In the blink of an eye, in terms of human history, we have exchanged a life with very few hubs to one with a multitude of them. We have gone from interacting with a few highly predictable groups to interacting with many fast-shifting and unpredictable groups. The transformation from a society with few hubs per lifetime to one with many–from one where our hubs were largely preordained to one where we can select or create any number of hubs–is about as profound a social change as could be imagined.
What’s good about this change? And what is not so good?
Langres, eastern France, 1713
Denis Diderot was born into a prosperous French family. When he was twenty-one, he defied his father by refusing to become a priest or a lawyer, determined to pursue a career as a writer. His father cut him off, but Denis didn’t care. He slowly established himself and was eventually approached by a leading publisher to provide a translation of Chambers’ Cyclopaedia into French. Diderot read it and was disappointed: it was safe and unoriginal, confined to academically respectable subjects. So, instead of translating it, he had a vision of a totally different kind of project–one that would make every branch of knowledge, including that of every practical trade, readily available to anyone who could read. In 1750, a prospectus for Diderot’s Encyclopédie created a flurry of interest, and a year later the first volume rolled off the press.
It started well. Diderot gathered a large number of contributors–both famous writers and obscure tradesmen–and attracted four thousand subscribers, a fantastic achievement at the time. But then the French authorities noted the encyclopedia’s rather subversive tone. There was too much respect for the common people and reason; too little for tradition, the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Church. The establishment began to harass the writers, and Diderot’s collaborators fell away.
He did not give up, however. He wrote several hundred articles himself, supervised the printing, and spent endless days and nights correcting the proofs, ruining his eyesight. After twenty-two years of constant drudgery, police interference and increasing isolation, the work was finally completed in 1772. Then Diderot discovered that his publisher had axed swathes of the manuscript at the very last minute, deleting anything deemed politically sensitive. It is little exaggeration to say that the project practically killed its originator.
Ultimately, then, the Encyclopédie was a great practical and intellectual achievement, but it was achieved at high cost and it never fulfilled its objective of letting ordinary people gain access to all available knowledge. The cost of subscription and the absence of public libraries confined the work largely to affluent readers.
Saint Petersburg, Florida, 2001
Jimmy Donal Wales had the bright idea of a free, multilingual, online encyclopedia. Each entry would be written and edited, without reward, by anyone who wanted to contribute. Wales had enough faith in his idea to bankroll it himself, and soon he hired Larry Sanger, a philosopher with whom he had worked on an earlier encyclopedia project, as the chief organiser. It was Sanger who thought up the name Wikipedia and championed the use of wiki technology–a wiki is a web page or pages specifically designed to enable anyone to change its content easily.
To many people’s astonishment, it worked. By the end of 2001, less than a year after its launch, Wikipedia featured 20,000 articles in 18 languages. As I write in 2009, it has 2,750,000 articles in English and–including articles in another 260 languages–12 million in total. It is the seventh most visited site on the World Wide Web.
Wikipedia is an amazing resource–in a few seconds, you can get generally high-quality information on almost any subject. But its most extraordinary facets are the dedication and expertise of its contributors, all of whom work for nothing. According to David Weinberger, fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Wikipedia is ‘epically important’. It has ‘really proved something…we now know without a doubt that some immense and immensely complex works of humans can be created by removing most of the elements of control’.
Yet, it is worth asking what, precisely, is so different about Wikipedia, compared with Diderot’s project a quarter of a millennium earlier?
The resemblances are striking. The objective was the same–Diderot’s vision was the original. He was a philosopher; Wales hired a philosopher. Both projects were ground-breaking, collaborative exercises. Both achieved impressive, though inevitably controversial, products. Both reached a wide audience that had not previously had such easy access to the knowledge they provided.
There are, however, two telling contrasts. The first is the scale of the collaboration and the achievement. Diderot, at least initially, had more than a hundred collaborators. Wales has more than 150,000. Diderot had to find, cajole and pay his partners. Wales is able to use people he never knew existed, without paying them a penny. Diderot’s product reached a few thousand users. Wikipedia reaches hundreds of millions.
The second difference is the ease with which the projects were achieved. Diderot toiled slavishly on his for over two decades. Wales worked part time on Wikipedia and it was hugely successful within twelve months. Diderot poured his life energy into the Encyclopédia, and it wore him out. Wales’s life was immeasurably enhanced by Wikipedia. Diderot was persecuted by the establishment. Wales was welcomed into it. In 2006, Time magazine named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world.
What explains these disparities? It seems doubtful that Wales is more intelligent, or more dedicated, or a better networker than Diderot was. Rather, he is fortunate to live at a time when human collaboration on a grand scale is so much easier and can achieve so much more. Because of advances in technology, the cost of cooperation and communication is so much lower and its quality so much higher today. There is also much less political interference with knowledge. It is far easier for ordinary people to contribute what they know to any hub, and for others to connect easily to it.
As history has unfurled, there has been a cumulative increase in the number of humans, in the number and variety of collaborative hubs, in what they can achieve, and in the number of weak links binding together nearly everyone on the planet. The ease of making connections has increased exponentially, while the cost of making them has declined at a similar rate. The differences between the nature of human cooperation in the past and the present are relatively superficial; the continuity is profound and the results grow ever more impressive.
This all sounds very upbeat. Hubs, as we’ve said, are at the heart of human cooperation and advance. And in recent years, their number, diversity and achievements have soared off the scale. But listen to Martin Luther King: ‘All human progress’, he said, ‘is precarious, and the solution to one problem brings us face to face with another.’
This is certainly true for hubs and their current abundance.
Oxford, 2005
Psychology professor Barry Schwartz is lecturing a large group. Only he doesn’t look professorial in his purple T-shirt, black shorts, white socks and black-and-white trainers. He paces the stage, sounding more polemicist than psychologist. He uses cartoons rather than research to make his points.
Society’s dogma, Schwartz says, is that choice gives more freedom and welfare. When we have no choice, life is intolerable. More choice is better. But beyond a certain point, too much choice adds little value and might even become destructive. A high degree of choice has become embedded in our lives. The professor’s local supermarket stocks 285 varieties of cookies, 75 iced teas, 230 soups, 40 toothpastes and 175 salad dressings. Using components on sale at the consumer electronics store, he says, you could construct 6.5 million different stereo systems. It used to be that there was one type of telephone and you rented it from the phone company. Now, there is almost unlimited choice and you can’t buy a mobile phone that doesn’t do many other things, too.