks ago, a handful of adaptations of the argument ran in a few different venues. In The Wall Street Journal, I laid out the basic argument for "peer progressive" politics, and in the NY Times Magazine, I discussed the question of who invented the Internet, and why we should care. Interestingly, Deepak Chopra asked me to write a post for his site on the "power of peers."

Reviewing the book for The Wall Street Journal, John Horgan wrote, "If you're a pessimist—and chances are you are—you should read 'Future Perfect' by the technophilic science writer Steven Johnson. In fact, read it even if you're an optimist, because Mr. Johnson's book will give you lots of material to brighten the outlook of your gloomy friends." Horgan then wrote a follow-up post for Scientific American, called, "Comrades, Join the “Peer Progressive” Movement!" It included this criticism from his colleague, Andy Russell, a historian of technology at Stevens Institute of Technology: "Andy objects to Johnson’s claim that the Internet is itself the product of a peer network. Johnson calls Arpanet, the Pentagon-funded network that gave rise to the Internet, a 'radically decentralized system' and a 'network of peers, not a hierarchy.' Wrong, says Andy, who has done lots of research on the development of standards for the Internet. 'The evidence is pretty clear that the Arpanet and Internet were designed and built through a hierarchical process,' Andy writes. 'In fact its hierarchy (and well-heeled sponsor, the Department of Defense) was the single factor most responsible for the Internet’s success: it kept at bay the factions unleashed by democracy in international standards committees.'" (I will try to dive into this more deeply when I have a bit more time, as it's a very important point.)

Writing for the SF Chronicle, Glenn C. Altschuler ends his review with these lines: "Johnson knows that direct democracies sometimes elect corrupt or incompetent leaders and spend money on trivial, dangerous or damaging policies. He recognizes that market-based economies sometimes produce grotesque income inequalities and catastrophic bubbles. And yet, despite an analysis that can be rather facile, "Future Perfect" serves the estimable service of arguing persuasively that direct democracy is more feasible in a networked age than it has been for a very long time - and prompting one to ask whether, despite its imperfections, it beats the alternatives." Reviewing the book for Reuters, Bernard Vaughan calls the book "a refreshing tonic to fears that the Web is dehumanizing." The Boston Globe called it a "buoyant and hopeful book" though included this one "quibble": "Johnson’s notion of armies of peer progressives changing the world sounds mighty familiar. They’ve had a less-flashy name for decades: grass-roots community organizers." Maria Popova at Brain Pickings called it "an absorbing, provocative, and unapologetically optimistic vision."

Future Perfect was designed from the beginning to be a conversation starter, so it's appropriate that the tour has included a series of delightful public discussions with some of my favorite thinkers and makers. (More to come in the next month or two.) For starters, Richard Florida interviewed me for AtlanticCities, which was a real treat given how much I respect Richard's work. We have video of almost all the public discussions, starting with this panel discussion sponsored by Personal Democracy Media, featuring Beth Noveck, Tina Rosenberg, and Clay Shirky. Last week, I talked about the personal and social impact of networks with MIT's Sherry Turkle at the New York Public Library. There's an entertaining pre-debate chat between us, conducted by The Verge's Paul Miller. And then this week, I had the great pleasure of appearing on BookTV's Author In-Depth series, where we talked about all of my books (and many other topics) for three hours!

Future Perfect Tour

2012-09-16T11:19:16-07:00

Here's the latest schedule for my Future Perfect appearances. Hope some of you can come out. In the spirit of a book about collaboration, many of these events are actual conversations with other people, not just me rambling onstage by myself, so that should be extra incentive for folks to show up. I'll post news of other events as they come together...

Tuesday, September 18 -- MARIN
7:00 PM
Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd
Corte Madera, CA 94925

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 -- SEATTLE
7:30 PM
Town Hall Seattle
1119 8th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98101

Sunday, September 23—Washington DC
5:00 PM
Politics and Prose
5015 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20008

Monday, September 24—New York
7:30-9:00 PM
Personal Democracy Forum event at New York Law School
In conversation with Clay Shirky, Tina Rosenberg, Beth Noveck and Micah Sifry
Information and tickets available here

Friday, September 28—Boston
7:00 PM
Harvard Bookstore
1256 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138

Tuesday, October 2—Portland
7:30
Powells Books
1005 W. Burnside Street
Portland, OR 97209

Wednesday, October 3—New York
In Conversion with Sherry Turkle
7:00 PM
New York Public Library
5th Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11 – SEBASTOPOL
7:00 PM
Sebastopol Community Church
Hosted by Copperfield’s Books
1000 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472

Monday, October 15—San Francisco
7:00 PM
In Conversation with Wired’s Bill Wasik
JCC of San Francisco
3200 California Street
San Francisco, CA 94118

First reviews for Future Perfect

2012-08-27T10:58:13-07:00

A couple nice early reviews of Future Perfect have come in over the past few weeks: Publishers Weekly calls it "fascinating and compelling" and says "Johnson’s thought-provoking ideas steer us steadily into the future." (Full review here.) The Kirkus review is not online yet, but they call it a "thought-provoking, hope-inspiring manifesto." And it's made a bunch of top fall books lists, which is always nice. The tour is shaping up nicely, and I'll have more info on specific dates and appearances in the next week or so.

Almost as exciting: I received the final copies in the mail last week, and the cover is an unmissable orange:

Introducing Future Perfect

2012-07-26T10:54:46-07:00

In the spring of 2001, I was finishing up the final chapter of my second book, Emergence: The Connected Lives Of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. That subtitle gives some sense of the book’s specific subject matter, though the primary theme of the book was more abstract: it was an examination of self-organizing systems, like city neighborhoods or ant colonies, systems that lacked traditional leadership structures or command hierarchies but that nonetheless managed to solve complex problems.

Emergence was not explicitly a book about politics or social movements, but I wanted to end it with a hint of those possibilities. And so the final pages included a description of the Seattle anti-WTO protests that, reading them today, could just as easily have been a description of Occupy Wall Street:

It’s almost impossible to think of another political movement that generated as much public attention without producing a genuine leader—a Jesse Jackson or Cesar Chavez—if only for the benefit of the television cameras. The images that we associate with the protests are never those of an adoring crowd raising its fists in solidarity with an impassioned speaker on a podium. That is the iconography of an earlier model of protest. What we see again and again with the new wave are images of disparate groups: satirical puppets, black-clad anarchists, sit-ins and performance art—but no leaders. To old-school progressives, the protesters appeared to be headless, out of control, a swarm of small causes with no organizing principle—and to a certain extent they’re right in their assessment. What they fail to recognize is that there can be power and intelligence in a swarm, and if you’re trying to do battle against a distributed network like global capitalism, you’re better off becoming a distributed network yourself.

In the months and years that followed the publication of Emergence, a number of readers took these political undertones and amplified them. (This is one of the beautiful things about writing books, particularly idea books: your readers are free to take your ideas and push them in all sorts of directions you never anticipated.) First Joi Ito—now, wonderfully, the head of MIT’s Media Lab—published some online musings on what he called “emergent democracy”-- asking a series of probing questions about how these principles could be applied to civic life. In Brazil, a number of city leaders used the book to refine the already innovative systems of participatory budgeting that they had pioneered a decade before. Emergence inspired some of the early crowdfunding strategies employed by the Howard Dean campaign in 2004.

And so, over time, a book I had written about social insects and video games and software algorithms started to feel more and more like a book about politics that happened to employ an extended metaphor of social insects and video games and software algorithms. And the more I looked, the more examples I found of this new view of social change in the world, and not just in the decentralized protest movements of Occupy and Arab Spring. All around me, it seemed, people were using decentralized peer networks to solve problems -- and not just express their outrage -- sometimes using software and computer networks, and sometimes not. You could see it at work in New York’s 311 service; in Kickstarter; in the prize-backed challenges of the Obama administration; in Beth Noveck’s peer-to-patent system; in the growing adoption of participatory budgeting around the world; in new forms of corporate organization that were less hierarchical in nature.

The funny thing about this new movement was that it didn’t readily fit the categories of either political party in the US. Because it favored decentralized, bottom-up solutions, it broke with the statist, Big Government solutions of the Left, and yet it looked nothing like the free market religion of the libertarian Right. And it wasn’t the moderate’s safe middle ground between those two poles. It was something altogether new. And more that that, it was a political worldview with a real track record of practical success. In an age of great disillusionment with current institutions, I thought, here were individuals and groups that could inspire us, in part because they had attached themselves to a new kind of institution, more network than hierarchy--more like the Internet itself than the older models of Big Capital or Big Government.

And so I wrote a book about that movement, a book that hopefully conveys some of the promise and possibility—and even outright optimism—that these new ideas carry. It’s called Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age. In the U.S., it will be released September 18th; in the UK, October 4th. (Other foreign editions will roll out next year.) I hope you’ll check it out, and, like the readers of Emergence so many years ago, you’ll take the ideas and run with them—as long as I can follow along.

Why The Bay Area Needs The Bay Lights

2012-03-16T21:20:00-07:00

For a few months now, I’ve been talking to my new neighbors here in California about my old friend Leo Villareal’s proposed epic installation on the Bay Bridge, commemorating the Bridge’s 75th anniversary and the completion of the new East Span in 2013. You can find more about it here, including some great visualizations, but the shorthand description from the promotional site is this:

Created with over 25,000 energy efficient, white LED lights, it is 1½ miles wide and 500 feet high... The Bay Lights is a monumental tour de force seven times the scale of the Eiffel Tower’s 100th Anniversary lighting.

There’s been a lot of buzz about this project, and it seems like it has a very good chance of being made thanks to the $3M challenge grant they’ve received. This would be terrific news. There’s no question in my mind that The Bay Lights would become an iconic example of grand urban art: a digital-age Gates or Wrapped Reichstag. Visually it will be intoxicating, I have no doubt. But I think there’s an important element to The Bay Lights that makes it uniquely appropriate to the Bay Area context. Leo is an environmental/algorithmic artist. Leo’s installations are, literally, programs. There are many interesting artists tinkering with software and human interfaces now, but most of their work lives on the screen or in a browser. Leo’s code lives outdoors, on a grand scale. He writes software for cities, not screens.

So I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the bridge at the heart of the Bay Area than with an immense work by one of the most acclaimed algorithmic artists of our time. The world capital of code should have a coder/artist as its Christo. Let’s make it happen.

Anatomy Of An Idea

2011-12-14T10:09:43-08:00

People often ask me about my research techniques. You would think this would be a relatively straightforward question, but the truth is that I have to keep changing my answer, because my techniques are constantly shifting as new forms of search or discovery become possible. Right now, I'm in that thrilling stage of writing-while-still-researching my next book, and I just went through a little episode of discovery that I think might be worth mapping out, as a case study of how ideas come into being, at least in my little corner of the world.

The subject matter of the book is not all that important here, but suffice it to say that I am currently working on an introductory bit that contrasts old, bureaucratic models of state organization with some new network structures that are currently on the rise. So my mind has been primed for anything that seems thematically relevant to those topics.

This particular thread begins with a random encounter on Twitter: checking out my @ mentions a few weeks ago (vanity will get you everywhere), I stumbled across someone mentioning my book to a friend, and also recommending something called "Seeing Like A State." (I can't track down this tweet, so can't give proper credit here.) I wasn't fully sure what "Seeing Like A State" was, but it sounded up my alley, so a quick Amazon search revealed that it was, in fact, a very promising-sounding book written by James C. Scott, about the methods of state organization and control in modern history, and so within a matter of minutes, I was reading it on the Kindle iPad app. (I'm sure it is mentioned in many books that I've read already, but somehow I had missed it over the years.)

The book turned out to have a small discussion of the design of the French railway system in the early 19th-century, which reminded me of a map my old mentor Franco Moretti had showed me two decades ago in grad school, contrasting the heavily centralized French system with the more chaotic British rail lines. So that sent me into a quick exploration of French engineering history that culminated in downloading two PDFs of academic essays on the topic, each of which provided some key historical texture that was missing in Scott's book.

In the meantime, I was continuing to devour Seeing Like A State. Feeling a little guilty about missing a book that should have come across my radar before (it had been published in 1998), I googled around to see what responses the book had generated. As it happened, one of the top-ranking results was a blog post by the political theorist Henry Farrell, with whom I have been discussing the ideas in my new book for many years now. His post was part of a larger debate about the Scott book with the economist Brad DeLong, who had penned a detailed review on his blog. One of DeLong's main criticisms is the way in which Scott ignores the insights of Hayek, which sent me back to an essay of Hayek's that I'd been meaning to read for my book, but hadn't yet got around to. The Hayek essay opened up a whole approach to what I was writing about that I suspect will generate at least a dozen pages of material in the final book.

As I was reading the Scott book, I was storing my highlights from it in the new service, findings.com, which we launched a month or so ago. Findings lets you organize important quotations from eBooks or the Web, but it also allows you to follow other users' quotations. (My introductory post about it is here.) One of the fascinating things it lets you do is see what quotations other readers found interesting in the books you've read. And so when I was reviewing my quotes from the Scott book, I discovered a few other Findings users were also reading it, and one them had picked out a quote that I had somehow missed, a quote that perfectly described the logic of state organization. That turned out to be the quote from the Scott book that I ended up using in my own chapter.

Sometime in the middle of this, I gave a talk at Google, and the speaker before me was the Internet legend Vint Cerf. Listening to Cerf talk about the origins of the Internet -- and thinking about the book project -- made me wonder who had actually come up with the original idea for a decentralized network. So that day, I tweeted out that question, and instantly got several replies. One of those Twitter replies pointed to a Wired interview from a decade ago with Paul Baran, the RAND researcher who was partially responsible for the decentralized design. When I clicked through the link, I discovered that the interview had been conducted by my friend and new neighbor, Stewart Brand, with whom I was having lunch that week. So when I saw Stewart I got to ask him about Baran, and try out this little hunch I was working on about the contrast between the French rail system and the design of the Internet. Meanwhile, one of the other Twitter replies had pointed me to Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s Where Wizards Stay Up Late, released more than a decade ago but also available on Kindle, where I found a detailed history of the Internet's early days. And reprinted in that book was an early sketch by Baran of the network model that beautifully contrasted the centralized model of the French rail system, and the map that I had seen so many years ago as a grad student.

And so after all that meandering, my vague introduction had turned into two distinct stories, with two perfectly contrasting diagrams to anchor them visually.

What's the moral of this story? I think there are a few:

1. The discovery process is remarkably social, and the social interactions come in amazingly diverse forms. Sometimes it's overhearing a conversation on Twitter between two complete strangers; sometimes it's the virtual book club of something like Findings; sometimes it's going out to lunch with a friend and bouncing new ideas off them. It's the social life of information, in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's wonderful phrase -- we just have so many more ways of being social now.

2. I find it interesting that there are certain kinds of questions that I now send out by default to Twitter, not Google. The more subtle and complex the question, the more likely it'll go to Twitter. But if it's simply trying to find a citation or source, I'll use Google. So trying to figure out who wrote Seeing Like A State was a Google query, but wondering about the origins of the Internet made more sense on Twitter. (I should add that the responses I'm looking for on Twitter are links to longer discussions, not 140 character micro-essays.)

3. Priming is everything. All these new tools are incredible for making rapid-fire discoveries and associations, but you need a broad background of knowledge to prime you for those discoveries. I'm not sure I would have jumped down that wonderful rabbit hole of the French railway design if I hadn't seen that map in grad school two decades ago. Same goes for the Hayek and the internet history as well. I had enough pre-existing knowledge to know that they belonged in the story, so when something about them got in my sights, I was ready to pounce on it.

4. Very few of the key links came from the traditional approach of reading a work and then following the citations included in the endnotes. The reading was still critical, of course, but the connective branches turned out to lie in the social layer of commentary outside of the work.

5. It’s been said it a thousand times before, by me and many others, but it's worth repeating again: people who think the Web is killing off serendipity are not using it correctly.

6. Finally, this simple, but amazing fact: almost none of this--Twitter, blogs, PDFs, eBooks, Google, Findings--would have been intelligible to a writer fifteen years ago.