# Cognitive Surplus  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Clay Shirky]] - Full Title:: Cognitive Surplus - Category: #books ## Highlights > In an evocatively titled 2007 study from the Journal of Economic Psychology—“Does Watching TV Make Us Happy?”—the behavioral economists Bruno Frey, Christine Benesch, and Alois Stutzer conclude that not only do unhappy people watch considerably more TV than happy people, but TV watching also pushes aside other activities that are less immediately engaging but can produce longer-term satisfaction. ([Location 106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=106)) > As Jib Fowles notes in Why Viewers Watch, “Television viewing has come to displace principally (a) other diversions, (b) socializing, and (c) sleep.” ([Location 119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=119)) > Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year. That represents about two thousand Wikipedias’ projects’ worth of free time annually. Even tiny subsets of this time are enormous: we spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials. ([Location 157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=157)) > Neither the shake itself nor the history of breakfast mattered as much as customers needing food to do a nontraditional job—serve as sustenance and amusement for their morning commute—for which they hired the milkshake. ([Location 204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=204)) > However pathetic you may think it is to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience: it’s worse to sit in your basement trying to decide whether Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter. ([Location 303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=303)) > In 2010 the global internet-connected population will cross two billion people, and mobile phone accounts already number over three billion. Since there are something like 4.5 billion adults worldwide (roughly 30 percent of the global population is under fifteen), we live, for the first time in history, in a world where being part of a globally interconnected group is the normal case for most citizens. ([Location 336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=336)) > All revolutions are different (which is only to say that all surprises are surprising). If a change in society were immediately easy to understand, it wouldn’t be a revolution. And today, the revolution is centered on the shock of the inclusion of amateurs as producers, where we no longer need to ask for help or permission from professionals to say things in public. ([Location 682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=682)) > The internet is the first public medium to have post-Gutenberg economics. You don’t need to understand anything about its plumbing to appreciate how different it is from any form of media in the previous five hundred years. ([Location 721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=721)) > And finally, the new media involves a change in economics. With the internet, everyone pays for it, and then everyone gets to use it. ([Location 741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=741)) > This shift to post-Gutenberg economics, with its interchangeably perfect versions and conversational capabilities, with its symmetrical production and low costs, provides the means for much of the generous, social, and creative behavior we’re seeing. ([Location 745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=745)) > With digital sharecropping, the platform owners get the money and the creators of the content don’t, a situation Carr regards as manifestly unfair. ([Location 758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=758)) > (As Cicero said two millennia ago, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”) ([Location 1060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1060)) > We have always wanted to be autonomous, competent, and connected; it’s just that now social media has become an environment for enacting those desires, rather than suppressing them. ([Location 1094](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1094)) > The lesson of Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf is this: If you give people a way to act on their desire for autonomy and competence or generosity and sharing, they might take you up on it—every successful example in this book involves harnessing those intrinsic motivations in one way or another. However, if you only pretend to offer an outlet for those motivations, while actually slotting people into a scripted experience, they may well revolt. ([Location 1245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1245)) > The cognitive surplus is not simply trillions of hours of free time spread across two billion connected individuals. Rather, it is communal; we must combine our surplus free time if it is to be useful, and we can do that only when we’re given the right opportunities. ([Location 1260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1260)) > No one wants e-mail for itself, any more than anyone wants electricity for itself; rather, we want the things electricity enables. ([Location 1272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1272)) > When a surprising new thing happens, instead of asking Why is this new? we can ask Why is it a surprise? ([Location 1279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1279)) > Many of the unexpected uses of communications tools are surprising because our old beliefs about human nature were so lousy. ([Location 1280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1280)) > that a tool’s capabilities don’t completely determine its ultimate functions. Instead, users can press a tool into service in ways that the designers never imagined, and those new functions are often discovered and perfected not by a burst of solo inspiration but by exploration and improvement among a collaborative group. ([Location 1330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1330)) - Note: eric von hippel mit econ > Groups that manage common resource problems assume a shared commitment to a norm of cooperation. This is different from the ability to see bad behavior and punish it. The easiest infraction to deal with is the one that doesn’t happen, so having members internalize a sense of right and wrong when dealing with irrigation or fishing rights becomes an essential tool. ([Location 1467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1467)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The social reduction of selfish impulses can be triggered easily. When a plate of doughnuts is set out in a common area, office workers will take fewer if there are paper cutouts of eyes nearby (thereby proving H. L. Mencken’s hypothesis, “Conscience is the little voice that tells you someone might be looking”). ([Location 1471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1471)) > This increase in our ability to create things together, to pool our free time and particular talents into something useful, is one of the great new opportunities of the age, one that changes the behaviors of people who take advantage of it. ([Location 1549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1549)) > Generations do differ, but less because people differ than because opportunities do. Human nature changes slowly but includes an incredible range of mechanisms for adapting to our surroundings. ([Location 1571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1571)) > The fundamental attribution error is at work when we explain our own behavior in terms of the constraints on us (“I didn’t stop to help the stranded driver because I was late for work”) but attribute the same behavior in others to their character (“He didn’t stop to help the stranded driver because he’s selfish”). ([Location 1589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1589)) > As Thomas Jefferson famously remarked: “He who receives ideas from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine, as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me.” ([Location 1611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1611)) > As the visionary Kevin Kelly wrote in an essay called “Triumph of the Default,” engineers can influence the behavior of their users: Therefore the privilege of establishing what value the default is set at is an act of power and influence. Defaults are a tool not only for individuals to tame choices, but for systems designers—those who set the presets—to steer the system. The architecture of these choices can profoundly shape the culture of that system’s use. ([Location 1621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1621)) > In January 2000, an unusual paper called “A Fine Is a Price” appeared in the Journal of Legal Studies. Written by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, it was about psychology, though it appeared in a legal studies journal; it was short, in a field given to writing by the yard; it was written in plain (and quite vivid) English; and it attacked a central tenet of legal theory, namely that deterrence is a simple and reliable way to affect people’s behavior. ([Location 1682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1682)) > The Invisible College became so important to British science that its members formed the core of the Royal Society, a much less invisible organization chartered in 1662 and still in operation to this day. ([Location 1787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1787)) > Knowledge is the most combinable thing we humans have, but taking advantage of it requires special conditions. ([Location 1800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1800)) > Increases in community size, decreases in cost of sharing, and increases in clarity all make knowledge more combinable, and in groups where these characteristics grow, combinability will grow. ([Location 1829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1829)) > These three conditions are all magnified by a medium that is global and cheap, and that lets unlimited perfect copies of information spread at will, even among large and physically dispersed groups. Our technological tools for making information globally available and discoverable, by amateurs, at zero marginal cost, thus represent an enormous and positive shock to the combinability of knowledge. ([Location 1831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1831)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Foray’s fourth condition is culture, a community’s set of shared assumptions about how it should go about its work, and about its members’ relations with one another. ([Location 1834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1834)) > Etienne Wenger, an independent sociologist, coined the term “communities of practice” to describe people who come together to share their knowledge as a way of getting better at what they do. ([Location 1837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1837)) > According to an open source aphorism, “Good community plus bad code makes a good project.” ([Location 1850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1850)) > Wilfred Bion, a psychotherapist ([Location 2072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2072)) > To the question “Are groups of people best thought of as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive unit?” his answer was that we are, as a species, “hopelessly committed to both.” ([Location 2080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2080)) > Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren’t real. ([Location 2094](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2094)) > For most groups, Bion observed, the primary threat is internal: the risk of falling into emotionally satisfying but ineffective behavior. ([Location 2096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2096)) > He called groups that do so “basic groups,” that is, they fall into their basest desires. Basic groups are incapable of, and often actively avoid, pursuing any higher purpose. (Bion’s neurotic patients, for example, were nominally in treatment to get better but actually tried to avoid doing any work that would lead to real change.) Any group trying to create real value must police itself to ensure it isn’t losing sight of its higher purpose, or what Bion called the “sophisticated goal.” By contrast, Bion called groups that pursued their goals “sophisticated work groups”: their members worked to keep themselves and one another from sliding into satisfying but ineffective emotions and, when they did get sidetracked, returned the group to its sophisticated goal. The primary mechanism in such sophisticated groups is that the members internalize the standards of the group and react to behavior that undermines those standards, whether that behavior is their own or from other group members. Governance in such groups is not just a set of principles and goals, but of principles and goals that have been internalized by the participants. Such self-governance helps us behave according to our better natures. ([Location 2097](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2097)) > As Gary Kamiya has noted of today’s web, “You can always get what you want, but you can’t always get what you need.” The kinds of things we need are produced by groups pursuing public value. ([Location 2236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2236)) > As Dean Kamen, the inventor and entrepreneur, puts it, “In a free culture, you get what you celebrate.” ([Location 2241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2241)) > Neither perfect individual freedom nor perfect social control is optimal (Ayn Rand and Vladimir Lenin both overshot the mark), so it falls to us to manage the tension between individual freedom and social value, a trade-off that follows the by-now-familiar pattern of having no solution, just different optimizations that create different kinds of value, and different kinds of problems that need to be managed. ([Location 2248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2248)) > Ultimately members’ reputations mattered enough to keep fraud to a minimum. Buyers and sellers with long-term identities and reputations on the site were provided with an incentive not just to behave well but to be seen as behaving well. Paul Resnick, a social media researcher at the University of Michigan, studied eBay’s reputation system and concluded that sellers with a positive reputation, as reported by their customers, could command an 8 percent premium on price over sellers who’d just arrived on the site. ([Location 2259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2259)) > Omidyar’s original dictum—“People are basically good”—is true only with some commitment to governance structure. ([Location 2263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2263)) > The less catchy but more accurate lesson from eBay is “People will behave if they sense that there is long-term value in doing so, and short-term loss in not doing so.” ([Location 2265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2265)) > There is no one-size-fits-all set of rules for governing groups that create public value. ([Location 2268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2268)) > It’s easy to galvanize a group with thoughts of some external enemy, but, in fact, the likeliest source of distraction from a shared goal is from the members of the group with that goal. (Ironically, one of the easiest ways to distract such a group is to get them to focus on outside enemies, real or imagined, rather than on their shared interests or tasks.) Because the biggest threat to group action is internal, voluntary groups need governance so that we can defend ourselves from ourselves; we need governance to create a space we can create in. ([Location 2275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2275)) > Falling costs create room for experimentation, experiments create value, and that value creates an incentive to benefit from it. If incentive led only to more experimentation, then lowered costs would create a pure virtuous circle. Unfortunately, the incentive to make use of experimental value reaches people who had nothing to do with creating or sustaining it. The larger and more publicly successful a project is, the more people will want to appropriate that value while giving nothing back or even to see the project fail. ([Location 2281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2281)) > Because we are hopelessly committed to both individual satisfaction and group effectiveness, groups committed to public or civic value are rarely permanent. ([Location 2301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2301)) > A cynical streak in society looks at all forms of amateur participation as either naive or stupid. ([Location 2339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2339)) > If we want to create new forms of civic value, we need to improve the ability of small groups to try radical things, to help the inventors of the next PatientsLikeMe or the next set of Responsible Citizens get up and going. ([Location 2345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2345)) > We are all living through the disorientation that comes from including two billion new participants in a media landscape previously operated by a small group of professionals. ([Location 2349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2349)) > When this much has changed, our best chance for finding good ideas is to have as many groups as possible try as many things as possible. ([Location 2350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2350)) > Johannes Gutenberg’s best-known work was his forty-two-line Bible, a spectacularly beautiful example of early printing. But it was neither his first work nor his most voluminous. (He printed fewer than two hundred copies.) That honor goes instead to his printing of indulgences. ([Location 2353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2353)) > In Gutenberg’s time, an indulgence was a written record of the transaction, which also worked as a kind of token that validated the bearer’s future time off. The Church would deputize people to issue indulgences and collect money on its behalf; the issuer got a cut of the proceeds for his trouble. (Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” is told by one of these issuers.) ([Location 2360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2360)) > Gutenberg’s press flooded the market. In the early 1500s John Tetzel, the head pardoner for German territories, would sweep into a town with a collection of already printed indulgences, hawking them with a phrase usually translated as “When a coin a coffer rings / A soul for heaven springs.” The nakedly commercial aspects of indulgences, among other things, enraged Martin Luther, who in 1517 launched an attack on the Church in the form of his famous Ninety-five Theses. ([Location 2370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2370)) > Luther’s critique, along with the spread of Bibles translated into local languages, drove the Protestant Reformation, plunging the Church (and Europe) into crisis. ([Location 2374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2374)) > The tool that looked like it would strengthen the social structure of the age instead upended it. ([Location 2375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2375)) > By 1550 it had become apparent that the volume of indulgences had debauched their value, creating “indulgence inflation”—further evidence that abundance can be harder for a society to deal with than scarcity. ([Location 2377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2377)) > This is the paradox of revolution. The bigger the opportunity offered by new tools, the less completely anyone can extrapolate the future from the previous shape of society. ([Location 2383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2383)) > So it is today. The communications tools we now have, which a mere decade ago seemed to offer an improvement to the twentieth-century media landscape, are now seen to be rapidly eroding it instead. ([Location 2384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2384)) > A society where everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere is a different kind of society than one where citizens approach media as mere consumers. ([Location 2385](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2385)) > As Elizabeth Eisenstein notes in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, observers of early print culture assumed that the abundance of books would mean more people reading the same few texts. The press seemed to offer (or threaten, depending on your point of view) an increase in monoculture as a small group of books would become the shared literary patrimony of a whole continent. As it turned out, the press undermined rather than strengthened the earlier intellectual culture. ([Location 2391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2391)) > Because each reader had access to more books, intellectual diversity, not uniformity, was the result. ([Location 2394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2394)) > When a scholar could read both Aristotle and Galen side by side and see that the two sources clashed, it corroded reflexive faith in the ancients. If you couldn’t trust Aristotle, who could you trust? ([Location 2395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2395)) > When the general public began using digital networks, the idea that everyone would contribute something to the public sphere was assumed to be contradictory to human nature (for which read: accidental behaviors of the twentieth century). And yet our desire to communicate with one another has turned out to be one of the most stable features of the current environment. The use of tools that support public expression has gone from narrow to broad in the space of a decade. ([Location 2397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2397)) > Observers of society had a fairly unprecedented opportunity to observe people’s behavior around the adoption of digital tools, and the result is exactly what you’d expect from the arrival of an unfamiliar new medium: we are absolutely terrible at predicting our own future behavior. ([Location 2403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2403)) > You can never get complex social interactions right first crack out of the box, but you can get them wrong. The key to starting well is to understand how the initial launch of social media is special. ([Location 2442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2442)) > Designers of these services have to put themselves in the user’s position and take a skeptical look at what the user gets out of participating, especially when the motivation of the designer differs from that of the user. ([Location 2463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2463)) > As Joshua Porter, a social media designer who writes the influential weblog Bokardo, explains to his clients, “The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for.” ([Location 2471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2471)) > Amtrak, the U.S. passenger rail company, has on many of its trains a “quiet car.” The rules are fairly self-explanatory: no music without headphones, no loud talking, and no mobile phone conversations. It’s that last one that trips people up. Businessmen (they are always men in my experience) violate this rule with some regularity, either not knowing that they are on the quiet car or forgetting when they reflexively reach for their phone. Remarkably, the other passengers react quickly and publicly, shushing offending phone users within seconds. They even take a certain pleasure in policing the rules of the quiet car, the same effect observed in the Ultimatum Game, when responders are willing to expend resources to punish ungenerous proposers. Given the many examples of rudeness and mobile phone use in public, what’s special about the quiet car? It’s that the riders know they can call for backup. The quiet in the quiet car is one of Elinor Ostrom’s collective resource problems. The riders are willing to police the rules themselves, because they know that if an argument ensues, the conductor will appear and take over enforcement. A visible willingness to enforce the rules, in other words, actually reduces the amount of energy the people who run the train have to expend on policing, because the riders are willing to coordinate a response among themselves, knowing they can count on predictable support. (One of the most parsimonious examples of this pattern on the web is from JavaRanch, a site for people learning the Java programming language; one of the rules for participants on the site reads, in full, “Be nice.”) Adapting ([Location 2554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2554)) > Organizations most often fail to learn from their users because of a bias toward the “office drone/ couch potato” view of humanity, but successful uses of cognitive surplus figure out how to change the opportunities on offer, rather than worrying about how to change the users. ([Location 2578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2578)) > As Brewster Kahle, a serial technology entrepreneur, once said, “If you want to solve hard problems, have hard problems.” ([Location 2591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2591)) > David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, summed this point up nicely in a 2004 speech about groups and governance: clarity is violence. To use a historical analogy, the United States was founded in 1776, but the country that today’s U.S. citizens actually live in was founded in 1787, the year the second (and current) constitution was written. The first constitution was written when the original thirteen olonies couldn’t imagine giving up much of their sovereignty to participate in the larger federation of states, so the country in the 1770s was less a nation than a loose collection of competing entities. By the late 1780s, the lack of mutual obligation was clearly keeping the union weak, so a new constitution was drawn up, obliging the states to contribute to national defense and forbidding them from erecting trade barriers, to name just two of the many new constraints. That constitution worked, and though it has been modified many times in the two centuries since it was ratified, the continuity between then and now is unbroken. For all the value of the 1787 constitution, though, it couldn’t have been enacted in 1777, because the states wouldn’t have been willing to yoke themselves to one another that tightly without an additional decade of experience. Groups tolerate governance, which is by definition a set of restrictions, only after enough value has accumulated to make the burden worthwhile. Since that value builds up only over time, the burden of the rules has to follow, not lead. ([Location 2604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2604)) # Cognitive Surplus  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Clay Shirky]] - Full Title:: Cognitive Surplus - Category: #books ## Highlights > In an evocatively titled 2007 study from the Journal of Economic Psychology—“Does Watching TV Make Us Happy?”—the behavioral economists Bruno Frey, Christine Benesch, and Alois Stutzer conclude that not only do unhappy people watch considerably more TV than happy people, but TV watching also pushes aside other activities that are less immediately engaging but can produce longer-term satisfaction. ([Location 106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=106)) > As Jib Fowles notes in Why Viewers Watch, “Television viewing has come to displace principally (a) other diversions, (b) socializing, and (c) sleep.” ([Location 119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=119)) > Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year. That represents about two thousand Wikipedias’ projects’ worth of free time annually. Even tiny subsets of this time are enormous: we spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials. ([Location 157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=157)) > Neither the shake itself nor the history of breakfast mattered as much as customers needing food to do a nontraditional job—serve as sustenance and amusement for their morning commute—for which they hired the milkshake. ([Location 204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=204)) > However pathetic you may think it is to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience: it’s worse to sit in your basement trying to decide whether Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter. ([Location 303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=303)) > In 2010 the global internet-connected population will cross two billion people, and mobile phone accounts already number over three billion. Since there are something like 4.5 billion adults worldwide (roughly 30 percent of the global population is under fifteen), we live, for the first time in history, in a world where being part of a globally interconnected group is the normal case for most citizens. ([Location 336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=336)) > All revolutions are different (which is only to say that all surprises are surprising). If a change in society were immediately easy to understand, it wouldn’t be a revolution. And today, the revolution is centered on the shock of the inclusion of amateurs as producers, where we no longer need to ask for help or permission from professionals to say things in public. ([Location 682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=682)) > The internet is the first public medium to have post-Gutenberg economics. You don’t need to understand anything about its plumbing to appreciate how different it is from any form of media in the previous five hundred years. ([Location 721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=721)) > And finally, the new media involves a change in economics. With the internet, everyone pays for it, and then everyone gets to use it. ([Location 741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=741)) > This shift to post-Gutenberg economics, with its interchangeably perfect versions and conversational capabilities, with its symmetrical production and low costs, provides the means for much of the generous, social, and creative behavior we’re seeing. ([Location 745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=745)) > With digital sharecropping, the platform owners get the money and the creators of the content don’t, a situation Carr regards as manifestly unfair. ([Location 758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=758)) > (As Cicero said two millennia ago, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”) ([Location 1060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1060)) > We have always wanted to be autonomous, competent, and connected; it’s just that now social media has become an environment for enacting those desires, rather than suppressing them. ([Location 1094](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1094)) > The lesson of Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf is this: If you give people a way to act on their desire for autonomy and competence or generosity and sharing, they might take you up on it—every successful example in this book involves harnessing those intrinsic motivations in one way or another. However, if you only pretend to offer an outlet for those motivations, while actually slotting people into a scripted experience, they may well revolt. ([Location 1245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1245)) > The cognitive surplus is not simply trillions of hours of free time spread across two billion connected individuals. Rather, it is communal; we must combine our surplus free time if it is to be useful, and we can do that only when we’re given the right opportunities. ([Location 1260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1260)) > No one wants e-mail for itself, any more than anyone wants electricity for itself; rather, we want the things electricity enables. ([Location 1272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1272)) > When a surprising new thing happens, instead of asking Why is this new? we can ask Why is it a surprise? ([Location 1279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1279)) > Many of the unexpected uses of communications tools are surprising because our old beliefs about human nature were so lousy. ([Location 1280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1280)) > that a tool’s capabilities don’t completely determine its ultimate functions. Instead, users can press a tool into service in ways that the designers never imagined, and those new functions are often discovered and perfected not by a burst of solo inspiration but by exploration and improvement among a collaborative group. ([Location 1330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1330)) - Note: eric von hippel mit econ > Groups that manage common resource problems assume a shared commitment to a norm of cooperation. This is different from the ability to see bad behavior and punish it. The easiest infraction to deal with is the one that doesn’t happen, so having members internalize a sense of right and wrong when dealing with irrigation or fishing rights becomes an essential tool. ([Location 1467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1467)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The social reduction of selfish impulses can be triggered easily. When a plate of doughnuts is set out in a common area, office workers will take fewer if there are paper cutouts of eyes nearby (thereby proving H. L. Mencken’s hypothesis, “Conscience is the little voice that tells you someone might be looking”). ([Location 1471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1471)) > This increase in our ability to create things together, to pool our free time and particular talents into something useful, is one of the great new opportunities of the age, one that changes the behaviors of people who take advantage of it. ([Location 1549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1549)) > Generations do differ, but less because people differ than because opportunities do. Human nature changes slowly but includes an incredible range of mechanisms for adapting to our surroundings. ([Location 1571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1571)) > The fundamental attribution error is at work when we explain our own behavior in terms of the constraints on us (“I didn’t stop to help the stranded driver because I was late for work”) but attribute the same behavior in others to their character (“He didn’t stop to help the stranded driver because he’s selfish”). ([Location 1589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1589)) > As Thomas Jefferson famously remarked: “He who receives ideas from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine, as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me.” ([Location 1611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1611)) > As the visionary Kevin Kelly wrote in an essay called “Triumph of the Default,” engineers can influence the behavior of their users: Therefore the privilege of establishing what value the default is set at is an act of power and influence. Defaults are a tool not only for individuals to tame choices, but for systems designers—those who set the presets—to steer the system. The architecture of these choices can profoundly shape the culture of that system’s use. ([Location 1621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1621)) > In January 2000, an unusual paper called “A Fine Is a Price” appeared in the Journal of Legal Studies. Written by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, it was about psychology, though it appeared in a legal studies journal; it was short, in a field given to writing by the yard; it was written in plain (and quite vivid) English; and it attacked a central tenet of legal theory, namely that deterrence is a simple and reliable way to affect people’s behavior. ([Location 1682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1682)) > The Invisible College became so important to British science that its members formed the core of the Royal Society, a much less invisible organization chartered in 1662 and still in operation to this day. ([Location 1787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1787)) > Knowledge is the most combinable thing we humans have, but taking advantage of it requires special conditions. ([Location 1800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1800)) > Increases in community size, decreases in cost of sharing, and increases in clarity all make knowledge more combinable, and in groups where these characteristics grow, combinability will grow. ([Location 1829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1829)) > These three conditions are all magnified by a medium that is global and cheap, and that lets unlimited perfect copies of information spread at will, even among large and physically dispersed groups. Our technological tools for making information globally available and discoverable, by amateurs, at zero marginal cost, thus represent an enormous and positive shock to the combinability of knowledge. ([Location 1831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1831)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Foray’s fourth condition is culture, a community’s set of shared assumptions about how it should go about its work, and about its members’ relations with one another. ([Location 1834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1834)) > Etienne Wenger, an independent sociologist, coined the term “communities of practice” to describe people who come together to share their knowledge as a way of getting better at what they do. ([Location 1837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1837)) > According to an open source aphorism, “Good community plus bad code makes a good project.” ([Location 1850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=1850)) > Wilfred Bion, a psychotherapist ([Location 2072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2072)) > To the question “Are groups of people best thought of as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive unit?” his answer was that we are, as a species, “hopelessly committed to both.” ([Location 2080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2080)) > Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren’t real. ([Location 2094](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2094)) > For most groups, Bion observed, the primary threat is internal: the risk of falling into emotionally satisfying but ineffective behavior. ([Location 2096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2096)) > He called groups that do so “basic groups,” that is, they fall into their basest desires. Basic groups are incapable of, and often actively avoid, pursuing any higher purpose. (Bion’s neurotic patients, for example, were nominally in treatment to get better but actually tried to avoid doing any work that would lead to real change.) Any group trying to create real value must police itself to ensure it isn’t losing sight of its higher purpose, or what Bion called the “sophisticated goal.” By contrast, Bion called groups that pursued their goals “sophisticated work groups”: their members worked to keep themselves and one another from sliding into satisfying but ineffective emotions and, when they did get sidetracked, returned the group to its sophisticated goal. The primary mechanism in such sophisticated groups is that the members internalize the standards of the group and react to behavior that undermines those standards, whether that behavior is their own or from other group members. Governance in such groups is not just a set of principles and goals, but of principles and goals that have been internalized by the participants. Such self-governance helps us behave according to our better natures. ([Location 2097](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2097)) > As Gary Kamiya has noted of today’s web, “You can always get what you want, but you can’t always get what you need.” The kinds of things we need are produced by groups pursuing public value. ([Location 2236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2236)) > As Dean Kamen, the inventor and entrepreneur, puts it, “In a free culture, you get what you celebrate.” ([Location 2241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2241)) > Neither perfect individual freedom nor perfect social control is optimal (Ayn Rand and Vladimir Lenin both overshot the mark), so it falls to us to manage the tension between individual freedom and social value, a trade-off that follows the by-now-familiar pattern of having no solution, just different optimizations that create different kinds of value, and different kinds of problems that need to be managed. ([Location 2248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2248)) > Ultimately members’ reputations mattered enough to keep fraud to a minimum. Buyers and sellers with long-term identities and reputations on the site were provided with an incentive not just to behave well but to be seen as behaving well. Paul Resnick, a social media researcher at the University of Michigan, studied eBay’s reputation system and concluded that sellers with a positive reputation, as reported by their customers, could command an 8 percent premium on price over sellers who’d just arrived on the site. ([Location 2259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2259)) > Omidyar’s original dictum—“People are basically good”—is true only with some commitment to governance structure. ([Location 2263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2263)) > The less catchy but more accurate lesson from eBay is “People will behave if they sense that there is long-term value in doing so, and short-term loss in not doing so.” ([Location 2265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2265)) > There is no one-size-fits-all set of rules for governing groups that create public value. ([Location 2268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2268)) > It’s easy to galvanize a group with thoughts of some external enemy, but, in fact, the likeliest source of distraction from a shared goal is from the members of the group with that goal. (Ironically, one of the easiest ways to distract such a group is to get them to focus on outside enemies, real or imagined, rather than on their shared interests or tasks.) Because the biggest threat to group action is internal, voluntary groups need governance so that we can defend ourselves from ourselves; we need governance to create a space we can create in. ([Location 2275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2275)) > Falling costs create room for experimentation, experiments create value, and that value creates an incentive to benefit from it. If incentive led only to more experimentation, then lowered costs would create a pure virtuous circle. Unfortunately, the incentive to make use of experimental value reaches people who had nothing to do with creating or sustaining it. The larger and more publicly successful a project is, the more people will want to appropriate that value while giving nothing back or even to see the project fail. ([Location 2281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2281)) > Because we are hopelessly committed to both individual satisfaction and group effectiveness, groups committed to public or civic value are rarely permanent. ([Location 2301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2301)) > A cynical streak in society looks at all forms of amateur participation as either naive or stupid. ([Location 2339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2339)) > If we want to create new forms of civic value, we need to improve the ability of small groups to try radical things, to help the inventors of the next PatientsLikeMe or the next set of Responsible Citizens get up and going. ([Location 2345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2345)) > We are all living through the disorientation that comes from including two billion new participants in a media landscape previously operated by a small group of professionals. ([Location 2349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2349)) > When this much has changed, our best chance for finding good ideas is to have as many groups as possible try as many things as possible. ([Location 2350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2350)) > Johannes Gutenberg’s best-known work was his forty-two-line Bible, a spectacularly beautiful example of early printing. But it was neither his first work nor his most voluminous. (He printed fewer than two hundred copies.) That honor goes instead to his printing of indulgences. ([Location 2353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2353)) > In Gutenberg’s time, an indulgence was a written record of the transaction, which also worked as a kind of token that validated the bearer’s future time off. The Church would deputize people to issue indulgences and collect money on its behalf; the issuer got a cut of the proceeds for his trouble. (Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” is told by one of these issuers.) ([Location 2360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2360)) > Gutenberg’s press flooded the market. In the early 1500s John Tetzel, the head pardoner for German territories, would sweep into a town with a collection of already printed indulgences, hawking them with a phrase usually translated as “When a coin a coffer rings / A soul for heaven springs.” The nakedly commercial aspects of indulgences, among other things, enraged Martin Luther, who in 1517 launched an attack on the Church in the form of his famous Ninety-five Theses. ([Location 2370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2370)) > Luther’s critique, along with the spread of Bibles translated into local languages, drove the Protestant Reformation, plunging the Church (and Europe) into crisis. ([Location 2374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2374)) > The tool that looked like it would strengthen the social structure of the age instead upended it. ([Location 2375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2375)) > By 1550 it had become apparent that the volume of indulgences had debauched their value, creating “indulgence inflation”—further evidence that abundance can be harder for a society to deal with than scarcity. ([Location 2377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2377)) > This is the paradox of revolution. The bigger the opportunity offered by new tools, the less completely anyone can extrapolate the future from the previous shape of society. ([Location 2383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2383)) > So it is today. The communications tools we now have, which a mere decade ago seemed to offer an improvement to the twentieth-century media landscape, are now seen to be rapidly eroding it instead. ([Location 2384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2384)) > A society where everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere is a different kind of society than one where citizens approach media as mere consumers. ([Location 2385](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2385)) > As Elizabeth Eisenstein notes in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, observers of early print culture assumed that the abundance of books would mean more people reading the same few texts. The press seemed to offer (or threaten, depending on your point of view) an increase in monoculture as a small group of books would become the shared literary patrimony of a whole continent. As it turned out, the press undermined rather than strengthened the earlier intellectual culture. ([Location 2391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2391)) > Because each reader had access to more books, intellectual diversity, not uniformity, was the result. ([Location 2394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2394)) > When a scholar could read both Aristotle and Galen side by side and see that the two sources clashed, it corroded reflexive faith in the ancients. If you couldn’t trust Aristotle, who could you trust? ([Location 2395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2395)) > When the general public began using digital networks, the idea that everyone would contribute something to the public sphere was assumed to be contradictory to human nature (for which read: accidental behaviors of the twentieth century). And yet our desire to communicate with one another has turned out to be one of the most stable features of the current environment. The use of tools that support public expression has gone from narrow to broad in the space of a decade. ([Location 2397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2397)) > Observers of society had a fairly unprecedented opportunity to observe people’s behavior around the adoption of digital tools, and the result is exactly what you’d expect from the arrival of an unfamiliar new medium: we are absolutely terrible at predicting our own future behavior. ([Location 2403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2403)) > You can never get complex social interactions right first crack out of the box, but you can get them wrong. The key to starting well is to understand how the initial launch of social media is special. ([Location 2442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2442)) > Designers of these services have to put themselves in the user’s position and take a skeptical look at what the user gets out of participating, especially when the motivation of the designer differs from that of the user. ([Location 2463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2463)) > As Joshua Porter, a social media designer who writes the influential weblog Bokardo, explains to his clients, “The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for.” ([Location 2471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2471)) > Amtrak, the U.S. passenger rail company, has on many of its trains a “quiet car.” The rules are fairly self-explanatory: no music without headphones, no loud talking, and no mobile phone conversations. It’s that last one that trips people up. Businessmen (they are always men in my experience) violate this rule with some regularity, either not knowing that they are on the quiet car or forgetting when they reflexively reach for their phone. Remarkably, the other passengers react quickly and publicly, shushing offending phone users within seconds. They even take a certain pleasure in policing the rules of the quiet car, the same effect observed in the Ultimatum Game, when responders are willing to expend resources to punish ungenerous proposers. Given the many examples of rudeness and mobile phone use in public, what’s special about the quiet car? It’s that the riders know they can call for backup. The quiet in the quiet car is one of Elinor Ostrom’s collective resource problems. The riders are willing to police the rules themselves, because they know that if an argument ensues, the conductor will appear and take over enforcement. A visible willingness to enforce the rules, in other words, actually reduces the amount of energy the people who run the train have to expend on policing, because the riders are willing to coordinate a response among themselves, knowing they can count on predictable support. (One of the most parsimonious examples of this pattern on the web is from JavaRanch, a site for people learning the Java programming language; one of the rules for participants on the site reads, in full, “Be nice.”) Adapting ([Location 2554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2554)) > Organizations most often fail to learn from their users because of a bias toward the “office drone/ couch potato” view of humanity, but successful uses of cognitive surplus figure out how to change the opportunities on offer, rather than worrying about how to change the users. ([Location 2578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2578)) > As Brewster Kahle, a serial technology entrepreneur, once said, “If you want to solve hard problems, have hard problems.” ([Location 2591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2591)) > David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, summed this point up nicely in a 2004 speech about groups and governance: clarity is violence. To use a historical analogy, the United States was founded in 1776, but the country that today’s U.S. citizens actually live in was founded in 1787, the year the second (and current) constitution was written. The first constitution was written when the original thirteen olonies couldn’t imagine giving up much of their sovereignty to participate in the larger federation of states, so the country in the 1770s was less a nation than a loose collection of competing entities. By the late 1780s, the lack of mutual obligation was clearly keeping the union weak, so a new constitution was drawn up, obliging the states to contribute to national defense and forbidding them from erecting trade barriers, to name just two of the many new constraints. That constitution worked, and though it has been modified many times in the two centuries since it was ratified, the continuity between then and now is unbroken. For all the value of the 1787 constitution, though, it couldn’t have been enacted in 1777, because the states wouldn’t have been willing to yoke themselves to one another that tightly without an additional decade of experience. Groups tolerate governance, which is by definition a set of restrictions, only after enough value has accumulated to make the burden worthwhile. Since that value builds up only over time, the burden of the rules has to follow, not lead. ([Location 2604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NX75HC&location=2604))