Stirrings of unrest in the digital manor economy

The digital peasants are getting restless. The first signs of unrest are evident in the stirrings of the bloggers filing a suit against the Huffington Post and its parent AOL, which acquired the publication in February for $315 million. The same writers who were happy to contribute for free before the sale are now accusing the publication of turning them into “modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation.” The suit claims that about 9,000 people wrote for the Huffington Post on an unpaid basis, and it argues that their writings helped contribute about a third of the sale value of the site. These bloggers weren’t paid a single penny in the sale—the money went mostly to Huffington and a few investors.

Whether the bloggers have a case or not remains to be seen. The suit, however, brings to the fore tensions inherent in a new kind of production that is emerging today—what we might call “social production.” This kind of work involves micro-contributions from large networks of people who often receive “payment” in the form of fun, peer recognition, and a sense of belonging—that is, in social rather than monetary currencies. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Flickr, and many other stalwarts of today’s digital economy are enablers and beneficiaries of such production. They couldn’t possibly exist without the content of social producers, without the unpaid, albeit fun, labor. It is we who create Facebook profiles and post to them, we who share our thoughts on Twitter, we who upload our pictures to Flickr, we who post our medical data on PatientsLikeMe—it is we who are the new producers. Without us making these daily micro-contributions, none of these platforms could persist and grow and create value at the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars.

But the Huffington case brings us face-to-face with the reality that we, as social producers, are all becoming digital peasants. By turn, we are the heroic commoners feeding revolutions in the Middle East and, at the same time, “modern serfs” working on Mark Zuckerberg’s and other digital plantations. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I find myself feeling like a hypocrite. On the one hand, I write about “amplified individuals”—individuals able to bypass traditional institutional structures to do almost anything: get funding for their projects through platforms such as Kickstarter, do science in garages, like Eri Gentry, founder of non-profit BioCurious, obtain health information through crowdsourcing sites such as Curetogether and PatientsLikeMe. On the other hand, when my college sophomore son and many of his peers tell me how they really don’t see why they need to go to college and sit through lectures rather than easily read the same material online at their leisure, I find myself urging them to stay in and focus on the good parts of college—finding one or two amazing professors, making friends for life, getting a credential without which it would be hard to move to the next step in life.

On the one hand there is Peter Thiel, a flamboyant billionaire co-founder of PayPal, urging young budding entrepreneurs to drop out of college and offering them $100K to do so. On the other hand is data: in the past forty years the wage ratio of those with college degrees to those without grew from 1.5 to 1.95 (mostly due to wages actually falling dramatically in non-college populations, by 12% for high school graduates and 16% for high school dropouts).

I increasingly feel that we are at the proverbial “inflection point,” with the Millenials caught between the two worlds—one world in which everything is done through institutions (schools, universities, corporations, music labels, foundations, banks) and the other in which individuals are increasingly able to put together all the necessary resources to accomplish things outside of such structures.

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I worry about the future of Chatroulette. This widely successful site where random strangers from around the world can chat with each other using their webcams was built by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old Russian hacker. And what a compelling story it has been: a teenager bored with school and clearly captivated by the promise of technology, builds a site in his bedroom. A few months later the site gets more than a million hits a day. Ternovskiy has no idea what Chatroulette could be or what the “business model” behind it is. He boasts to a New York Times reporter that advertising on Chatroulette is kept to a minimum, because ads “distract you from what you want to do on the site.” Ternovskiy cares to get just enough money to keep the site going. Fast forward to today: Ternovskiy is ensconced in Silicon Valley, where eager venture capitalists and seasoned entrepreneurs are advising him on “the business model.” I expect the next incarnation of Chatroulette will be as a channel for social marketing. I can just imagine clicking the “next” button and seeing a ruggedly handsome 20-something proclaiming the wonders of Absolut Vodka or modeling designer jeans.

After all such has been the path of many geeks who started out with the promise of creating communities and connecting people for noble purposes but quickly turned communities they enabled into markets for selling products, services, and data. This is the path of PatientsLikeMe–a site inspired by one the founder’s brothers who developed Lou Gehrig’s disease. The goal was to build a community for people with similar conditions to share treatment information and get knowledge and support from peers. The platform has been extremely successful, with close to 70,000 members to date sharing information on many conditions and treatment regiments. But as the community grew and the scale of operations increased, the opportunity and the promise of turning the community into a business, i.e. to monetize the community, became increasingly apparent. Today, the site sells health data, gathered from member profiles, to drug makers and others for scientific and marketing research. While such data may be beneficial to both patients and pharmaceutical companies trying to develop more effective treatments, the data is also being used to create more effective drug marketing campaigns, something that may actually be harmful to community members.

Patientslikeme, Facebook, Twitter, and, I expect, shortly, Chatroulette exemplify a growing clash between the promise of commons-based platforms and the relentless drive to convert them into profit-driven businesses. The clash is likely to grow simply because the number of such endeavors is growing exponentially. What this clash brings into focus is that while we have invented a generation of transformative technologies, we remain stuck in economic and organizational models of the past. Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you, Nicolas Kristof, for reminding us that many Americans have too much and many of us can live quite well and, in fact, be a lot happier if we gave up some of our material wealth (What Can You Live Without? The New York Times, Sunday, January 24, 2010) That’s exactly what the Salwen family Kristof writes about, did—they sold their house, gave half of the proceeds to the Hunger Project, an international development organization, and moved themselves into a much smaller home which surprisingly turned out to be “more family friendly” than their previous one. There was much less space to retreat to, so family members spent more time around each other. “We essentially traded stuff for togetherness and connectedness,” Mr. Salwen says. Part of this togetherness involved engagement with the work of the Hunger Project in Ghana.

Not everyone has a large house to trade or a large sum of money to donate but look around you—we have excess of stuff, talent, ideas, information—in our homes , in our communities, and in our organizations. We are over-producing and under-utilizing resources all over the place. Witness the recent example of clothing retailers like H&M deliberately mutilating and tossing unsold clothes in the trash. Many experts in retail concede that the practice is not uncommon—for some unfathomable “economic” reason it makes more sense to destroy clothes than to release them into a local community. The situation is even worse when it comes to food. We over-produce and waste a lot of it. According to the USDA, just over a quarter of America’s food — about 25.9 million tons — gets thrown into the garbage can every year. University of Arizona estimates that the number is closer to 50 percent. The country’s supermarkets, restaurants and convenience stores alone throw out 27 million tons between them every year (representing $30 billion of wasted food). This is why the U.N. World Food Program says the total food surplus of the U.S. alone could satisfy “every empty stomach” in Africa. How about empty stomachs in our own communities?

The list goes on an on. We have surplus of space—many commercial buildings, schools, corporate and government spaces are underutilized, while many small organizations and individuals are struggling to find spaces for their work. We also have excess of talent—musicians, artists, designers, educated unemployed people, young and old—needing audiences, venues to work in, or contribute ideas to. Many unemployed or underemployed people have excess of time, excess of knowledge, excess of skills. We have excess of empty seats in our cars and not enough public transport to help people get around. I bet we even have medical doctors who are willing to treat people in need for free. This is what many doctors are doing in Haiti right now; this is what many of them do informally among their family and friends. Read the rest of this entry »

Can you envision a society without money? Can you conceive of a functioning economic system without corporations or in which corporations as we have come to know them play a much-diminished role? Can you imagine a truly participatory governance system beyond Congress, Parliament, or Duma? The mere prospects seem jarring, if not subversive. And yet, I would argue, if you are not thinking these thoughts, you are not paying attention. Because looking across the landscape of deep global recession, environmental crisis, and ongoing technological transformation, it is clear that we are at the beginning of a large-scale organizational transformation that will impact everything we do—from how we organize production to how we grow our food to how we govern ourselves.

It is hard to imagine this today, but people have been conducting economic activities for millennia outside of formal organizational frameworks. In such “traditional” or “peasant economies,” humans were engaged in production of a variety of goods and services in which they sold or traded with others in their geographic proximity. You knew who was a good baker, a good shoemaker, who repaid debts on time, and who was a cheat. However, such transactions were limited in scale. The genius of the types of organizations we’ve perfected in the 20th century is that they allowed us to massively increase the range and scale of these interactions by aggregating resources among strangers and by becoming institutional proxies for the kind of trust we previously reserved for our neighbors and family. We needed large hierarchical organizations in order to find, aggregate, and allocate resources efficiently at massive scales.

What happens, however, if we can increasingly find, aggregate, and allocate resources without the organizational infrastructure we’ve created? What if we do not need organizational proxies, or at least, the kind of proxies we’ve come to rely on, for most things we do? In his book “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky, professor of new media at NYU, writes, “When we change the way we communicate, we change society.” Today, we are indeed changing the communications infrastructure and are just beginning to feel the reverberations of this transformation in our economic life. Publisher Tim O’Reilly calls the infrastructure we are building the “architecture of participation,” and its existence will lead us to re-invent ourselves as a society and as individuals.

After all, organizations we have built are not pre-ordained, inevitable, or immutable creations—they are products of particular times, outgrowths of existing technological, social, and demographic forces. Or as Doug Ruskoff, writer and media expert, puts it, “Economics is not a natural science.”

The new architecture of participation will cause us to reweave the social fabric that links the individual to others and to the larger whole in entirely new ways. It will enable people to find each other, to connect and trade with each other in efficient and productive new ways that are outside of established organizational structures.

So pay attention to new organizational forms that are beginning to dot our landscape. From Kickstarter and LendingClub (new platforms for giving, raising capital, and lending); to Patientslikeme and Curetogether (grassroots platforms for sharing detailed health and treatment data); to numerous mission-oriented project organization platforms like Groundcrew; these are all harbingers of things to come. What is important to study is not whether these particular organizations will survive but the larger shifts they represent. Their design usually does not emerge as a whole from the outset. Rather, we see new structures emerge little by little from the contribution of many. In this, they resemble biological structures in which complexity emerges without a grand central design.

The emergence of new organizational forms coincides with discoveries in neuroscience, biology, quantum physics, and increased ability to model and understand interactions in complex systems. This latest scientific knowledge will usher in new frameworks for how to organize people to get things done.

Scientific management of the 20th century was a brainchild of Frederick Taylor, mechanical engineer and efficiency expert. New gurus of organizational management and design may well be people like Frans De Waal, a primatologist studying empathy and cooperative behavior in groups.

In a fitting ending to my week in Washington DC, with a few hours left to spare, a colleague and I wondered into the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. The museum is celebrating 75th anniversary of the Public Works of Arts Project, an amazing undertaking initiated by Roosevelt in the depth of Great Depression in 1934. It became the first federal project to support the arts nationally. Many of the paintings have a decidedly social realism look and feel. Made me wonder if people in those days organized town hall meetings and protests against the “socialist” President. I can only hope that something as beautiful and lasting will come out of this Depression (or are we still calling it a recession?). Read the rest of this entry »

This is the title of a book written by Donald Finkel, a former professor at the Evergreen State College. Unfortunately Dr. Finkel passed away in 1999 but his daughter Zoe loaned me this book after reading a draft of my essay about Peninsula school. The book sat on my desk for a while until I happened to take it to a bluegrass festival one weekend. Finding myself digitally deprived and with lots of unstructured time on my hands, I started reading the book. It took only a few pages before I was taken in by both, the book and the author. I wish I could’ve met professor Finkel, I wish I were a student in one of his seminars, and I wish every teacher would read this book.

Finkel’s exhorts readers to abandon the prevalent model of teaching as TELLING, He writes:
“Our natural, unexamined model for teaching is Telling…The fundamental act of teaching is to carefully and clearly tell students something they did not previously know. Knowledge is transmitted, we imagine through the act of telling.” What we think of as good teachers just do this in a more captivating way than the not so good ones. Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry while reading today’s NYT article about how many teachers/schools are experimenting with giving students choice in what books they read rather than assigning required reading to the whole class. Turns out giving kids choice motivates them to read more. My only response was a proverbial “Dah?!” How long did it take experts to come up with this discovery? Has anyone bothered to just talk to any high school student? Last summer we held a roundtable at IFTF with about 15 high school seniors most of whom talked about loving to read when they were younger but hating “doing” reading in high school both because it was “assigned” and simply because they did not have time to read for pleasure. Is there anything we like to do when forced? Why should reading be any different? The sad part was to read about teachers having to make choices in whether to teach to the test or in in a way that develops the love of reading in students. Here is a reaction of one teacher who was observing a reading workshop where kids were given reading choices:

At the end of the first day the teachers discussed the demands of standardized testing and how some had faced resistance from administrators. Ms. McNeill said her students had so little freedom that they even had to be escorted to the bathrooms.

Suddenly she was overcome with emotion as she contrasted that environment with the student-led atmosphere in Ms. Atwell’s class. “It makes me sad that my students can’t have this every day,” she said, wiping away tears. “These children are so fortunate.”

Thinking again about unintended consequences and how oftentimes what you think is bad for you turns out to be good, this time in connection with education, specifically how what today is construed as “rigorous academic education” filled with AP classes, competitive tests, and loads of homework results in kids turned off from learning. This again based on personal experience.

For 10 years, starting in 1995, my family was engaged in an educational experiment. The experiment involved our son, Greg, who was enrolled at Peninsula school, an 85-year old progressive school in the San Francisco Bay Area. For about half of that time, mostly starting with 4th grade, my husband and I were nagged by doubt: yes, Peninsula is a great environment for kids; yes, Greg is turning out to be a creative, caring, thoughtful human being; but is he getting enough academics? Is he getting enough of the basics in math, writing, and sciences? Several times we seriously thought about taking him out of Peninsula and enrolling him in another “more academic” school. Usually this happened after a conversation with a parent whose child was doing algebra in 3d grade or writing 10 page essays in 5th. The only thing that stopped us from leaving Peninsula was the fact that Greg truly loved it—its teachers, its choices, its grounds, its smells, its music room (more about that later)—and that at some subconscious level we felt that for him, and for us, being at Peninsula was the right thing. We just didn’t know why—it went against all the prevailing wisdom of more accountability, more standards, more rigor, more home work, more time management for kids—all the prescriptions for improving our education system and preparing our kids for a world in which they will be competing for jobs with highly educated kids from China, India, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, noone at Peninsula was good at articulating for a couple of overeducated, analytically minded adults schooled in the “old” system why this was the best kind of education. We constantly saw examples of Peninsula’s success—poised, articulate, and reflective graduates who went on to high schools and did remarkably well. Every time, however, the nagging doubt was still there—yes, it worked for them, that doesn’t mean it will work for Greg. He still can’t do math very well. Read the rest of this entry »

I just went through a ritual of helping my kid move into a college dorm. The college he is entering has pretty much mastered what could otherwise be a chaotic and messy process. We had exact directions for where to go, where to drop stuff off, and there were plenty of helpers and carts on site. While watching my son’s belongings as he was lugging stuff upstairs, I had the occasion to review everyone else’s pile of stuff, one of which included a giant flat screen TV (several kids hoped to get the owner as a roommate). The amount of stuff was impressive, with even more modest piles probably having enough to furnish a house in a “less developed” country. It got me thinking about Peter Menzel’s book “Material World” published in the early 90’s and showing pictures of families with all their belongings in front of their houses. In fact, when I got home I found an old NOVA PBS documentary based on the book and called “World in the Balance.” I just wanted to see how a single American teenager compares in terms of material possessions (physical only and probably partially so as, I am sure, most kids left lots of stuff at home) to families around the world. In my inexpert judgment they have way more than the Wu family in China had in the early 90’s, about a third of what a three person family in Japan had, way more than a family in Mali (albeit no pots and pans), and about a quarter of what the American family of four had at the time. And this is just what they are starting life with.

Any wonder I was humming “I’m a Material Girl” all the way home?