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When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products
common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that new socialism.
What they have in common is the ver...
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He defined dot-communism as a “workforce composed entirely of free agents,” a decentralized gift or barter economy without money where there is no ownership of property and where technological architecture defines the political space.
It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.
Clay Shirky suggests a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements, ranked by the increasing degree of coordination employed. Groups of people start off simply sharing with a minimum of coordination, and then progress to cooperation, then to collaboration, and finally to collectivism.
The number of personal photos posted on Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, and other sites is an astronomical 1.8 billion per day.
The community’s collective influence is far out of proportion to the number of contributors. That is the whole point of social institutions:
Nearly 1 million community-designed Arduinos and 6 million Raspberry Pi computers have been built by schools and hobbyists.
the peer producers who create these products and services gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience.
The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of sharing technology is this: to maximize both the autonomy of the individual and the power of people working together. Thus, digital sharing can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant a lot of the old conventional wisdom.
650,000 people working on more than half a million projects.
One study estimates that 60,000 person-years of work have poured into the release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that self-assembly and the dynamics of
sharing can govern a project on the scale of a town.
The most common motivation for working without pay (according to a survey of 2,784 open source developers) was “to learn and develop new skills.”
imaginary Sharing Meter Index we are still at 2 out of 10. There is a whole list of subjects that experts once believed
we modern humans would not share—our finances, our health challenges, our sex lives, our innermost fears—but it turns out that with the right technology and the right benefits in the right conditions, we’ll share everything.
But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, proves that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what
Much of the prosperity in recent decades was gained by unleashing market forces on social problems.
Three of the largest creators of commercial wealth in the last decade—Google, Facebook, and Twitter—derive their value from unappreciated sharing in unexpected ways.
Google calculated that link as a vote of confidence for the linked page and used this vote to give a weight to links throughout the web.
encouraged us to share it, while making it easy for us to
No one needed to ask permission to publish. Anyone with an internet connection could post their work and gather an audience; it was the end of publishers controlling the gates. This was a revolution!
And the attention given to this immense corpus of prosumer content is significant—it was sold to advertisers for $24 billion in 2015.
This is true for other types of editors as well. Editors are the middle people—or what are called “curators” today—the professionals between a creator and the audience.
OhMyNews in South Korea did better than most and ran a reader-written news organization for years before it was returned to editors in 2010.
every working anarchy, there’s an old-boy
On the other hand, organizations built to create products rather than platforms often need strong leaders and hierarchies arranged around timescales: Lower-level work focuses on hourly needs; the next level on jobs that need to be done today. Higher levels focus on weekly or monthly chores, and levels above (often in the CEO suite) need to look out ahead at the next five years.
Given enough time, decentralized connected dumb things can become smarter than we think.
People who find whispering sexy (and it turns out many do) can watch whispering videos produced and shared by like-minded whispering folks.
Approximately 40 percent of all projects succeed in reaching their funding goal.
Two early attempts at equity crowdfunding in the U.S., SeedInvest and FundersClub, still rely on rich “qualified investors” and are awaiting a change in U.S. law that would legalize equity crowdfunding for ordinary citizens in early 2016.
Since Kiva’s launch in 2005, over 2 million people have lent more than $725 million in microfinance loans via its sharing platform. The payback rate is about 99 percent. That is a strong encouragement to lend again.
99Designs, TopCoder, or Threadless will run a contest for you. Say you need a logo. You offer a fee for the best design.
We have barely begun to explore what kinds of amazing things a crowd can do. There must be two million different ways to crowdfund an idea, or to crowdorganize it, or to crowdmake it. There must be a million more new ways to share unexpected things in unexpected ways.
In the next three decades the greatest wealth—and most interesting cultural innovations—lie in this direction. The largest, fastest growing, most profitable companies in 2050 will be companies that will have figured out how to harness aspects of sharing that are invisible and unappreciated
thoughts, emotions, money, health, time—will be shared in th...
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Anything that can be shared can be shared better, faster, easier, longer, and in a million more wa...
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sharing something that has not been shared before, or in a new way, is the surest w...
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have a choice of 10,000 different co-ops I can contribute
try to give my favorite co-ops a lot of time not because they pay more, but because I really enjoy working with the best folks—even though we’ve never met in
active agents who are contributing to several projects over the years, with multiple streams of automatic payments, as a sign you work well in this sharing economy.
So in all the collabs I work with, we keep and share all the email, all the chat logs, all correspondence, all intermediate versions, all drafts of everything we do. The entire history is open. We share the process, not just the end product. All the half-baked ideas, dead ends, flops, and redos are actually valuable for both myself and for others hoping to do better. With the entire process out in the open it is harder to fool yourself and easier to see what went right, if it did.
I have learned that in collaborative work when you share earlier in the process, the learning and successes come earlier as well. These days I live constantly connected. The bulk of what I share, and what is shared with me, is incremental—constant microupdates, tiny improved versions, minor tweaks—but those steady steps forward feed me. There is no turning the sharing off for long. Even the silence will be shared.
Every 12 months we produce 8 million new songs, 2 million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 182 billion tweets, 400,000 new products.
According to the most recent count I could find, the total number of songs that have been recorded on the planet is 180 million. Using standard MP3 compression, the total volume
It is 10 times easier today to make a simple video than 10 years ago. It is a hundred times easier to create a small mechanical part and make it real than a century ago. It is a thousand times easier today to write and publish a book than a thousand years ago.
There is simply not enough time in any lifetime to review the potential of each choice, one by one. It would consume more than a year’s worth of our attention to merely preview all the new things that have been invented or created in the previous 24 hours.
Life is short, and there are too many books to read. Someone, or something, has to choose, or whisper in our ear to help us decide.
We filter by ourselves: We make choices based on our own preferences, by our own judgment. Traditionally this is the rarest filter.
