Ahead of the Crowd

After adding political celebrities to the show, Web 2.0 hype scaled a new peak last week. Tim O’Reilly’s meme for “harnessing collective intelligence” and building systems “so that they get smarter the more people use them” seemed prescient when it arrived in 2004. But Web 2.0 became a “piece of jargon” which “nobody even knows what it means” according to web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, who grew bored of it two years ago. Now Web 2.0 has jumped the shark.

Listen to what environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore said at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit last week:

Web 2.0 has to have a purpose… to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our relationship to this planet and the imminent danger and opportunity that we face because of the radical transformation of the relationship between human beings and the Earth. We have everything we need to save it…

Let me translate: Web 2.0 is about saving the Earth. From ourselves. Endorsing Gore’s rhetoric, O’Reilly gushed, “Who knew that you were the guru of Web 2.0 as well as global warming?” The divisive global warming political debate has no middle ground. By cranking the dial to the left and ripping off the knob, O’Reilly now adds partisan politics to the long list of things Web 2.0 stands for. When a buzzword stands for everything, it stands for nothing.

I write about technology, not partisan politics. O’Reilly is following a political path, which I respect, but I cannot endorse. Our blog’s former tag line, “Cognition, Coordination, and Cooperation in the Web 2.0 Era” is history, not just because the Web 2.0 meme has lost its mojo, but because politicizing Web technology is the wrong way to go.

I ran into Vinny the barber on Friday at Starbucks and sat down with him over a latte to ponder the state of the Net. He had stumbled upon the Twitter web site, and wondered what was happening. As he put it, “I thought connecting with others to make better social and political decisions using the wisdom of the crowds was such a good idea. Now we have behavior that seems to have no social purpose whatsoever, merely generating stupendous amounts of inane chatter about personal events no one cares about in the first place. What’s going on?”

Taking a long pull at my latte, I gave his question some thought, and came up with several possible explanations, none of which consoled him. First, it seemed to me that pushing social networking to its extremes is by no means unprecedented; small-town behavior, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, has been doing that for centuries. Nor did I feel that the fact that some site produces such trivia is an indication that social networking is doomed; on the continuum of group behavior there are always extremes, which tend to wash out over time.

These remarks did nothing for Vinny’s despair over the deterioration of social networking, so I tried again, recalling Michael H. Goldhaber’s article on The Attention Economy and the Net. Goldhaber argues that the product of the Net that carries value is not information (of which there is a glut) but attention, which can be viewed as existing in inverse proportion to the amount of information. But that was no help either, for I wondered how any of these non-stop personal situation reports like Enjoying the weekend with family… Just got a great $400 haircut could generate much attention for the typical twitterer.

I finally gave it my best shot, arguing that not all such services would be worthless. For instance, imagine a service that reports your child’s whereabouts at any time. In spite of the privacy concerns, as a parent who has lived through his child’s struggle for independence, I have been torn between the desire to let her make her own way and the need to protect her if necessary.

Vinny seemed mollified, if not encouraged, by these observations, but time will tell whether social networking will produce useful results or just chatter.

Collective Intelligence is the theory of collaboration that forms the core of Web 2.0. Authors Eric S. Raymond (The Cathedral and the Bazaar) and James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds) assert that (under the right conditions) better decisions and greater productivity will result from more people contributing their minds to the problem-solving process. From our perspective, the story of Collective Intelligence starts in the classical antiquity era and follows a path of rich intellectual development. Through the lens of history, we’ll see that the theory only makes sense in economic systems that offer equal opportunity to all.

You might think of Web 2.0 collaboration as a 21st century innovation, but its principles date back to ancient Greece. The classical era of Athens featured democratic institutions that ruled for over 500 years. The marketplace (agora) formed the center of civic life and the main communications hub. Athens’ rise in economic power through sea trade fueled the growth of democracy, which created political and economic rights for everyone except women, slaves, and aliens. Every man over age 18 who had completed military duty, regardless of wealth, could speak and vote in the Assembly, which set the laws. Just as economic growth and democracy emancipated Athens from the rule of tyrants, the Web today seems to offer individuals a level playing field against corporate and media interests.

Another interesting parallel between Athenian democracy and the Web is representation. Each citizen represented his own interests directly (with no elected representatives) and the modern Web similarly minimizes the need for intermediaries. Drawbacks of this model include the potential of extreme behavior. For example, Athenians had the annual opportunity to ostracize and banish unpopular people, somewhat like being voted off the island in a modern-day Survivor television episode.

Fast forward to English philosopher John Locke in the 17th century, when the ideals of economic freedom and political equality converged again. According to him, the individual is the ultimate source of political power. Government’s right to rule comes only from power delegated by its citizens, rather than the other way around. The theory of private property holds that a worker owns the value of his own labor. Locke’s theories of liberty form two preconditions needed to stimulate collective intelligence, not to mention their role in sparking the French and American revolutions.

Thinking on classical liberalism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by such American luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison further solidified respect for the collective wisdom. Even the inverted form, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time,” attributed to Abraham Lincoln, captures the essence of collective intelligence.