Why make your own posts when other people do it so much better

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
By
Clay Shirky
on April 26, 2008 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)


I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.


If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.


And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.


We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.


And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.


This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."


So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."


So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.


And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.


Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.


The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.


The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.


Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.


Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark." But it's something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now."


Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.


So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."


At least they're doing something.


Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.


And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.


This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.


And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.


And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.


I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?


Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.


I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into. But I'm not sure she believed me, in part because she didn't want to believe me, but also in part because I didn't have the right story yet. And now I do.


I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."


Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.


It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.


Thank you very much.

Court allows search and seizure in Virginia case

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court affirmed Wednesday that police have the power to conduct searches and seize evidence, even when done during an arrest that turns out to have violated state law.

The unanimous decision comes in a case from Portsmouth, Va., where city detectives seized crack cocaine from a motorist after arresting him for a traffic ticket offense.

David Lee Moore was pulled over for driving on a suspended license. The violation is a minor crime in Virginia and calls for police to issue a court summons and let the driver go.

Instead, city detectives arrested Moore and prosecutors say that drugs taken from him in a subsequent search can be used against him as evidence.

"We reaffirm against a novel challenge what we have signaled for half a century," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.

Scalia said that when officers have probable cause to believe a person has committed a crime in their presence, the Fourth Amendment permits them to make an arrest and to search the suspect in order to safeguard evidence and ensure their own safety.

Moore was convicted on a drug charge and sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/125195.html?

Better Dead Than High

The morally dubious logic of drug warriors

Radley Balko | February 29, 2008

For several years now, the drug naloxone has been used in emergency rooms and clinics to treat people who have overdosed on opium-derived drugs like heroin or morphine.

A new version of the drug is even more promising in that it can be administered outside of hospitals. The new version comes as a nasal spray, and retails for about $10.

Several dozen volunteers and government public health groups across the United States have begun distributing the packets to drug users, along with training on how to use it.

The results have been encouraging. One study looked at 16 organizations that have been distributing the kits, and found that they'd cumulatively trained 20,950 people to administer the drug, and successfully reversed 2,642 overdoses.

Perhaps you aren't fond of the idea of using tax dollars to help drug addicts avoid overdoses (and yes, some of the groups distributing the packets are taxpayer-subsidized). As a libertarian, I have mixed feelings.

But a $10 antidote is considerably preferable to a taxpayer-funded trip to the emergency room. The packets seem even more reasonable given that many states have been reluctant to pass "good Samaritan" laws, which shield people who call 911 to report overdoses from prosecution.

In any case, they certainly seem like a good idea for private groups and non-profits. It's a cost-effective way of saving lives.

But not everyone is happy. Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, recently told National Public Radio she opposes the distribution programs because—and hold on to your hat for this one—she believes life-threatening overdoses are an important deterrent to drug use.

"Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care professional is enough to make a person snap into the reality of the situation and snap into having someone give them services," Madras said.

Madras' reaction offers a telling glimpse into the mind of a drug warrior.

We're told that certain drugs have to be prohibited because they're too dangerous. But we should also resist efforts to make them less dangerous because doing so might encourage drug use.

It's a bizarre argument until you consider the real motivation behind it: In truth, it's not so much about the harm some drugs do; it's about an absolute moral opposition to the use of some drugs.

Even if they were completely harmless, some people simply don't like the idea that we can ingest chemicals that make us feel good.

Over the years, drug warriors from former Drug Czar William Bennett to current Czar John Walters to recent DEA Administrator Karen Tandy have defended the efficacy of alcohol prohibition. All three have called the experiment a "success," and the notion that it failed a "myth."

They insist alcohol prohibition was a success because it reduced alcohol consumption. That assertion itself is debatable, but even assuming they're right, the argument itself is revealing.

Americans didn't pass prohibition because there's something inherently evil about alcohol. They passed it because of the alleged deleterious effects associated with drinking.

To call Prohibition a "success," you'd have to ignore the precipitous rise in homicides and other violent crime during the period; the rise in hospitalizations due to alcohol poisoning; the number of people blinded or killed by drinking toxic, black-market gin; the corrupting influence of Prohibition on government officials, from beat cops to the halls of Congress to Harding's attorney general; and the corresponding erosion of the rule of law.

Of course, the 18th Amendment was passed because prohibitionists convinced the country that their movement would alleviate many of these problems. But once Prohibition was in place—and still today among its defenders—it became not about the negative effects of alcohol, but about preventing people from drinking as an ends unto itself. Stop people from drinking, and we've won. Never mind that the cure was worse than the disease.

In December 2006, the ONDCP put out a triumphant press release celebrating a five-year decline in the use of illicit drugs among teens.

"There has been a substance abuse sea change among American teens," Walters said in the release. "They are getting the message that dangerous drugs damage their lives and limit their futures. We know that if people don't start using drugs during their teen years, they are very unlikely to go on to develop drug problems later in life."

But the following February, the Centers for Disease Control reported that deaths from drug overdoses rose nearly 70 percent over the previous five years.

Half the overdose deaths were attributable to cocaine, heroin, and prescription drugs (the number of overdose deaths caused by marijuana—the drug most targeted by the ONDCP—remained at zero). One of the biggest increases (113%) came among aged 15-22, those same teenagers Walters was celebrating just three months earlier.

To look at those two figures and conclude that the drug war is moving in the right direction betrays a near-religious devotion to preventing recreational drug use, at any cost.

Prohibition advocates are again measuring success not on how well the drug war is preventing real, tangible harm, but simply on how effectively they're preventing people from getting high.

The naloxone story only reinforces in a tidier narrative what we've witnessed for the last 25 years—that drug warriors are willing to write off the loss of human life as collateral damage and engage in all sorts of morally dubious practices in order to prove their point.

That point, ironically enough, is that drug use is immoral and dangerous.

I didn't mean that, blog, I love you, blog

FUCK THIS BLOG

Yeah I guess they are for now.


Now, a post.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....

Global warming? WE'RE ALL Gonna die.

Hmm......

This is a good colour scheme I have here. White is hard on the eyes after a while.

If the entire Earth was an artificial alien moving platform, orbiting as it normally would and with stuff growing on it but with an engine instead of a core, would you still love it like you do now? Please rate on a scale from "Yes" to "No" and answer in complete sentences.

Remember when I said that my allergies were under control? I lied. NOW they're under control.

Or are they?

Ok, here's something that's actually somewhat true and/or meaningful:

Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, and lying to cover up those weaknesses isn't going to do any good for anyone. The only possible utopia is one in which everyone can not only live together, but share with each other every aspect of themselves as intimately as they would in the almost fantastically unique case of "true love", but due to everyone's own feelings of insecurity and their insistent censoring of thoughts, their own personal walls stay in place, and their whole closeted, personal sense of the "world" retains intact, and thus, their sense of identity and individuality. Thinking for yourself is not necessarily the same thing as being yourself.

Based on my years of experience from working at the grocery store, I'm pretty sure the only difference between organic onions and regular onions is that organic onions are smaller and constantly have fruit flies buzzing around them.

How is smoking pot any different from eating candy? Neither of them are physically addictive, both of them are psychologically addictive. Both of them have no benefit other than to activate reward pathways. One of them is the desire to taste something delicious set off by generations of evolution, and the other is the desire to taste a delicious state of mind set off by your apathy with your current state of mind, so the only argument that remains is whether or not naturalism is more "valid" than chemical interactions, and that's just retarded.

If you had two small moving platforms that you could tie around your feet, would you use them? Where would you go with them? Please answer in complete sentences.

Back to school throw rugs.

Allergies

1. Contact with allergen.
2. Foggy headedness, immediately after for up to a few hours - this worsens depending as to how strongly I was reacting before the contact. If I was perfectly healthy, skip this step.
3. Coming Up (or Down?!), anywhere from half an hour to several hours (12+) after exposure, for a few hours (2-5) - a period where I feel very irritable, tense, anxious, and/or insecure, but at the same time I'll also feel somewhat confident and euphoric, but only at the very beginning of the reaction. Of course, the confidence doesn't really make up for the anxiousness, so it's not really apparent. Around this time is also when I'll feel like I really "need" weed, because not only do I know that I'll be getting worse soon, but t
4. Hives, instantly to up to 24 hours after exposure - They'll start as small red dots surrounded by a ring of pale skin. They'll get larger and the paleness will go away over the next few hours. During this time, the irritable and anxious feelings from the transition period will intensify and the euphoria will become totally absent.
5. Rebound, 12+ hours after exposure - Shifting neurotransmitter levels give me a huge range of emotions if the reaction is strong, much less so if it's not, however they're almost always above a somewhat thin layer of annoyance, futility, "sense of impending doom", or anxiousness. Symptoms can include excessive talking, excitement, paranoia, feelings of insecurity, euphoria, difficulty in using memory, difficulty in performing physically demanding tasks, fatigue, lowered stamina, tiredness, apathy, and a bunch of other crap. If you look up "histamine abundance" on Wikipedia, pretty much all of those. Generally, though, an increasingly strong foggy headedness as the reaction goes on, and a decreasingly strong irritability.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until I "finish reacting" and the hives and irritability are no longer climbing. This whole thing can take anywhere from 12 hours to a couple of days. The closer I am to the end, the more tired I'll be, and the more paranoid I'll be of another reaction (obviously). Repeat step 2 if I'm still working out previous reactions.
7. I get my bearings. I get the sense that my body was hibernating, or under attack, or just plain sleeping up until this point, depending as to how long I've been reacting for. Around here I'll notice all the things that need to be done that I haven't, which is sometimes stressing. This step is obviously absent if I get attacked again before this.

Allergies work in waves, depending as to how much I'm reacting to something, building up and up and layering on top. Lately, though, this hasn't been the case, I've been much more under control. Go me.

Allan we should hang out soon, whenever I call you you never call back! What up with that.

Sex Magic

The fundamental premise of sex magic is the concept that the sexual energy, or libido, of the human organism is the most potent force it contains, and harnessing the unique states that arise through sexual activity provides a special experiential conduit for the transcendence of nominal reality.

Idea to help the environment #063: One of the first things that come to mind is buying recycled paper products. I am lucky because the grocery store I go to carries recycled paper napkins, towels and toilet paper. Are these any different than what one normally buys, you might ask? I have no idea.

Idea to help the environment #055: IS ETHANOL THE ANSWER TO OUR OIL PROBLEMS? DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT AT HOME?

Idea to help the environment #056: UTILIZE SOLAR OR WIND TO GENERATE ELECTRICITY. CAMOUFLAGE THE TOWERS AS BIRDS, BOATS, TREES, CLOUDS, ETC.. FOR EXAMPLE, THERE IS A TOWER IN NEW YORK DRESSED UP LIKE A PINE TREE

Idea to help the environment #057: Plant a tree and help prevent global warming

SUBSECTION C: Automobiles

Idea to help the environment #058: WHERE THERE IS TRAFFIC CONGESTION ON HIGHWAYS, FOR EXAMPLE THE CONNECTICUT TURNPIKE (I95), ALOT CAN BE DONE, CHEAPLY AND QUICKLY, BY INSTALLING ENTRANCE TRAFFIC CONTROLS, I.E. STOP SIGNS AND TRAFFIC LIGHTS THAT OPERATE DURING RUSH HOUR.

Idea to help the environment #059: Refrain from using your brakes, please!

Idea to help the environment #060: Do not leak oil from your car. Routinely check your car to make sure it is not leaking oil.

Idea to help the environment #061: Do not use seperate cars. Carpool instead.

Idea to help the environment #062: Air is damaged by car and lorry fumes, and power stations create acid rain which destroys entire forests and lakes.

END SUBSECTION

Idea to help the environment #054: We are like caterpillers contemplating pupation. No longer will I chew on cabbage leaves, no longer will I spend my time moving around on the underside of foliage. From now on I will recycle ALL of my foliage.

Idea to help the environment #047: Turn off all your computer, printer, and photocopiers when not in use.

Idea to help the environment #048: Unplug cellphone, camera and other battery chargers when charging is complete.

Idea to help the environment #049: Turn down your thermostat 1° C

Idea to help the environment #050: Buy fruits and veggies loose, and not in plastic bags.

Idea to help the environment #051: Use reusable cloth bags for shopping; keep them in your car. Don’t know where to fin one? We sell them at our store!

Idea to help the environment #052: Strive to buy only recycled products

Idea to help the environment #053: Avoid supporting fast-food restaurants.