We Think: We are a Wise Crowd

I had the pleasure of hearing Charles Leadbeater speak about the basis of his new book, We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity, at the British Library last night. Now, the title of the event was “We Think: Will the Web be Good for Us?” which has a foreboding ring to it, doesn’t it?

Charles suggested that we are experiencing the beginning of a great social shift, with the Wikipedias and Linuxes of this age being comparable to Ford’s revolutionary approach to production in the early twentieth century. But this change is not just a blindfolded step into a wholly new future. Instead, we are witnessing a return to pre-industrial ideologies, whereby history will be written by the masses rather than the superior few, as folklore once was.

We have already seen a few astonishingly successful examples of huge groups working for no money to achieve large, non-trivial goals. However, Charles points out that these successes are not the results of purely egalitarian communes of anarchists. Open source communities like Linux developers are akin to the ancient craft guilds: united to protect their causes. All these collaborative projects are moderated to some degree too. The trick to successful collaboration, it seems, is yet to be realised definitively but it probably requires a new type of leadership which is passive, self-effacing, transparent, and embraces the community’s needs and ideas.

All rather positive stuff so far, although any chief executives within the audience were probably close to tears at this point. The talk briefly touched on a couple of potentially concerning themes, namely the possible loss of privacy and the danger to security which the internet poses, but I suspect that the title of the talk belied the speaker’s optimism for the future.

Our favourite hot subject, politics, was also alluded to. Charles described how, while there has so far been little to watch over here, three major shifts in political processes have occurred in the US:

- Accountability: many feared that it would be diluted due to the oceans of libellous chit-chat through which we must all wade but there is evidence that it has in fact become tighter than ever, with watchful people checking every word from politician’s mouths.

- Democratic deliberation: to much delight, this seems to have spread in the US, although not as much as some predicted.

- Motivation: here we have seen the biggest change. Great masses of support have been cultivated through digital channels in several places – Belarus and Spain, for examples – although the effects seem generally to be short-lived.

Lastly, some departing afterthoughts, from my bus ride home last night:

- It could be valuable to define some common attributes of successful collaborations, in the hope of writing some guidelines for new ones. I suspect we would find that the pre-requisites would include: large scales, rewards for participation, and a soft moderating hand.

- Fine quality work will come from huge groups of amateurs but, through them and independently, individual geniuses and small groups of experts will rise to recognition more than ever before.