Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

When we change the way we communicate, we change society

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.

Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.

[C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.

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.

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction...

Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.

Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.

A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.

The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.

[R]elying on nonfinancial motivations may actually make systems more tolerant of variable participation.

Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.

[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.

Collaboration is not an absolute good.

Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, [...] and not just more groups but more kinds of groups.

The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing [...].

Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.

[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.