In a recent presentation, entrepreneur, angel, and Googler Joe Kraus provided a good overview of the costs of our “culture of distraction” and how smartphones are ratcheting those costs up. Early in the talk he shows, in stark graphical terms, how people’s patterns of internet use change when they get a smartphone. Essentially, a tool becomes an environment.

For those of you who are text-biased, here’s a transcript.

[Google Doodle from Nov. 30, 2011]

For my sins, I’ve been reading some marketing brochures – pdfs, actually – from an outfit called Lithium. Lithium is a consulting company that helps businesses design programs to take advantage of the social web, to channel the energies of online communities toward bottom lines. “We do great things and have a playful mindset while doing it,” Lithium says of itself, exhibiting a characteristically innovative approach to grammar. It likes the bright colors and rounded fonts that have long been the hallmarks of Web 2.0’s corporate identity program:

One of the main thrusts of Lithium’s business, as the above clipping suggests, is to reduce its clients’ customer service costs by tapping into the social web’s free labor pool. This, according to a recent report from the Economist’s Babbage blog, is called “unsourcing.” Instead of paying employees or contractors to answer customers’ questions or provide them with technical support, you offload the function to the customers themselves. They do the work for free, and you pocket the savings. As Babbage explains:

Some of the biggest brands in software, consumer electronics and telecoms have now found a workforce offering expert advice at a fraction of the price of even the cheapest developing nation, who also speak the same language as their customers, and not just in the purely linguistic sense. Because it is their customers themselves. “Unsourcing”, as the new trend has been dubbed, involves companies setting up online communities to enable peer-to-peer support among users. … This happens either on the company’s own website or on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and the helpers are generally not paid anything for their efforts.

If Tom Sawyer were alive today and living in Silicon Valley, he might well be bigger than Zuck.

Unsourcing reveals that the digital-sharecropping model of low-cost online production has applications beyond media creation and curation. Businesses of all stripes have opportunities to replace paid labor with play labor. Call it functional sharecropping.

As Lithium makes clear, customer-service communities don’t just pop up out of nowhere. You have to cultivate them. You have to create the right platform to capture the products of the labor, and you have to offer a set of incentives that will inspire the community to do your bidding. You also have to realize that, as is typical of social networks, a tiny fraction of the members are probably going to do the bulk of the work. So the challenge is to identify your star sharecroppers (or “superfans,” as Lithium calls them), entice them to contribute a good amount of time to the effort, and keep them motivated with non-monetary rewards. That’s where gamification comes in. “Gamification” refers to the use of game techniques – competition, challenges, awards, point systems, “level up” advances, and the like – to get people to do what you want them to do. Lithium describes it like this:

Humans love games. There’s all kinds of math and science behind why, but the bottom line is – games are fun. Games provide an opportunity for us to enter a highly rewarding mental state where our challenges closely match our abilities. Renowned game designer, Jane McGonigal, writes that games offer us “blissful productivity” – the chance to improve, to advance, and to level up. If you’re trying to get your social customers to post product reviews, help other customers solve problems, come up with new solutions, provide sales advice, or help you innovate new products, introducing games – the chance for blissful productivity – into the experience can provide the right type of incentives that pave the way to higher, more sustained interactions.

Blissful productivity: that sounds nice, doesn’t it? I mean, given the choice between bliss and a paycheck, I would go with bliss every time. Believe it or not, though, there are some critics who see gamification as manipulative and even grotesque, a debasement of the innocence of games. One of those party-poopers, Rob Horning, puts it this way:

Gamification is awful for many reasons, not least in the way it seeks to transform us into atomized laboratory rats, reduce us to the sum total of our incentivized behaviors. But it also increases the pressure to make all game playing occur within spaces subject to capture; it seeks to supply the incentives to make games not about relaxation and escape and social connection but about data generation.

Chill out already. I think people like Horning really need to have more bright colors and rounded fonts in their lives. “Games introduce addictive fun,” says Lithium. And what’s wrong with addictive fun when it brings both blissful productivity and demonstrable cost savings? One thing Lithium doesn’t point out is that online gamification is also a great way to recruit kids into performing some free labor for your business. After all, isn’t the ideal online technical support superfan a geeky, game-loving 13-year-old boy with a lot of time on his hands? And since you’re paying the tyke with badges rather than cash, you can totally avoid that weird grey area of child labor.

It seems pretty clear to me that gamification-fueled unsourcing is a great breakthrough for both business and the social web. It not only allows companies to trim their head counts and cut their labor costs; it also spreads the altruistic peer-production model to more sectors of the economy and puts a little more bliss into people’s lives. It’s a win-win all around. Except, of course, for the chump who – n00b! – loses his job.

In 1993, the band Cracker released a terrific album called Kerosene Hat – the opening track, “Low,” was an alternative radio staple – and I became a fan. I remember checking out the group’s message board on America Online at the time and being pleasantly surprised to find the two founding members – David Lowery and Johnny Hickman – making frequent postings. Lowery, who had earlier been in Camper Van Beethoven, turned out to be one of the more tech-savvy rock musicians. He’d been trained as a mathematician and was as adept with computers as he was with guitars. When the Web came along, he and his bands soon had a fairly sophisticated network of sites, hosting fan conversations, selling music, promoting gigs. In addition to playing, Lowery runs an indie label, operates a recording studio, produces records for other bands, teaches music finance at the University of Georgia, and is married to a concert promoter. He knows the business, and much of his career has been spent fighting with traditional record companies.

That’s all by way of background to a remarkable talk that Lowery gave in February at the SF MusicTech Summit, a transcript of which has been posted at The Trichordist (thanks to Slashdot for the pointer). Lowery offers a heartfelt and incisive critique of the effects of the internet and, in particular, the big tech companies that now act as aggregators and mediators of music, a critique that dismantles the starry-eyed assumption that the net has liberated musicians from servitude to record companies. The net, he argues, has merely replaced the Old Boss with a New Boss, and, as it turns out, the New Boss is happy to skim money from the music business without investing any capital or sharing any risk with musicians. The starving artist is hungrier than ever.

When Napster came along, Lowery says, he immediately understood that bands would “lose sales to large-scale sharing” but he was nevertheless optimistic that “through more efficient distribution systems and disintermediation we artists would net more”:

So like many other artists I embraced the new paradigm and waited for the flow of revenue to the artists to increase. It never did. In fact everywhere I look the trend seemed to be negative. Less money for touring. Less money for recording. Less money for promotion and publicity. The old days of the evil record labels started to seem less bad. It started to seem downright rosy …

Was the old record label system better? Sadly I think the answer turns out to be yes. Things are worse. This was not really what I was expecting. I’d be very happy to be proved wrong. I mean it’s hard for me to sing the praises of the major labels. I’ve been in legal disputes with two of the three remaining major labels. But sadly I think I’m right. And the reason is quite unexpected. It’s seems the Bad Old Major Record Labels “accidentally” shared too much revenue and capital through their system of advances. Also the labels ”accidentally” assumed most of the risk. This is contrasted with the new digital distribution system where some of the biggest players assume almost no risk and share zero capital.

Lowery also points out how the centralization of traffic at massive sites like Facebook and YouTube has in recent years made it even harder for musicians to make a living. The big sites have actually been a force for re-intermediation, stealing visitors (and sales) away from band sites:

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter ate our web traffic. It started with Myspace and got worse when Facebook added band pages. Somewhere around 2008 every artist I know experienced a dramatic collapse in traffic to their websites. The Internet seems to have a tendency towards monopoly. All those social interactions that were happening on artists’ websites aggregated on Facebook. Facebook pages made many bands’ community pages irrelevant. …

Most artists I know now mostly use their websites to manage their Facebook and Twitter presence. There are band-oriented [content management] services that automatically integrate with Facebook and Twitter. They turn your website news, tour dates and blog posts into Facebook events, Facebook posts and Tweets. Most websites function more as a backend control panel for your web presence. Yes, some of us sell swag and downloads on our websites but unless you are a really really popular band, or you have a major record label that can help you promote your website, it’s generally a few hundred of the most ardent fans that ever spend anytime on a band’s website …

A similar situation occurs with the process of selling music online. Our fans already have an iTunes account. They already have a credit card on file with Amazon. That small hassle of getting your credit card out of your wallet to buy music directly from the artist website is a giant hurdle that most people will not jump over.

It’s a long piece, and if you’re interested in the unexpected economic effects of the net on creative professions, you owe it to yourself to read it in full, whatever your views are. I’ll just share a little bit more from the end:

I think I’ve demonstrated how important it was to the old system that record labels shared risk and invested capital in the creation of music. And that by doing this the record labels “accidentally” shared more revenue with the artists. But I’ve yet to explain why it is that The New Boss refuses to share risk and invest in content creation. I mean the old record labels eventually saw that it was in their long-term interest to do so.

My only explanation is that there is just something fundamentally wrong with how many in the tech industry look at the world. They are deluded somehow. Freaks. Taking no risk and paying nothing to the content creators is built into the collective psyche of the Tech industry. They do not value content. They only see THEIR services as valuable. They are the Masters of the Universe. They bring all that is good. Content magically appears on their blessed networks. …

Not only is the New Boss worse than the Old Boss. The New Boss creeps me out.

“If you could choose only one of the following two inventions, indoor plumbing or the Internet, which would you choose?” -Robert J. Gordon

Justin Fox is the latest pundit to ring the “innovation ain’t what it used to be” bell. “Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century,” he writes, summing up the argument, “the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live.” Fox has a lot of company. He points to sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, who worries that the Internet, far from spurring a great burst of creativity, may have actually put innovation “on hold for a generation.” Fox also cites economist Tyler Cowen, who has argued that, recent techno-enthusiasm aside, we’re living in a time of innovation stagnation. He could also have mentioned tech powerbroker Peter Thiel, who believes that large-scale innovation has gone dormant and that we’ve entered a technological “desert.” Thiel blames the hippies:

Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost.

The original inspiration for such grousing – about progress, not about hippies – came from Robert J. Gordon, a Northwestern University economist whose 2000 paper “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?” included a damning comparison of the flood of inventions that occurred a century ago with the seeming trickle that we see today. Consider the new products invented in just the ten years between 1876 and 1886: internal combustion engine, electric lightbulb, electric transformer, steam turbine, electric railroad, automobile, telephone, movie camera, phonograph, linotype, roll film (for cameras), dictaphone, cash register, vaccines, reinforced concrete, flush toilets. The typewriter had arrived a few years earlier and the punch-card tabulator would appear a few years later. And then, in short order, came airplanes, radio, air conditioning, the vacuum tube, jet aircraft, television, refrigerators and a raft of other home appliances, as well as revolutionary advances in manufacturing processes. (And let’s not forget The Bomb.) The conditions of life changed utterly between 1890 and 1950, observed Gordon. Between 1950 and today? Not so much.

So why is innovation less impressive today? Maybe Thiel is right, and it’s the fault of hippies, liberals, and other degenerates. Or maybe it’s crappy education. Or a lack of corporate investment in research. Or short-sighted venture capitalists. Or overaggressive lawyers. Or imagination-challenged entrepreneurs. Or maybe it’s a catastrophic loss of mojo. But none of these explanations makes much sense. The aperture of science grows ever wider, after all, even as the commercial and reputational rewards for innovation grow ever larger and the ability to share ideas grows ever stronger. Any barrier to innovation should be swept away by such forces.

Let me float an alternative explanation: There has been no decline in innovation; there has just been a shift in its focus. We’re as creative as ever, but we’ve funneled our creativity into areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs. And we’ve done that for entirely rational reasons. We’re getting precisely the kind of innovation that we desire – and that we deserve.

My idea – and it’s a rough one – is that there’s a hierarchy of innovation that runs in parallel with Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. Maslow argued that human needs progress through five stages, with each new stage requiring the fulfillment of lower-level, or more basic, needs. So first we need to meet our most primitive Physiological needs, and that frees us to focus on our needs for Safety, and once our needs for Safety are met, we can attend to our needs for Belongingness, and then on to our needs for personal Esteem, and finally to our needs for Self-Actualization. If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy as an inflexible structure, with clear boundaries between its levels, it falls apart. Our needs are messy, and the boundaries between them are porous. A caveman probably pursued self-esteem and self-actualization, to some degree, just as we today spend effort seeking to fulfill our physical needs. But if you look at the hierarchy as a map of human focus, or of emphasis, then it makes sense – and indeed seems to be born out by history. In short: The more comfortable you are, the more time you spend thinking about yourself.

If progress is shaped by human needs, then general shifts in needs would also bring shifts in the nature of technological innovation. The tools we invent would move through the hierarchy of needs, from tools that help safeguard our bodies on up to tools that allow us to modify our internal states, from tools of survival to tools of the self. Here’s my crack at what the hierarchy of innovation looks like (click on the image to enlarge it):

The focus, or emphasis, of innovation moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think fire), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think steam engine), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac).

As with Maslow’s hierarchy, you shouldn’t look at my hierarchy as a rigid one. Innovation today continues at all five levels. But the rewards, both monetary and reputational, are greatest at the highest level (Technologies of the Self), which has the effect of shunting investment, attention, and activity in that direction. We’re already physically comfortable, so getting a little more physically comfortable doesn’t seem particularly pressing. We’ve become inward looking, and what we crave are more powerful tools for modifying our internal state or projecting that state outward. An entrepreneur has a greater prospect of fame and riches if he creates, say, a popular social-networking tool than if he creates a faster, more efficient system for mass transit. The arc of innovation, to put a dark spin on it, is toward decadence.

One of the consequences is that, as we move to the top level of the innovation hierarchy, the inventions have less visible, less transformative effects. We’re no longer changing the shape of the physical world or even of society, as it manifests itself in the physical world. We’re altering internal states, transforming the invisible self. Not surprisingly, when you step back and take a broad view, it looks like stagnation – it looks like nothing is changing very much. That’s particularly true when you compare what’s happening today with what happened a hundred years ago, when our focus on Technologies of Prosperity was peaking and our focus on Technologies of Leisure was also rapidly increasing, bringing a highly visible transformation of our physical circumstances.

If the current state of progress disappoints you, don’t blame innovation. Blame yourself.

I was pleased to see that Yochai Benkler launched a blog on Monday – and, since the first (and as yet only) post was a response to my claim of victory in the Carr-Benkler Wager, I think I can even take a bit of credit for inspiring the professor to join the hurly-burly of the blogosphere. Welcome, Yochai! Long may you blog!

I fear, however, that no one explained to Yochai the concept of Comments. You see, on Monday I scribbled out a fairly long reply to his post, and submitted it through his comment form. I was hoping, as a long-time social producer myself, to spur a good, non-price-incentivized online conversation. But, now five days later, my comment has not appeared on his blog. In fact, no comments have appeared. Perhaps it’s a technical glitch, but since Yochai’s blog is one of many Harvard Law blogs, I have to think that the Comment form is working and that the fault lies with the blogger. (I even resubmitted my comment, just in case there was a glitch with the first submission.)

Memo to Yochai: social production begins at home.

Fortunately, I saved a copy of my comment. So, while waiting for Yochai to get around to tending his comment stream, I will post it here:

Yochai,

Thanks for your considered reply. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to discover that I disagree with your claim that you’ve won our wager. I think you’re doing more than a little cherry-picking here, both in choosing categories and in defining categories. Most important, you’re shortchanging the actual content that circulates online, which I would consider the most important factor in diagnosing the nature of production. For example, you highlight “music distribution” and “music funding,” but you ignore the music itself (the important thing), which continues to be dominated by price-incentivized production – even on p-to-p networks, the vast majority of what’s traded is music produced by paid professionals. The same goes, for example, for news reporting, where peer production is a minuscule slice of the pie. Where is the great expansion of the peer production model that you promised six years ago? Where are all the Wikipedias in other realms of informational goods? The fact is, the spread of social production just hasn’t happened. Even open-source software – your primary example of social production – has moved away from peer production and toward price-incentivized production. I don’t say that this is necessarily a good thing, I just say that it’s the reality of what’s happening.

Here’s my (quick and dirty) alternative rundown of whether the most influential sites in major categories of online activity are generally characterized by price-incentivized production (pi) or peer production (pp):

News reporting/writing: pi (relatively little pp)

News opinion: pi (Huff Post has mix, but shifting toward more pi, both by Huff Post paid staff and for others writing as paid employees of other organizations; other popular news opinion sites are dominantly pi)

News story discovery/aggregation: unclear (are Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon et al. really the most influential, or are they secondary to the editorial decision-making by sites like NY Times, WSJ, BBC, Guardian, Daily Mail, The Atlantic, and other traditional papers and magazines? I don’t think this is an easy one to figure out. My own sense is that traditional news organizations play a dominant role in shaping what news is seen and read online, though I acknowledge the importance of social production in the sharing of links to stories and the incorporation of social-production tools at traditional newspaper and magazine sites.)

General (non-news) web content discovery/aggregation: pp

Blogging: pi (big change from 2006)

Other writing: pi

Music (creation): pi

Music (discovery/aggregation): difficult to say, as a lot of sites (eg, YouTube) have mixed models, but I would give the edge to pi based on dominance of big retailing sites (iTunes, Amazon), big streaming sites (Spotify, Rhapsody), and artist and record company sites. Certainly since 2006, there’s been a shift toward commercial sites.

Photographs: pp

Video (creation): pi (with all due respect to YouTube amateurs, professionally produced TV shows, TV show clips, movies, movie clips, music videos, advertisements, now dominate online viewing through YouTube, Hulu, Netfllix, tv sites, newspaper sites, e.g. WSJ video, professional blog sites with video components, etc.

Radio/podcasting: pi

Recipes: pi

Charitable giving: pi (i.e., operated by paid staff)

Reviews: pp (a big, diffuse category that could be broken up in many ways, but I think overall pp dominates in use, if not influence)

How-to advice: pi

Encyclopedias: pp

E-books: pi (that goes for even self-published e-books)

Apps: pi

Games: pi

Advertising: pi (except classified advertising, which goes pp thanks to Craigslist)

Education and training: pi

Weather reports and forecasts: pi

Greeting cards and invitations: pi

Scholarship: pi

Political campaigns: pi (the social-networking hype that attended the first Obama campaign turned out to be overblown; campaigns continue to be professionally managed operations)

Pornography: pi (again, with all due respect to the intrepid amateurs)

The fact is that peer production hasn’t revolutionized models of content production online, even if we grant (as I do) that peer production continues to play an important (and occasionally dominant) role in some areas.

Social networking? Yes, social networking is, by definition, social networking, but even in what we define as social networking, do you really dispute that price-incentivized content is not playing an ever larger (rather than smaller) role? Here, to illustrate, are the Top 20 most popular Facebook pages as of the end of 2010 (most recent stats I could find):

1. Texas Hold’em Poker (Zynga page)

2. Facebook

3. Michael Jackson

4. Lady Gaga

5. Family Guy

6. YouTube

7. Eminem

8. Vin Diesel

9. Twilight Saga

10. Starbucks

11. Megan Fox

12. South Park

13. Coca-Cola

14. House (TV show)

15. Linkin Park

16. Barack Obama

17. Lil Wayne

18. Justin Bieber

19. Mafia Wars (Zynga)

20. Cristiano Ronaldo

Of the ten most viewed YouTube videos of all time (as of this month), nine are professional productions and only one (yes, it’s “Charlie Bit My Finger”) is a non-price-incentivized production. Even Twitter is far from a pure p-to-p site; many contributors contribute as part of their jobs. I think what we’re learning – and it’s hardly a surprise – is that when a for-profit corporation operates a social network, it becomes steadily more commercialized.

I don’t expect that I’ve convinced you that I’ve won the bet, but it sure would be nice if you would acknowledge the web’s shift, since 2006, to a medium ever more dominated by professionally produced content and ever more controlled by commercial interests, for better or for worse.

And welcome to blogging,

Nick

“You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it’s a slum.”
-Bruce Sterling

1

Hardware is a problem. It wears out. It breaks down. It is subject to physical forces. It is subject to entropy. It deteriorates. It decays. It fails. The moment of failure can’t be predicted, but what can be predicted is that the moment will come. Assemblies of atoms are doomed. Worse yet, the more components incorporated into a physical system – the more subassemblies that make up the assembly – the more points of failure the apparatus has and the more fragile it becomes.

This is an engineering problem. This is also a metaphysical problem.

2

One of Google’s great innovations in building the data centers that run its searches was to use software as a means of isolating each component of the system and hence of separating component failure from system failure. The networking software senses a component failure (a dying hard drive, say) and immediately bypasses the component, routing the work to another, healthy piece of hardware in the system. No single component matters; each is entirely dispensable and entirely disposable. Maintaining the system, at the hardware level, becomes a simple process of replacing failed parts with fresh ones. You hire a low-skilled worker, or make a robot, and when a component dies, the worker, or the robot, swaps it out with a good one.

Such a system requires smart software. It also requires cheap parts.

3

Executing an algorithm with a physical system is like putting a mind into a body.

4

Bruce Sterling gave an interesting speech

at a conference in 2009. He drew a distinction between two lifestyles that form the poles of our emerging “cultural temperament.” On the one end – the top end – you have Gothic High-Tech:

In Gothic High-Tech, you’re Steve Jobs. You’ve built an iPhone which is a brilliant technical innovation, but you also had to sneak off to Tennessee to get a liver transplant because you’re dying of something secret and horrible. And you’re a captain of American industry. You’re not some General Motors kinda guy. On the contrary, you’re a guy who’s got both hands on the steering wheel of a functional car. But you’re still Gothic High-Tech because death is waiting. And not a kindly death either, but a sinister, creeping, tainted wells of Silicon Valley kind of Superfund thing that steals upon you month by month, and that you have to hide from the public and from the bloggers and from the shareholders.

And then there’s the other end – the bottom end – which Sterling calls Favela Chic. These are the multitudinous “play-laborers” of the virtual realm.

What is Favela Chic? Favela Chic is when you have lost everything material, everything you built and everything you had, but you’re still wired to the gills! And really big on Facebook. That’s Favela Chic. You lost everything, you have no money, you have no career, you have no health insurance, you’re not even sure where you live, you don’t have children, and you have no steady relationship or any set of dependable friends. And it’s hot. It’s a really cool place to be.

The Favela Chic worship the Gothic High-Tech because the Gothic High-Tech have perfected unreality. They have escaped the realm of “the infrastructure” and have positioned themselves “in the narrative,” the stream that flows forever, unimpeded. They are avatars: software without apparatus, mind without body.

Except when a part fails.

5

H. G. Wells, in his Gothic novella “The Time Machine,” used different terms. The Gothic High-Tech he called Morlocks. The Favela Chic he called Eloi. Of course Wells was writing not in a time of virtualization but in a time of industrialization.

About eight or nine in the morning I came to the same seat of yellow metal from which I had viewed the world upon the evening of my arrival. I thought of my hasty conclusions upon that evening and could not refrain from laughing bitterly at my confidence. Here was the same beautiful scene, the same abundant foliage, the same splendid palaces and magnificent ruins, the same silver river running between its fertile banks. The gay robes of the beautiful people moved hither and thither among the trees. Some were bathing in exactly the place where I had saved Weena, and that suddenly gave me a keen stab of pain. And like blots upon the landscape rose the cupolas above the ways to the Under-world. I understood now what all the beauty of the Over-world people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.

6

The young, multibillionaire technologist is left with only two avocations: space travel and the engineering of immortality. Both are about escaping the gravity of the situation.

There are two apparent ways to sidestep death. You can virtualize the apparatus, freeing the mind from the body. But before you can do that, you need to figure out the code. And, alas, when it comes to the human being, we are still a long way from figuring out the code. Disembodiment is not imminent. Or you can take the Google route and figure out a way to quickly bypass the failed component, whether it’s the heart or the kidney, the pancreas or the liver. In time, we may figure out a way to fabricate the essential components of our bodies – to create an unlimited supply – but that eventuality, too, is not imminent. So we are left, for the time being, with transplantation, with the harvesting of good components from failed systems and the use of those components to replace the failed components of living systems.

The Gothic High-Tech, who cannot abide death, face a problem here: the organ donation system is largely democratic; it can’t be easily gamed by wealth. A rich person may be able to travel somewhere that has shorter lines – Tennessee, perhaps – but he can’t jump to the head of the line. So the challenge becomes one of increasing the supply, of making dear components cheap.

7

A week ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a move that he said was inspired by the experience of his friend Steve Jobs, announced that Facebook was introducing a new feature that would make it easy for members to identify themselves as organ donors. Should Zuckerberg’s move increase the supply of organs, it will save many lives and alleviate much suffering. We should all be grateful. Dark dreams of the future are best left to science-fiction writers.

My reservoir of patience, deep as it may be, is running dry. Nearly a year has passed since the culmination of the fabled Carr-Benkler Wager, and Yochai Benkler has yet to pay his debt to me. Dude, have you heard of PayPal? I haven’t even received a simple acknowledgement of my triumph.

What, you ask, is the Carr-Benkler Wager? Well, that’s hard to say definitively. But here’s how Benkler defined it back in July of 2006, when Web 2.0 was still an innocent babe cooing happily in its mother’s arms:

We could decide to appoint between one and three people [that never happened] who, on some date certain – let’s say two years from now, on August 1st 2008 [this was later extended to five years, so the operative date was August 1, 2011] – survey the web or blogosphere, and seek out the most influential sites in some major category: for example, relevance and filtration (like Digg); or visual images (like Flickr). And they will then decide whether they are peer production processes or whether they are price-incentivized systems. While it is possible that there will be a price-based player there, I predict that the major systems will be primarily peer-based.

I took the bet. I argued that, if you looked at the most influential sites across major categories of online activity in 2011, you would find them to be dominated by price-based players (i.e., commercial entities), whereas Benkler argued that they would be dominated by peer-production players (i.e., loose, unmanaged groups of unpaid contributors). Basically, the wager boiled down to this: Is the web fated to follow the path of earlier media and become dominated by commercial interests, or will it be ruled by amateurs operating outside the traditional marketplace and its money-making incentives? (Just to be clear, neither Benkler nor I saw this as a black and white question. Peer production and commercial production will both continue to exist online – as they always have offline. What Benkler predicted is that peer production would be the dominant mode of online production; I disagreed.)

This is an essential question – maybe the essential question – about the fate of the net. It’s pretty much the same question that Tim Wu posed, more eloquently, in his 2010 book The Master Switch:

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the second closing of the traditional information industries was complete … [T]he industrial concentration had reached levels not seen since the 1950s. The one great exception to this dominion of big business was the Internet, its users, and the industry that had grown on the network. Amid the consolidation, the 1990s also saw the so-called Internet revolution. Would it lead to the downfall of these consolidating superpowers? Some certainly thought so. “We are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy,” prophesied Yochai Benkler. “It is displacing the industrial information economy …”

Unfortunately, the media and communications conglomerates didn’t consult Benkler as their soothsayer. With aggregate audiences in the billions and combined revenues in the trillions, they had – in fact, have – a very different vision of the future: the Internet either remade in their likeness, or at the very least rendered harmless to their core business interests. … Is the Internet really different? Every other invention of its kind has had its period of openness, only to become the basis of yet another information empire. Which is mightier: the radicalism of the Internet or the inevitability of the Cycle?

So what’s happened over the last five years? Let’s look at the blogosphere. Many of the most popular sites in 2006 were strictly amateur productions, often written by a lone scribbler. Today, the most popular blog sites are almost all corporate productions, usually written by teams of wage-earners employed by corporations, often large media corporations. That doesn’t mean the amateurs have gone away; it just means they’ve been marginalized. Video? In 2006, YouTube was a playground of amateur videographers, uploading their work for kicks. The amateurs are still there, but the most popular videos today are corporate productions – from TV networks, film studios, recording companies, publishing companies, game studios – and even a lot of the amateur productions are wrapped in advertisements. Beyond YouTube, online video is dominated by sites syndicating professional productions: Hulu, Vevo, Netflix, and the various TV networks, et al. Online music? Definitely dominated by sites offering professional productions from record companies (iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon, etc.). Again, there’s still plenty of amateur music online, but the dominant outlets are fundamentally commercial. Even open-source software – one of Benkler’s core examples of peer production – has shifted in the last five years toward commercial dominance, with many contributors to the largest open-source projects being salaried employees of software firms.

There are certainly places where unpaid contributors continue to play a dominant role online – photography, Wikipedia – but they are exceptions to the net’s general evolution away from a populist medium and toward a commercial one. There is also, importantly, the phenomenal rise of Facebook and Twitter. But what is the nature of Facebook and Twitter? Certainly, most contributors are not getting paid for their activity, but many of the most popular tweeters and Facebook pages are motivated by commercial interests – entertainers and other celebrities promoting their (profit-making) careers, journalists contributing as an element of their (salary-paying) jobs, corporations using the networks as PR or marketing channels, etc. And, beyond the individual contributors, Facebook and Twitter are of course commercial entities that operate their sites for profit (or at least for IPO riches). What Benkler calls social production is not going to disappear from the net – thank goodness – but, like amateur radio, it is turning into a sideshow. Wu’s “Cycle” is, once again, playing out. The dominant production systems in most online media categories are commercial ones.

I am happy to consider the counterargument – that Benkler was right and that the web has become less commercial over the last five years. But even a cursory glance over the net’s recent history makes it hard for me to believe that such a case can be made. So I will continue to await my PayPal windfall from Yochai Benkler.

How much will that windfall amount to? Exactly this much: $0.00. Unlike the web, the Carr-Benkler Wager exists outside of all price-incentivized systems. It is a purely social bet.

UPDATE: More.