Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee

Openness.

In Chapter 7 we noted that there are many motivations for writing smartphone apps; people and organizations also have many different motivations for contributing to an open-source operating system project. Because of its openness, Linux was able to tap into all of them.

Noncredentialism.

This is noncredentialism, or abandoning the view that people should be allowed to contribute to an effort only if they have the right credentials: diplomas, job titles, letters of recommendation, years of experience, good grades, and so on.

This was an early example of what the writer, publisher, and technology guru Tim O’Reilly distilled in 2005 as a key principle of Web 2.0 (the second generation of the web, which was by then coming into view): trusting users as codevelopers. Torvalds didn’t know this at the time, though.

Verifiable and reversible contributions.

Clear outcomes.

Self-organization.

In fact, there was not even an attempt to stick to one version of Linux. Instead, the operating system could “fork” so that it had one version called Raspbian optimized for the Raspberry Pi, a credit card–sized programmable computer that costs less than $40, while other Linux variants were optimized for giant servers. Forking was seen as evidence of Linux’s success, rather than as a loss of control, and it showed the benefits of letting contributors organize themselves and their work.

Geeky leadership.

Wales saw an opportunity to bring the vast scope of encyclopedias to everyone by tapping into people’s spirit of volunteerism. So, in 1999 he hired Sanger, who was then a graduate student working toward a PhD in philosophy, to help him launch Nupedia, which was to be the web’s first free online encyclopedia.

The first failed project that led to Wikipedia

In today’s complex, fast-changing, technologically sophisticated world, it can be quite hard to distinguish who actually knows what they’re talking about.

In early 2016, Indiegogo introduced a dedicated section of its site and a set of tools for “Enterprise Crowdfunding,” offering large companies the promise of receiving “real-time customer feedback before investing in manufacturing” and turning “research from a cost into an opportunity for pre-sales and customer acquisition.”

Marc Andreessen told us about the startup Teespring, founded in 2011 by Walter Williams and Evan Stites-Clayton. As Andreessen explained to us, Teespring is the modern method to convert social capital into financial capital. It’s one of these things where it first will strike you as absurd, and then if you swallow the red pill, you’ll realize what’s happening.†† It’s a way for a Facebook group or a YouTube star or Instagram star to be able to sell T-shirts. At first you’re like, whatever, merchandise—big deal. But it actually turns out that what happens is that you have these Facebook groups or YouTube stars that have a million followers . . . [and] social capital is real. Your followers or your fans are people who value what you do, and they don’t have a way to pay you. They love you and they want to support you. . . . Now what we would argue is that T-shirts are just the beginning. It could just be anything; it just has to be something. It’s memorabilia, and you care about it and you’re passionate and you’re indicating something about yourself. . . . It’s like a totem; it’s a psychological anchor into something that you care about.

The errand-running service TaskRabbit, for example, was conceived by Leah Busque, a then twenty-eight-year-old IBM engineer living in Massachusetts. On a wintry night in 2008, she needed food for her dog (a yellow lab named Kobe) and thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a place online you could go. . . . A site where you could name the price you were willing to pay for any task. There had to be someone in my neighborhood who was willing to get that dog food for what I was willing to pay.”

Even the ancient human activity of farming is being remade by makers. Caleb Harper of the MIT Media Lab has developed “food computers,” or enclosed environments of various sizes for growing crops. The energy, water, and mineral use of each computer can be precisely monitored and controlled, as can parameters including humidity, temperature, and levels of carbon dioxide and dissolved oxygen. Growers can experiment with different “climate recipes” to produce characteristics they want in their crops, share the recipes they come up with, and work to improve others’ recipes. The goal of Harper’s Open Agriculture Initiative is to allow climate recipe experimentation and innovation at scales ranging from the desktop-sized personal food computer to warehouse-sized spaces.

hands have been created, assembled, and delivered to people in over forty-five countries.¶¶ This work is highly decentralized; its main points of coordination are a website and Google document that any interested person can join and edit. As economist Robert Graboyes points out, this crowd’s creations are both cheap and innovative: The cost of a workable prosthetic plunged overnight by more than 99 percent. 3D-printed models weren’t the same as $5,000 models, but they were functional and so inexpensive to build that makers could give them to users free-of-charge. Working together, users and makers modified designs. The original boxy-looking hand became sleeker. Time-consuming nuts and bolts gave way to snap-on joints, and the total cost dropped to as little as

Over and over again, the recognized experts of the core see their performance beaten by uncredentialed and conventionally inexperienced members of the crowd.

Writing in the Atlantic shortly after the conference, Alexis Madrigal pondered the effects of the stacks: What will the world that they create look like? Here’s what I think: Your technology will work perfectly within the silo and with an individual stacks’s [sic] (temporary) allies. But it

will be perfectly broken at the interfaces between itself and its competitors. That moment where you are trying to do something that has no reason not to work, but it just doesn’t and there is no way around it without changing some piece of your software to fit more neatly within the silo? That’s gonna happen a lot. The argument was that the companies forming the innermost core of the tech industry could not be trusted to look after consumers’ interests as they looked after their own. And the power of the stacks seemed only to grow, and to make Sterling look prescient. In late July of 2016, for example, the five companies he had named more than three years earlier became the five publicly traded companies with the highest stock market valuations in the world.

The term “solutionism” was originally intended as an insult; the writer Evgeny Morozov coined the phrase to refer to “an intellectual pathology.” Instead of taking offense at being called solutionists, however, many technologists embraced the term; in 2014, Marc Andreessen described himself in his Twitter profile as a “proud solutionist since 1994.”

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon. — attributed to Winston Churchill (1874–1965)

The Way of The DAO At 9:00 a.m. GMT on May 28, 2016, the purest expression of the crowd that the capitalist business world had ever seen closed the largest round of crowdfunding ever. The entity involved was the first truly decentralized autonomous organization ever created, “The DAO”—an entity that, as its manifesto explained, existed “simultaneously nowhere and everywhere and operat[ed] solely with the steadfast iron will of immutable code”* It was something like a venture capital fund, but one that followed the principle of decentralizing all the things.

The anonymous hacker who stole approximately one-third of The DAO’s money shortly after it went live, however, was probably not as community minded. After examining its code, this person or persons realized that it would be straightforward to essentially make The DAO operate like an ATM full of cash that kept dispensing money even though the requesting account had a zero balance.

As has often been said, we tend to overestimate the potential of new technologies in the short term, but underestimate it in the long term. And we think it’s very easy to underestimate the new distributed ledgers and their kin. Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever that is, really did bring something new and powerful into the world.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that this arrangement will work out well. Management can be indecisive, incompetent, corrupt, or simply wrong, and shareholders can lose their money. But firms exist and endure because they work, and they work, in part, because they address the problem of incomplete contracts and residual rights of control that plague markets.

Such activities are highly valuable, but they don’t remove the need for the “transmission belts” of the organization, which is our MIT colleague Paul Osterman’s excellent image of middle managers. These people solve small problems, escalate large ones, interpret and clarify communications both upward and downward, negotiate and discuss with their peers, and exercise their social skills in many other ways. The old definition of a great lawyer is one who makes problems go away before they show up in court. Really good managers are much the same; they make the transmission of an organization work smoothly, and prevent it from seizing up.

do want to point out two consistent features of the management styles we’ve observed at the successful and technologically sophisticated companies we’ve worked with. The first is egalitarianism, especially of ideas. While these companies have a clear organizational structure and management hierarchy, they also have a practice of listening to ideas even if they come from junior or low-level people, and even if they originate far from the R&D department or other parts of the core. Sometimes the upward percolation of these ideas is facilitated by technology, and sometimes it happens via the old routes: meetings and conversations.

essentially got project submissions and recruited people to look at them: project comes in, internal person does it, we go find somebody else external [and compare the two]. “Oh, wow, they look pretty similar.” Do that a few times. “Oh my gosh, you know what? There’s talented people all over the place. We don’t have to hire them here in Mountain View. They can actually provide just as meaningful feedback, if not better.” Then we started thinking, “What do we have to pay for this stuff?” We started experimenting with different amounts of pay. “Wow, we could do it for 30%.” He manually tested his way to build the product that he launched in six weeks. When we asked Makhijani if he had formally approved opening up Udacity’s grading to outsiders, he said he had not. I just said, “That sounds pretty cool. Keep going.” And he did. It’s funny, [Udacity founder] Sebastian [Thrun] says it the best: “When we make a change to the mobile app, I find out because it’s in the app store.” There’s no product reviews here, there’s no sense that you must clear your idea with Vish or anything like that. I don’t have this absolute perfect filter of what should be in the market and what shouldn’t, let alone the creativity to do it all. So why not tap the collective brains of everybody here? In addition to egalitarianism, and often in support of it, second-machine-age companies have high levels of transparency: they share more information more widely than has been typical. Wall Street Journal te...

Second-machine-age companies are combining modern technologies with a better understanding of Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 (discussed in Chapter 2), and of human abilities and biases, to change how they make and evaluate decisions, how they generate and refine new ideas, and how they move forward in a highly uncertain world.

OVER THE NEXT TEN YEARS, YOU WILL HAVE AT YOUR DISPOSAL 100 times more computer power than you do today. Billions of brains and trillions of devices will be connected to the Internet, not only gaining access to the collective knowledge of our humanity, but also contributing to it. And by the end of the decade, more and more of that knowledge will be accessed by software agents, and created by them.

So we should ask not “What will technology do to us?” but rather “What do we want to do with technology?” More than ever before, what matters is thinking deeply about what we want. Having more power and more choices means that our values are more important than ever.