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After the Stall
ham’s concepts with the ambition to create an online encyclopedia written and
edited by the world at large. With few exceptions anyone can edit a Wikipedia
entry at any time. As discussed at length later in this book, the possibility for inaccuracy
or outright falsehood is thus legion, and Wikipedia’s users have both
created new technology and solicited commitments from people who share
Wikipedia’s ethos to maintain its accuracy without significantly denting its
generativity. Wikipedia stands at the apex of amateur endeavor: an undertaking
done out of sheer interest in or love of a topic, built on collaborative software
that enables a breathtakingly comprehensive result that is the sum of individual
contributions, and one that is extraordinarily trusting of them. 86 Wikipedia’s
character will no doubt evolve as, say, companies discover its existence and
begin editing (and policing) entries that mention or describe them, 87 just as
ownership of domain names evolved from an informal and free first-come,
first-served system to a hotly contested battlefield once their true value was recognized.
88 Today, Wikipedia’s success showcases the interactions that can take
place among the layers of a technical system, with the Internet’s absence of gatekeepers
allowing wiki software to be developed, shared, and then taken up for
educational and social purposes with contributions from people who have little
to no technical expertise.
The ubiquity of PCs and networks—and the integration of the two—have
thus bridged the interests of technical audiences and artistic and expressive
ones, making the grid’s generativity relevant not only to creativity in code-writing
as an end, but to creativity in other artistic ventures as well, including those
that benefit from the ability of near-strangers to encounter each other on the
basis of mutual interest, form groups, and then collaborate smoothly enough
that actual works can be generated. If one measures the value of generativity
through the amount of creativity it unleashes, 89 then the generativity of the PC
and Internet grid should be measured not solely by the creativity it enables
among coders, but also by the creativity it enables among artists—and among
groups of each. 90
THE GENERATIVE PATTERN
Generative technologies need not produce forward progress, if by progress one
means something like increasing social welfare. Rather, they foment change.
They solicit the distributed intellectual power of humanity to harness the leveraging
power of the product or system for new applications, and, if they are