In Here Comes Everybody: The Power Of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky observes that one consequence of the shift to a “Publish, Then Filter” culture is a massive, exponential increase in the amount of failure that is created and must be tolerated. As Shirky explains,
“Most pictures posted to Flickr get very few viewers. Most weblogs are abandoned within a year. Most weblog posts get very few readers. On YahooGroups, an enormous collection of mailing lists on topics from macrame’ to classic TV shows to geopolitics, about half the proposed mailing lists fail to get enough members to be viable. And so on. The power law distribution of many failures and a few remarkable successes is general.”
But here’s the thing: those failures in an open source system have costs so low as to be, for all practical purposes, free. Shirky proposes a simple mathematical equation to help us think about failure. “The overall effect of failure is its likelihood times its cost.” We could summarize it as F(ailure) = L(ikelihood) x C(ost).
With this formula (F = L x C) there are two ways to limit the effect of failure on an organization, network or project. One (the more traditional one) is to reduce its likelihood. Corporations traditionally do this by making careful (and expensive) decisions about who to hire and which projects to work on, so as to reduce the likelihood of failure.
Shirky argues that competitors in the open source environment (e.g., Linux, Wikipedia, Flickr) limit the effect of failure by radically reducing its cost:
“Open source is a profound threat, not because the open source ecosystem is outsucceeding commercial efforts but because it is outfailing them. Because the open source ecosystem, and by extension open social systems generally, rely on peer production, the work on those systems can be considerably more experimental, at considerably less cost, than any firm can afford. Why? the most important reasons are that open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea.”
Of course, failure isn’t really free. The failure of existing institutions and corporations comes with enormous costs for the workers who relied on them for paychecks, health and retirement benefits. And as ever-increasing swaths of paid work are turned into voluntary hobbies—or are simply replaced by computers and robots—then the question of how to reorganize society so that the benefits of the new social tools are broadly shared becomes increasingly important.
Shirky doesn’t have an answer to that question but then, neither does anyone else. Best case scenario? The expanding experimental culture created by a world in which failure is free will help us all to figure out answers that work for the growing numbers of people who are seeing their work, their craft, their profession, disappear.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
