Ted Reads

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10:29
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This is not only outside of businesses. When you think of what is the critical innovation of Google, the critical innovation
is outsourcing the one most important thing—the decision about what’s relevant—to the community of the Web as a
whole, doing whatever they want to do: so, page rank. The critical innovation here is instead of our engineers, or our
people saying which is the most relevant, we’re going to go out and count what you, people out there on the Web, for
whatever reason—vanity, pleasure—produced links, and tied to each other. We’re going to count those, and count
them up. And again, here, you see Barbie.com, but also, very quickly, Adiosbarbie.com, the body image for every
size. A contested cultural object, which you won’t find anywhere soon on Overture, which is the classic market-based
mechanism: whoever pays the most is highest on the list.
So, all of that is in the creation of content, of relevance, basic human expression. But remember, the computers were
also physical. Just physical materials—our PCs—we share them together. We also see this in wireless. It used to be
wireless was one person owned the license, they transmitted in an area, and it had to be decided whether they would be
licensed or based on property. What we’re seeing now is that computers and radios are becoming so sophisticated that
we’re developing algorithms to let people own machines, like Wi-Fi devices, and overlay them with a sharing protocol
that would allow a community like this to build its own wireless broadband network simply from the simple principle:
When I’m listening, when I’m not using, I can help you transfer your messages; and when you’re not using, you’ll help
me transfer yours. And this is not an idealized version. These are working models that at least in some places in the
United States are being implemented, at least for public security.
If in 1999 I told you, let’s build a data storage and retrieval system. It’s got to store terabytes. It’s got to be available 24
hours a day, seven days a week. It’s got to be available from anywhere in the world. It has to support over 100 million
users at any given moment. It’s got to be robust to attack, including closing the main index, injecting malicious files,
armed seizure of some major nodes. You’d say that would take years. It would take millions. But of course, what I’m
describing is P2P file sharing. Right? We always think of it as stealing music, but fundamentally, it’s a distributed data
storage and retrieval system, where people, for very obvious reasons, are willing to share their bandwidth and their
storage to create something.
So, essentially what we’re seeing is the emergence of a fourth transactional framework. It used to be that there were
two primary dimensions along which you could divide things. They could be market based, or non-market based; they
could be decentralized, or centralized. The price system was a market-based and decentralized system. If things worked
better because you actually had somebody organizing them, you had firms, if you wanted to be in the market—or you
had governments or sometimes larger non-profits in the non-market. It was too expensive to have decentralized social
production, to have decentralized action in society. That was not about society itself. That was, in fact, economic.
But what we’re seeing now is the emergence of this fourth system of social sharing and exchange. Not that it’s the first time
that we do nice things to each other, or for each other, as social beings. We do it all the time. It’s that it’s the first time that
it’s having major economic impact. What characterizes them is decentralized authority. You don’t have to ask permission, as
you do in a property-based system. May I do this? It’s open for anyone to create and innovate and share, if they want to, by
themselves or with others, because property is one mechanism of coordination. But it’s not the only one.
Instead, what we see are social frameworks for all of the critical things that we use property and contract in the market:
information flows to decide what are interesting problems; who’s available and good for something; motivation
structures—remember, money isn’t always the best motivator. If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you
don’t increase the probability of being invited back. And if dinner isn’t entirely obvious, think of sex. (Laughter)
It also requires certain new organizational approaches. And in particular, what we’ve seen is task organization. You have
to hire people who know what they’re doing. You have to hire them to spend a lot of time. Now, take the same problem,
chunk it into little modules, and motivations become trivial. Five minutes, instead of watching TV? Five minutes I’ll
spend just because it’s interesting. Just because it’s fun. Just because it gives me a certain sense of meaning, or, in places
that are more involved, like Wikipedia, gives me a certain set of social relations.