HERE COMES EVERYBODY THE POWER OF ORGANIZING WITHOUT ORGANIZATIONS CLAY SHIRKY ALLEN LANE an imprint of PENGUIN BOOKS ALLEN LANE Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London we2R ORL, England Penguin Group IUSA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group ICanada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 la division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland la division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group IAustralia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell. Victoria 3124. Austra1ia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, II Community Centre, Panchsheel Park. New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group INZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand la division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books ISouth Africa) IPty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London we2R ORL, England www.penguin.com First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2008 First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2008 Copyright © Clay Shirky, 2008 The moral right of the author has been asserted AU rights reserved Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic A CI P catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library www.greenpenguin.co.uk Penguin Books is committed (0 a sustainable future D MIXed Sources for our business, our readers and our planer. The book in your hands is made (rom p3�r FSl certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. FOR ALMAZ CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 It Takes a Village to Find a Phone 1 CHAPTER 2 Sharing Anchors Community 25 CHAPTER 3 Everyone Is a Media Outlet 55 CHAPTER 4 Publish, Then Filter 81 CHAPTER 5 Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production 109 CHAPTER 6 I Collective Action and Institutional Challenges 14 3 CHAPTER 7 Faster and Faster 161 CHAPTER 8 Solving Social Dilemmas 188 CHAPTER 9 Fitting Our Tools to a Small World 212 CHAPTER 10 Failure fo r Free 233 CHAPTER 11 I Promise, Tool, Bargain 260 EPIL..OGUE 293 ACKNOWL..EDGMENTS 305 BIBL..IOGRAPHY 308 INDEX 320 CHAPTER 1 IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO FIND A PHONE n an afternoon in late May 2006 a woman named Ivanna O left her phone in the backseat of a New York City cab. No surprise there; hundreds of phones a year show up in the New York Ta xi and Limousine Commission'soffices, and more than that are actually lost, since some unknown number are simply taken by the next passenger. That was the fate of Ivanna's phone, a fairly expensive multifunction version called a Sidekick, which came with a screen, keyboard, and built-in camera. Sadly for her, the Sidekick was the sole repository of much of the information for her upcoming wedding, from con­ tact information for the catering company to the guest list. When she realized what she'd done, Ivanna asked Evan Guttman, a friend who worked as a programmer in the financial industry, to offer a reward for its return, via an e-mail message that would show up on the phone. Getting no response after a couple of days, she shelled out more than $300 to buy a new one. Ivanna's phone company had stored copies of her informa­ tion on its servers and transferred it to her new phone. Once she had the information on her new phone, she discovered that 2 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY her original one had ended up in the hands of a girl in Queens. I vanna knew this because the girl was using it to take pictures of herself and her friends and e-mail them around; the photos taken on her old phone had been transferred to her new one. Ivanna and Evan couldn't be sure who had taken the phone from the cab, but they knew who had it now, or rather they had her picture and her e-mail [email protected] (since disabled, for reasons that will become apparent). Evan immediately e-mailed Sasha, explaining the situation and asking for the phone back. Sasha replied that she wasn't stupid enough to return it, a view punctuated with racial invec­ tive, saying that Evan's "white ass" didn't deserve it back. (She inferred Evan and Ivanna's race from pictures on the phone; Sasha is Hispanic.) The back-and-forth went on for some time. During the conversation Sasha said her brother had found it in a cab and given it to her; Evan continued to ask for it back, on the grounds that Sasha knew who its rightfulowner was. Sasha finally wrote that she and her boyfriend would meet Evan, say­ ing, in the spelling-challenged manner of casual e-mails, "i got ball this is my adress !O8 20 37 av corona come n do it iam give u the sidekick so I can hit you wit it." Evan declined to go to the listed address, both because he assumed it was fake (it was) and because of the threatened violence. Instead, he decided to take the story public. He cre­ ated a simple webpage with Sasha's photos and a brief descrip­ tion of the events so far, with the stated rationale of delivering a lesson on "the etiquette of returning people's lost belong­ ings," as he put it. He titled the page Stolen Sidekick, added it to his personal website at Evan WasHere.com, and began tell­ ing his friends about what had happened. IT TAK£S A VIL.L.AG£ TO FIND A PHON£ I :3 The original page went up on June 6, and in the first few hours it was up, Evan's friends and their friends forwarded it around the internet, attracting a growing amount of attention. Evan first updated the page later that day, noting that his friends had done some online detective work and had found a page on MySpace, the social networking website, that had photos of Sasha and a man they surmised was her boyfriend. Evan's sec­ ond update provided more background on how the phone was lost and on who had it now. His third update, later that after­ noon, reported that an officer from the NYPD had seen the story and had written explaining how to file a claim with the police. That evening, two things happened. First, a man named Luis sent Evan mail, saying he was Sasha's brother and a mem­ ber of the Military Police. He said that Sasha had bought the phone from a cabbie. (This story, as Evan pointed out on the webpage, directly contradicted Sasha's earlier account of her brother findingthe phone.) Luis also told Evan to stop harassing Sasha, hinting violence if Evan didn't lay off. The other event that evening was that Evan's story appeared on Digg. Digg is a collaborative news website; users suggest stories, and other users rate them thumbs up or thumbs down. The Digg front page, like all newspaper front pages, is made up of stories that are both timely and important, except on Digg timeliness is measured by how recently a story was added, and importance is measured by user votes rather than by the judgment of edi­ tors. The front page of Digg gets millions of readers a day, and a lot of those readers took a look at the Stolen Sidekick page. The story clearly struck a nerve. Evan was getting ten e-mails a minute from people asking about the phone, offering encouragement, or volunteering to help. Everyone who has ever 4 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY lost something feels a diffuse sense of anger at whoever found and kept it, but this time it was personal, since Evan, and every­ one reading Stolen Sidekick, now knew who had the phone and had seen her insulting refusals to return it. When the barrier to returning something is high, we make peace with "Finders, keepers. Losers, weepers," but when returning something be­ comes easier, our sympathies ebb. Finding a loose bill on the street is different from finding a wallet with 10 in it, and the case of the missing Sidekick was even worse than a lost wallet. Using someone's own phone to refuse to return it to them crossed some barrier of acceptability in the eyes of many follow­ ing the saga, and the taunts and threats from Sasha and her friends and family only added insult to injury. Evan, clearly energized by the response from his growing readership, continued posting a running commentary on his webpage. He wrote forty updates in ten days, accompanied by a growing frenzy of both local and national media attention. There was a lot to update: he and the people tuning in posted more MySpace profiles of Sasha, her boyfriend Gordo, and her brother. Someone reading the Stolen Sidekick page figuredout Sasha's full name, then her address, and drove by her house, later posting the video on the Web for all to see. Members of Luis's Military Police unit wrote to inquire about allegations that an MP was threatening a civilian and promised to look into the matter.