2020 Visionaries Networks and Human Impulses Two Internet experts, a psychologist, and an anthropologist explore our multiplying connections. CHRISTIAN ANTHONY / ISTOCKPHOTO The Network and Its Contents sight in this final installment of the 2020 Visionaries series. What is a social network? A few years ago, the social net- In true futurist fashion, we’ve tried to cast our net wide. work would have referred to our immediate acquaintances, We begin with a broad discussion about the new relation- the people we lived with and worked beside, perhaps indi- ship between individuals and institutions. viduals we identified as similar to us in age, income, poli- First, New York University telecommunications professor tics, or consumption habits. They may simply have been and best-selling author Clay Shirky says that the greatest classmates, just as Facebook was originally designed to challenge of the Interconnected Age is also its greatest as- cater to the student body at Harvard University. (A new film set: cognitive surplus. We have more creativity, more data, directed by Aaron Sorkin provocatively chronicling the rise more art, more content than any publisher, editor, or news of Facebook is called The Social Network.) producer could ever use effectively. The onus is on each of Take a look at the average Facebook page today and us to participate and make something useful with the new you’ll find millions of networks overlapping one another in tools at our disposal. a grand circuit. Personal and intimate postings from daily Following, we present our account of a remarkable con- life—details of a child’s first steps, a disappointing day at versation. In one corner, Cory Doctorow, best-selling sci- work, a spousal argument—mingle freely with bits of po- ence-fiction writer, creator of the popular technology blog litical activism, amateur journalism, small acts of civic en- Boing Boing, and one of the world’s most vocal advocates gagement. Our every human relationship, from the way we for network freedom, liberal copyright policies, and open- interact with one another at the most personal level to the source creative collaboration. His conversational partner? way we relate to institutions, are interwoven into a single The network, in person: 60 people with whom Doctorow fabric that we now wear in public. Our social network is spoke over the course of two days of touring the mid- everyone with whom we interact; and that, increasingly, is Atlantic region. The discussion ranged from science-fiction everyone. scenarios to the future of e-readers to the Google versus The question becomes, how do we make the most of these Viacom copyright fight and what it means for the future new connections in order to become better citizens, better life (hint: a lot). Here are the highlights of that discussion. partners, and better people? We attempt to provide some in- —Patrick Tucker, senior editor, THE FUTURIST © 2010 World Future Society • 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814, U.S.A. • All rights reserved. 20 THE FUTURIST November-December 2010 LIA BULAONG Tapping the Cognitive Surplus By Clay Shirky The sudden bounty of accessible creativity, insight, and knowledge is a public treasure, says a network guru. Imagine treating the free time of the world’s educated Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus. citizenry as a kind of cognitive surplus. How big would that surplus be? To figure it out, we need a unit of mea- surement, so let’s start with Wikipedia. Suppose we consider the total amount of time people have spent on been better than the big media at reporting acts of vio- it as a kind of unit—every edit made to every article, lence as they started, better at reporting acts of nonfatal every argument about those edits, for every language violence (which are often a precursor to deaths), and in which Wikipedia exists. That would represent some- better at reporting over a wide geographical area, in- thing like 100 million hours of human thought. cluding rural districts. One hundred million hours of cumulative thought is You don’t need fancy computers to harness cognitive obviously a lot. A television producer once asked me surplus; simple phones can be all that’s required. But about people who volunteer to edit Wikipedia, “Where one of the most important lessons is this: Once you’ve do they find the time?” The people posing this question figured out how to tap the surplus in a way that people don’t understand how tiny that entire project is relative care about, others can replicate your techniques, over to the aggregate free time we all possess. How much is and over, around the world. all that time spent on Wikipedia compared with the The question we now face—all of us who have access amount of time we spend watching television? Ameri- to new models of sharing—is what we’ll do with those cans watch roughly 200 billion hours of TV every year. opportunities. The question will be answered more de- That represents about 2,000 Wikipedia projects’ worth cisively by the opportunities we provide for one an- of time annually. Even tiny subsets of this time are other and by the culture of the groups we form than by enormous: We spend roughly a hundred million hours any particular technology. The trick for creating new every weekend just watching commercials. social media is to use those lessons as ways to improve The good news about our current, remarkable age is the odds for successful harnessing of cognitive surplus. that we can now treat free time as a general social asset Our media environment (that is to say, our connec- that can be harnessed for large communally created tive tissue) has shifted. In a historical eyeblink, we have projects, rather than as a set of individual minutes to be gone from a world with two different models of me- wiled away one person at a time. dia—public broadcasts by professionals and private Wikipedia is one well­known example; here’s another conversations between pairs of people—to a world you may not have heard of, a service called Ushahidi where public and private media blend together, where (Swahili for “witness”) developed to help Kenyan citi- professional and amateur production blur, and where zens track outbursts of ethnic violence. The originator, voluntary public participation has moved from non­ human rights activist Ory Okolloh, imagined a service existent to fundamental. that would automatically aggregate citizen reporting of This was a big deal even when digital networks were attacks with the added value of locating the reported used by only an elite group of affluent citizens, but it’s attacks on a map in near­real time. She floated the idea becoming a much bigger deal as the connected popula- on her blog, attracting the attention of programmers tion has spread globally and crossed into the billions. Erik Hersman and David Kobia, who helped Ushahidi The world’s people, and the connections among us, .com go live. provide the raw material for cognitive surplus. The Several months later, Harvard’s Kennedy School of technology will continue to improve, and the popula- Government compared the site’s data to that of the tion will continue to grow, but change in the direction mainstream media and concluded that Ushahidi had of more participation has already happened. THE FUTURIST November-December 2010 21 What matters most now is our imaginations. The op- very complicated tasks and make them low. The change portunity before us, individually and collectively, is is profound, because any task that one person can’t do enormous; what we do with it will be determined alone, whether it’s making an airplane or a skyscraper, largely by how well we are able to imagine and reward is literally superhuman. But the superhuman is becom- public creativity, participation, and sharing. ing easier. You could write a damn good science­fiction story about free skyscrapers. About the Author Audience: On the subject of exponential price depre- Clay Shirky teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Pro- ciation, what can we do to ameliorate the socially and gram at New York University. He is the author of Here Comes economically disruptive effects of a hypothetical break- Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street through in nanofabrication? Those negative effects Journal, the Times of London, Harvard Business Review, Busi- would be massive unemployment, institutions becom- ness 2.0, and Wired. ing obsolete, and millions of people having no idea This article was adapted from Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and what to do about government or commerce. Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky. Reprinted by ar- Doctorow: How can we ameliorate the social up- rangement of The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group heaval that arises from a postindustrial revolution (USA), Inc. Copyright 2010 by Clay Shirky. based on nanofabrication? Iron­fisted totalitarian dicta- torship? Workers’ paradise? I don’t know. Audience: In your novel Makers, you talk about people who take electronic gadget waste (referred to as e­waste) and turn it into something new. Where do you see this happening in real life? Cory Doctorow Doctorow: A large part of the e­waste problem is that we design devices that are meant to be used for a year but take a hundred thousand years to degrade. I won- Meets the Public der if we won’t someday design some devices to grace- fully degrade back into the part stream, back into mate- rials faster. Bruce Sterling wrote a manifesto about this Sixty people interview one of today’s hottest science- for MIT Press called Shaping Things.