William Davies has written a brief, important essay called The Cold, Cold Heart of Web 2.0 in The Register. He argues that it’s a mistake to assume that the technology-driven efficiencies we welcome in the commercial realm, as a means of reducing costs and, often, expanding choices, will also bring benefits when applied to the social or cultural realm. Society is not a market, and automation may harm it rather than enhance it.

“The first dotcom boom,” Davies writes, “was principally about putting the internet to work in increasing the efficiency of existing services.” It made activities like the purchase of books and the payment of taxes easier by automating some of their more time-consuming aspects. The main thrust of Web 1.0 was to streamline “one-to-many” services, which “feature an organisation that resembles a ‘producer’ offering something to individuals who resemble ‘consumers’, who usually have some choice about whether or not to accept it.”

Web 2.0, by contrast, “abandons this conventional one-to-many model of service provision, and sets about exploiting the many-to-many potential of the internet. Rather than using the web to connect producers to consumers, it is used to connect individuals to each other.” Computer networks have, of course, always supported many-to-many services, like bulletin boards and other social networks. What’s changed with Web 2.0, Davies writes:

is that these otherwise secluded and organic realms of social interaction are now the focus of obsessive technological innovation and commercial interest. The same technological zeal and business acumen that once was applied to improving the way we buy a book or pay our car tax is now being applied to the way we engage in social and cultural activities with others.

In short, efficiency gains are no longer being sought only in economic realms such as retail or public services, but are now being pursued in parts of our everyday lives where previously they hadn’t even been imagined. Web 2.0 promises to offer us ways of improving the processes by which we find new music, new friends, or new civic causes. The hassle of undesirable content or people is easier to cut out. We have become consumers of our own social and cultural lives.

The problem – and the danger – is that efficiency plays a very different role in the marketplace of products than it does in the realm of society and culture. “Undoubtedly there are instances where we do want our social lives to be more efficient,” write Davies. “But we should worry about this psychology seeping too far into our lives.” We do not, and should not, judge the quality of our social and cultural life by its efficiency. As Davies concludes:

The pursuit of maximum convenience in the cultural sphere risks dissolving what we value in it in the first place. Outside of the economy – and very often within the economy too – we find that the constraints and accidents of everyday life are the basis for enjoyable and meaningful activities. They don’t necessarily connect us to the people we most want to speak to or the music we most want to listen to. Sometimes they even frustrate us. But this shouldn’t lead to business process re-engineering.

In a recent blog post, the usually perceptive Clay Shirky writes, of my own work, “I have never understood Nick Carr’s objections to the cultural effects of the internet … when he talks about the effects of the net on business, he sounds more optimistic, even factoring in the wrenching transition, so why aren’t the cultural effects similar cause for optimism, even accepting the wrenching transition in those domains as well?” The real question, to me, is this: Why in the world would anyone believe that the cultural effects of the internet would be beneficial simply because the internet’s effects on business are beneficial? And yet Shirky is far from alone in making this bizarre association – it runs like a vein of fool’s gold through the writing of the Net’s rose-tinted-glasses set. They want to believe that the processes of culture-making and society-building can be automated and reengineered as if they were the processes of widget-manufacturing. As Davies eloquently explains, they’re wrong.

(This is a theme, by the way, that runs, less succinctly, through my forthcoming book The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny.)

UPDATE: Ian Douglas and Joshua Porter offer thoughtful rejoinders. I agree with Porter that I was mistaken to call efficiency “an intrinsic good” in markets; I have edited my original post to temper that point. I disagree, however, with Porter’s contention that there’s no difference between “markets” and “social lives.”