I’ve been a fan of Clay Shirky ever since I read his piece on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality a few years ago. Now he has a new book out, Here Comes Everybody, on The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason writes about his book and about how frivolous technologies go From Ridiculous to Revolutionary:
“Nothing says ‘police state’ like detaining kids for eating ice cream.”
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They were a flashmob, of course. Flashmobs started out as a critique of hipster culture. Bill Wasik, an editor at Harper’s, started sending out messages (as “Bill from New York”) to large groups, suggesting that they do things like make bird noises on a ledge in Central Park. He intended it as a kind of elaborate thumb in the eye of hipster conformism. Others caught on, perhaps omitting the irony, and did things like staging a silent rave in Victoria Station. The New York Times runs a smug story on how flashmobbers “have nothing better to do” with their time. And, as the cliché goes, once The New York Times has heard of a trend, it must be so over, right?But then, suddenly, flashmobs found their true calling: On a blog in Belarus, someone proposes a flashmob. The plan is to get together in October Square—the preferred site for political action, and a place where concerted action is banned—and eat ice cream.
Black clad secret police appear and drag dairyphilic kids bodily out of the square. “The problem with a group eating ice cream wasn’t the ice cream, it was the group,” says Shirky. “Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, is the last great Eastern European dictator [but] the Lukshenko government can’t penetrate the conspiracy, right? The whole thing is being done on the web. And they can’t stop the group from entering October Square because they’re not a group when they enter October Square.”
Photos went up online almost immediately. The thinking was that it’s tough to be really consistently oppressive and brutal when the world is watching. (Shirky: “The bug in the system is that the West cares quite a bit less about Eastern European dictatorship than it used to.”)
Shirky has created a new blog specifically for the book — not an uncommon marketing strategy — with some intriguing, timely posts, like this one on WikiLeaks:
There is a tension between freedom of speech in general, and restriction of certain kinds of speech; how can society let people say what they like, while still restricting things like libel or publication of trade secrets? And although the law around these issues hasn’t changed, the economics of media have been so transformed that the old legal bargains between freedom and restriction are breaking, and we have no easy way of replacing them.The current way we have structured this bargain relies on the motivations of media professionals. Since media outlets are costly and complex to set up and run, every such outlet has a natural constituency, the professional publishers and editors and engineers who have a long-term commitment to the business. Because these professionals have a long-term commitment, it is possible to balance broad freedom of speech with specific classes restrictions, with laws that punish media professionals for publishing libelous material or trade secrets. The threat of these punishments motivate them to act as filters, not publishing such material in their newspapers or airing it on their stations. And because there are so few media outlets, society can rein in certain kinds of speech with very little little legal leverage.
Except none of those things are true anymore. Creating media is no longer costly or complex as an absolute case, it doesn’t require trained professionals, and it doesn’t require long-term commitment. Amateurs now have direct access, without going through a professional bottleneck.
Media, in its most elemental form, is the means of repeating a message thousands or millions of times, a capability that has become vanishingly cheap and held in common by amateurs and professionals. This mass amateurization is an end to the scarcity of media outlets. Now, if you have something to say in public, you don’t need to ask anyone for help or permission. We can try to find you and punish you, but this will always be post hoc — the self-interest of media professionals in keeping their jobs is no longer a way of preventing the amateurs from speaking out.