Critique of Clay Shirky and organizing without organizations
If you’re somebody who regularly reads about technology trends and how they shape society at large, you may have come across Clay Shirky’s writings (if not the occasional critique of Clay Shirky and his ideas).
Shirky is an influential author when it comes to discussing the social and economic effects of new media. (‘New media’ refer to computer and digital technologies such as smart devices and social networking sites, as opposed to ‘old media’ like books and newspapers.) On this topic, Shirky has spent much time highlighting new media’s most celebrated outcome: the power to organize crowds.
.jpg)
Let’s start with an idea that Shirky expands upon in his popular book Here Comes Everybody. By providing an interconnected network of mobile devices, smartphones and social media have greatly enhanced a deep-rooted human ability. Simply put, it’s the power to efficiently and effectively organize many people into crowds or groups. Shirky refers to this power as “organizing without organizations.”
Organizing without organizations
In essence, Shirky makes the argument that digital technologies—including smartphones and social media, which he calls “social tools”—have lowered the “transaction costs” to organize crowds. By “transaction costs,” he means the full time and effort it takes to organize individuals into large groups with a common goal or purpose. As Shirky points out,
Running an organization is difficult in and of itself, no matter what its goals. Every transaction it undertakes—every contract, every agreement, every meeting—requires it to expend some limited resource: time, attention, or money. Because of these transaction costs, some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of (Shirky, 2008, p 29).
However, what the latest digital technologies bring to the table, Shirky argues, is the ability to self-organize without top-down management. In effect, innovations like smartphones and social media let people replace formal or hierarchical management styles with informal, self-organized groups. In consequence, writes Shirky,
we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations [emphasis added] (p 20-21).
Sharing, cooperation, and collective action
So, by giving people the power to easily self-organize, new media like smart devices and social networking sites allow for sharing, cooperation, and collective action at unprecedented scales. To briefly clarify what Shirky means by each of these activities:
- By sharing, Shirky has in mind posting platforms (from Flickr to Twitter) that allow people to distribute content online. (For example, messages, photos, videos, etc.)
- Cooperation refers to collaborative platforms, which give people the opportunity to participate and contribute to online discussions or projects. (For example, Internet forums or message boards.)
- Collective action means awareness-raising platforms in which people can come together virtually to advocate institutional changes. (For example, online support groups or activist causes.)
On these points, Shirky is no doubt correct. Smartphones and social media make it virtually effortless for people to organize themselves into groups so they can share, cooperate, and work together collectively. The result is what we could call easy logistics and scalable network effects.
Easy logistics
For instance, thanks to smartphones with easy web access, the logistics of coordinating large numbers of individuals has never been easier, particularly when they all have apps like social media.
Even if it’s not traditional, it’s incredibly convenient to organize group events on an online platform and send mass e-invites. (As opposed to calling everyone individually or mailing multiple RSVPs back and forth via snail mail.)
Scalable network effects
Moreover, if enough people use these digital technologies to organize themselves in groups, they create online networks with scalable effects that are impossible to ignore. Economists refer to these as “network effects.” That is to say, when more consumers buy smartphones and utilize social media, the value of these digital technologies increase in proportion to the number of users.
For example, many people joined Facebook simply because so many others were already on Facebook. For every user that joins the online platform, its network effect goes up correlatively. In this way, network effects create positive feedback loops that can compel more people to join with each additional user.
Critique of Clay Shirky’s conclusions
Thus, it’s not unreasonable for Shirky to highlight new media’s power to organize groups and create networks that are valuable, at least in terms of logistics and network effects. Nevertheless, there are problems with Shirky’s broader conclusions, which, in my opinion, rest upon questionable assumptions.
In short, his conclusions seem to go like this. Since digital technologies enhance our power to organize groups and create networks, smartphones and social media will benefit society overall. How so, exactly? So far as I can tell, Shirky’s arguments tend to border on wishful thinking. What follows is a brief critique of Clay Shirky and his two main arguments. He calls them the “net value” argument and the “political value” argument.
Critique of Clay Shirky’s “Net Value” argument
To start, Shirky gives a “net value” argument:
Increased flexibility and power for group action will have more good effects than bad ones, making the current changes, on balance, positive (p 296).
Unfortunately, no empirical benchmarks are really provided to back up this claim. Hence, it sounds more like a statement of blind faith than a logical argument.
After all, for every positive development we’ve seen from smart devices and social networking sites—such as new forms of online learning, charitable giving, and philanthropic fundraising—it’s easy to name a counter example. Authoritarian governments, white nationalists, and global terrorist groups have also organized themselves effectively using smartphones and social media. On this matter, it’s worth quoting at length counterterrorism expert Clint Watts:
The internet brought people together, but today social media is tearing everyone apart. By sharing information, experiences, and opinions, social media was supposed to support free societies by connecting users who could collaboratively work through their differences—or so we were told. Initially, we laud each of these new platforms—YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, Instagram, Snapchat. Over time, though, each of these applications ultimately introduces unimagined negative outcomes. Not long after many across the world applauded Facebook for toppling dictators during the Arab Spring revolutions of 2010 and 2011, it proved to be a propaganda platform and operational communications network for the largest terrorists mobilization in world history, bringing tens of thousands of foreign fighters under the Islamic State’s banner in Syria and Iraq.
As social media platforms hit their stride, gaining sizable market share and audience engagement, bad actors move in to abuse the system for their own ends. Criminals, terrorists, and nation-states sour human interactions in what were initially wonderful virtual sanctuaries (Watts, 2018, p 298).
Critique of Clay Shirky’s political value argument
So much for the “net value” argument. However, Shirky also gives a “political value” argument to make the case that society will mostly benefit from new media:
the current changes [from new media] are good because they increase the freedom of people to say and do as they like (Shirky, 2008, p 298).
Well, maybe … but more likely not, because more quantity doesn’t necessarily mean increased quality, and unfettered self-expression is no exception. Again, consider the rise of extremism online, not to mention harmful misinformation on social media platforms. As the world has seen, platforms like Facebook and Twitter helped fuel conspiracy theories that led angry mobs to attack public spaces, as well as lies that hampered public health efforts, including vaccine distribution.
Again, Shirky’s “political value” argument sounds like a statement of blind faith. As computer scientist Jaron Lanier has pointed out in his technological manifesto, You Are Not A Gadget, producing and consuming more quantity does not inevitably result in higher quality, and it’s a categorical error to conflate the two:
A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out (Lanier, 2010, p 49).
Shirky’s technological optimism continued
To be fair, Shirky is somewhat aware of these problems with his conclusions in Here Comes Everybody. Deciding whether or not digital technologies are benefiting society overall is, in part, a subjective judgment call. As he acknowledges toward the end of the book,
Anyone inclined to see the good effects of the coming changes can assure a positive value to society simply by deciding to weight the benefits more heavily than the disadvantages, while anyone who believes that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket can support that conclusion by citing the evidence, simply by deciding that the new bad things are worse than the new good things (Shirky, 2008, p 297).
Nonetheless, Shirky attempts to defend his technological optimism with a slightly different take in his follow-up book Cognitive Surplus. Like Here Comes Everybody, Cognitive Surplus contains interesting observations about smartphones and social media. But it also pushes an unyielding optimism about the social implications of these new media, and the conclusions don’t strike me as very realistic.
Therefore, it’s to that book we’ll turn to next in Part II of this book review and critique of Clay Shirky and his ideas.
References
Shirky, Clay. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Group.
Lanier, Jaron. (2010). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Watts, Clint. (2018). Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News. New York: Harper.