(2008-10-01) Pesce Social Vs Mass

Mark Pesce on the conflict between our biological/neurological focus on the Social Network vs the Internet level of Mass Communication.

The steam engine transformed the natural world into a largely artificial environment; the amplification of our muscles made us masters of the physical world. Now, the technologies of hyperconnectivity are translating the natural world, ruled by Dunbar Number, into the dominating influence of maddening crowd.

Given this, and given that many of us here today are already in the midst of this, it seems to me that the most useful tool any of us could have, moving forward into this future, is a social contextualizer. This prosthesis - which might live in our Mobile-s, or our nettops (NetBook), or our Blue Tooth HeadSet-s - will fill our limited minds with the details of our social interactions. This tool will make explicit that long, Jacob Marley-like train of lockboxes that are our interactions in the techno-social sphere. Thus, when I introduce myself to you for the first or the fifteen hundredth time, you can be instantly brought up to date on why I am relevant, why I matter. When all else gets stripped away, each relationship has a core of salience which can be captured (roughly), and served up every time we might meet. (Social NetworkContext)

That system of positive feedbacks - which we are already quite in the midst of - is fashioning a new polity, a rewritten Social Contract, which is making the institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries - that is, the industrial era - seem as antiquated and quaint as the feudal systems which they replaced. It is not that these institutions are dying, but rather, they now face worthy competitors. Democracy, as an example, works well in communities, but can fail epically when it scales to mobs. Crowdsourced knowledge requires a mob, but that knowledge, once it has been collected, can be shared within a Community, to hyperempower that community. This tug-of-war between communities and crowds is setting all of our institutions, old and new, vibrating like taught strings. We already have a name for this small-pieces-loosely-joined form of social organization: it's known as Anarcho Syndicalism... I come before you today wearing my true political colors - literally. I did not pick a red jumper and black pants by some accident or wardrobe malfunction. These are the colors of Anarcho Syndicalism. And that is the new System of the World... I assert, on the weight of a growing mountain of evidence, that anarcho-syndicalism is the place where the community meets the crowd; it is the environment where this social prosthesis meets that radical hyperempowerment of capabilities.

So, sure, four hundred people might sign up to a Facebook group to indicate their need for a better mobile carrier, but would any of them think of stepping forward to spearhead its organization, its cash-raising, or it leasing agreements? No. That's all too much hard work... So this is the other thing. The ugly thing that no one wants to look at, because to look at it involves an admission of laziness. Well folks, let me be the first one here to admit it: I'm lazy. I'm too lazy to administer my damn Q Mail server, so I use GMail. I'm too lazy to setup WebDAV, so I use GoogleDocs. I'm too lazy to keep my devices synced, so I use MobileMe. And I'm too lazy to start my own TelCo carrier, so instead I pay a small fortune each month to Voda Fone, for lousy service. And yes, we're all so very, very busy. I understand this. Every investment of time is a tradeoff. Yet we seem to defer, every time, to let someone else do it for us. And is this wise? The more I see of Cloud Computing, the more I am convinced that it has become a Single Point Of Failure for data communications. The decade-and-a-half that I spent as a network engineer tells me that. Don't trust the cloud. Don't trust redundancy. Trust no one. Keep your data in the cloud if you must, but for goodness' sake, keep another copy locally. And another copy on the other side of the world. And another under your mattress.

Socially, we have two states of being: community and crowd. A community can collaborate to bring a new mobile carrier into being. A crowd can only gripe about their carrier. And now, as the strict lines between community and crowd get increasingly confused because of the upswing in hyperconnectivity, we behave like crowds when we really ought to be organizing like a community. And this, at last, is the other thing: the message I really want to leave you with. You people, here in this auditorium today, you are the masters of the world... You can contour, shape and control that chaotic meeting point between community and crowd. That is what you do every time you craft an interface, or write a script. Your work helps people Self Organize.

I want to make things that empower people, so I've decided to take some time to work with Andy Coffey, and re-think the book (EBook?) for the 21st century. Yes, that sounds ridiculous and ambitious and quixotic, but it's also a development whose time is long overdue. If it succeeds at all, we will provide a publishing platform for people to share their long-form ideas. Everything about it will be open source and freely available to use, to copy, and to hack, because I already know that my community is smarter than I am.