Denise Caruso and Clay Shirky opened Supernova 2007 this morning by approaching the socially networked environment of the World Wide Web from two different directions. Caruso’s basic thesis was that people needed to break out of their insular social networks and take additional risks in order to bring in a greater variety of viewpoints and push innovation forward. Shirky called for the industry to rely more heavily on love, and posited that love would be a better indicator of where the IT industry is headed than business models are.
Caruso opened with a presentation titled “Anti-Social Media: A Provocation.” She looks at assessing risks in science and in technology innovations in particular. “What I found is that, as you all know, innovation is inherently risky. But there’s a different kind of risk, which is the risk inherent in the fact that you can’t really calculate the probability of some things for something that’s brand new: WIll anyone use it? What will go wrong? Will it get hacked? How will it get hacked? How will users interact with it?”
“The most important things are the assumptions that you use to decide what’s risky when something is brand new. And there are some great examples of ‘oops past and present.’ In nuclear energy, it was the human factor that was overlooked. With DDT and antibiotics, it was too much of a good thing. We killed the good bugs with the bad, and the good bugs died, but the bad ones became resistant. With genetic engineering, it was the fact that genes work as networks, not as Lego blocks.”
“With the Internet, we have this assumption that in order to innovate, you need total freedome, no taxes, no borders, no regulation. But there have been some pretty nasty unanticipated consequences, things like spam, identity theft, net neutrality and spectrum conflicts. And these are things that cost the industry gazillions of dollars, including in opportunity costs.”
“The National Research Council did a study on this in 1996, asking, How do you anticipate these kinds of issues. The answer is, it’s simple: You have a conversation. You convene experts and stakeholders, you ask them what outcomes matter to them, and you investigate how deploying these technologies would affect those outcomes. Then you decide together how to proceed.”
“The potential benefits are tremendous. You can create breakthrough products, you can build better and safe products and make better and safe decisions, you can inform decision-makers. The bottom line in, this kind of cooperation lubricates markets.”
“So what stops people from doing this if the benefits are so great? I think it’s fear. It’s the fear of losing power or advantage in the market, of inviting unwanted oversight, of creating extra costs. And they’re fears that arise because people have no experience with collaboration [so they don't realize collaboration can help].”
“In this industry, the Internet-based tools and culture that we’ve developed actually exacerbate the problem. You have targetted search but no serendipity. Blogs allow you to create content, but they don’t actually create conversation. Social networks connect us with other people just like us. This is not social media, it’s anti-social media.”
“I think we’ve got some situations working right now in this industry that are potential deal-breakers for the future of the Internet. It’s things like copyright vs. social media, privacy vs. surveillance networks, and private vs. public networks in terms of things like net neutrality.”
“My challenge to you would be that we need to think about resocializing the net. It’s an interesting challenge to think about how to automate serendipity. How can you get people to run into information they wouldn’t normally look at or what to know about? How would we figure out how to build social networks of people who aren’t like us? For some things, you have to cooperate in order to compete.” (Raph has already posted more of Denise’s comments.)
Clay Shirky responded with reference to a 1,300-year-old Shinto shrine that UNESCO had refused to list as a historic site — because the Shinto priests tore the whole thing down and rebuilt it in the same manner as the original, using wood from the same groves, again and again over the years. Shirky pointed out the contrast between the solidity of the edifice and the solidity of the intent behind maintaining it.
Shirky told a related story about having AT&T as a client in 1995. AT&T was suspicious of his desire to use Perl rather than C++ because there was no commercial support for Perl, only support from the community. Even after Shirky posted a moderately complex question to a Perl newsgroup and had it answered before the meeting was over, AT&T remained skeptical. “They didn’t care if it worked in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory.”
Shirky’s thesis was that solidity of edifice doesn’t count as much as people think it does. “Perl exists now as an edifice, but as an act of live. People love Perl and love and take care of each other through their involvement with Perl.”
“Our generation has a set of tools for aggregating things people care about in ways that increase scope and longevity in ways that were unpredictable even a decade ago. We have all kinds of coordinating tools, mailing lists, Weblogs, etc. Those tools turns love into a renewable building material.”
“Today, looking toward the future, you will make more accurate predictions about software and services if you don’t ask about the business model, but you ask, Do the people who like it take care of each other? Linux gets rebuilt every night, like that Shinto shrine, by people who care about its being around the following morning. The ability to aggregate non-financial motivations has received a huge comparative advantage. Many of the future commercial opportunities are going to be inextricably intertwined with that kind of work in those kind of groups.”
“With love plus coordinating tools, you can write an operating system. In the past you could do small things with love. Now, with the coordinating tools at our disposal, you can do big things with love.”
Shirky agreed that there was risk “in places where you’d like decision-makers or analysts to be hearing alternate points of view. We don’t really have a solid metric of when we’re dealing with a diverse vs. a homogeneous group.”
Denise conceded that it was not an either/or situation. “There’s incredible power in social networks. But when you start running up against other groups of people and you have a problem to solve and there’s a conflict between people in power, or people who want power or want to be able to do something, that narrow positioning is not helping solve our problems and more the conversation forward. What you need is a conversation where a group of people with dissimilar interests come together and say, Here’s the problem on the table, what are we going to do about it?” (Again, Raph beat me to the punch with more of Clay’s comments.)
Both agreed that more real conversations should happen face-to-face.