Clay Shirky, in responding to Jaron Lanier’s recent essay Digital Maoism, provides an excellent description of the way Wikipedia works today:

Neither proponents nor detractors of hive mind rhetoric have much interesting to say about Wikipedia itself, because both groups ignore the details. As Fernanda Viegas’s work shows, Wikipedia isn’t an experiment in anonymous collectivist creation; it is a specific form of production, with its own bureaucratic logic and processes for maintaining editorial control. Indeed, though the public discussions of Wikipedia often focus on the ‘everyone can edit’ notion, the truth of the matter is that a small group of participants design and enforce editorial policy through mechanisms like the Talk pages, lock protection, article inclusion voting, mailing lists, and so on. Furthermore, proposed edits are highly dependant on individual reputation — anonymous additions or alterations are subjected to a higher degree of both scrutiny and control, while the reputation of known contributors is publicly discussed on the Talk pages.

Wikipedia’s bureaucratic structure increasingly resembles the editorial structure of a traditional publishing operation, with “a small group of participants [who] design and enforce editorial policy” and a large group of contributors judged according to their reputations (ie, talent). As it has pursued its goal of improving its quality, it has naturally evolved away from an open-collective structure, with little central control or rule-making, toward a more conventional hierarchical structure. Today, the essential difference between Wikipedia and other reference-book publishers may well be that Wikipedia can draw on a vast pool of free, volunteer labor, whereas most publishers have to pay their workers. Yet, as I’ve written recently, the myth of the centerless collective continues to cling to Wikipedia, promulgated by Wikipedia evangelists like Mitch Kapor and echoed throughout the press.

So when Shirky writes, at the end of his critique, that “to have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action … is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures” I don’t think he’s actually that far from Lanier’s point that “the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force.” Lanier, too, is arguing against caricatures, ones that, in his view, demean the central role that individuals play in the creation of culture.

But when Shirky adds the word “anonymous” to his sentence “Wikipedia isn’t an experiment in anonymous collectivist creation,” I think he’s missing, or trying to gloss over, a deeper and more troubling point that Lanier makes:

When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn’t just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even Britannica has an editorial voice, which some people have criticized as being vaguely too “Dead White Men.”

When Shirky writes that “contra Lanier, individual motivations in Wikipedia are not only alive and well, it would collapse without them,” he’s misreading Lanier. It’s not the anonymity of the process that concerns Lanier, but the anonymity of the product. Those are two very different things. And while Wikipedia may now have an editorial process, it certainly doesn’t have an editorial voice – it’s committee-speak. Now, it may turn out that this doesn’t matter to people – that we’re willing to sacrifice authorial voice in order to get free content that’s “good enough.” (And I’m not just talking about encyclopedias.) What that choice would bring, though, is a kind of cultural deafness, and that’s a frightening prospect, at least to some of us.

Anyone interested in the current debate about the future of the internet would do well to spend an hour reading Jonathan Zittrain’s new Harvard Law Review article The Generative Internet, which I found through a reference by Ethan Zuckerman. Zittrain discusses the internet’s “generativity,” by which he means the way it allows a whole lot of people to create and distribute a whole lot of things (like software programs) which can then be used to create even more things. He provides a particularly illuminating history of the interdependency of the PC and internet, showing how the net’s generativity arises as much from the openness of the PC as from the openness of the net itself.

Zittrain goes on to describe how mounting internet security problems threaten to engender a consumer backlash against the openness of the net and hence its generativity. The security problems can – and ultimately will – be addressed either by imposing restrictions on the internet or by “locking down” PCs so that they can run only certain types of software. Under the latter scenario, PCs would come to work more like special-purpose information appliances than the general-purpose machines we’re used to. Zittrain believes that the uncompromising stance of “end-to-end” purists – those who fight any attempt to regulate the internet itself – may be self-defeating. The stance may lead frustrated consumers to demand the lockdown of PCs and other internet devices, which could well be more damaging to generativity than modest regulations on the net itself:

According to end-to-end theory, placing control and intelligence at the edges of a network [ie, in PCs and other devices] maximizes network flexibility and user choice. The political implication of this view — that end-to-end design preserves user freedom — depends on an increasingly unreliable presumption: whoever runs a machine at a given network endpoint

can readily choose how the machine will work. For example, in response to a network teeming with viruses and spam, network engineers suggest more bandwidth (to make invisible the transmission of “deadweights” like viruses and spam) and better protection at user endpoints, rather than interventions by ISPs closer to the middle of the network. But consumers are not well positioned to maintain their machines painstakingly against attack, leading them to prefer the locked-down PCs … Those who favor end-to-end principles because they favor generativity must realize that failure to

take action at the network level may close some parts of the grid because consumers may demand, and PC manufacturers may provide, locked-down endpoint environments that promise security and stability with minimum user upkeep. Some may embrace a categorical end-to-end approach anyway: even in a world of locked-down PCs, there will no doubt remain non-mainstream generative computing platforms for professional technical audiences. But this view is too narrow. We ought to see the possibilities and benefits of PC generativity made available to everyone, including the millions of people who obtain PCs for current rather than future uses, but who end up delighted at the new uses to which they can put their machines.

Put simply, complete fidelity to end-to-end may cause users to embrace the digital equivalent of gated communities. Gated communities offer safety and stability to residents and a manager to complain to when something goes wrong. But from a generative standpoint, digital gated communities are prisons. Their confinement is less than obvious because what they block is generative possibility: the ability of outsiders to offer code and services to users, giving users and producers an opportunity to influence the future without a regulator’s permission. If digital gated communities become the norm, highly skilled Internet users of the sort who predominated in the mid-1980s will still be able to enjoy generative computing on platforms that are not locked down, but the rest of the public will not be brought along for the ride. For those using locked-down endpoints, the freedom in the middle of the network is meaningless.

Zittrain concludes that the best course is to “try to maintain the fundamental generativity of the existing grid while taking seriously the problems that fuel enemies of the Internet free-for-all. It requires charting an intermediate course to make the grid more secure — and to make some activities to which regulators object more regulable — in order to continue to enable the rapid deployment of the sort of amateur programming that has made the Internet such a stunning success.” It’s not a question, in other words, of whether there will be limits. There will be. It’s a question of where those limits will be imposed and who will impose them.

“It is an odd state of affairs,” writes Lee Gomes in today’s Wall Street Journal, “when books or movies need defending, especially when the replacement proffered by certain Web-oriented companies and their apologists is so dismally inferior: chunks and links and other bits of evidence of epidemic ADD. Reading some stray person’s comment on the text I happen to be reading is about as appealing as hearing what the people in the row behind me are saying about the movie I’m watching.”

He describes a visit to an internet company where he watched a demo of a new web service that allows people to create mashups of movies, combining scenes from various films. “Until now,” his host blathers, “watching a movie has been an entirely passive experience.” Gomes comments: “Watching a good movie is ‘passive’ in the same way that looking at a great painting is ‘passive’ – which is, not very; you’re quite actively lost in thought. For my friend, though, the only activity that seemed ‘active,’ and thus worthwhile, was when a person sitting at a PC engaged in digital busy work of some kind.”

Gomes hits on one of the more annoying characteristics of the web philistine-utopians: they’re need to create false dichotomies about the products of creative work. In this case, the false dichotomy is between “passive” and “active.” If you’re not “actively” fiddling around with something, you’re being “passive,” and passive is, of course, bad. But as Gomes points out, there’s nothing passive about reading a good book or watching a good movie or sitting down with a good newspaper. If someone feels that watching a good movie is a passive experience, that says more about his shortcomings than the work’s.

The other popular false dichotomy is between “static” and “dynamic.” A completed work of art or craft – a book, a painting, a movie, an encyclopedia entry – is “static,” and static, like passive, is bad. A work is only “dynamic” if it’s some kind of open-ended group production – art by committee. Again, though, these terms are fake. A good book is anything but static – it gives to the active reader a wealth of meanings and connections. It’s the mashed-up products of committee culture that tend to feel static. The more a mob messes with something, the flatter, more one-dimensional it becomes. When it comes to creative work, the individual mind is more interesting – more dynamic – than the mob mind.

What’s particularly sad, and dangerous, is that these false dichotomies are infecting mainstream thought and discourse. They’re becoming an accepted way of looking at culture. A recent Library Journal featured an interview with Ben Vershbow, a fellow of the Institute for the Future of the Book, which is connected to the Annenberg Center for Communication and is funded in part by the MacArthur and Mellon foundations. Vershbow sees books as being static, and the reading of them as passive. He believes that the promise of books will only be fulfilled when they come to have “social lives.” “Soon,” he says, “books will literally have discussions inside of them, both live chats and asynchronous exchanges through comments and social annotation. You will be able to see who else out there is reading that book and be able to open up a dialog with them.” The model is Wikipedia, which, Vershbow says, “is never static, always growing.”

Vershbow looks forward to a future where books are replaced by “multimedia electronic texts”: “People raised with high-quality electronic reading devices, using only multimedia electronic texts in school and forming little or no attachment to dead-tree media, may consider paper books at best fascinating antiquities, at worst, inert, useless things.” It is, to echo Gomes, an odd state of affairs when the Institute for the Future of the Book is bent on the book’s destruction.

Google Spreadsheets, released in beta today, is being touted in both the print and online media as a challenger to the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel – part of Google’s mythical “Office killer” suite of online applications. The New York Times headline runs “Google Takes Aim at Excel.” CNET says, “Google Spreadsheets turns up heat on Excel.” John Battelle is more blunt, summing up the move as Google’s way of saying “FU, MSFT.”

This view, while understandable, strikes me as being a complete misreading of Google’s intent. What, after all, is the single most important feature of Google Spreadsheets? The single most important feature – by far – is its compatibility with Excel. You can export an Excel file into Spreadsheets and import Spreadsheets data into Excel. Spreadsheets is not an alternative to Excel so much as an extension or an add-on to the program, one that, in essence, provides a simple web interface to the Microsoft application. To put it into terms I’ve been using recently, Spreadsheets is a complement to Excel. It actually makes Excel more useful – and hence more valuable. Let me repeat that: Spreadsheets makes Excel more valuable.

So why would Google put out a product that makes its arch-rival’s product more valuable? Because Google doesn’t want to compete with Office. It sees Office as part of the existing landscape, and it wants to build a new layer of functionality on top of that landscape. No one is going to stop buying Office because Google Spreadsheets exists. But what people may well do is use Spreadsheets for sharing Excel and other data online – rather than just emailing Excel files around, as they used to. If Google Spreadsheets competes with a Microsoft product, it competes with a Microsoft product that doesn’t yet exist: Excel Live, Microsoft’s own web interface for Excel data.

Google, as it has itself said repeatedly, is not interested in fighting old wars. Microsoft won the war for spreadsheet applications. Google’s fighting a new war, a war that’s barely begun. It’s the war for web services. And it knows that, for the foreseeable future, these services will not displace desktop applications but extend them. Google is happy to make Excel more valuable as long as it also encourages greater use of the Internet and, in particular, attracts more traffic to its own sites. In a way, Spreadsheets is not only an Excel complement; it also turns Excel into a complement to Google’s own services and the lucrative ads that those services carry.

Yesterday, the International Herald Tribune ran a story (reprinted in the Times) on how people in China are using the Internet to investigate and punish bad behavior. When a cuckolded husband posted on the web a message about his wife’s affair with a student, “tens of thousands [of] total strangers” used the Net to form “teams to hunt down the student’s identity and address, hounding him out of his university and causing his family to barricade themselves inside their home.” One of the participants wrote, “‘Let’s use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons.'” It was only

the latest example of a growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs and where anonymous Web users come together to investigate others and mete out punishment for offenses real and imagined … Many here draw disturbing parallels to the Cultural Revolution [when] mobs of students taunted and beat their professors and mass denunciations and show trials became common for a decade.

Today comes word from the Houston Chronicle that Texas’s governor, Rick Perry, has

unveiled state plans to install hundreds of video surveillance cameras along the Rio Grande to allow anyone with Internet access to witness and report suspicious activity as it occurs … Perry said the cameras will cover stretches of farms and ranches on the border where “criminal activity is known to occur” … The video will be available on the Web in real time and cameras will have night vision capability. People who witness suspicious actions, including crossings, will be able to call a toll-free number to report it to the authorities.

This is great. We can all be cops now. It makes sense, too. Why keep the video feeds from surveillance cameras secret? Put ’em on the web. Given enough eyeballs, all crimes are shallow.

I smell some commerical potential here, too. Collective policing could be the next great online media opportunity. Coming soon: Yahoo Stakeout. Google Surveillance. MSN PI. And, of course, Baidu Justice.

Ivor Tossell muses on MySpace’s “remarkable hateability” in today’s Globe and Mail. The popular site, he says, “flaunts shallowness in a way that makes blogs look like Proust,” and its pages “are often places of unparalleled garishness.” Big deal, you might say. Isn’t that what popular culture’s all about? But then Tossell gets to the core of what makes MySpace both compelling and creepy:

MySpace doesn’t just create social networks, it anatomizes them. It spreads them out like a digestive tract on the autopsy table. You can see what’s connected to what, who’s connected to whom. You can even trace the little puffs of intellectual flatus as they pass through the system. Things that used to be fleeting and private – the nothings of telephone calls and idle chatter – are made permanent and public.

As a result, an awful lot of people wind up looking at these conversations, relationships, banterings that they can’t take part in. Maybe they’re too old, maybe they’re too shy, maybe they just live in the wrong part of the world to ever really engage. Some might say good riddance to all that. Others might harbour a regret or two. MySpace might really be in the business of selling yearning.

Love it or loathe it, MySpace has become our mirror – for the moment, anyway.

In a recent post, I talked about the central role that complements are playing in shaping the economics of the web. (Complements are products that tend to be consumed together, like popcorn and movies or blogs and Google ads.) In Complementary Genius, my latest column on innovation for Strategy & Business, I take a broader look at complements and the different ways companies can use complementary innovation as a strategic weapon.

Here’s how it begins:

What were André and Edouard Michelin thinking? In 1900, shortly after the two brothers took control of their family’s venerable rubber business in Clermont-Ferrand, France, they suddenly decided to publish a guidebook for tourists. Their Michelin Guide provided information on gas stations, hotels, restaurants, and roadside attractions along with various maps and driving tips. The brothers printed 35,000 copies of the first edition – and gave them away free.

According to our contemporary notions of business logic, the move seems hard to justify. After all, book publishing has little to do with rubber processing. Management gurus, if they had existed then, might have chided the brothers for losing sight of their “core business” and expanding beyond the scope of their “organizational capabilities.” They might even have used the story as a case study on why family businesses should bring in professional managers.

But the diversification turned out to be an act of genius …

Read on.