Supernova has posted a 15 minute vcast interview with me, by Howard Greenstein, about the Berkman Publius Project and my op-ed in it about why tacit governance is usually better than getting all explicit about stuff.

[Tags: berkman publius governance ]

1 Comment »

The Berkman Center has announced the launch of the Publius Papers, a collection of short essays (op-ed length) about the various ways constitutional moments the Internet is going through, from formal declarations to norms and nuances. The essays are in conversation with one another, by a whole bunch of authors. The exact site will be announced tomorrow on the Berkman main page. And it’s with a great deal of trepidation that I say that the first essays is mine, on why the government that governs tacitly governs best, with responses by Esther Dyson and Kevin Werbach. Ulp.

[Tags: publius esther_dyson kevin_werbach ]

Be the first to comment »

Rocketboom is running a synopsis of my talk on fame at ROFLcon. (Does that make me meta-famous?)

[Tags: rocketboom roflcon2008 fame ]

1 Comment »

Chris Kelty, a prof. from Rice, leads a panel of Internet cult leaders. He asks if we want these celebrities to become leaders. [I am totally out of my demographic]. Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics). Randall Munroe (xkcd). Moot (4chan). [Live-blogging. Highly compressed. Many mistakes. Even sketchier than usual. ]

Ryan denies he has any leadership beyond superficially. Randall also doesn’t want to lead anything. He’s humbled and horrified that there are other people like him. Moot says he merely provides a place for people to express themselves.

Randall denies that the comic is based on his life. Ryan “tries to have it both ways with his comics.”

Q: Ryan, you’re the creator of Project Wonderful, an auction-based ad system that has revolutionized advertising on the Web. So, which Dinosaurs characters are based on your ex-girlfriends?
A: Sometimes. Unadvisably.
Randall: It can be bad if you write about a fake relationship while you’re in a real relationship…

Q: Are you fighting any preconceptions?
Ryan: People don’t know how to respond to someone writing comics on the Internet.

Q: When have you been most afraid about what you’ve created and the consequences thereof?
A: Right now. [applause]

For some reason, Moot pantomimes a barrel roll.

Ryan says that he doesn’t explain his jokes even when people get them wrong.

For reasons I don’t understand, Randall has the entire audience do a barrel roll. Later, he says that he expected controversy when he did a comic on the meth addicts of cunnilingus in order to set the outer edge of edginess within which he can operate. But there was no controversy.
Ryan adds that he’s surprised by which of his comics are controversial.

Q: Why are so many of the cultural producers men?
Ryan: Online I could be a 12 yr old girl if I wanted to, and perhaps I have been. I don’t think there’s anything inherent in the Internet that selects towards men.
Moot: It’s a conspiracy. We can’t talk about it.
Kelty: A comic like yours does more to entice people into that world than anything the universities do. You seem to be trying to do this. Can you do more than a comic?
Randall: It’s hard to be preachy and funny at the same time. The causes of the gender imbalance are complex. It’s by far the most complicated thing I’ve ever studied, and I’ve studied quantum mechanics.

Q: When you meet someone in a bar, is it more weird and awkward when they know who you are?

Randall: The weirdest is when they seem to be friendly, and they’ve read the comic and don’t like it.
Ryan: It’s nice when you start on an even ground.

Moot: I’m a huge fan of anonymous posting. It evens the playing ground.
something

Q: Was society crying out for the communities you’ve created?
Moot: 4chan was based on 2chan. Eventually, someone else would have come along and done it.

Q: 4chan has a different community than it started with. During the panel, moot, you’ve both distanced yourself and identified yourself with. What parts of the community do you like?
Moot: Hard to articulate. Started out for anime. The random board grew. The “let’s raid someone’s life for no good reason” is terrible, but a lot of that has migrated elsewhere. I don’t control 4chan but I am at the reins and can say what we do and don’t want there.

Q: What will you be doing in 10 yrs. The same thing?
Ryan: I can see it. My drawing doesn’t change. It’s hard work but I enjoy it.
Randall: Me, too.

Q: Ryan, do you feel more constrained or liberated by the form of your comic?
Ryan: There’s a lot you can do with the narrative form even with a repeating graphic.

Moot: I spend most of my time on the Net reading news. It’s important to be connected to your world. Not just BBC, but community sites.

For reasons I do understand, people ask many insider questions I don’t understand.

Huge applause at the end. Even huger for the organizers of the conference. And why not? ROFLcon is now a meme as much as conf. On its way to becoming a movement? [Tags: roflcon2008 ]

4 Comments »

I was talking with Kate Raynes-Goldie of the CBC at the end of the first day of ROFLcon yesterday [live-streamed here] and had a small realization about another difference between broadcast fame and Web fame. A little connection that immediately seemed too obvious to blog about. Nevertheless, here goes….

I said in my talk at the conference yesterday that we are making fame our own, rather than an alienating effect of the broadcast regime, because we make people famous on the Web by passing around links, and that — especially when you watch people watching YouTubes together — it’s a lot like how people tell jokes together: one video reminds someone of another, and there can be a type of pleasant one-upmanship as people try to top the current video with one that’s even better.

Not until I was talking with Kate did the further obviousness occur to me: One of the differences between broadcast and Web fame is that in making someone famous on the Web, we are putting a little bit of our social standing at risk. We’ve got a stake in it.

For example, during the wonderful, impromptu videofest blogged by (and, to a large degree, led by) the wonderful and impromptu Ethan Zuckerman, during Fellows Hour at the Berkman Center last week, everyone was pointing to the next great video to play. In the midst of this, I lost the thread and pointed to a video that, when projected to the group, was out of place and not even very interesting. People shuffled uncomfortably, trying to figure out why I would suggest such a clunker. I was embarrassed. (At least the video was short.)

That we have something at stake in what we recommend is, of course, well understood and completely obvious. But for me, only last night did I recognize that that’s one of the reasons the Web famous feel more like ours than the broadcast famous usually do. Not only do we make them famous, but we do so at some risk to ourselves.

It’s a type of sweat equity, or, in my case during video night at the Berkman, it was more like a type of flop sweat equity. [Tags: roflcon2008 fame ]

1 Comment »

The LOLcats panel at ROFLcon, with six panelists and a moderator, is redeeming the format. It’s been hilarious. And sometimes more than that. “Ignore the haters,” says Cheez (ICanHasCheezburger), “because every moment you spend responding is a moment taken from those who love you.” Another advises not to try to control the meme.

Q: Why is it pronounced “loll” instead of spelled out L-O-L? Because it’s easier, they say. But an audience member — and it’s a raucous audience — says that it’s because you can make puns with “loll” but not with L-O-L, e.g., LOLicoaster.

Someone asks when the dialect went from based on toddlers to based on the retarded. (I told you it was raucous.) Cheez responds that it’s the first dialect that was written first, and spoken later. Thus, he says, we all hear it in our heads differently. So, if the questioner is now hearing a retarded person instead of a toddler…

One of them says that the LOLcat Bible is well underway. The moderator suggests a LOLcat Koran…

A question about origins brings replies pointing to l33t speak and to Yoda.

Is there LOLporn? The panel rolls its collective eyes. Oh yes. “The most common meme is ‘do not want,’” one says.

Has anyone tried to own the language? “There’s so much prior art,” says Cheez.

I haven’t gotten close to capturing this. It was hilarious, with a great panel and a great audience. There’s a real sense of commonality at this conference, and it’s in high spirits. [Tags: roflcon2008 lolcats ]

Be the first to comment »

I’m talking tomorrow at ROFLcon, a conference about Web fame, celebrity and culture. I’m supposed to be talking in a general way about Web fame. Then I’m leading a panel composed of men (yup) who are Web famous: Kyle Macdonald (One Red Paperclip), Joe Mathelete (Joe Mathelete Explains Marmaduke), Ian Spector (Chuck Norris Facts), Andy Ochiltree (JibJab.com), Andrew Baron (Rocketboom), Alex Tew (The Million Dollar Homepage)

Here’s a sketch of what I’m thinking of saying:

Fame has been a property of the broadcast (= one-to-many) system. Fame is based on the math of many people knowing you, so many that you can’t know them. But it’s not just math, of course. It’s also economics. The broadcast economy has a fiduciary interest in building and maintaining the famous. They’re “bankable.”

Because of this scarcity and the fact that the one-to-manyness of the relationship means the knowing is one-way, the famous become a special class of person: mythic and not fully real. They are not like us, even ontologically. Fame is a type of alienation.

Outside of the broadcast system, fame looks different. This is a type of do-it-yourself fame, not only in that we often want human fingerprints on the shiny surfaces we’re watching, but also because we create fame through passing around links … occasionally for mean and nasty reasons. Kids sitting around watching YouTubes with one another are like kids telling jokes: That reminds me of this one; if you liked that one, you’ll love this one. And the content itself fuels public conversations in multiple media. This is P2P fame.

There’s a long tail of fame, although I suspect the elbow isn’t quite as sharp as in the classic Shirky power law curve for links to blogs. At the top of the head of the curve, fame operates much as it does in the broadcast media, although frequently there’s some postmodern irony involved. In the long tail, though, you can be famous to a few people. Sure, much of it’s crap, but the point about an age of abundance is that we get an abundance of crap and of goodness. We get fame in every variety, including anonymous fame, fame that mimics broadcast fame, fame that mocks, fame that does both, fame for what is stupid, brilliant, nonce, eternal, clever, ignorant, blunt, nuanced, amateur, professional, mean, noble … just like us. It’s more of everything.

But most of all, it’s ours.

* * *

[ROFLcon will be live-streamed here. [Tags: roflcon2008 web_culture fame celebrity ]

12 Comments »

In case you were wondering, we have scientifically determined that the Net is different on a scale of 8.4 out of 10.

Our methodology was unassailable. Each member of the Web Difference class had to state a number from 1-10 saying what difference the Net will make, where “Net” includes the Internet, the Web, and the computing devices it uses, and where the potential for change is included in the number.

Next question!

[Tags: web_difference webdiff ]

2 Comments »

Can you guess what the Open Science Directory might be a directory of? Score 0 points if you guess “open science sources,” but subtract -10 if you guessed anything else…

[Tags: science open_access ]

1 Comment »

Over at the Web Difference class blog, I’ve posted my qualms about posting here (i.e., at Joho) some thoughts about the course. Very circular and self-involved, I know.

Anyway, the question over at the Web Difference blog is whether a teacher should be neutral/fair/objective or transparent… [Tags: education media objectivity transparency ]

5 Comments »

Yesterday afternoon, somehow the Berkman Fellows Hour turned into a campaign musical videofest. Ethan has blogged it all, with plenty of links.

For reasons I can’t possibly explain, this is my favorite:

2 Comments »

Congratulations to the folks at the Public Radio Exchange for receiving one of eight MacArthur Foundation awards for Creative and Effective Institutions. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people! (More info at the Berkman site.) [Tags: prx berkman macarthur]

1 Comment »

BradSucks sees a 750GB external hard drive for $159.97 CAD that says it holds 660 hoursdays of MP3s and does the math:

* 660 days around-the-clock is 1.8 years of non-stop music, never repeating a single song
* That’s 15,840 hours.
* That’s 990 days or 2.7 years of non-repeating music if we adjust for waking hours.
* 28 of these hard drives full of music would play for 75 years, the average American male’s life-span. Again never repeating a song.
* 28 drives (18,627,840 hours of music storage) would cost only $4,464 CAD.
* Digital downloads to fill those drives would cost roughly 370 million dollars.

Best of all, you’d only have to listen to “Mandy” once!

[Tags: music hardware bradsucks ]

5 Comments »

The Media Re:Public group at Berkmanhas announced a breakthrough technology that promises to take the “conference” out of “un-conference.”

Be the first to comment »

The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies runs multiple reviews of books along with authors’ responses. This month, they review Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture, Lisa Gitelman’s Always Already New, Online Matchmaking by Whitty et al., and Everything is Miscellaneous. (Unfortunately, I can’t find a way to link to this particular issue or to the sets of reviews, so you after this April, you’ll have to do some scrolling or searching on the site.)

[Tags: books henry_jenkins lisa_gitelman monica_t._whitty everything_is_miscellaneous ]

1 Comment »

Google Maps now (well, I just noticed) lets anyone add a place marker that is visible to all other users. Their example is a spot in a SF park where there’s open air dancing.

I’ll be interested in following two questions: 1. How will policy evolve to handle abuse and edge cases? 2. How will the system be hacked?

1. What controls is Google going to have to introduce to keep maps from being polluted with markers such as “Best pizza in town,” “Marcie the Slut lives here” and “[enter your choice of slur]town”?

As of now, Google lists two types of controls. First, some listings are protected, either because they’re hospitals or government buildings, or because the owners of a business have “claimed” the listing; Google does some form of verification before awarding ownership. Second, there’s a “report abuse” button which sends the listing to a moderation process.

I hope that that’s sufficient. But what about edge cases? If grieving parents mark the spot on the road where their child was killed, will Google count that as abuse and remove it? Historical markers? Celebrity homes? Notices of where events will be held? Treasure hunt clues?

2. Related to the first: How will people creatively hack the system, not to bring it down (the bad hacking) but to use it in ways Google didn’t anticipate (the good hacking)? For example, maybe citizens will mark potholes, possibly giving the text a distinctive, findable tag. Or educational walks. Or the rankings of public schools. Or all the places there was a death by gun. Or a link to a Flickr query that aggregates photos from that spot. Or the ten million better ideas that everyone else will have.

It’ll be fun to watch. [Tags: google google_maps everything_is_miscellaneous ]

7 Comments »

I am so disappointed that I had to miss Lisa Stone’s Berkman talk. She’s blogged a transcript here, and pretty soon the video will be up here. Sounds like a great talk…

[Tags: lisa_stone ]

Be the first to comment »

John Palfrey has blogged about Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected (open access version here), reflecting on the essays and enticing us to read them ourselves. The book sounds terrific, and the post is a treat to read just to see the generosity of JP’s intellect. (Disclosure: JP is the exec. dir. of the Berkman Center, and, I’m thrilled to say, I’m co-teaching a course with him this semester.) [Tags: ]

Be the first to comment »

Eric Lease Morgan has a good post (from a couple of weeks ago) about the Open Library project’s developers meeting. Such interesting questions… (Open Library wants to give every book its own home page to accrete metadata, and, of course, make all that info open, public and standard.

Be the first to comment »

MoveOn is sponsoring a “Make your own Obama ad” contest — thirty seconds to explain wnhy you think Obama should be the next president.

I hope they pick something funky and home-made, instead of a superslick Doritos style ad. [Tags: politics obama marketing doritos]

Be the first to comment »

Jesse Dylan, who directed the Will.I.Am “Yes we can” video, is coming to the Berkman Center at 10:30am on Thursday. The event is not physically open to the public, but it’ll be webcast then here. From the Berkman site:

Jesse Dylan, the director behind Will.I.Am’s Yes We Can video, and Rob Holzer, CEO of Syrup NYC, will discuss the next stage of their attempt to build a movement geared around the Hope|Act|Change web site (hopeactchange.com)

I’m kicking myself that I’m going to be in Orlando, giving a talk, instead of here. I am a big fan of the Obama videos.

[Tags: berkman jesse_dylan will.i.am ]

1 Comment »

Clay Shirky is giving his book talk. Here Comes Everybody was released today. It’s immediately necome #1 at two Amazon lists. [Note: I'm typing quickly, getting things wrong, paraphrasing, etc. For an accurate report of what Clay's book is about, please read Clay's book.]

The Internet isn’t a decoration on society. It is a challenge. It is important on the order of print and broadcast. Previous media either were two way or they didn’t create groups. Now we have a network that is natively good at group forming. And this medium contains the contents of the others. In a single bullet point his book says: “Group action just got easier.”

Humans are great at forming groups. But they get complicated faster as they get large. A workgroup of 10 has four times more connections than a group of five. There are native disabilities once a group passes a certain size. The typical answer has been to install a hierarchy. Now we’re seeing a set of tools that make it easier to create large groups: Ridiculously easy group forming. E.g., email unexpectedly became the dominant service used on the original Internet. That was because of the “reply all” button, a social feature.

But there’s been an enormous social lag. This tech has not transformed society as rapidly as it might. That’s because groups are innately conservative. No one wants a protocol that shuts out group members. It needed to become ubiquitous and boring. That’s when the social effects become interesting. Clay tells the story of his parents’ first date, a story that is not about internal combustion engines but that depends on the presence of them. We needed the Net to be always present and invisible for it to have its social effect.

Sharing, conversation, collaboration, collective action are rungs on a ladder: How much does an individual have to work to coordinate with the group?

Sharing. E.g., Delicious.com has urls, users and tags. It lowers the difficulty of sharing, so the social effects are practically unintended. It’s “me-first” collaboration (cf. Stowe Boyd).

Tagging systems let you share and then aggregate, reversing the traditional order. E.g., the mermaid parade in Coney Island. Since Flickr added tagging in 2005, you can click mermaidparade and get all the photos. The photographers weren’t coordinated ahead of time. Sharing has become a platform for coordination, rather than vice versa.

The next rung up the ladder is conversation, i.e., people actually synchronizing with one another. Clay shows a “communty of practice” at Flickr: High Dynamic Range photography at Flickr. Pre-Web, it would have taken 5-7 yrs from a pro photographer figuring it out to people in the street doing it. At Flickr, it took 3 months because when a photo went up, people could talk and ask how it was done. People post photos, etc. The medium becomes the platform for a community practice where people help one another get better. No commercial incentive.

That’s an example of “every url is a link to a community.” The discussion can turn into a group sharing resources. Clay points to bronzebeta.com, a Buffy site. It came after the Bronze bulletin board shut down. The fans raised money for new software to create their own bronze. They told the designers not to give it any features: no ratings, no identity mgt. They just wanted the system they used to have, a very basic discussion board.

He also points to Aegisub, a project that required a division of labor. It was a huge collaborative effort without a commercial motivation, or an anti-commercial motivation. Their success resulted in making themselves unnecessary.

The fourth rung is collective action. That’s coming. Three stories:

In Jan, 1999, a Northwest flight was stuck on the tarmac fo 7.5 hours. NW signs a toothless bill of passenger rights. Same thing happened last year and it resulted in legislation. What happened? Kate Hanni was on the second plane. She googled for articles about the flight. She comments on all of them, in detail. At the end of each comment, she asked others on the flight to contact her. She’s coopted the media and turned them into sites for coordination. She goes around to legislators’ offices. William James, the philosopher, once said “Thinking is for doing.” We have brains because we’re deciding between courses of action. Now publishing is for acting.

Second, flash mobs started as a critique of hipster culture. The guy who started them said he could get people to do anything at all if you tell them that it’s a protest against the bourgeoisie. It spread to Belarus: They’d go to a square in Minsk eating ice cream in January. Cops arrested them. It was illegal to form groups in October Sq. The kids turned the joke on hippies into a genuine form of dissident action. They provoked the government into reacting, and documented it. Media led to collective action, and the action led to more media. They thought publicity would make a difference, but the West turned out not to care much about Eastern European dictatorships. The tools are very different when deployed in high or low freedom environments. (They’d also done a flash mob where people walked around October Sq smiling.)

Third, a group ran around Palermo putting up stickers protesting the prominence of the Mafia. It was a big story. Now they’re reversing it. They put up a Web site at which businesses can agree to refuse to pay the protection money. If an individual business were to do this, the Mafia would act. They also let citizens search the site for businesses who’d signed.

So, ridiculously easy group forming improves sharing, convesation, collaboration and collective action. Clay is watching now and in the future to see how collective action evolves, for that is the hardest but could be the most important.

Q: Privacy?
A: Privacy cuts across all of this. The higher up the ladder you go, the more important it matters. For sharing, privacy doesn’t matter much, but if we’re going to converse, I at least need a handle. To collaborate, I need to know more. But if we’re going to bind ourselves in collective action, then identity becomes really important. [Hmm. That last point seems wrong. In some collective action, we don't need to know much about others. E.g., a flash mob of kids eating ice cream.] Privacy isn’t all or nothing. Under what circumstances do we want people in a collective action to know one another, but not be known by others. The big change in privacy is not in opt-in or opt-out; it’s that we’ve lost “don’t ask.”

Q: Yochai Benkler is working on whether you can explain this other than by enlightened self-interest?
A: There’s a growing literature on explaining behavior via social motivations. Behavioral economics is unambiguous about the ultimatum game: People will refuse deals that seem unfair, even if they’re in their interest.
Q: But social cohesion is to my benefit …
A: What you’d really like to be in a group that produces public goods but not have to contribute. But the willingness of people to spend resources to keep social cohesion going cannot be rolled up just to individual enlightened self-interest. [Missed some of that. Sorry.]

Q: What are the downsides you see?
A: I used to be a cyber-utopian. That view broke for me. I was teaching a class at NYU on social software. One of my students was a community manager for a magazine for teenage girls. They were shutting down the health and beauty boards because we can’t get the pro-anorexia girls to shut up with tips about how to avoid eating. I was thinking this isn’t a side effect of the Net. It was an effect. Ridiculously easy group forming for anorexics. Now, we have to move to a publish-then-filter world. That pattern suggests we’re moving the media world from decision to reaction. We can’t stop the pro-anorexia groups from forming. All we can do is watch and act.

A: My nightmare is that the advertising budget for print shrinks and we lose newspapers in mid-size American cities. We lose investigative journalism. Every city under a million goes back to endemic civic corruption. The newspaper industry is not ready now to talk about how to save investigative journalism as we lost print.

Q: [couldn't hear it]
A: The social media being used in the presidential campaign is less social than before. Obama excels at fund raising, and public-created media. But no one has proposed a policy wiki. No one has proposed the lateral conversation among supporters. (I’m an Obama supporter.) There may be an opportunity in the first 100 days to do social production of shared ideas, which the campaign has not done so far. But I don’t think it can get there without creating a profound cognitive dissonance among the voters.

Have you looked at the mechanics of collective action?
A: The things that are working now are hard to fake, non-professional surprises. Someone has done something you couldn’t do with a fake grassroots campaign. Most email campaigns to the Senate are of zero value because they’re too easy to fake. [Hmm. It's not that they're hard to fake. It's that they had a cost.] The thing that worries most is the need to be surprising, because surprise is a wasting asset, because you can’t be surprising three times in a row.

Q: [me] Why did you choose the axis of groups that take actions? I can feel I’m a member of the Group That Likes Obama without actually doing anything…
A: I’m interested in the trade-off between individuals and groups. At what point can you not explain behaviors through individual psychology. I was irked by businesses that think they have communities instead of cusomters. The dividing line is between people who change their behavior because they’re in a group and those who don’t.

Q: Mobile streaming and virtual worlds. How do they fit into collective action?
A: The change in things we can do via mobiles will be far broader. And I don’t think there is such a category as virtual worlds. All successful virtual worlds are games. [Tags: berkman clay_shirky here_comes_everybody groups social_software sociology books ]

9 Comments »

Clay Shirky is giving a small talk at the Berkman Center, before giving his bigger talk this evening. His topic this afternoon is “protest culture.” [I'm live blogging, getting it wrong, etc. This is certainly far less coherent than Clay's actual presentation, which was (as always) pristinely structured and clear. His talk will be up at Media Berkman before too long.]

One of the easiest examples of this, he says, started in early 1999. A NW Airlines flight was landed in Detroit and got stuck on the tarmac for 7.5 hours. There was a class action lawsuit that got settled out of court and agreed to a toothless code of conduct. Last year, an American Airlines plane was stuck on the tarmac for 8 hours. A Napa Valley real estate agent got off the plane pissed. She googled all of the traditional media outlet stories. She left comments on them, and asked others on that flight to call her. Within a few days, she’d used the mainstream media stories to pull people together. They put up a passenger bill of rights. Eight months later, the NY legislature passed it. The airlines didn’t know what hit them. The group didn’t create this by suing but by organizing the unorganized. The difference between 1999 and 2006 wasn’t a change in tools but a change in audience density.

Second example: John Geoghan was brought to trial for abusing 130 boys in 2002. A group of people came together in a church, called Voice of the Faithful. By summer they had tens of thousands of members. Organizations don’t usually grow that faith. The Catholic Church responded by not allowing people to organize across parishes. “They were explicitly trying to extend the hierarchy to the laity.” Yet exactly the same thing had happened in 1992: A pedophile priest who had raped 90 boys, the Globe covered it, etc. What changed? For one thing, the Globe wasn’t global in 1992, but in 2002, when the Globe published the story on the Web, it went global. “The audience for the story became larger than the audience for the media outlet.” Also, “Voice of the Faithful is a very Google-friendly name.” Google it and you’re one click away.

Voice of the Faithful is now really suffering. After their initial success, they now have to institutionalize. Should they have dissolved after their initial issue ran its course? If not, they run into other Catholic organizations.

Third: The sf show Jericho was canceled and the fans get upset. But they’ve learned that email is ineffective. The last line in the series was “Nuts!” So the fans decided to send peanuts to the executives. Twenty tons of peanuts. The loading dock at CBS is not optimized for handling 20 tons of peanuts, and “peanuts are not easily deleted.” CBS relented. The Jericho example is a repudiation of the MoveOn model of political engagement, because email is too easy to send. There’s too much astroturfing, so on the Hill, email is discounted, generally. The Jericho found something that was much higher cost than email: People had to pay for the nuts and the shipping.

Flash mobs were synchronized by “Bill” from NY — everyone would go to Macy’s and pretend to be shopping for a love rug for their commune. Bill said that people are so malleable they’ll do anything if you tell them it’s cool. In Minsk, there was a flash mob of kids who all ate ice cream. And then there are photos of those kids being arrested. Eating ice cream is legal, but not being in a group in a square. These kids took a tool designed as a a-political tool in America and used it politically in Belarus, and did it in a way that can’t be stopped: The flash mob doesn’t exist before it flashes into a mob. One of the flash mobs: “Let’s all go downtown and smile at one another.” The kids did these actions to document them; they came with their cameras. The bug in the system is that the kids think the West still cares about oppression there.

“Here’s the conundrum.” A commonality is that these cases are hard to fake; enough people are signing on that you couldn’t just astroturf this. These protests get around the fact that the ease of communication makes protests less effective. And these are non-professional: This isn’t an institution to institution clash. There was no horse trading to do with the airline passengers because they only had a single issue; there was no horse-trading to do. And that’s why Voice of the Faithful worked in the early days; you couldn’t write them off as professional dissidents.” Finally, there’s surprise. The “protein code of protest is mutating faster” than ever. Institutions don’t know how to respond.

“By making it easier for more to participate, you change the calculus of trying to get people excited about improving their lives.” Usually, a handful of people are the instigators. Now, caring a little a bit is enough to get people to participate.

But, Clay asks, how do you lower the hurdle to participate while maintaining the hard-to-fake characteristic?

Working backwards from non-professional, hard-to-fake, surprises. But once you get a tactic that works well, the surprise doesn’t work as well. So, this may favor the people who can wait out surprises. E.g., the success of the Jericho protest may have created anti-bodies that will make TV execs less susceptible to this.

And because there is no institution on the other side, it may surface only the most egregious examples. So, “if investigative journalism goes away in every city of half a million or less, institutional corruption may come back in through the door through which it left when we got good investigative journalism in the 1950s…I’m not convinced that an active blogging community has the same effect as a beat reporter going back down to City Hall to check again on something that doesn’t seem right.”

Finally, human emotion is a lousy filter for reporters. People forward puppy stories, not Abu Ghraib stories. We may therefore get a lighter-weight protest culture. Clay says he doesn’t know where this may go.

John Clippinger: Great. You’re starting to reframe how we think about these things. I agree that you’re going to need persistent institutions. Do you see emergent institutions.?
Clay: I think the reinvention of the media is based on the recognition that every URL is a potential community. Everyone looking at the photos of the kids in Belarus might be able to form a group that can help.

Almost everything that happens on the Net happens in an un-democratic ways, says Clay. We’re blinded to this by the drone of the Internet being democratizing. Credentialed reputations.

Clip: We’re here looking at how to create layers that provide the underpinnings of persistent groups. E.g., the Higgins ID project. Do it on an iPhone.

Clay: The surprise is that the mental models of the users is as important as what’s under the hood. One of the great advantages of Wikipedia is that it had a pedia suffix. There was a shared mental model of what goes into an encyclopedia. It’s now gone beyond it…

Gene Koo: You seem to be opposing institutions and non-institutions, but movements are something in between. To build a long-term strategy, a flash mob mentality won’t work. How do you group a long-term group of people but not so sterile as an institution, that’s what communities organizers think about. Organizers try to get commitment, which maps to hard-to-fake. And part of what you’re describing is authenticity: A movement succeeds when it finds its authentic voice. E.g., the Farm Workers tried to import “We Shall Overcome,” but it failed because it didn’t come from that group. That links to your third point, that human emotion is a lousy thing to mobilize around. Organizers try to find people’s stories and link to the objectives of the group. That’s a more disciplined emotion than the flash in the pan sort of thing.

Clay: What’s happened to the protest march?

Gene: Lack of a tie between the act and the long-term goal. The aim is to threaten a power structure. If it’s just a flash, it doesn’t have that effect. Another aim, though, is to create a group identity.

Clip: There’s a cost. E.g., sit-down protests in the South. Lives were at risk.

Me: The Jericho execs wouldn’t have reacted if people had donated $2 each instead of buying $2 worth of peanuts. This is a non-rational response. Why did the execs respond to the peanuts? And will the culture adapt so we can skip the $2 reaction?

We’re struggling through this. The response was imaginative — self-organized and a thematic response to the show. Part of this was a counting problem — they had missed the people watching over the Net. And the people inside CBS thought they had an opportunity to work with the viewers. They responded in part as an experiment. Can we get past the $2? Well, I like the notion of authenticity. Money is one way to say that this is a hard-to-fake activity. On the other hand, if people can reliably get together and say we’re going to watch the show, and we should be counted, that might be effective. What determines how you get elected is how interested the least interested voter is; you’ve got to swing those people. Pledgebank stuff and ThePoint.com — I’ll do this if 10K other people agree to do this — are interesting social ideas. Can you make a bonded agreement that you’ll act in a particular way.

Sally Walkerman: Advertisers are used to being to surprise us. It’s getting harder. Advertisers therefore get more specific. Protestors can get more specific, too. The peanut protest is an example of that. Protestors will figure out what will surprise their targets.

Clay: Surprise isn’t as much of a wasting resource as I think? Hmm. The protests will get more specific? Is it happening organically?

Sally: Yes.

Wendy Seltzer: I love your point about every URL being a gathering point. Every cease and desist letter can be a gathering point. E.g., wikileaks right now.

Clay: What had been two-party transactions are now multi-party transactions. The message that is hardest to get across to my students that in the early 1990s, if you have something to say, you couldn’t. The C&D is a great example of what used to be 2-way simply because there was no way to turn it into a multi-party transaction, and, as with Groklaw, that can change the course of a multi-million dollar case.

John Kelley: There’s a professional class of activists in DC that’s not doing a very good job of coping with the new way. To them, a measure of effectiveness is whether they can make their budget. How do the people who are professionally organized hear what people are saying?

Clay: Sometimes it’s the role of an institution to ignore some demands of its users. E.g., in ‘03 or ‘04 the Sierra Club had to decide if it needed a stance on immigration. The more you’re channeling the members’ leverage, the clearer you have to be that these are their one or two issues. I suspect that multi-issues organizations will have a harder time. But orgs that coordinate their customers with one another will probably have to learn how to listen better, e.g., IBM WorldJam. We’ll need new organizations to be exemplars before the old will change.

Rob Faris: Is the future single issue movements? Is the Sierra Club dead?
Clay: It will increase the range of what happens. The Net makes it easier to form an institution as well as form a mob. The radical possibility is that we could do group organization at population scale. E.g., what the long tail can conserve is less than what a short-head polluting factory creates. But there’s a possibility that the environmental movement could actually reach everybody. Not everyone should do a little bit, but rather: Only together can we change demand.

Clip: There’s an effort to aggregate markets to create collective actions…
Clay: I sometimes call my book “post-optimistic.” I am no longer a cyber utopian. Instead of the book being structured as “great great great great surprise! Bad!”, I’m overall an optimist but I no longer believe these social changes are fundamentally good with no down sides.

Bruce Ettinger: Why haven’t there been effective protests about the Iraq war?
Clay: Some things are so completely about the issue that the mechanism gets lost. So I didn’t write about Iraq war protests. How did it come to be that in a democracy when an enormous percentage of the population dislikes a specific targeted policy, how were we unable to affect that policy? That was the background question I started with. That’s a big mystery but in a way it has as much to do with the checks and balances in the constitution as it does with any of the social tools. I suppose the mesage is that it’s possible to have a set of institutions so fully entrenched and defeneded from outside influence that there is no mechanism for altering their behavior during the normal course of operations. As an American, this is the darkest hour I’ve lived through. I’m not optimistic that even really imaginative, widely adopted beliefs, even with the social tools, can do much.

Charlie Nesson: What do you think of Lessig’s strategy?
A: God bless him. I’m more interested in what he learns in his first three years than in what he does. I’d hate to have seem him mired in the day to day operations of a congressional office. The inertia in that system will only be broken by fiding some surprising point of leverage. I hope he discovers that point. We haven’t reformed the Electoral College even after the thing we were told wouldn’t have happened and would be a disaster in fact happened and was a disaster. I’m eagerly waiting to see what Larry finds about the points of leverage. I hope he finds a shallow rule is susceptible to popular will in some way. I don’t think the frontal assault will work, and mere outrage won’t move the institution off the dime. (Says Clay.)

[Great talk and conversation.] [Tags: berkman clay_shirky politics here_comes_everybody ]