Here Comes Everybody


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Paperback
344 pages
ISBN 9780143114949 Published March 2009
Penguin Books
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Here Comes Everybody
The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
By Clay Shirky 

Related Blog Posts
Culture and The Innovator's Cookbook
Posted Aug. 29, 2011 11:30 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

When you booted up Windows 95, a man named Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno made that experience more remarkable and memorable. He made the little league game at the end of the movie Traffic seem profound and timeless—a gentle, reassuring reminder that the universe is stitched together of individual, seemingly mundane moments. His music makes one think and write things like that, takes you to different dimensions and other worlds. Just writing this post caused me to stumble across a YouTube video that is nothing but the Windows 95 Startup Sound for 10 Minutes, and not only did I listen to it, but I took the brilliant advice of the only intelligent comment I've ever come across on YouTube and played it in multiple tabs at once. The result was 10 minutes of bliss. Window 95 slowed down 23 times is also lovely (and if you happen you watch the equally slowed down Microsoft commercial that accompanies it, pause it at minute 2:12).

I write of Brian Eno today because he has showed up in two books that have floated across my desk recently. Both books—Culture, edited by John Brockman, and The Innovator's Cookbook edited by Steven Johnson—are compilations of material that include interviews with Eno. You may know the editors... Steven Johnson from his wonderful 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From, and John Brockman from his many compilations, including This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future, My Einstein and The Mind—the last of which was released alongside Culture earlier this month. Brockman is also the author of The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution.

In Culture, Eno observes that art "seems to to be something we are biologically inclined to do," that "all human groups engage in something that we call artistic behavior" and talks about the need to develop a language for having a conversation about the arts. He compares the transition he's looking for to the way Darwin changed the field of natural history forever by giving it a common language—taking it from a science that simply collected material to one that could develop theories about the material collected. He goes on to discuss his own theory that we codify most of our knowledge in metaphors, and that "Science ... enables us to come up with a structure upon which we can build useful metaphors.: He continues: "This is why artists are interested in science ... because science keeps coming up with big ideas, like chaos, like complexity, that we then think, ah , yes, perhaps that's how a lot of things work. Then we have a new metaphor." Speaking of the spectrum, or continuum, our minds move along, he says:


If I drew [a] spectrum of the highly rational to the highly intuitive, what I would have to say is that we don't spend much of our time at either of those extremes. We spend most of our time somewhere along the middle.

You have art writers who constantly celebrate the "intuition" extreme and think that this is the sort of apex of human existence, and you have scientists who by default, almost, dignify the other one. That's where they live, or that's where they'd like to live. They want to be able to make the kind of statements that push that boundary. What I would like to see is a conversation that admits that we spend most of our time somewhere in the middle, and we ought to find a way of thinking about it.

I suppose at the root of all this is the feeling that possibly the only way that humans can remain cooperative is by those of us who are artists or who are interested in the arts realizing that we have some kind of a job to do. It's no good anymore, as far as I'm concerned, for artists to just take the bohemian attitude of, oh, it just comes out of me, and I don't know what I'm doing, etc. I just can't stand that; I don't want this romantic attitude that says artists shouldn't be a part of this planet. This is a real job, and it has to do something.

In Steven Johnson's The Innovator's Cookbook, coming out in October from Riverhead Books, he discusses how technologies spark innovation, not the other way around:


I think one thing that is interesting that I don't think people acknowledge is that normally we think that technologies arise out of good ideas. So somebody has a brilliant scientific notion or artistic notion and then they create the technology to realize it. But actually I more and more think that it's the technology that precedes the understanding of the principles. This is what happens in science a lot: a tool is invented, and the tool then leads to some new realization, something that you could now do or see or understand that you could never have understood before. I think that often happens in the arts. Think for instance of my favorite example—because it's the one I've spent my life working in—the recording studio. The multitrack studio was invented for completely mundane reasons so that engineers could could more easily balance the voice against the rest of the performers. They didn't have to make all those decisions before the recording; they could do it afterward. But of course, that humble invention gave rise to a whole different way of making music, really a different understanding of music completely.

Beyond Eno, Brockman's book contains Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus), Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget) and Douglass Rushkoff (author of Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Business, Life, Inc. and Program and Be Programmed) among many others. Johnson pulls from the minds of Clayton Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma), Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class), Tom Kelley (The Art of Innovation) and more. The two books also share Stewart Brand (author of Whole Earth Discipline among other books) as a contributor. Taken together, they make for a really interesting read about culture, innovation, the culture of innovation, and the innovation of culture. I highly recommend both books—and Brian Eno.



Links for a Monday Afternoon
Posted June 6, 2011 10:57 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

➻ Cory Doctorow has laid out an interesting chronology of intellectual property rights since the first part of the 20th century for The Guardian's Comment Is Free interview series. Arguing that Every pirate wants to be an admiral, he tells a story that begins with sheet music composers and ends with the Internet about how elements of every innovation are seen as piracy until they become the mainstream, at which time they begin accusing the next generation of innovators of piracy. Stating at the beginning of the video that "The way to increase the health of the cultural realm is to allow more people to participate in it in more ways," he ends with anxiety that, for the first time in history, lawmakers may end up on the wrong side of the debate between the so-called "pirates" and supposed "admirals."

If you're interested in real piracy, The Guardian also covered that recently, with Jay Bahadur (the author of Deadly Waters: Inside the Hidden World of Somalia's Pirates—not yet available in the U.S.) writing about his Interview With a Pirate for the paper.

➻ Palgrave Macmillan has a new Family Business Publication series. Mark T. Green wrote recently for the Powell's Books blog about his release in that series, Inside the Multi-Generational Family Business: Nine Symptoms of Generational Stack-Up and How to Cure Them. Speaking of Family Business Light and Dark, he wrote:

Death of a Salesman. Buddenbrooks. The Godfather. The Count of Monte Cristo.

These great works of literature have larger-than-life characters and sweeping themes of love and loss. They also share something else: They're about family businesses. Sometimes the fictional business is like a living, breathing character itself (Buddenbrooks, The Godfather). Sometimes the business is more for setting and context (The Count of Monte Cristo). As a family-business researcher and consultant for over 10 years, I'm not surprised that so many authors, playwrights, filmmakers, and TV-show creators look to a family livelihood for inspiration. The real-life intersection of family and work, arguably the two richest sources of self-worth (and pain), is rife with the most archetypal themes and conflicts, the lightest and darkest sides of the human psyche and human interaction.

I'm sure those of you out there with family businesses can relate. And, if so, Palgrave's Family Business Bookstore can probably help you avoid the dark side. They're the Jedi of the family business book universe.

➻ And for all you social entrepreneurs out there, The Echoing Green SPARK*BLOG posted a list of books for social entrepreneurs that were recommended by their readers. It's about a month old now, but it's new to me so maybe it will be new to you. The original post broke the answers up to show which suggestions came from Americorps Alumni and which came from the Echoing Green Community, but I'm going to list them all together:

Hopefully Lisa Galinsky's Work on Purpose will show up on that list soon (Ms. Galisnky is the Senior Vice President of Echoing Green). To get even more book recommendations, check out their previous post on Books Every Social Entrepreneur Should Read, which links to lists from Change.org, Acumen Fund, and Social Edge.

➻ Jon and Aaron have been out of town attending Chris Guillebeau's World Domination Summit, which gives me a great reason to link to Chris's recent post about The Need for Change:

When the time comes where you’re willing to make a big break, you may find yourself facing down fear and trying to see through to the other side. Just remember: once you start going down the road of change, you don’t always know where you’re going to end up. This very reason is why many people remain stuck in discontent but unable to find their way out.

Will it be easy? Probably not, at least not if it’s worth doing. Will everything be OK? Maybe, maybe not. That’s why it’s scary.

That's also why it's worth it.

➻ Speaking of change, we now turn to music (a passion everyone in our office shares) and an article Jack shared with me to this morning—The New York Times Magazine's great profile of Who, What and Where is Bon Iver? It turns out that all of those questions can in be answered in one way or another with "Eau Claire, Wisconsin."

➻ Skinny Love.

Bon Iver - Skinny Love - Une Soiree de Poche from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.



Friday Links (On a Snowy Monday Afternoon)
Posted Jan. 10, 2011 8:50 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

It's been a while since we linked up a Friday afternoon, and since I didn't get the chance to do it last Friday, I thought I'd do so today.

➻ Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus, contributed an article to the current issue of Foreign Affairs about The Political Power of Social Media. You'll need to purchase the full length article ($0.99) if you're not an active subscriber, or you can read about how Shirky squares the circle (and a little about Evgeny Morozovover's new book, The Net Delusion) over at The Economist. From that review:

For wizened cyberpunks, it is a seemingly timeless debate: does the internet inherently promote openness and democracy, or can it just as easily strengthen the hand of authoritarian regimes? A decade ago Andrew Shapiro's book The Control Revolution argued the former, while Shanthi Kalathil's and Taylor Boas's tome Open Networks, Closed Regimes dissented. This week sees the publication of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov, which sides with the pessimists. [...] Between the cyber-utopians and cyber-pessimists, Mr Shirky has articulated an astute framework and found a sensible middle ground.

Head on over to The Economist's review of the argument to read more about Shirky's "three principal contributions to the debate."

➻ Our dear friend and former colleague Daniel Goldin, now the proprieter of Boswell Book Company on Milwaukee's East Side, was featured on NPR's Morning Edition last month with Stusan Stamberg to pick his favorite books of 2010 and answer the question, "Where's the craic?" (You have to actually listen to the story to get the answer to that question, but Daniel is the first bookseller to speak in the story, so you don't have to wait too long.)

➻ 2010 might have been the year of the e-reader, but Alexander Chee focused more on I, Reader is his essay at The Morning News in late November. Talking about his first experience in e-book reading—reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on the train with the Kindle app on his phone—and it's effect on him, he writes:

Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, made a big splash this year, presenting an elegant argument about the way we’re being disarrayed. The problems are structural, he argues: This is our brain; this is our brain on the internet. One favorite quote: “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Yes, I thought. Me too.

When his book appeared, I’d more or less accepted that this had also somehow happened to me, my brain remapped by the internet. But now with my phone-sized e-reader that sometimes took calls, now that I was walking and reading again the way I did as a child, reading fiction, not news, I noticed during the Gulf oil spill I no longer cared quite as much about the latest shitty thing happening in American politics that was out of my control (and that also made me feel paralyzed by it). Instead, there I was on the train, reading about a giant glowing non-gasoline-burning submarine and wondering why the scientists who borrowed inspiration from science fiction never thought of using that as a tech model.

It's not an entirely rose-tinted reflection of e-readers, but Chee's essay is a reminder that, as a reader, no matter how you get them, "There is always going to be a book that saves you."

➻ Steve Denning, author of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling and The Leader's Guide to Radical Management, has written a great, lengthy review of Umair Haque's New Capitalist Manifesto. In it, Denning writes:

Haque believes in firms that have a philosophy, particularly “a philosophy that emphasizes the first, fundamental principle of value creation, rather than planning planning a strategy focused on value extraction.” There is thus a shift from an overriding preoccupation with financial value and costs to instilling real values that create the basis for generating thick value that makes a difference in people’s lives.

The New Capitalist Manifesto was released by Harvard Business School Press last week.

➻ It's a bit old now, but just in case you missed it, The New York Times Sunday Book Review picked 100 Notable Books of 2010. The books on the list that I feel could fit in the business category (some loosely) are:

For those interested, there are many quality titles on the list that are not business books, as well. It's worth a gander.

➻ Bethany McLean, coauthor of All the Devils are Here—the only book in the list above that fits neatly into the business category—wrote an Op-Ed last week asking Who Want a 30-Year Mortgage?

It turns out a lot of people do, but banks aren't particularly keen on them. McLean looks at the promises coming from both sides of the aisle in Washington and tries to square them with reality, writing:

Almost certainly, any 30-year product would be offered on a more limited basis and at a higher price than it is today. How much higher, it’s hard to say. In the pre-crisis days, Fannie used to argue that its guarantee enabled consumers to pay one quarter to one half of a percentage point less in annual interest on their mortgages; today, [William] Gross, [the co-founder and managing director of the investment firm Pimco], says that mortgages without a government guarantee would cost at least several percentage points more. If his numbers are right, then mortgages—and 30-year mortgages in particular—would be far more expensive, and the pool of American homebuyers would shrink.

This may well be the right long-term answer. After all, other countries manage fine without the widespread availability of 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. But is there an American politician alive who would accept responsibility for depressing the housing market further?

I think she's implying that the answer is "no," but that rhetorical question is not the end of her point.

➻ Our next article came to life after Bhob Rainey "was recently asked by a student to submit an op-ed column for the Loyola New Orleans student paper, The Maroon." For such a sanguine-sounding publication, Rainey chose a (seemingly) rather blue topic—boredom. Writing that "A radical boredom could remind us that reality is much more vast and exciting than common sense allows," he sums up his article with a brilliant (and creative?) quote from Kenneth Goldsmith:

Creativity is such a bankrupt concept in our culture… such an over used cliché, and yet something held so highly esteemed, still, that in order to truly be creative and truly find a way out of that we need to employ a strategy of opposites—we need to be uncreative, we need to be boring, we need to be everything that the culture claims creativity isn’t.

How boring.

➻ "Try to ride on waves of activity... in every direction" —Junip (Jose Gonzalez/Elias Araya/Tobias Winterkorn)



Friday Links
Posted Jan. 22, 2010 9:38 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

With work events and the holidays and winter bugs, it's been awhile since I've posted Friday Links. I'm going to remedy that right... now.

➻ The Economist had a fascinating article in December about how the Internet (and electric telegraph) might very well destroy the newspaper business in 2010 (and 1845). Their summation is, of course, correct:

The internet may kill newspapers; but it is not clear if that matters. For society, what matters is that people should have access to news, not that it should be delivered through any particular medium; and, for the consumer, the faster it travels, the better.

But the really entertaining aspect of the article is reading the hysteria over what would happen to newspapers upon the telegraph's arrival.

➻ Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, contributed his thoughts to a great little project that asked "How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think?" Other contributors include Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, Kevin Kelly, author of New Rules for the New Economy and Whole Earth Discipline author Stewart Brand.

➻ Speaking of Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand, Kevin write a great review of Brand's book over on Cool Tools. (Incidentally, we're big fans of viewing books as tools.)

➻ GalleyCat asked some really smart people about "Book Publishing 10 Years in the Future," Seth Godin and Richard Nash among them. Nash delved into the matter further earlier this month at Publishing Perspectives.

➻ Cool Hunting takes a look at Debbie Millman's Look Both Ways.

➻ David Holohan wrote a great review of Rah Pattel's critique of modern capitalism, The Value of Nothing, in The Christian Science Monitor yesterday.

➻ The New York Times newly released book section includes I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne with Chris Ayres, and Ozzy's warning:

Other people’s memories of the stuff in this book might not be the same as mine. I ain’t gonna argue with ’em. Over the past 40 years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, Quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other heavy-duty substances to list in this footnote. On more than a few occasions I was on all of those at the same time.

Sounds like it may be entertaining, or a disaster... maybe both.

➻ Today is the the first Indie Press Friday over on Twitter.

➻ And, finally, we have a story Remembering Spike Jones and His City Slickers from NPR's All Things Considered, aired late last month.



In the Books - Off to the Printers IX
Posted Jan. 11, 2010 8:01 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

In our second to last installment of articles from past editions of In the Books, we have a short essay from mister Jon Mueller. In it, Jon shares some of his insights on an oft-discussed topic around these parts—the future of the book and distribution of ideas.

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The Shifting Landscape of Moving Ideas: The Art of Publishing in a Socially Empowered World BY JON MUELLER

The book remains the definitive source for deep exploration of knowledge on a topic. Whether developing a fictional idea, characters and events, or explaining a non-fiction theory or process, the potential size and portability of books allows them to continue to function as a useful tool of communicating information. All in all, books haven’t changed much. But the ways people receive information sure have.

Each year the number of book titles produced rises as publishers attempt to increase their odds of having a bestseller. But is it working? With each title, there’s less time to create an impact, yet a greater number of opportunities to communicate the idea as readers find more methods to receive information. Within that irony is a solution to publishing’s dilemma.

Random House publisher Jonathan Karp existed in a title-saturated world for many years before forming his own imprint called Twelve. As the name of the company suggests, it produces twelve titles per year, and invests more time and energy into each title than larger publishers, which might produce hundreds of titles per year. This focused method allows Twelve to examine many different ways to spread the idea and spend more time implementing those methods, which greatly increases the chances that more people will hear about and support the idea—in whatever forms it takes on. In an August 2005 BusinessWeek article, Karp explained, “Most writers I know don't think of themselves as working in only one format. It's entirely possible that something will begin as a magazine article in Time, then become a book, then become a movie, then become a television show.”

For publishers like Twelve, the rules seem to be: Know your audience, produce fewer titles and do more with those titles. As audiences are continually introduced to new ways to receive content, there are great possibilities for authors and publishers to make an impact with their work. If an idea is revealed when a reader holds a book, gets online, reads a magazine, watches television, sees a movie and more, that idea, that author and that publisher will have communicated a variety of things to their audience, and captivated its attention in ways a single format could not.

This year, The Word of Mouth Manual by Dave Balter was published online. This 128-page book was offered for free to anyone as a digital file, and word spread rapidly as people began downloading and reading. A physical edition of the book was also produced. Featuring a waterproof cover, and an original piece of art from an artist-in-residence at the author’s company, the physical version fully utilizes the tactile experience absent from reading the text online. Though the physical book carried a price tag with it (as opposed to the free download), the point is that different people want different things. Fortunately, for author and publisher, whichever version the audience members use, it’s likely they will tell others about the great free book they read, or the interesting presentation, touch and interaction with a book unlike any they had read before.

Those conversations are the goals of marketing, and are essential for authors and publishers to be able to continue to do what they do. Offering various formats is a trend not only practiced in the book publishing world, but in many mediums, as blog writers acquire book deals, recordings are paired with exclusive film work and further conglomerations of all angles from all media are formed. Addressing all these formats takes time, so it makes sense that a lesser amount of titles would be published to put these to full effect. In this scenario, ad hype will give way to a clear understanding of what is good, and what isn’t, as those absorbing content will understand it deeper than they might have from traditional methods of promotion. In other words, you can’t reveal the content any clearer than by offering an entire book for free. Then it’s up to the audience to decide which other ways they want to see that content. Some will be content to simply read it once online. Others will want a reference guide on a shelf that they can pull, reread, take with them places and not require any sort of electricity to activate.

Multiple formats are not only beneficial for digesting ideas, but also for spreading them. As more people are getting information from different sources, more people inevitably are talking about that information. As Deirdre Breakenridge states in her book, PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences, “Social networking empowers the twenty-first century consumer to choose what is newsworthy and relevant to them. Consumers are leading a 2.0 revolution in their social networking communities. They pass more and more information back and forth through connections; relying on an extended network of family, friends, business associates, and acquaintances. The movement toward social media enables easy information sharing” (141). As publishers and authors utilize social networking, the ideas spread in ways that previously would take much longer to work, and to a much lesser extent. This process also teaches publishers and authors more about their audience.

As Bill Tancer states in his book Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters, “In our increasingly connected lives, we’re bombarded with news and information from a multitude of channels (television, print, radio, and the internet), some useful, some not so useful. It gets interesting…when we react to that information by interacting with the source itself. What information we react to and how, when viewed collectively, reveals insight into what affects us. From a business perspective, having a view into the feedback loop is invaluable – from the simple, tactical use of planning when to promote products online, such as prom dresses and engagement rings, to the visualization of Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point…” (201).

Through the human/technology interaction, there is a substantial growth of opportunities for authors and publishers. As content gets into the heads and hands of the audience, it has the potential to flourish, creating a scenario where the content creator can explore other methods of generating income. As Dave Balter states on his web site, “The publishing industry, much like the music industry, is teetering on a massive change in control—from publishers to authors and consumers! The distribution of the book itself is an indication of the power of Word of Mouth.” As this change continues to occur, the process isn’t necessarily becoming easier to manage, but for those dedicated to spreading their ideas, the resources for getting those ideas to people (who will hopefully become evangelists), are more plentiful than ever.

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Books from 2008 that can help.