Here Comes Everybody

Howard could imagine someone doing what he did, but better. He couldn’t imagine someone making what he did obsolete.

And this is the Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.

The groups of photographers were all latent groups, which is to say groups that existed only in potentia, and too much effort would have been required to turn those latent groups into real ones by conventional means.

It is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence.

When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants. The hive is a social device, a piece of bee

So what do you do? You adopt both strategies—dense and sparse connections—at different scales. You let the small groups connect tightly, and then you connect the groups. But you can’t really connect groups—you connect people within groups. Instead of one loose group of twenty-five, you have five tight groups of five. As long as a couple of people i

One of the few uncontentious tenets of economics is that people respond to incentives. If you give them more of a reason to do something, they will do more of it, and if you make it easier to do more of something they are already inclined to do, they will also do more of it.

The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming “gather, then share” into “share, then gather.”

By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management (and its attendant overhead), these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort (the limits that created the institutional dilemma in the first place). Th

Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.