The dream is to scale up this third way beyond local experiments. How big can decentralized collaboration go? Black Duck Open Hub, which tracks the open source industry, lists roughly 650,000 people working on more than half a million projects. That total is three times the size of the General Motors workforce. That is an awful lot of people working for free, even if they’re not full-time. Imagine if all the employees of GM weren’t paid, yet continued to produce automobiles!
So far, the biggest online collaboration efforts are open source projects, and the largest of them, such as Apache, manage several hundred contributors—about the size of a village. One study estimates that 60,000 person-years of work have poured into the release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that self-assembly and the dynamics of sharing can govern a project on the scale of a town.
Of course, the total census of participants in online collective work is far greater. Reddit, the collaborative filtering site, has 170 million unique visitors per month and 10,000 daily active communities. YouTube claims 1 billion monthly users; they are the workforce that produces the videos that now compete with TV. Nearly 25 million registered users have contributed to Wikipedia; 130,000 of them are designated active. More than 300 million active users have posted on Instagram, and more than 700 million groups participate in Facebook Groups each month.
The number of people who belong to collective software farms or work on projects that require communal decisions still fall short of a nation. But the population of people who live in socialized media is gigantic and still increasing. More than 1.4 billion citizens of Facebook freely share their lives in an informational commune. If it were a nation, Facebook would be the largest country on the planet. Yet the entire economy of this largest country runs on labor that isn’t paid. A billion people spend a lot of their day creating content for free. They report on events around them, summarize stories, add opinions, create graphics, make up jokes, post cool photos, and craft videos. They are “paid” in the value of the communication and relations that emerge from 1.4 billion connected verifiable individuals. They are paid by being allowed to stay on the commune.
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One might expect a lot of political posturing from folks who are constructing an alternative to paid labor. But the coders, hackers, and programmers who design sharing tools don’t think of themselves as revolutionaries. The most common motivation for working without pay (according to a survey of 2,784 open source developers) was “to learn and develop new skills.” One academic put it this way (paraphrasing): “The major reason for working on free stuff is to improve my own damn software.” Basically, overt politics is not practical enough. The internet is less a creation dictated by economics than one dictated by sharing gifts.
However, citizens may not be immune to the politics of a rising tide of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism. The more we benefit from such collaboration, the more open we become to socialized institutions in government. The coercive, soul-smashing system that controls North Korea is dead (outside of North Korea); the future is a hybrid that takes cues from both Wikipedia and the moderate socialism of, say, Sweden. There will be a severe backlash against this drift from the usual suspects, but increased sharing is inevitable. There is an honest argument over what to call it, but the technologies of sharing have only begun. On my imgainary Sharing Meter Index we are still at 2 out of 10. There is a whole list of subjects that experts once believed we modern humans would not share—our finances, our health challenges, our sex lives, our innermost fears—but it turns out that with the right technology and the right benefits in the right conditions, we’ll share everything.
How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society can this movement take us? Every time that question has been asked, the answer has been: closer than we thought. Consider Craigslist. Just classified ads, right? Craigslist is far more than that. It amplified the handy community swap board until it reached a regional audience, then enhanced the ads with pictures. It let the customers do all the work of inputting their own ads and, more important, kept the ads in real time with real-time updates, and to top it off it made them free. National classifieds for free! How could debt-laden corporate newspapers compete with that? Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, globally, daily, this mostly free marketplace achieved social good at an efficiency (at its peak it had only 30 employees) that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, peer-to-peer classified undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.
Every public health care expert declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, proves that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what you’re thinking (Twitter), what you’re reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Motley Fool Caps), your everything (Facebook) is becoming a foundation of our culture. Doing it while collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don’t know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step.
A similar thing happened with free markets over the past century. Every day someone asked: What can markets do better? We took a long list of problems that seemed to require rational planning or paternal government and instead applied marketplace logic. For instance, governments traditionally managed communications, particularly scarce radio airways. But auctioning off the communication spectrum in a marketplace radically increased the optimization of bandwidth and accelerated innovation and new businesses. Instead of a government monopoly distributing mail, let market players like DHL, FedEx, and UPS try it as well. In many cases, a modified market solution worked significantly better. Much of the prosperity in recent decades was gained by unleashing market forces on social problems.
Now we’re trying the same trick with collaborative social technology: applying digital socialism to a growing list of desires—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn’t solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. We’ve had success in using collaborative technology in bringing health care to the poorest, developing free college textbooks, and funding drugs for uncommon diseases. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the sharing is bigger than we imagined.
The power of sharing is not just about the nonprofit sector. Three of the largest creators of commercial wealth in the last decade—Google, Facebook, and Twitter—derive their value from unappreciated sharing in unexpected ways.
The earliest version of Google overtook the leading search engines of its time by employing the links made by amateur creators of web pages. Each time an ordinary person made a hyperlink on the web, Google calculated that link as a vote of confidence for the linked page and used this vote to give a weight to links throughout the web. So a particular page would get ranked higher for reliability in Google’s search results if the pages that linked to it were also linked to pages that other reliable pages linked to. This weirdly circular evidence was not created by Google but was instead derived from the public links shared by millions of web pages. Google was the first to extract value from the shared search results that customers clicked on. Each click by an ordinary user represented a vote for the usefulness of that page. So merely by using Google, the fans themselves made Google better and more economically valuable.