The main reason why Kelly wrote What Technology Wants became clear to me only after I looked at his review of his own book, which was conveniently published on one of his blogs:
Taken together these giga-trends inform the development of technology investment and the choice technological expressions today. These “wants” of technology provide a long-horizon framework for business—your business. I’ll be doing as many talks at companies and organizations about “what technology wants” as I can in the coming months.
Kelly is not the first technology guru to make a living by selling advice to corporations. But it is hard to imagine the previous generation of serious thinkers about technology—the likes of Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford and John Dewey—moonlighting as corporate advisers to Danone and Halliburton. In contrast, most of today’s technology gurus-from Kevin Kelly to Clay Shirky to Douglas Rushkoff—take special pride in publicizing how deeply embedded they are in the very industry that they are supposed to scrutinize. Perhaps this is what technology wants.
In the 1990s, when few businesses really knew what they were doing and the online population was small, putting up a forum that allowed anyone to say anything seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t. People aren’t naturally well behaved; we’re well behaved in environments that reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. Conversation can be incredibly valuable where it works well and terrible where it works badly. We need to structure environments to promote the former and discourage the latter; anyone who wants to get value out of convening many minds has to create and maintain the shadow of the future, or else risk activating the witlessness of crowds. Clay Shirky ☀
Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow. Clay Shirky ☀
Everyone’s waiting to see what will happen with the paywall – it’s the big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial calculation, I don’t think the numbers add up. Here’s what worries me about the paywall. When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they’re critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn’t want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times. Clay Shirky ☀
Years ago companies like P&G, Coca Cola and the other manufacturers would dictate to the stores that sold their goods how to do so, mandating marketing campaigns and product positioning. But now the balance of power has now shifted closer to the customer - to Wal-Mart and the retailers, who send Coca Cola back to change the taste of their drink and who tell P&G to pay for the privilege of managing Wal-Mart’s shampoo shelves. Amazon and Google are trying to become the Wal-Mart of the cultural world, increasingly dictating terms to their suppliers. But while the stories of Amazon and Google are part of today’s reality, they are not stories Clay wants to tell because they don’t fit his agenda. He would rather stick with Charlie and the finger biting. And that populism is a problem, partly because for all his promotion of the underdog Clay ends up consistently on side of the free market and against collective efforts by working people to gain a respectable source of income. Wikibollocks: The Shirky Rules ☀
As the philosopher John Searle describes social facts, they rely on the formulation X counts as Y in C — in this case, Wikipedia comes to count as an acceptable source of answers for a particular group. There’s a spectrum of authority from “Good enough to settle a bar bet” to “Evidence to include in a dissertation defense”, and most uses of algorithmic authority right now cluster around the inebriated end of that spectrum, but the important thing is that it is a spectrum, that algorithmic authority is on it, and that current forces seem set to push it further up the spectrum to an increasing number and variety of groups that regard these kinds of sources as authoritative. There are people horrified by this prospect, but the criticism that Wikipedia, say, is not an “authoritative source” is an attempt to end the debate by hiding the fact that authority is a social agreement, not a culturally independent fact. Authority is as a authority does. Clay Shirky ☀
I think a bad thing is going to happen, right? And it’s amazing to me how much, in a conversation conducted by adults, the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place. To use the historical analogy from Eisenstein, from The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, there was a long hundred years between the Protestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia. And that was a hundred years in which people almost literally did not know what to think. The old institutions were visibly not functioning any longer, but the nation-state as a new organizing principle was not yet in place. And those were, for many people, not a great hundred years. So I have no idea how long this transition will take. But I don’t think that some degree of failure and decay is avoidable. I think our goal should be to minimize the depth of that trough, to constrain that trough to the areas we can constrain it to, and to hasten its end. But I don’t think we can get away with a simple and rapid alternative to what we enjoyed in the 20th century — in part because the accidents that held that landscape together in the 20th century were so crazily contingent. Clay Shirky ☀
We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Clay Shirky ☀
Newspapers, even if every single one of them acted in collusion, cannot establish a monopoly on news. The main source of value for newspapers is reporting on events in the real world, and since those events can’t be copyrighted, and can be reported on by radio stations and television programs and non-profits and webloggers and twitterers and and and, news online will always be a competitive business in a way music is not. Clay Shirky ☀
Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style
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