the human network

I.  My, How Things Have Changed

When I came to Australia six years ago, to seek my fame and fortune, business communications had remained largely unchanged for nearly a century.  You could engage in face-to-face conversation – something humans have been doing since we learned to speak, countless thousands of years ago – or, if distance made that impossible, you could drop a letter into the post.  Australia Post is an excellent organization, and seems to get all of the mail delivered within a day or two – quite an accomplishment in a country as dispersed and diffuse as ours.

In the twentieth century, the telephone became the dominant form of business communication; Australia Post wired the nation up, and let us talk to one another.  Conversation, mediated by the telephone, became the dominant mode of communication.  About twenty years ago the facsimile machine dropped in price dramatically, and we could now send images over phone lines.

The facsimile translates images into data and back into images again.  That’s when the critical threshold was crossed: from that point on, our communications have always centered on data.  The Internet arrived in 1995, and broadband in 2001.  In the first years of Internet usage, electronic mail was both the ‘killer app’ and the thing that began to supplant the telephone for business correspondence.  Electronic mail is asynchronous – you can always pick it up later.  Email is non-local, particularly when used through a service such as Hotmail or Gmail – you can get it anywhere.  Until mobiles started to become pervasive for business uses, the telephone was always a hit-or-miss affair.  Electronic mail is a hit, every time.

Such was the business landscape when I arrived in Australia.  The Web had arrived, and businesses eagerly used it as a publishing medium – a cheap way of getting information to their clients and customers.  But the Web was changing.  It had taken nearly a decade of working with the Web, day-to-day, before we discovered that the Web could become a fully-fledged two-way medium: the Web could listen as well as talk.  That insight changed everything.  The Web morphed into a new beast, christened ‘Web 2.0’, and everywhere the Web invited us to interact, to share, to respond, to play, to become involved.  This transition has fundamentally changed business communication, and it’s my goal this morning to outline the dimensions of that transformation.

This transformation unfolds in several dimensions.  The first of these – and arguably the most noticeable – is how well-connected we are these days.  So long as we’re in range of a cellular radio signal, we can be reached.  The number of ways we can be reached is growing almost geometrically.  Five years ago we might have had a single email address.  Now we have several – certainly one for business, and one for personal use – together with an account on Facebook (nearly eight million of the 22 million Australians have Facebook accounts), perhaps another account on MySpace, another on Twitter, another on YouTube, another on Flickr.  We can get a message or maintain contact with someone through any of these connections.  Some individuals have migrated to Facebook for the majority of their communications – there’s no spam, and they’re assured the message will be delivered.  Among under-25s, electronic mail is seen as a technology of the ‘older generation’, something that one might use for work, but has no other practical value.  Text messaging and messaging-via-Facebook have replaced electronic mail.

This increased connectivity hasn’t come for free.  Each of us are now under a burden to maintain all of the various connections we’ve opened.  At the most basic level, we must at least monitor all of these channels for incoming messages.  That can easily get overwhelming, as each channel clamors for attention.

But wait.  We’ve dropped Facebook and Twitter into the conversation before I even explained what they are and how they work.  We just take them as a fact of life these days, but they’re brand new.  Facebook was unknown just three years ago, and Twitter didn’t zoom into prominence until eighteen months ago.  Let’s step back and take a look at what social networks are.  In a very real way, we’ve always known exactly what a social network is: since we were very small we’ve been reaching out to other people and establishing social relationships with them.  In the beginning that meant our mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers.  As we grew older that list might grow to include some of the kids in the neighborhood, or at pre-kindy, and then our school friends.  By the time we make it to university, that list of social relationships is actually quite long.  But our brains have limited space to store all those relationships – it’s actually the most difficult thing we do, the most cognitively all-encompassing task.  Forget physics – relationship are harder, and take more brainpower.

Nature has set a limit of about one hundred and fifty on the social relationships we can manage in our heads.  That’s not a static number – it’s not as though as soon as you reach 150, you’re done, full.  Rather, it’s a sign of how many relationships of importance you can manage at any one time.  None of us, not even the most socially adept, can go very much beyond that number.  We just don’t have the grey matter for it.

Hence, fifty years ago mankind invented the Rolodex – a way of keeping track of all the information we really should remember but can’t possibly begin to absorb.  A real, living Rolodex (and there are few of them, these days) are a wonder to behold, with notes scribbled in the margins, business cards stapled to the backs of the Rolodex cards, and a glorious mess of information, all alphabetically organized.  The Rolodex was mankind’s first real version of the modern, digital, social network.  But a Rolodex doesn’t think for itself; a Rolodex can not draw out the connections between the different cards.  A Rolodex does not make explicit what we know – we live in a very interconnected world, and many of our friends and associates are also friends and associates with our friends and associates.

That is precisely what Facebook gives us.  It makes those implicit connections explicit.  It allows those connections to become conduits for ever-greater-levels of connection.  Once those connections are made, once they become a regular feature of our life, we can grow beyond the natural limit of 150.  That doesn’t mean you can manage any of these relationships well – far from it.  But it does mean that you can keep the channels of communication open.  That’s really what all of these social networks are: turbocharged Rolodexes, which allow you to maintain far more relationships than ever before possible.

Once these relationships are established, something beings to happen quite naturally: people begin to share.  What they share is often driven by the nature of the relationship – though we’ve all seen examples where individuals ‘over-share’ inappropriately, confusing business and social channels of communication.  That sort of thing is very easy to do with social networks such as Facebook, because it doesn’t provide an easy method to send messages out to different groups of friends.  We might want a social network where business friends might get something very formal, while close friends might that that photo of you doing tequila shots at last weekend’s birthday party.  It’s a great idea, isn’t it?  But it can’t be done.  Not on Facebook, not on Twitter.  Your friends are all lumped together into one undifferentiated whole.  That’s one way that those social networks are very different from the ones inside our heads.  And it’s something to be constantly aware of when sharing through social networks.

That said, this social sharing has become an incredibly potent force.  More videos are uploaded to YouTube every day than all television networks all over the world produce in a year.  It may not be material of the same quality, but that doesn’t matter – most of those videos are only meant to be seen among a small group of family or friends.  We send pictures around, we send links around, we send music around (though that’s been cause for a bit of trouble), we share things because we care about them, and because we care about the people we’re sharing with.  Every act of sharing, business or personal, brings the sharer and the recipient closer together.  It truly is better to give than receive.  On the other hand, we’re also drowning in shared material.  There’s so much, coming from every corner, through every one of these social networks, there’s no possible way to keep up.  So, most of us don’t.  We cherry-pick, listening to our closest friends and associates: the things they share with us are the most meaningful.  We filter the noise and hope that we’re not missing anything very important.  (We usually are.)

In certain very specific situations, sharing can produce something greater than the sum of its parts.  A community can get together and decide to pool what it knows about a particular domain of knowledge, can ‘wise up’ by sharing freely.  This idea of ‘collective intelligence’ producing a shared storehouse of knowledge is the engine that drives sites like Wikipedia.  We all know Wikipedia, we all know how it works – anyone can edit anything in any article within it – but the wonder of Wikipedia is that it works so well.  It’s not perfectly accurate – nothing ever is  – but it is good enough to be useful nearly all the time.  Here’s the thing: you can come to Wikipedia ignorant and leave it knowing something.  You can put that knowledge to work to make better decisions than you would have in your state of ignorance.  Wikipedia can help you wise up.

Wikipedia isn’t the only example of shared knowledge.  A decade ago a site named TeacherRatings.com went online, inviting university students to provide ratings of their professors, lecturers and instructors.  Today it’s named RateMyProfessor.com, is owned by MTV Networks, and has over ten million ratings of one million instructors.  This font of shared knowledge has become so potent that students regularly consult the site before deciding which classes they’ll take next semester at university.  Universities can no longer saddle student with poor teachers (who may also be fantastic researchers).  There are bidding wars taking place for the lecturers who get the highest ratings on the site.  This sharing of knowledge has reversed the power relationship between a university and its students which stretches back nearly a thousand years.

Substitute the word ‘business’ for university and ‘customers’ for students and you see why this is so significant.  In an era where we’re hyperconnected, where people share, and share knowledge, things are going to work a lot differently than they did before.  These all-important relationships between businesses and their customers (potential and actual) have been completely rewritten.  Let’s talk about that.

II.  Linked Out

Of all the challenges you face in your professional practice, the greatest of them comes from a website that, at first glance, seems completely innocuous.  LinkedIn is the “professional” social network, where individuals re-create their C.V. online, and, entry by entry, link their profiles to other people they have worked with over the years.

Just that alone is something entirely new and very potent.  When a potential employer sees a C.V., they don’t see the network of connections the candidate created at every position – a network which tells the employer much of what they need to know about the suitability of the candidate.  Suddenly, all of this implicit information has been revealed explicitly.  An employer can ‘walk the chain’ of associations, long before a candidate submits any references.  The LinkedIn profile is the reference, quite literally.

This means that a LinkedIn profile is more valuable than any hand-crafted C.V., because it is, on the whole, a more accurate read of the candidate.  A candidate’s connections tell you everything about who the candidate is.  They certainly tell you more than a list of hand-picked referees ever could.  LinkedIn is simply a better way of doing business.

This means that LinkedIn has caught on like a bushfire in Big End of town.  Throughout the nation, employers look for the LinkedIn profile of potential candidates, and these profiles carry more weight than any words from the candidate, or a recruiter, or, really, anyone else.  This transformation happened suddenly over the last 12 months, as businesspeople reached a critical mass of involvement with LinkedIn.  LinkedIn benefits from the ‘network effect’: the more people who create profiles on LinkedIn, the more valuable the service becomes – because it’s more likely you’ll find someone’s profile there.  That, in turn, makes it more likely another individual will create a LinkedIn profile, making it more valuable, etc.  It also means that any candidate without a LinkedIn profile is immediately suspect – what’s he or she trying to hide?

LinkedIn become the new standard in recruiting.  But don’t look too closely, or you’ll get scared.  LinkedIn takes one of the things the recruiter brings to the table – an extensive and wide-ranging set of contacts – and reproduces that electronically in such a way that anyone can take advantage of them.  In other words, everyone is now on a much more equal footing.  The time and energy you have dedicated to building up those networks can now be matched by someone spending a lot less time on it – someone who is employing the latest tools.

The big worry, from here forward, is that recruiters as we have known them will be obsolesced by social networking technologies.  As we get further into the social media revolution, and these tools become more refined, many of the functions of the recruiter-as-networker, recruiter-as-matchmaker, and recruiter-as-talent-finder will be subsumed into these social networks.  Already I can dial and tune searches on LinkedIn to give me, say, a list of electrical engineers who work in Melbourne.  That’s a list I can work from, if I’m doing a personnel search.  I can message those folks through LinkedIn, to find out if they’re interested in a conversation about a potential opportunity.  The platform provides the basic set of capabilities to amplify my effectiveness – without any substantial investment.

People will begin to ask why they need recruiters.  People are already beginning to ask this question, as they see the social network providing the same capabilities – and for free.  This is something that should scare you a little bit, because it shows you that recruiting, as we’ve known it, has about as much life expectancy as a buggy-whip maker did in 1915.  There are still a few years left in which recruiting will be a profitable business, but after that it will simply be overwhelmed by social networking tools which can amplify the powers of the average person so effectively that recruiting simply becomes another task on offer, like sending a message or posting a photo.

As people are drawn together over social networks, they get a better sense of the talents of those around them.  This talent-spotting used to be the sine qua non of the recruiter.  Now that each of us can manage connections far beyond the natural limit of 150, we each learn our respective strengths.  We use systems like LinkedIn to help us keep tally of those strengths.  We use the tools to deploy those strengths.  Everything happens because the tools empower us.  But will they empower us so much that recruiters become redundant?

You need to have a good think about your business, and about the way you practice your business.  You need to have a good look at the tools – particularly LinkedIn, but also Twitter and Facebook.  You’ll learn that these tools are good at some things, and lousy at others.  Here’s the question: are you good at the things the tools aren’t?  Tools are no substitute for relationships.  Even though the tools give us some false sense of relationship, it’s not the real thing.  Recruiting is the real thing.  But, is that enough?

III.  Social Media Gods

In times long past – and by this, I mean just five years ago – recruiters were the masters of the Rolodex.  You survived and thrived by knowing everybody, everywhere, with talent, and everybody, everywhere, who needed that talent.  That in itself is quite a talent.  But that talent is no longer enough.  It is, however, the springboard to get you to the next level.

Fasten your seatbelts.  You’re about to get launched headlong into the future.  I want you to imagine a time – let’s say, tomorrow afternoon – when the average person now has quite extraordinary Rolodex capabilities, courtesy of the social networks, and where you, the masters, have gone beyond that into regions undreamed of.  Imagine being able to take each of your contacts, and use those as starting points for new contacts within new networks.  You’d have an inner ring of close contacts – just as you do today, but multiplied by the capabilities of the tools to support and nurture these contacts.  Outside that inner ring, you’d have consecutive rings of contacts-to-contacts, and contacts-to-contacts-to-contacts, and so on, all the way out until the network simply becomes too diffuse and too difficult to maintain.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it echoes the famed ‘six degrees of separation’, a theorem that provides that we are all just six people away from any other person on the planet.  Australia is a lot smaller than the world; within any particular domain of expertise, there’s really only one or two degrees of separation, whether that’s in filmmaking, medicine, or software engineering.  There just aren’t that many of us.  Fortunately, that means that our networks aren’t deep: we can more-or-less know everyone involved in our field, with the help of a good Rolodex.

You have more than a good Rolodex.  You have the new tools; you can build a Rolodex of Rolodexes, one Rolodex per discipline, and use that to track everybody, everywhere, who matters.  In this future, that is really tomorrow afternoon, you’ve so leveraged your network resources that each of you sits in the middle of a vast web, and each time there’s a twitch upon a thread, you know about it, because that information is shared throughout your networks, and finds its way toward your receptive ears.

You’re going to need good tools to make this ambitious project a reality, and you’re going to need them for two entirely contradictory reasons: first, to be able to listen to everything going on everywhere, and second, because that chaotic din will deafen you.  You need tools to help you find out what’s going on, but, more significantly, you need tools to help you winnow the wheat from the chaff.  Being well-connected means bearing the burden of drowning in pointless information.  Without the right tools, as you grow your networks you will simply sink under the noise.

What tools?  They barely exist today.  Google Alerts is one tool that will help keep you abreast of news as it is created on the net.  Within the next few months, Google will begin to digest the endless ‘feeds’ created by Facebook and Twitter users, and you’ll be able to search through those as well.  But again, there’s just too much there.  You likely need a more professional tool, such as Sydney’s own PeopleBrowsr, to sift through the wealth of information that will be generated by your ever-more-encompassing networks of networks.

I should point out – for the more entrepreneurial among you – there is now a market for tools that recruiters need to become better recruiters: tools that harness the networks.  Such tools will need to be designed by someone who understands the recruiting business and the network. That means it could be one of you.  You could partner with a Google or a PeopleBrowsr, or strike out on your own.  If you don’t do it, one of your competitors – either in Australia or overseas – certainly will.

The first half of my advice is simply this: build your networks.  Build them out to unimaginable reaches.  Use the tools to leverage your capabilities.  Use the tools as if your livelihood depended upon it.  Because it does.  Behind you are a new generation, unafraid to use the tools to build their networks up.  When you go head-to-head against them, those with the best networks – and the best tools – will tend to win.  That’s what the next decade looks like, as we transition from the Rolodex to the social network: more and more business will go to the well-networked.  So really, there is no choice: adapt or die.

There’s another face to this, one that turns itself outward.  Sure, you’ve created this vast and nationwide network to feed you information.  But you’ve got to do more than listen.  You must present yourself within the network.  You must be present.  Many people and most companies think that they can use social media as an advertising medium.  Plenty of firms set up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and post lots of advertising messages to an ever-decreasing number of followers.

People don’t want to get spammed.  They don’t want to hear your marketing messages over a communications channel that they consider personal.  So please, don’t make this mistake.  In fact, I’ll go even further – don’t think of the Web as an advertising medium.  Sure, it had a few good years where a business presence online was simply a great way to get your marketing materials out there inexpensively, but those days are over.  Today everything is about engagement.  Engagement begins with conversation.

Conversation is a tricky thing: on the one hand it’s the most natural of human capabilities; on the other hand, it’s fraught with disaster.  Social media amplifies both sides of this equation.  There are more places for more conversations than ever before, and more opportunities for these conversations to run off the rails.  Here are some simple rules of thumb which should keep you out of trouble:

1. Only go where you’re invited.  No one likes a salesman who sticks their foot in the door.
2. Participate in a conversation from a place of authenticity.  Let people know who you are and why you’re there.
3. Spend time building relationships.  Social media is a lot like friendship – it takes time and investment and a bit of love to make it work.
4. Be consistent.  Invest time every single day, or at least with regularity.  If you can’t do that, it’s probably better you do nothing at all.

Where are these conversations happening?  All around you: on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube and Flickr and thousand blogs.  They’re happening all the time, everywhere.  You probably want to spend some time investigating these conversations before you participate.  That’s known as ‘lurking’, and it’s the foundation of successful net relationships.  Having an appreciation and an understanding of a community before you participate within it shows respect.  Respect will be reciprocated.

That’s about it for today – and frankly, that’s quite a lot.  I’ve asked you to re-invent yourselves for the mid-21^st century.  I’ve asked you to become the gods of social media, to translate your natural role as connectors and facilitators into a greatly amplified form, just so you can remain competitive.  I’m not saying that this transition will happen overnight.  You have at least a few years to become adept with the tools, and a few more to build out those nationwide networks.  But I can promise this: at the close of the 2^nd decade of the 21^st century, recruiting will look entirely different.

Every social network has a few individuals who are ‘superconnected’, who have many more connections than their peers within the network.  Those individuals are the glue who keep the network held together.  This is your natural role.  The challenge, moving forward, is to remain extraordinary when everyone around you becomes superconnected themselves.  It will take some work, and some time, but it can be done.  Good luck.

Part One: Hyperconnected

We have been human beings for perhaps sixty thousand years. In all that time, our genome, the twenty-five thousand genes and three billion base pairs which comprise the source code for Homo Sapiens Sapiens has hardly changed.

For at least three thousand generations, we’ve had big brains to think with, a descended larynx to speak with, and opposable thumbs to grasp with. Yet, for almost ninety percent of that enormous span of time, humanity remained a static presence.

Our ancestors entered the world and passed on from it, but the patterns of culture remained remarkably stable, persistent and conservative. This posed a conundrum for paleoanthropologists, long known as ‘the sapient paradox’: if we had the “kit” for it, why did civilization take so long to arise?

Cambridge archeologist Colin Renfrew (more formally, Baron Renfrew of Kamisthorn) recently proposed an answer. We may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of it.

We had to pass through symbolization, investing the outer world with inner meaning (in the process, creating some great art), before we could begin to develop the highly symbolic processes of cities, culture, law, and government.

About ten thousand years ago, the hidden interiority of humanity, passed down through myths and teachings and dreamings, built up a cultural reservoir of social capacity which overtopped the dam of the conservative patterns of humanity. We booted up (as it were) into a culture now so familiar we rarely take notice of it.

In Guns, Germs and Steel, evolutionary biologist and geographer Jared Diamond presented a model which elegantly explains how various peoples crossed the gap into civilization.

Cultures located along similar climatic regions on the planet’s surface could and did share innovations, most significantly along the broad swath of land from the Yangtze to the Rhine. This sharing accelerated the development of each of the populations connected together through the material flow of plants and animals and the immaterial flow of ideas and symbols. Where sharing had been a local and generational project for fifty thousand years, it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of the planet. Cities emerged in Anatolia, Palestine and the Fertile Crescent, and civilization spread out, over the next five hundred generations, to cover all of Eurasia.

Civilization proved another conservative force in human culture; despite the huge increases in population, the social order of Jericho looks little different from those of Imperial Rome or the Qin Dynasty or Medieval France.

But when Gutenberg (borrowing from the Chinese) perfected moveable type, he led the way to another and even broader form of cultural sharing; literacy became widespread in the aftermath of the printing press, and savants throughout the Europe published their insights, sharing their own expertise, producing the Enlightenment and igniting the Scientific Revolution. Peer-review, although portrayed today as a conservative force, initially acted as a radical intellectual accelerant, a mental hormone which again amplified the engines of human culture, leading directly to the Industrial Age.

The conservative empires fell, replaced by demos, the people: the cogs and wheels of a new system of the world which allowed for massive cities, massive markets, mass media, massive growth in human knowledge, and a new type of radicalism, known as Liberalism, which asserted the freedom of capital, labor, and people. That Liberalism, after two hundred and fifty years of ascendancy, has become the conservative order of culture, and faces its own existential threat, the result of another innovation in sharing.

Last month, The Economist, that fountainhead of Ur-Liberalism, proclaimed humanity “halfway there.” Somewhere in the last few months, half the population of the planet became mobile telephone subscribers. In a decade’s time we’ve gone from half the world having never made a telephone call to half the world owning their own mobile.

It took nearly a decade to get to the first billion, four years to the second, eighteen months to the third, and – sometime during 2011 – over five billion of us will be connected. Mobile handsets will soon be in the hands of everyone except the billion and a half extremely poor; microfinance organizations like Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank work hard to ensure that even this destitute minority have access to mobiles. Why? Mobiles may be the most potent tool yet invented for the elimination of poverty.

To those of us in the developed word this seems a questionable assertion. For us, mobiles are mainly social accelerants: no one is ever late anymore, just delayed. But, for entire populations who have never had access to instantaneous global communication, the mobile unleashes the innate, inherent and inalienable capabilities of sociability. Sociability has always been the cornerstone to human effectiveness. Being social has always been the best way to get ahead.

Until recently, we’d seen little to correlate mobiles with human economic development. But, here again, we see the gap between raw hardware capabilities and their expression in cultural software. Handing someone a mobile is not the end of the story, but the beginning. Nor is this purely a phenomenon of the developing world, or of the poor. We had the Web for almost a decade before we really started to work it toward its potential. Wikis were invented in 1995, marking it as an early web technology; the idea of Wikipedia took another six years.

Even SMS, the true carrier of the Human Network, had been dismissed by the telecommunications giants as uninteresting, a sideshow. Last year we sent forty three billion text messages.

We have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the ‘hyperconnectivity’ engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations. This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty.

This is coming as a bit of a shock.

Part Two: Hypermimesis

I have two nephews, Alexander and Andrew, born in 2001, and 2002. Alexander watched his mother mousing around on her laptop, and – from about 18 months – reached out to play with the mouse, imitating her actions. By age three Alex had a fair degree of control over the mouse; his younger brother watched him at play, and copied his actions. Soon, both wrestled for control of a mouse that both had mastered. Children are experts in mimesis – learning by imitation. It’s been shown that young chimpanzees regularly outscore human toddlers on cognitive tasks, while the children far surpass the chimps in their ability to “ape” behavior. We are built to observe and reproduce the behaviors of our parents, our mentors and our peers.

Our peers now number three and a half billion.

Whenever any one of us displays a new behavior in a hyperconnected context, that behavior is inherently transparent, visible and observed. If that behavior is successful, it is immediately copied by those who witnessed the behavior, then copied by those who witness that behavior, and those who witnessed that behavior, and so on. Very quickly, that behavior becomes part of the global behavioral kit. As its first-order emergent quality, hyperconnectivity produces hypermimesis, the unprecedented acceleration of the natural processes of observational learning, where each behavioral innovation is distributed globally and instantaneously.

Only a decade ago the network was all hardware and raw potential, but we are learning fast, and this learning is pervasive. Behaviors, once slowly copied from generation to generation, then, still slowly, from location to location, now ‘hyperdistribute’ themselves via the Human Network. We all learn from each other with every text we send, and each new insight becomes part of the new software of a new civilization.

We still do not know much about this nascent cultural form, even as its pieces pop out of the ether all around us. We know that it is fluid, flexible, mobile, pervasive and inexorable. We know that it does not allow for the neat proprieties of privacy and secrecy and ownership which define the fundamental ground of Liberal civilization. We know that, even as it grows, it encounters conservative forces intent on moderating its impact. Yet every assault, every tariff, every law designed to constrain this Human Network has failed.

The Chinese, who gave it fair go, have conceded the failure of their “Great Firewall,” relying now on self-censorship, situating the policeman within the mind of the dissident netizen.

Record companies and movie studios try to block distribution channels they can not control and can not tariff; every attempt to control distribution only results in an ever-more-pervasive and ever-more-difficult to detect “Darknet.”

A band of reporters and bloggers (some of whom are in this room today) took down the Attorney General of the United States, despite the best attempts of Washington’s political machinery to obfuscate then overload the processes of transparency and oversight. Each of these singular examples would have been literally unthinkable a decade ago, but today they are the facts on the ground, unmistakable signs of the potency of this new cultural order.

It is as though we have all been shoved into the same room, a post-modern Panopticon, where everyone watches everyone else, can speak with everyone else, can work with everyone else. We can send out a call to “find the others,” for any cause, and watch in wonder as millions raise their hands. Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule.

This shows up, at its most complete, in Wikipedia, which (warts and all) represents the first attempt to survey and capture the knowledge of the entire human race, rather than only its scientific and academic elites. A project of the mob, for the mob, and by the mob, Wikipedia is the mob rule of factual knowledge. Its phenomenal success demonstrates beyond all doubt how the calculus of civilization has shifted away from its Liberal basis. In Liberalism, knowledge is a scarce resource, managed by elites: the more scarce knowledge is, the more highly valued that knowledge, and the elites which conserve it. Wikipedia turns that assertion inside out: the more something is shared the more valuable it becomes. These newly disproportionate returns on the investment in altruism now trump the ‘virtue of selfishness.’

Paradoxically, Wikipedia is not at all democratic, nor is it actually transparent, though it gives the appearance of both. Investigations conducted by The Register in the UK and other media outlets have shown that the “encyclopedia anyone can edit” is, in fact, tightly regulated by a close network of hyperconnected peers, the “Wikipedians.”

This premise is borne out by the unpleasant fact that article submissions to Wikipedia are being rejected at an ever-increasing rate. Wikipedia’s growth has slowed, and may someday grind to a halt, not because it has somehow encompassed the totality of human knowledge, but because it is the front line of a new kind of warfare, a battle both semantic and civilizational. In this battle, we can see the tracings of hyperpolitics, the politics of era of hyperconnectivity.

To outsiders like myself, who critique their increasingly draconian behavior, Wikipedians have a simple response: “We are holding the line against chaos.” Wikipedians honestly believe that, in keeping Wikipedia from such effluvia as endless articles on anime characters, or biographies of living persons deemed “insufficiently notable,” they keep their resource “pure.” This is an essentially conservative impulse, as befits the temperament of a community of individuals who are, at heart, librarians and archivists.

The mechanisms through which this purity is maintained, however, are hardly conservative.

Hyperconnected, the Wikipedians create “sock puppet” personae to argue their points on discussion pages, using back-channel, non-transparent communications with other Wikipedians to amass the support (both numerically and rhetorically) to enforce their dictates. Those who attempt to counter the fixed opinion of any network of Wikipedians encounter a buzz-saw of defiance, and, almost invariably, withdraw in defeat.

Now that this ‘Great Game’ has been exposed, hypermimesis comes into play. The next time an individual or community gets knocked back, they have an option: they can choose to “go nuclear” on Wikipedia, using the tools of hyperconnectivity to generate such a storm of protest, from so many angles of attack, that the Wikipedians find themselves overwhelmed, backed into the buzz-saw of their own creation.

This will probably engender even more conservative reaction from the Wikipedians, until, in fairly short order, the most vital center of human knowledge creation in the history of our species becomes entirely fossilized.

Or, just possibly, Wikipedians will bow to the inevitable, embrace the chaos, and find a way to make it work.

That choice, writ large, is the same that confronts us in every aspect of our lives. The entire human social sphere faces the increasing pressures of hyperconnectivity, which arrive hand-in-hand with an increasing empowerment (‘hyperempowerment’) by means of hypermimesis. All of our mass social institutions, developed at the start of the Liberal era, are backed up against the same buzz saw.

Politics, as the most encompassing of our mass institutions, now balances on a knife edge between a past which no longer works and a future of chaos.

Part Three: No Governor

Last Monday, as I waited at San Francisco International for a flight to Logan, I used my mobile to snap some photos of the status board (cheerfully informing me of my delayed departure), which I immediately uploaded to Flickr. As I waited at the gate, I engaged in a playful banter with two women d’un certain age, that clever sort of casual conversation one has with fellow travelers. After we boarded the flight, one of the women approached me. “I just wanted you to know, that other woman, she works for the Treasury Department. And you were making her nervous when you took those photos.”

Now here’s the thing: I wanted to share the frustrations of my journey with my many friends, both in Australia and America, who track my comings and goings on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. Sharing makes the unpleasant endurable. In that moment of confrontation, I found myself thrust into a realization that had been building over the last four years: Sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing.

A photo snapped on my mobile becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible. No wonder she’s nervous: in my simple, honest and entirely human act of sharing, it becomes immediately apparent that any pretensions to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power have already collapsed into shell-shocked impotence.

We are asked to believe that hyperconnectivity can be embraced by political campaigns, and by politicians in power. We are asked to believe that everything we already know to be true about the accelerating disintegration of hierarchies of all kinds – economic, academic, cultural – will somehow magically suspend itself for the political process. That, somehow, politics will be different.

Bullshit. Ladies and gentlemen, don’t believe a word of it. It’s whistling past the graveyard. It’s clapping for Tinkerbelle. Obama may be the best thing since sliced bread, but this isn’t a crisis of leadership. This is not an emergency. And my amateur photography did not bring down the curtain on the Republic.

For the first time, we have a political campaign embracing hyperconnectivity. As is always the case with political campaigns, it is a means to an end. The Obama campaign has built a nationwide social network (using lovely, old-fashioned, human techniques), then activated it to compete in the primaries, dominate in the caucuses, and secure the Democratic nomination. That network is being activated again to win the general election.

Then what? Three months ago, I put this question directly to an Obama field organizer. He paused, as if he’d never given the question any thought, before answering, “I don’t know. I don’t believe anyone’s thought that far ahead.” There are now some statements from candidate Obama about what he’d like to see this network become. They are, of course, noble sentiments. They matter not at all. The mob, now mobilized, will do as it pleases. Obama can lead by example, can encourage or scold as occasion warrants, but he can not control. Not with all the King’s horses and all the King’s men.

And yes, that’s scary.

Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all.” A hyperconnected polity – whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand – has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war.

Conserved across nearly four thousand generations, the social fabric will warp and convulse as various polities actualize their hyperempowerment in the cultural equivalent of nuclear exchanges. Eventually (one hopes, with hypermimesis, rather quickly) we will learn to contain these most explosive forces. We will learn that even though we can push the button, we’re far better off refraining. At that point, as in the era of superpower Realpolitik, the action will shift to a few tens of thousands of ‘little’ conflicts, the hyperconnected equivalents of the endless civil wars which plagued Asia, Africa and Latin America during the Cold War.

Naturally, governments will seek to control and mediate these emerging conflicts. This will only result in the guns being trained upon them. The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously pronounced that we should “Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.” Mead spoke truthfully, and prophetically. We are all committed, we are all passionate. We merely lacked the lever to effectively translate the force of our commitment and passion into power. That lever has arrived, in my hand and yours.

And now, the world’s going to move – for all of us.

Slides for the presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum are now available on SlideShare.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. 

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,

And human love will be seen at its height. 

Live in fragments no longer. 

Only connect…

– E.M. Forster, Howards End

I. Welcome to the Social

At 2:30 PM, Monday 12 May 2008, a huge earthquake struck the Sichuan province of China. In some places, the ground trembled for as long as three minutes. When the shaking stopped, those with computers turned to them to find out what had happened, and to share their own experiences. Just last month China passed the United States as the nation with the largest Internet-connected population: over 221 million Chinese go online nearly every day.

We all do the same sorts of things online: the utilitarian tasks, like electronic banking and flight reservations; the work-related tasks, answering queries from colleagues; and all of us, everywhere, use the Internet to expand and deepen our social lives.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Internet, we are told, will eventually turn the planet into the equivalent of the nerdy uni drop-out, living a hermit’s life in some poor parent’s basement. We’re turning within, abandoning contact with the cruel world.

In reality, something very different is taking place. We are reaching out, through the wire, first to our families, then our friends, our colleagues, and – just now – we’re touching people we’ve never met. And likely will never meet.

We touch all these individuals with acts of communication. To our families, we send love and kisses. To our friends, a favorite joke. To colleagues, a relevant link to an online report. And, for everyone else – well, we’ll come to that.

Every time we reach out, we reinforce and strengthen the bonds that tie us to other people. And this isn’t a new thing, or even something that’s unique to humans: gorillas and chimpanzees do it. This reaching out, to share something – something that we know, or something we stumbled upon, or something we feel – is a basic part of every one of us. Sharing makes the world go round.

Suddenly we’ve gotten very, very good at it.

Just in the last four years – less time than I’ve been in Australia – we’ve seen the phenomenal rise of the technologies of sharing. Flickr – which allows you to post your photos in one spot, where everyone else can view them. YouTube – now the third most trafficked site on the Web. And now there’s Twitter – which allows you to share bite-sited bits of text – called ‘tweets’ – with a select group of “followers”.

I call Twitter a “Social Messaging Service” – yes, another SMS – because it allows me to communicate much the same sorts things I would with a text message – but, rather than going to just one other person, I can send that message to over 530 of my followers. Many of these people are known to me – in person, or by reputation – but some follow me simply because they’re interested in what I have to say. Though most of the chatter on Twitter is inane – like the world’s weirdest cocktail party – some of it is incredibly immediate, vital and important.

As, for example, last Monday. Just before I left the house for the evening, I received a few tweets talking about the earthquake in China. What earthquake? I wondered – there’d been nothing about it on the telly, or on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, or the New York Times, or BBC News. Even the Associate Press hadn’t burped up an initial report. But I have one follower (whom I follow in return), Dedric Lam, who lives just outside Shanghai. Everyone in Shanghai felt the shaking, and, as they connected with one another, they all knew that everyone else in Shanghai had felt it, too. As they received tweets from places further away, they knew the shaking had been felt in Beijing – and quickly realized that Sichuan had gone dark. No tweets, no websites, no phone service. All of this flew by on Twitter a full thirty minutes before the first reports made their way onto the wire. When I met up with friends that night, I asked them if they had any news about the earthquake in China. They said, “What earthquake?”

Twitter, connecting people across boundaries of politics, culture and language through its social messaging service, has – quite accidentally – become a human early-warning system. One tweet might not have the ring of truth, unless it comes from a particularly well-trusted source. A thousand tweets, all saying more-or-less the same thing, possess enormous authenticity.

By the time I got back to my flat on Monday evening, the Twittersphere was alive with tweets from people in China, passing along the latest news reports, video segments and photos from the front lines of the rescue effort. On Tuesday, Dedric Lam posted perhaps a hundred tweets, the best of which I “re-tweeted”, forwarding them along to my own followers. This “human network” of connections gave all of us more insight into the tragedy unfolding in Sichuan than anything available from any news broadcaster or publisher. The mainstream news sources, playing catch-up, tried to send reporters into an area where no cars or planes or trains could travel, while, from deep within the earthquake zone, messages made their way out into the Human Network, via text messages, or email, or Twitter, and, forwarded along through this dense maze of connections, reached everyone interested in learning the ‘ground truth’ of the disaster. Some of the stories were uplifting – people saved from beneath collapsed concrete and brick buildings. Others tore at your heart.

We now have so many ways to stay connected, we’ve crossed the boundary from “well-connected” into “hyperconnected”. Our ability to reach out and touch or be touched by someone else, over matters trivial or life-and-death has grown so suddenly and so comprehensively, it’s changing the way we think, and the way we work. The social message service isn’t just a fun way to while the way the time, or a great new way to stay informed: it’s the way we’ll do business in the 21st century.

II. Instant Karma

On the first weekend of April, TechCrunch founder and widely-read blogger Michael Arrington faced frustrations at home. His broadband, provided by US cable giant Comcast, had gone dark. Despite every attempt to get his service restored – including a number of calls to Comcast’s repair center (receiving a different explanation for the outage every time he called), he spent the weekend stealing bandwidth from his neighbors’ WiFi connections. After thirty hours of putting up with crap from Comcast, Arrington let loose – on Twitter. Arrington has over 17,000 followers on Twitter, people who enjoy reading his insightful commentary on all things digital, individuals who are themselves well-connected and influential. So as Arrington vented his spleen, a large section of the technology community – all around the world – listened.

To Arrington’s immense surprise, within 20 minutes of his first tweet about Comcast, he received a call from a Comcast executive in Philadelphia – calling from the other side of the country, in the middle of a weekend. The executive offered his help getting Arrington’s service restored, and mentioned that he spent a lot of time monitoring Twitter and other social media services – trying to get a sense of what Comcast’s customers were saying online about their broadband service. The executive saw the discussion break out around Arrington’s tweets, and decided to swoop in and take action.

Although famous in technology circles, Arrington isn’t alone in getting such star treatment. Josh Lowenson, a self-professed “internet nobody”, was having some trouble installing software that had come with his Comcast cable modem, and fired off a few angry tweets about it. Within a few minutes, a Comcast employee tweeted back with a solution to his problems. Everyone was happy, and Lowenson wrote a blog post praising Comcast’s responsiveness to his needs. That kind of public display of affection is gold for any company working directly in the consumer marketplace.

A weapon with that kind of potency can be pointed both ways. Two weeks ago, a good friend of mine, a consultant who works with a range of companies, gave a presentation to the managing director of an up-and-coming web media firm. The presentation had been organized by the MD’s staff, who hired my friend to bring this out-of-touch MD up-to-speed. Now, we all know that consultants frequently get hired to deliver messages up the chain of command that the staff would present themselves, if they had the cojones. You can hire a consultant (and hide behind them) to break bad news or just difficult news with a degree of safety. We also know that some folks like to shoot the messenger.

That’s just what happened to my unlucky friend. After a successful presentation, he found himself peppered with insults and accusations from the MD – treatment that he reckoned he hadn’t earned. So, as soon as he left the meeting, he sent a tweet from his mobile – Twitter accepts text messages. I got the tweet and followed up on it, getting the whole horrid story.

That’s when I had a real penny-drop moment: although my friend has only a few Twitter followers, two of those followers, myself and Raven Zachary, have many hundreds. Both of us are well-known individuals, well-trusted in technology circles. If we spread the word about the nasty behavior of this particular MD, through our own hyperconnections, we could effectively bring that company to its knees. They’d be unable to hire any qualified technology types, because – for anyone who cared to look – the facts would be out there, the story plain for all to see. We could trigger the ‘nuclear option’, if we wanted to. And this stupid and mean MD would pay the price – in full – for her stupidity. It would all be over in just a few minutes.

Call it instant karma.

All of this means that we need new tools, more tools, better tools that can read the collective mind of the Internet, and – through whatever data sifting magic you care to use – present it as a comprehensible stream of meaningful tidbits. Everyone needs this, but big commercial firms need it desperately, because customers can now organize themselves against those firms at the press of a button. Rumors can destroy markets in an afternoon. And bad behavior can no longer be covered up.

But this is more than just a warning call; this is an opportunity. The same techniques of social sharing that we’re using in our day-to-day lives are almost never used inside companies. You got mail, and – if you’re very lucky – instant messaging. But the idea of giving employees a central line, where they can collectively gripe or muse or collaborate? That’s beyond the pale. Too much freedom, too much time spent doing “unproductive” tasks. Too much capability to foment an internal rebellion to corporate stupidity.

As if sharing your mind and building esprit de corps were unproductive.

There’s a disconnect between the way we do business and the way we live our lives. Right now, our lives outside the corporate cubicle are changing so rapidly it’s making us a bit dizzy. Down on the cube farm, things are pretty much same as it ever was. The longer this goes on, the more dangerous it becomes: for these companies, for their customers, for your job security. But, if you can build the tools that allow this sharing, if you can give everyone in your organization access to the collective capabilities of your organization, you can turbo-charge it. You can grasp the nettle, and turn all these potential negatives into game-changing positives.

Let’s look at how.

III. Empower Me

The Web is more than just words on a page, or a funny video embedded in a blog. The Web isn’t about content. Even though we constantly hear that ‘content is king’, it just ain’t so. Connection is king. Twelve years ago, sharing meant a cute page with an animated GIF background and bad MIDI music, accompanying four thousand digital snaps of your kitty cat. While that still goes on today, it’s become a sideshow. It’s not the main event. Sharing has evolved into something new, something more than just a way to unburden yourself.

In January 2001, when Jimmy Wales opened his failed encyclopedia project to all contributors, he had no idea that for the next two years, thousands of individuals would labor ceaselessly, adding article entries on every topic they could think of, correcting the grammatical and spelling mistakes in each other’s articles, and borrowing from the 1913 Encyclopedia Britannica where they lacked the expert knowledge themselves. When I first saw Wikipedia, in January 2002, it held nearly fifteen thousand articles on a broad range of subjects. Not bad, but hardly encyclopedic, though respectable enough after a year of thankless work on the part of many, many “Wikipedians”.

Even that was enough; word spread about Wikipedia. People dropped by to use it, adding something they knew, amending something they knew to be incorrect, and, each time, leaving something of themselves behind. With each contribution they made, they grew more fond of Wikipedia, returning to it more and more frequently, all the while telling their friends. This virtuous cycle – where contributions produce affection, and affection produces even more contributions – led to the exponential growth of Wikipedia, which, as of 19 May 2008, has two million three hundred and seventy six thousand articles in English. In just half a decade, Wikipedia has become the definitive reference in the English language, displacing the two hundred and fifty year-old Encyclopedia Britannica, which has just one-ninth the number articles.

Wikipedia is not perfect, but then, neither is Britannica. Both of them are, on average, equally accurate. But Wikipedia, available anywhere, at any time, through any connection to the Internet, has a reach and influence Britannica could never hope to achieve. As a child, I read through a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia, cover to cover, all twenty volumes digested over a year’s time; a child today could never hope to read all the articles in Wikipedia: new ones are created in such numbers that they’d always be falling behind.

In Wikipedia we have the standard factual reference in the English language. What has this given us? It all depends on how you use it. A secondary school student might use Wikipedia – against teacher’s strict instructions – to write a paper. Or we might settle a trivia dispute that arises at a dinner party.

If we were smart, we’d use the factual information in Wikipedia to make better decisions. In truth, we have such a wealth of knowledge available to us in Wikipedia that we should think of it as a part of our brains that sits just outside our heads. If we used it – consistently – as a reference, we’d make fewer mistakes, because, as the old saw (from Mark Twain) goes, “It’s not what you don’t know – it’s what you know that ain’t so!” For all of the factual questions of our lives, we have now have the answers. We just need to put those answers to work.

If we leverage the wealth of knowledge and expertise that once sat securely locked away in our heads, knowledge which we are now able to share with one another, we can increase our own intelligence. We can consistently make better decisions. We can improve our effectiveness, both as individuals and in groups.

This basic innovation – the most significant of the 21st century – has enormous implications for organizations of all sorts. Organizations thrive on information and knowledge. Every trade, from the most physical to the most abstract, relies upon the expertise of those who practice it. We apprentice young people so that this knowledge is passed along, or we send them to uni and post-graduate studies. We can accelerate and improve this transmission of knowledge with the technologies of sharing. Sometimes text is the best medium for sharing knowledge, but video or audio or animations or photographs often work far more effectively. You can go to Wikipedia to learn about the history of baking, but you have to go to YouTube if you want to learn how to bake a cake.

Consider the lesson of Wikipedia, and think about how it can apply to your own organization: can you improve the effectiveness of your organization’s ability to make decisions, to react quickly to a changing market, to innovate, to constantly re-invent itself? These are the challenges facing all organizations in the 21st century, in both the commercial and public sectors of the economy.

We now have proven tools that allow us to improve our effectiveness – to “hyperempower” the organization. First, you need to develop the tools which provide “hyperconnectivity” within these organizations. Once you’ve got that hyperconnectivity, you need to provide systems which allow these individuals to share their expertise and multiply their effectiveness.

It could be as simple as Twitter plus a Wiki. Just those two pieces, thrown together, can create a revolution in any organization. But, when you start adding rich media – capturing everything which can’t easily be expressed in text – you begin building up a reservoir of expertise which provides a foundation for excellence, a launchpad for a rocketship ride into hyperempowerment.

So today, as you learn about all the nifty things you can do, consider this: you already know how to put these tools to work. You use these tools every single day. They haven’t yet transformed the organization. But they will. Right now almost anything is possible. We’re at the cusp of an explosion in innovation, as we put the technologies of sharing to work. You have the tools, and your organizations need this to happen if they expect to be in business in a few years’ time. It’s up to you – all of you, here in this room today – to go down to the code mines, and make this revolution happen. You can lead the way. You can empower me. You can empower all of us.

Case One: Lists

I moved to San Francisco in 1991, because I wanted to work in the brand-new field of virtual reality, and San Francisco was the epicenter of all commercial development in VR. The VR community came together for meetings of the Virtual Reality Special Interest Group at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, the world-famous science museum. These meetings included public demonstrations of the latest VR technology, interviews with thought-leaders in the field, and plenty of opportunity for networking. At one of the first of those meetings I met a man who impressed me by his sheer ordinariness. He was an accountant, and although he was enthusiastic about the possibilities of VR, he wasn’t working in the field – he was simply interested in it. Still, Craig Newmark was pleasant enough, and we’d always engage in a few lines of conversation at every meeting, although I can’t remember any of these conversations very distinctly.

Newmark met a lot of people – he was an excellent networker – and fairly quickly built up a nice list of email addresses for his contacts, whom he kept in contact with through a mailing list. This list, known as “Craig’s List”, because a de facto bulletin board for the core web and VR communities in San Francisco. People would share information about events in town, or observations, or – more frequently – they’d offer up something for sale, like a used car or a futon or an old telly.

As more people in San Francisco were sucked into the growing set of businesses which were making money from the Web, they too started reading Craig’s List, and started contributing to it. By the middle of 1995, there was too much content to be handled neatly in a mailing list, so Newmark – who, like nearly everyone else in the San Francisco Web community, had some basic web authoring skills – created a very simple web site which allowed people to post their own listings to the Web site. Newmark offered this service freely – his way of saying “thank you” to the community, and, equally important, his way of reinforcing all of the social relationships he’d built up in the last few years.

Newmark’s timing was excellent; Craigslist came online just as many, many people in San Francisco were going onto the Web, and Craigslist quickly became the community bulletin board for the city. Within a few months you could find a flat for rent, a car to drive, or a date – all in separate categories, neatly organized in the rather-ugly Web layout that characterized nearly all first-generation websites. If you had a car to sell, a flat to sublet, or you wanted a date – you went to Craigslist first. Word of mouth spread the site around, but what kept it going was the high quality of the transactions people had through the site. If you sold your bicycle through Craigslist, you’d be more likely to look there first if you wanted to buy a moped. Each successful transaction guaranteed more transactions, and more success, and so on, in a “virtuous cycle” which quickly spread beyond San Francisco to New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and other well-connected American cities.

From the very beginning, everything on Craigslist was freely available – it nothing to list an item or to view listings. The only thing Newmark ever charged for was job listings – one of the most active areas on Craigslist, particularly in the heyday of the Web bubble. Jobs listings alone paid for all of the rest of the operational costs of Craigslist – and left Newmark with a healthy profit, which he reinvested into the business, adding capacity and expanding to other cities across America. Within a few years, Newmark had a staff of nine people, all working out of a house in San Francisco’s Sunset District – which, despite its name, is nearly always foggy.

While I knew about Craigslist – it was hard not to – I didn’t use it myself until 2000, when I left my professorial housing at the University of Southern California. I was looking for a little house in the Hollywood Hills – a beautiful forested area in the middle of the city. I went onto Craigslist and soon found a handful of listings for house rentals in the Hollywood Hills, made some calls and – within about 4 hours – had found the house of my dreams, a cute little Swiss cottage that looked as though it fell out of the pages of “Heidi”. I moved in at the beginning of June 2000, and stayed there until I moved to Sydney in 2003. It was perhaps the nicest place I’d ever lived, and I found it – quickly and efficiently – on Craigslist. My landlord swore by Craigslist; he had a number of properties, scattered throughout the Hollywood Hills, and always used Craigslist to rent his properties.

In late 2003, when I first came to Australia on a consulting contract – and before I moved here permanently – I used Craigslist again, to find people interested in sub-letting my flat while I worked in Sydney. Within a few days, I had the couple who’d created Dora the Explorer – a very popular children’s television show – living in my house, while they pursued a film deal with a major studio. When I came back to Los Angeles to settle my affairs, I sold my refrigerator on Craigslist, and hired a fellow to move the landlord’s refrigerator back into my flat – on Craigslist.

In most of the United States, Craigslist is the first stop for people interested in some sort of commercial transaction. It is now the 65th busiest website in the world, the 10th busiest in the United States – putting it up there with Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, MSN and eBay – and has about nine billion page views a month. None of the pages have advertising, nor are there any charges, except for job listings (and real estate listings in New York to keep unscrupulous realtors from flooding Craigslist with duplicate postings). Although it is still privately owned, and profits are kept secret, it’s estimated that Craigslist earns as much as USD $150 million from its job listings – while, with a staff of just 24 people, it costs perhaps a few million a year to keep the whole thing up and running. Quite a success story.

But everything has a downside. Craigslist has had an extraordinary effect on the entire publishing industry in North America. Newspapers, which funded their expensive editorial operations from the “rivers of gold” – car advertisements, job listings and classified ads – have found themselves completely “hollowed out” by Craigslist. Although the migration away from print to Craigslist began slowly, it has accelerated in the last few years, to the point where most people, in most circumstances will prefer to place a free listing in Craigslist than a paid listing in a newspaper. The listing will reach more people, and will cost them nothing to do so. That is an unbeatable economic proposition – unless you’re a newspaper.

It’s estimated that upwards of one billion dollars a year in advertising revenue is being lost to the newspapers because of Craigslist. This money isn’t flowing into Craig Newmark’s pocket – or rather, only a small amount of it is. Instead, because the marginal cost of posting an ad to Craigslist is effectively zero, Newmark is simply using the disruptive quality of pervasive network access to completely undercut the newspapers, while, at the same time, providing a better experience for his customers. This is an unbeatable economic proposition, one which is making Newmark a very rich man, even while it drives the Los Angeles Times ever closer to bankruptcy.

This is not Newmark’s fault, even if it is his doing. Newmark had the virtue of being in the right place (San Francisco) at the right time (1995) with the right idea (a community bulletin board). Everything that happened after that was driven entirely by the community of Craigslist’s users. This is not to say that Newmark isn’t incredible responsive to the needs of the Craigslist community – he is, and that responsiveness has served him well as Craigslist has grown and grown. But if Newmark hadn’t thought up this great idea, someone else would have. Nothing about Craigslist is even remotely difficult to create. A fairly ordinary web designer would be able to duplicate Craigslist’s features and functionality in less than a week’s worth of work. (But why bother? It already exists.) Newmark was servicing a need that no one even knew existed until after it had been created. Today, it seems perfectly obvious.

In a pervasively networked world, communities are fully empowered to create the resources they need to manage their lives. This act of creation happens completely outside of the existing systems of commerce (and copyright) that have formed the bulwarks of industrial age commerce. If an entire business sector gets crushed out of existence as a result, it’s barely even noticed by the community. This incredible empowerment – which I term “hyperempowerment” – is going to be one of the dominant features of public life in the 21st century. We have, as individuals and as communities, been gifted with incredible new powers – really, almost mutant ‘super powers’. We use them to achieve our own ends, without recognizing that we’ve just laid a city to waste.

Craigslist has not taken off in Australia. There are Craigslist sites for the “five capital cities” of Australia, but they’re only very infrequently visited. And, because they are only infrequently visited, they haven’t been able to build up enough content or user loyalty to create the virtuous cycle which has made Craigslist such a success in the United States. Why is this? It could be that the Trading Post has already got such a hold on the mindset of Australians that it’s the first place they think to place a listing. The Trading Post’s fees are low (fifty cents for a single non-car item), and it’s widely recognized, reaches a large community, etc. So that may be one reason.

Still, organizations like Fairfax and NEWS are scared to death of Craigslist. Back in 2004, Fairfax Digital launched Cracker.com.au, which provides free listings for everything except cars and jobs, which point back into the various paid advertising Fairfax websites. Australian newspaper publishers have already consigned classified advertising to the dustbin of history; they’re just waiting for the axe to fall. When it does, the Trading Post – among the most valuable of Testra/Sensis properties – will be almost entirely worthless. Telstra’s stockholders will scream, but the Australian public at large won’t care – they’ll be better served by a freely available resource which they’ve created and which they use to improve their business relations within Australia.

Case Two: Listings

In order to preserve business confidentiality, I won’t mention the name of my first Australian client, but they’re a well-known firm, publishers of traveler’s guides. The travel business, when I came to it in early 2006, was nearly unchanged from its form of the last fifty years: you send a writer to a far-away place, where they experience the delights and horrors of life, returning home to put it all into a manuscript which is edited, fact-checked, copy-edited, typeset, published and distributed. Book publishing is a famously human-intensive process – it takes an average of eighteen months for a book from a mainstream publisher to reach the marketplace, because each of these steps take time, effort and a lot of dollars. Nevertheless, a travel guide might need to be updated only twice a decade, and with global distribution it has always been fairly easy to recover the investment.

When I first met with my client, they wanted to know what might figure into the future of publishing. It turns out they knew the answer better than I did: they quickly pointed me to a new website, TripAdvisor.com. Although it is a for-profit website – earning money from bookings made through it – the various reviews and travel information provided on TripAdvisor.com are “user generated content,” that is, provided by folks who use TripAdvisor.com. Thus, a listing for a particular hotel will contain many reviews from people who have actually stayed at the hotel, each of whom have their own peccadilloes, needs, and interests. Reading through a handful of the reviews for any given hotel will give you a fairly rounded idea of what the establishment is really like.

This model of content creation and distribution is the exact opposite of the time-honored model practiced by travel publishers. Instead of an authoritative reviewer, the reviewing task is “crowdsourced” – literally given over to the community of users – to handle. The theory is that with enough reviews, some cogent body of opinion would emerge. While this seems fanciful on the face of it, it’s been proven time and again that this is an entirely successful model of knowledge production. Wikipedia, for example, has built an entire and entirely authoritative encyclopedia from user contributions – a body of knowledge far larger and at least as accurate as its nearest competitor, Encyclopaedia Britannica.

It’s still common for businesses to distrust user generated content. Movie studios nicknamed it “loser generated content”, even as their audiences turn from the latest bloated blockbuster toward YouTube. Britannica pooh-poohed Wikipedia , until an article in Nature, that bastion of scientific reporting, indicated that, on average, a Wikipedia article was nearly as accurate as a given article in Britannica. (This report came out in December 2005. Today, it’s likely an article in Wikipedia would be more accurate than an article in Britannica.) In short, businesses reject the “wisdom of crowds” at their peril.

We’ve only just discovered that a well-networked body politics has access to deep reservoirs of very specific knowledge; in some peculiar way, we are all boffins. We might be science boffins, or knitting boffins, or gearheads or simply know everything that’s ever been said about Stoner Rock. It doesn’t matter. We all have passions, and now that we have a way of sharing these passions with the world-at-large, this “collective intelligence” far outclasses the particulars of any professional organization seeking to serve up little slices of knowledge. This is a general challenge confronting all businesses and institutions in the 21st century. It’s quite commonplace today for a patient to walk into a doctor’s surgery knowing more about the specifics of an illness than the doctor does; this “Wikimedicine” is disparaged by medical professionals – but the truth is that an energized and well-networked community generally does serve its members better than any particular professional elite.

So what to do about about travel publishing in the era of TripAdvisor.com, and WikiTravel (another source of user-generated tourist information), and so on. How can a business possibly hope to compete with the community it hopes to profitably serve? When the question is put like this, it seems insoluable. But that simply indicates that the premise is flawed. This is not an us-versus-them situation, and here’s the key: the community, any community, respects expertise that doesn’t attempt to put on the airs of absolute authority. That travel publisher has built up an enormous reservoir of goodwill and brand recognition, and, simply by changing its attitude, could find a profitable way to work with the community. Publishers are no longer treated like Moses, striding down from Mount Sinai, commandments in hand. Publishing is a conversation, a deep engagement with the community of interest, where all parties are working as hard as they can to improve the knowledge and effectiveness of the community as a whole.

That simple transition from shoveling books out the door, into a community of knowledge building, has far reaching consequences. The business must refashion its own editorial processes and sensibilities around the community. Some of the job of winnowing the wheat from the chaff must be handed to the community, because there’s far too much for the editors to handle on their own. Yet the editors must be able to identify the best work of the community, and give that work pride of place, in order to improve the perceived value their role within the community.

Does this mean that the travel guide book is dead? A book is not dynamic or flexible, unlike a website. But neither does a book need batteries or an internet connection. Books have evolved through half a millennium of use to something that we find incredibly useful – even when resources are available online, we often prefer to use books. They are comfortable and very portable.

The book itself may be changing. It may not be something that is mass produced in lots of tens of thousands; rather, it may be individually printed for a community member, drawn from their own needs and interests. It represents their particular position and involvement, and is thus utterly personal. The technology for single-run publishing is now widespread; it isn’t terribly to print a single copy of a book. When that book can reflect the best editorial efforts of a brand known for high-quality travel publications plus the very best of the reviews and tips offered by an ever-growing community of travelers, it becomes something greater than the sum of its parts, a document in progress, an on-going evolution toward greater utility. It is an encapsulation of a conversation at a particular moment in time, necessarily incomplete, but, for that reason, intensely valuable.

Conversation is the mode not just for business communications, but for all business in the 21st century. Businesses which can not seize on the benefits of communication with the communities they serve will simply be swept aside (like newspapers) by communities in conversation. It is better to be in front of that wave, leading the way, than to drown in the riptide. But this is not an easy transition to make. It involves the fundamental rethinking of business practices and economic models. It’s a choice that will confront every business, everywhere, sometime in the next few years.

Case Three: Delisted

My final case study involves a recent client of mine, a very large university in New South Wales. I was invited in by the Director of Communications, to consult on a top-down redesign of the university’s web presence. After considerable effort an expenditure, the university had learned that their website was more-or-less unusable, particularly when compared against its competitors. It took users too many clicks to find the information they wanted, and that information wasn’t collated well, forcing visitors to traverse the site over and over to find the information they might want on a particular program of study. The new design would streamline the site, consolidate resources, and help prospective students quickly locate the information they would need to make their educational decisions.

That was all well and good, but a cursory investigation of web usage at the university indicated a larger and more fundamental problem: students had simply stopped using the online resources provided by the university, beyond the bare minimum needed to register for classes. The university had failed to keep up with innovations in the Web, falling dramatically out-of-step with its student population, who are all deeply engaged in emailing, social networking, blogging, photo sharing, link sharing, video sharing, and crowdsourcing. Even more significantly, the faculty of the university had set up many unauthorized web sites – using university computing resources – to provide web services that the university had not been able to offer. Both students and faculty had “left the farm” in search of the richer pastures found outside the carefully maintained walls of university computing. This collapse in utility has led to a “vicious cycle,” for the less the student or faculty member uses university resources, the less relevant they become, moving in a downward spiral which eventually sees all of the important knowledge creation processes of the university happening outside its bounds.

As the relevant information about the university (except what the university says about itself) escapes the confines of university resources, another serious consequence emerges: search engines no longer put the university at the top of search queries, simply because the most relevant information about the university is no longer hosted by the university. The organization has lost control of the conversation because it neglected to stay engaged in that conversation, tracking where and how its students and faculty were using the tools at hand to engage themselves in the processes of learning and knowledge formation. A Google search on a particular programme at the university could turn up a student’s assessment of the program as the first most relevant result, not the university’s authorized page.

This is a bigger problem than the navigability of a website, because it directly challenges the university’s authority to speak for itself. In the United States, the website RateMyProfessors.com has become the bane of all educational institutions, because students log onto the site and provide (reasonably) accurate information about the pedagogical capabilities of their instructors. An instructor who is a great researcher but a lousy teacher is quickly identified on this site, and students steer clear, having learned from their peers the pitfalls of a bad decision. On the other hand, students flock to lectures by the best lecturers, and these professors become hot items, either promoted to stay in place, or lured away by strong counter-offers. The collective intelligence of the community is running the show now, and that voice will only become stronger as better tools are developed to put it to work.

What could I offer as a solution for my client? All I could do was proscribe some bitter medicine. Yes, I told them, go forward with the website redesign – it is both necessary and useful. But I advised them to use that redesign as a starting point for a complete rethink of the services offered by the university. Students should be able to blog, share media, collaborate and create knowledge within the confines of the university, and it should be easier to do that – anywhere – than the alternative. Only when the grass is greener in the paddock will they be able to bring the students and faculty back onto the farm.

Furthermore, I advised the university to create the space for conversation within the university. Yes, some of it will be defamatory, or vile, or just unpleasant to hear. But the alternative – that this conversation happens elsewhere, outside of your ability to monitor and respond to it – would eventually prove catastrophic. Educational institutions everywhere – and all other institutions – are facing similar choices: do they ignore their constituencies or engage with them? Once engaged, how does that change the structure and power flows within their institutions? Can these institutions reorganize themselves, so that they become more permeable, pliable and responsive to the communities which they serve?

One again, these are not easy questions to answer. They touch on the fundamental nature of institutions of all varieties. A commercial organization has to confront these same questions, though the specifics will vary from organization to organization. The larger an organization grows, the louder the cry for conversation grows, and the more pressing its need. The largest institutions in Australia are most vulnerable to this sudden change in attitudes, because here it is most likely that sudden self-organizations within the body politic will rise to challenge them.

Conclusion: Over?

As you can see, the same themes appear and reappear in each of these three case studies. In each case some industry sector or institution confronts a pervasively networked public which can out-think, out-maneuver and massively out-compete an institution which formed in an era before the rise of the network. The balance of power has shifted decisively into the hands of the networked public.

The natural reaction of institutions of all stripes is to resist these changes; institutions are inherently conservative, seeking to cling to what has worked in the past, even if the past is no longer any guide to the future. Let me be very clear on this point: resistance is futile, and worse, the longer you resist, the stronger the force you will confront. If you attempt to dam up the tide of change, you will only ensure that the ensuing deluge will be that much greater. The pressure is rising; we are already pervasively networked in Australia, with nearly every able adult owning a mobile phone, with massive and growing broadband penetration, and with an increasing awareness that communities can self-organize to serve their own needs.

Something’s got to give. And it’s not going to be the public. They can’t be whipped or cowed or forced back into antique behaviors which no longer make sense to them. Instead, it is up to you, as business leaders, to embrace the public, engaging them in a continuous conversation that will utterly transform the way you do business.

No business is ever guaranteed success, but unless you embrace conversation as the essential business practice of the 21st century, you will find someone else, more flexible and more open, stealing your business away. It might be a competitor, or it might be your customers themselves, fed up with the old ways of doing business, and developing new ways to meet their own needs. Either way, everything is about to change.

I. Everything Must Go!

It’s merger season in Australia. Everything must go! Just moments after the new media ownership rules received the Governor-General’s royal assent, James Packer sold off his family’s crown jewel, the NINE NETWORK – consistently Australia’s highest-rated television broadcaster since its inception, fifty years ago – along with a basket of other media properties. This sale effectively doubled his already sizeable fortune (now hovering at close to 8 billion Australian dollars) and gave him plenty of cash to pursue the 21st-century’s real cash cow: gambling. In an era when all media is more-or-less instantaneously accessible, anywhere, from anyone, the value of a media distribution empire is rapidly approaching zero, built on the toppling pillars of government regulation of the airwaves, and a cheap stream of high-quality American television programming. Yes, audiences might still tune in to watch the footy – live broadcasting being uniquely exempt from the pressures of the economics of the network – but even there the number of distribution choices is growing, with cable, satellite and IPTV all demanding a slice of the audience. Television isn’t dying, but it no longer guarantees returns. Time for Packer to turn his attention to the emerging commodity of the third millennium: experience. You can’t download experience: you can only live through it. For those who find the dopamine hit of a well-placed wager the experiential sine qua non, there Packer will be, Asia’s croupier, ready to collect his winnings. Who can blame him? He (and, undoubtedly, his well-paid advisors) have read the trend lines correctly: the mainstream media is dying, slowly starved of attention.

The transformation which led to the sale of NINE NETWORK is epochal, yet almost entirely subterranean. It isn’t as though everyone suddenly switched off the telly in favor of YouTube. It looks more like death from a thousand cuts: DVDs, video games, iPods, and YouTube have all steered eyeballs away from the broadcast spectrum toward something both entirely digital and (for that reason) ultimately pervasive. Chip away at a monolith long enough and you’re left with a pile of rubble and dust.

On a somewhat more modest scale, other media moguls in Australia have begun to hedge their bets. Kerry Stokes, the owner of Channel 7, made a strategic investment in Western Australia Publishing. NEWS Corporation, the original Australian media empire, purchased a minority stake in Fairfax, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher (and is eyeing a takeover of Canadian-owned Channel TEN). To see these broadcasters buying into newspapers, four decades after broadcast news effectively delivered death-blows to newspaper publishing, highlights the sense of desperation: they’re hoping that something, somewhere in the mainstream media will remain profitable. Yet there are substantial reasons to expect that these long-shot bets will fail to pay out.

II. The Vanilla Republic

It’s election season in America. Everyone must go! The mood of the electorate in the darkening days of 2006 could best be described as surly. An undercurrent of rage and exasperation afflicts the body politic. This may result in a left-wing shift in the American political landscape, but we’re still two weeks away from knowing. Whatever the outcome, this electoral cycle signifies another epochal change: the mainstream media have lost their lead as the reporters of political news. The public at large views the mainstream media skeptically – these were, after all, the same organizations which whipped the republic into a frenzied war-fever – and, with the regret typical of a very disgruntled buyer, Americans are refusing to return to the dealership for this year’s model. In previous years, this would have left voters in the dark: it was either the mainstream media or ignorance. But, in the two years since the Presidential election, the “netroots” movement has flowered into a vital and flexible apparatus for news reportage, commentary and strategic thinking. Although the netroots movement is most often associated with left-wing politics, both sides of the political spectrum have learned to harness blogs, wikis, feeds and hyperdistribution services such as YouTube for their own political ends. There is nothing quintessentially new about this; modern political parties, emerging in Restoration-era London, used printing presses, broadsheets and daily newspapers – freely deposited in the city’s thousands of coffeehouses – as the blogs of their era. Political news moved very quickly in 17th-century England, to the endless consternation of King Charles II and his censors.

When broadcast media monopolized all forms of reportage – including political reporting – the mass mind of the 20th-century slotted into a middle-of-the-road political persuasion. Neither too liberal, nor too conservative, the mainstream media fostered a “Vanilla Republic,” where centrist values came to dominate political discourse. Of course, the definition of “centrist” values is itself highly contentious: who defines the center? The right-wing decries the excesses of “liberal bias” in the media, while the left-wing points to the “agenda of the owners,” the multi-billionaire stakeholders in these broadcast empires. This struggle for control over the definition of the center characterized political debate at the dawn of the 21st-century – a debate which has now been eclipsed, or, more precisely, overrun by events.

In April 2004, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a US army veteran who had been raised in civil-war-torn El Salvador, founded dKosopedia, a wiki designed to be a clearing-house for all sorts of information relating to leftwing netroots activities. (The name is a nod to Wikipedia.) While the first-order effect of the network is to gather individuals together into a community, once the community has formed, it begins to explore the bounds of its collective intelligence. Political junkies are the kind of passionate amateurs who defy the neat equation of amateur as amateurish. While they are not professional – meaning that they are not in the employ of politicians or political parties – political junkies are intensely well-informed, regarding this as both a civic virtue and a moral imperative. Political junkies work not for power, but for the greater good. (That opposing parties in political debate demonize their opponents as evil is only to be expected given this frame of mind.) The greater good has two dimensions: to those outside the community, it is represented as us vs. them; internally, it is articulated through the community’s social network: those with particular areas of expertise are recognized for their contributions, and their standing in the community rises appropriately.

This same process transformed dKosopedia into Daily Kos (dKos), a political blog where any member can freely write entries – known as “diaries” – on any subject of interest, political, cultural or (more rarely) nearly anything else. The very best of these contributors became the “front page” authors of Daily Kos, their entries presented to the entire community; but part of the responsibility of a front-page contributor is that they must constantly scan the ever-growing set of diaries, looking for the best posts among them to “bump” to front-page status. (This article will be cross-posted to my dKos diary, and we’ll see what happens to it.) Any dKos member can make a comment on any post, so any community member – whether a regular diarist or regular reader – can add their input to the conversation. The strongly self-reinforcing behavior of participation encourages “Kossacks” (as they style themselves) to share, pool, and disseminate the wealth of information gathered by over two million readers. Daily Kos has grown nearly exponentially since its founding days, and looks to reach its highest traffic levels ever as the mid-term elections approach.

III. My Left Eyeball

Salience is the singular quality of information: how much does this matter to me? In a world of restricted media choices, salience is best-fit affair; something simply needs to be relevant enough to garner attention. In the era of hyperdistribution, salience is a laser-like quality; when there are a million sites to read, a million videos to watch, a million songs to listen to, individuals tailor their choices according to the specifics of their passions. Just a few years ago – as the number of media choices began to grow explosively – this took considerable effort. Today, with the rise of “viral” distribution techniques, it’s a much more straight-forward affair. Although most of us still rely on ad-hoc methods – polling our friends and colleagues in search of the salient – it’s become so easy to find, filter, and forward media through our social networks that we have each become our own broadcasters, transmitting our own passions through the network. Where systems have been organized around this principle – for instance, YouTube, or Daily Kos – this information flow is greatly accelerated, and the consequential outcomes amplified. A Sick Puppies video posted to YouTube gets four million views in a month, and ends up on NINE NETWORK’s 60 Minutes broadcast. A Democratic senatorial primary in Connecticut becomes the focus of national interest – a referendum on the Iraq war – because millions of Kossacks focus attention on the contest.

Attention engenders salience, just as salience engenders attention. Salience satisfied reinforces relationship; to have received something of interest makes it more likely that I will receive something of interest in the future. This is the psychological engine which powers YouTube and Daily Kos, and, as this relationship deepens, it tends to have a zero-sum effect on its participants’ attention. Minutes watching YouTube videos are advertising dollars lost to NINE NETWORK. Time spent reading Daily Kos are eyeballs and click-through lost to The New York Times. Furthermore, salience drives out the non-salient. It isn’t simply that a Kossack will read less of the Times, eventually they’ll read it rarely, if at all. Salience has been satisfied, so the search is over.

While this process seems inexorable, given the trends in media, only very recently has it become a ground-truth reality. Just this week I quipped to one of my friends – equally a dedicatee of Daily Kos – that I wanted “an IV drip of dKos into my left eyeball.” I keep the RSS feed of Daily Kos open all the time, waiting for the steady drip of new posts. I am, to some degree, addicted. But, while I always hunger for more, I am also satisfied. When I articulated the passion I now had for Daily Kos, I also realized that I hadn’t been checking the Times as frequently as before – perhaps once a day – and that I’d completely abandoned CNN. Neither website possessed the salience needed to hold my attention.

I am certainly more technically adept in than the average user of the network; my media usage patterns tend to lead broader trends in the culture. Yet there is strong evidence to demonstrate that I am hardly alone in this new era of salience. How do I know this? I recently received a link – through two blogs, Daily Kos and The Left Coaster – to a political campaign advertisment for Missouri senatorial candidate Claire McCaskill. The ad, featuring Michael J. Fox, diagnosed with a early-onset form of Parkinson’s Disease, clearly shows him suffering the worst effects of the disorder. Within a few hours after the ad went up on the McCaskill website, it had already been viewed hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of times. People are emailing the link to the ad (conveniently provided below the video window, to spur on viral distribution) all around the country, and likely throughout the world. “All politics is local,” Fox says. “But it’s not always the case.” This, in a nutshell, describes both the political and the media landscapes of the 21st-century. Nothing can be kept in a box. Everything escapes.

Twenty-five years ago, in The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler predicted the “demassification of media.” Looking at the ever-multiplying number of magazines and television channels, Toffler predicted a time when the mass market fragmented utterly, into an atomic polity, entirely composed of individuals. Writing before the Web (and before the era of the personal computer) he offered no technological explanation for how demassification would come to pass. Yet the trend lines seemed obvious.

The network has grown to cover every corner of the planet in the quarter-century since the publication of The Third Wave – over two billion mobile phones, and nearly a billion networked computers. A third of the world can be reached, and – more significantly – can reach out. Photographs of bombings in the London Underground, captured on mobile phone cameras, reach Flickr before they’re broadcast on the BBC. Islamic insurgents in Iraq videotape, encode and upload their IED attacks to filesharing networks. China fights an losing battle to restrict the free flow of information – while its citizens buy more mobile phones, every year, than the total number ever purchased in the United States. Give individuals a network, and – sooner, rather than later – they’ll become broadcasters.

One final, and crucial technological element completes the transition into the era of demassification – the release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer version 7.0. Long delayed, this most important of all web browsers finally includes support for RSS – the technology behind “feeds.” Suddenly, half a billion PC users can access the enormous wealth of individually-produced and individually-tailored news resources which have grown up over the last five years. But they can also create their own feeds, either by aggregating resources they’ve found elsewhere, or by creating new ones. The revolution that began with Gutenberg is now nearly complete; while the Web turned the network into a printing press, RSS gives us the ability to hyperdistribute publications so that anyone, anywhere, can reach everyone, everywhere.

Now all is dissolution. The mainstream media will remain potent for some time, centers for the creation of content, but they must now face the rise of the amateurs: a battle of hundreds versus billions. To compete, the media must atomize, delivering discrete chunks of content through every available feed. They will be forced to move from distribution to seduction: distribution has been democratized, so only the seduction of salience will carry their messages around the network. But the amateurs are already masters of this game, having grown up in an environment where salience forms the only selection pressure. This is the time of the amateur, and this is their chosen battlefield. The outcome is inevitable. Deck chairs, meet Titanic.

I.

We are each, in our own ways, experts on something. The great among us might have expertise across several domains, but every one of us has a passion, a hobby, a predilection, into which we pour tens of thousands of hours of (generally) unpaid work. These passions define us to our peers, far more than any simple explanation of what we do to earn a living. Furthermore, these passions help us select our peers: we are more likely to spend time with individuals who share our obsessions. Nor are these passions singular, as they invariably present themselves in a multiplicity: family and home repair and computers and cinema. As our passions wax and wane, this multiplicity constantly rearranges itself, weighted by the interests of the moment.

We can declare our passion by attending meetings, visiting websites, purchasing material goods, and so forth. These are the outward signs of an inward state. Just by observation, it is possible for one person to learn of another’s passions. Where your heart is, there your feet will follow. Where are you spending your time? What are you doing with that time? Time, as the ultimate currency of the 21st century, represents the atomic unit of attention. Our attention is absorbed by the objects which fascinate us – our passions expressed.

It is possible – and relatively easy – to monitor an individual’s attention. In the context of the online world, it’s actually harder to ignore attention than to monitor it. Every web server, every chat room, and every blog keeps detailed records of who was there, when, and for how long. These records are maintained for the benefit of the provider of the service, but, since this information is an essential part of the data shadow of the individual, generated by their activities, it would also benefit the individual if this information could be fed back to them.

Although the individual generates a data shadow, this information is normally inaccessible to the individual; there are no mechanisms in place for the individual to store this information, nor any well-developed techniques for the individual to analyze this information for their own benefit. Yet, in the few situations where this information is put to use – Amazon.com’s recommendations being an outstanding example (adapted from Pattie Maes’ “Firefly” project at the MIT Media Lab) – an individual can improve the online experience enormously. A small investment in data analysis can produce enormous returns.

II.

Analysis of an individual’s data shadow can be treated as a type of metadata; that is, information about information. Although Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has been preaching about the importance of metadata since its earliest days, only in the last 24 months has metadata has emerged as a major developmental focus in online services. Metadata has become the defining feature of “Web2.0”, most often implemented through “tagging.” Tagging allows an individual – or, in rarer cases, an algorithm – to assign semantic keywords to any particular piece of information – a clip of video, a URL, a blog entry, etc. These tags do not reside in the data, but rather, sit in a “cloud” around the data, creating an envelope of context for data which, in isolation, has no specific meaning.

The two most familiar examples of tagging in use today are the social link sharing site del.icio.us, and the photo sharing site Flickr. Each allows the individual to provide an arbitrary set of keywords – “tags” – which are thereafter permanently associated with a link or image. Thus, the individual’s continued interaction with these services gradually generates a second-order set of metadata, the total set of tags created by an individual, which has come to be known as a “folksonomy”, that is, a user-generated taxonomy.

Tags have become instrumental in the individual’s quest to find specific information inside the riotous wealth of information presented by the Internet. Given that most individuals will create tags that are, more often than not, similar to those created by other individuals, folksonomies tend toward isomorphism: it is likely that we will use the same tags to describe the same things. del.icio.us actually performs an analysis of folksonomies, presenting a list of tags from the collective folksonomy when a link is being recorded in the system – you can use the tags selected by others to tag a link. Furthermore, del.icio.us presents your entire “tag cloud” – the set of all tags you have ever generated – when you tag a link, making it easy to keep to a regular folksonomy. A regular user of del.icio.us quickly develops a rich folksonomy (my own runs to several hundred keywords, from “ABC” to “Zen”), and this metadata about metadata has value in itself, which is, at present, completely unutilized.

III.

What would happen if we took a community of users – who have self-selected themselves around a common interest, such as travel, or sport, or the existence of extraterrestrial intelligences – and analyzed their tag clouds? In the case of each individual within the community, it would reveal their specific passions: this one loves Bali, that one the West Coast Eagles, and another, the Zeta Reticulans. This is valuable information, and can be used to greatly improve the experience of each of these users. Taking it to the next logical step, what would happen if you analyzed the tag clouds collectively, searching for common threads across members of a community? Here you’d find the communities of interest within a community: some people are obsessed with Asia, others with Rugby Union, still others with abduction experiences. There’s a high degree of likelihood that this analysis would closely mirror the communication affinities within these communities: that is, individuals with a high degree of isomorphism in their respective folksonimies would be more likely to be in communication with one another. When this tag cloud analysis is compared to the actual record of communication within the community, it should show not only who is talking to whom – reinforcing the comparative analysis of the tag clouds – but it should also clearly indicate who should be talking to whom.

Comparative analysis of folksonomies within any community will reveal the total knowledge encompassed by that community; this is the first step to establishing systems which allow individuals within that community to quickly and easily connect with others who possess some specific knowledge, or who have some specific need for knowledge. When an individual can immediately find the “go to” people with expertise in any specific area of interest, that individual’s effectiveness is multiplied. This straightforward approach will create communities of collective hyperintelligence, where the collective value of the community’s knowledge is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

It remains only to put this thesis to the test. The pieces are in place to make it all work: we have sufficient capability to record and store metadata, we have the ability – if not the will – to expose this metadata to the user, and we’ve begun to develop techniques to analyze this metadata. We need to move from analysis of the individual to an analysis of the collective, laying the exposed individual’s data shadow side-by-side with other co-communicants, to reveal the hidden structures of knowledge and expertise within the community. Once exposed, these structures can be reified with existing communications technologies, amplifying the expertise of the entire community. If this thesis is correct, communities which leverage their metadata to improve their effectiveness should quickly leap ahead of their peer communities in almost every endeavor. Passion, meet acceleration.

I

There is a phrase that rings out across the meeting rooms of Silicon Valley so frequently it has an almost comic quality. Comic, because all replies to this phrase are lies, damned lies, and spreadsheets. Yet this phrase has become the axis mundi, around which orbits the enormous influence of California’s venture capital community.

“What’s your business model?”

It seems an innocent question. Businesses, after all, must have some mechanism in place to earn money. Manufacturers make things. Retailers sell things. Creatives license things. All very neat, straightforward, and – through the clarity of hindsight – absolutely simple. Yet radio had no business model for almost 20 years after its invention. Commercial radio did not emerge until the mid-1920s, when advertising and sponsorship drove the development of an industry. The personal computer, born in 1975, had no real business model behind it until VisiCalc was released in 1979. Commodore, Apple and Tandy sold tens of thousands of computers to hobbyists, but the spreadsheet created an industry.

This story can be told again and again. There’s that famous line from the founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, who predicted the market for computers in the “few tens of units, worldwide.” Or HP’s executives knocking back Steve Wozniak’s suggestion that HP manufacture a personal computer – they didn’t see the market for it. (HP is now the second largest producer of personal computers, worldwide.) We could blame these ridiculous miscalculations on a lack of foresight, the peculiar human ability to imagine an eternal present, where nothing ever changes. But time is change. Nothing remains the same. Novelty emerges continuously, often from the most unexpected quarters.

So why, then, when confronted with something new, does anyone ask, “What’s your business model?” How, with any confidence, could anyone know? Here’s the uncomfortable truth: no one knows. Instead, entrepreneurs lie, dissemble, and build spreadsheets which, like the fabric of the universe, emerge from random quantum noise, hoping that no one can see through to the reality of the situation – nothing truly novel has a business model.

This makes entrepreneurship less an exercise in creativity than salesmanship: it is up to the entrepreneur to convince venture capitalists that yes, this wholly novel invention is well-understood, and revenues from it can be calculated using a formula. While charismatic entrepreneurs can make that statement seem believable, they can not make it true.

This friction between novelty and predictability forms the essential feature of a “disruptive” technological innovation; novelty must emerge before its benefits can be forecast. An invention, in its earliest days, has not grown into its full properties. We do not ask of children, “What’s your business model?” Why, then, do we demand an answer when confronted by novelty?

II

We have just passed through an era of failed Internet business models. In the explosion of novelty which followed the advent of the Web in the mid-1990s, the charisma of the Web led many venture capitalists to behave irrationally, predicting too much upside for innovations which simply were not that novel. When – as was bound to happen – most of these businesses failed, the venture capitalists resolved to do better next time, and thus the mantra – “What’s your business model?” – began its steady echo throughout Silicon Valley.

In other cases, the causes for failure can be laid directly at the feet of these same venture capitalists, who forced immature innovations into “exit strategies” – either through acquisition or an initial public offering. But innovation, like human maturity, can not be hurried along. Grow up too quickly, and a lifetime of therapy follows. Push an innovation where it doesn’t belong, and it fails, catastrophically. Time is needed; time to nurture the innovation, and time for careful observation. That observation will tell the entrepreneur how the innovation is being used by the world. Before that happens – and it will normally take some years – any attempt to “guide” the innovation will thwart its true potential.

Novelty is a constructivist process. Like a child, intent on learning about the world by playing in the world, the novel innovation must be free to explore its own capabilities. It does this through the agency of many individuals and organizations who adopt the innovation for their own ends. The role for the entrepreneur (and the venture capitalist) during this phase of development is simply to keep the innovation in an enriched environment, constantly introducing new scenarios and communities who might benefit from the innovation. As William Gibson wrote, “The street finds its own use for things, uses its makers never intended.” Entrepreneurs must surrender an innovation to the world-at-large if they expect that innovation to come into its own. Innovations nurture their own language, coming into being hand-in-hand with the words that make them apprehensible, sensible, and predictable. Only after this has happened can any exploration of business models begin.

III

In recent months I’ve talked to individuals working to revitalize the film industry in Australia. Their approach? Think up ways to make filmmaking look like less of a gamble than it really – always – is. So they’ll bombard investors with spreadsheets, surveys, financial models, in an effort to answer the eternal question – “Will I make my money back?” Most films lose money in their theatrical release – here in Australia, and everywhere else – but that hasn’t kept the studios from earning lots of money; the money’s not in the films themselves, but in all the ancillary licensing and distribution deals enabled by the films. That’s not a business model that emerged overnight: the motion picture studios nearly collapsed in the 1970s, as they foraged around for a business model that could thrive in a world thoroughly colonized by television. Eventually, after the success of Star Wars and the VCR (which the studios fought, until it emerged that the VCR would make them more money than they’d ever earned in theatrical release), the business model became clear: make intellectual properties and license the hell out of them.

Why would the technology industry insist on a form of surety guaranteed to no other industry? Why would venture capitalists demand something they know, in their heart of hearts, is all smoke and mirrors? Why can’t they simply say, “We don’t care about business models. We’re looking for novel innovations with a capacity to emerge into successful businesses.” Part of it comes down to training: most venture capitalists have MBAs, and that education has made them painfully aware of the difference between successful and unsuccessful business models. Furthermore, having been so badly burned in the Web 1.0 bubble, venture capitalists are naturally suspicious of anything that doesn’t seem immediately substantial. Here we see the paradox: venture capitalists haven’t the discernment to know if, in the long term, any innovation has substance. No one does.

We need to enter an era where we simply do not care about business models. Entrepreneurs need to build something, get it out there, and let the street find its own use for it. They have to sit back, listen intently, and let things emerge on their own, in their own good time. That’s the lesson of Flickr, which started as a game, and ended as part of Yahoo! That’s the lesson of del.icio.us, which started as a project to allow individuals to share their ever-growing lists of bookmarks, before it, too, became part of Yahoo! And that’s the lesson of Wikipedia, which began as an alternative to a locked-up Encyclopedia Britannica, and matured to become the 16th most-visited site on the Internet. None of these, in their earliest incarnations, portrayed the potential of what they would become. The street had not yet found its own use for them. In hindsight, everything seems perfectly obvious. But an innovation, raw and new, can not be judged on its merits or its models: only the sunshine of time and the rain of the street can grow value from novelty.