I have a choice of 10,000 different co-ops I can contribute to. (Not many of my generation want to work for a corporation.) They offer different rates, varying benefits, but, most important, different sets of coworkers. I try to give my favorite co-ops a lot of time not because they pay more, but because I really enjoy working with the best folks—even though we’ve never met in real life. It is actually hard sometimes to get your work accepted into a high-quality co-op. Your previous contributions—all trackable on the web, of course—have to be really top-notch. They prefer active agents who are contributing to several projects over the years, with multiple streams of automatic payments, as a sign you work well in this sharing economy.
When I am not contributing, I play in a maxed-out virtual world. This world is entirely built by the users—and controlled by them too. I’ve spent six years constructing this mountaintop village, making every stone wall, every mossy-tiled roof exactly right. I got a lot of cred points for the snow-covered corner, but more important to me is to have it fit perfectly in the greater virtual world we are making. Over 30,000 different games of all types (violent/nonviolent, strategy/shooter) are running on this world platform without interference. In surface area it’s almost as big as the moon. There are now 250 million people building the game, each one tending a particular block in this vast world, each one processing on his or her own connected chip. My village runs on my smarthouse monitor. In the past I’ve lost work to host companies that went out of business, so now I (like millions of others) work only on territory and chips I control. We all contribute our small CPU cycles and storage to the shared Greater World, linked up by a mesh network of rooftop relays. There is a solar-powered mini-relay on my roof that communicates with the other relays on nearby rooftops so that we—the Greater World builders—can’t be kicked off a company’s network. We collectively run the network, a network no one owns, or rather everyone owns. Our contributions can’t be sold, nor do we have to be marketed to while we make and play games within one extended interconnected space. The Greater World is the largest co-op in history, and for the first time we have a hint of a planetary-scale governance. The game world’s policies and budget are decided by electronic votes, line by line, facilitated with lots of explaining, tutorials, and even AI. Now over 250 million people want to know why they can’t vote on their national budgets that way too.
In a weirdly recursive way, people create teams and co-ops within the Greater World to make stuff in the real world. They find that the tools for collaboration improve quicker in the virtual spaces. I’m contributing to a hackathon that is engineering a collaboratively designed and crowdfunded boomerang probe to Mars, with the goal to be the first to return a few Mars rocks to Earth. Everyone, from geologists to graphic artists, is involved. Just about every high-tech co-op is contributing resources, even man-hours, because they long ago realized the best and newest tools are invented during massively collaborative endeavors like these.
For decades we have been sharing our outputs—our stream of photos, video clips, and well-crafted tweets. In essence, we have been sharing our successes. But only in the last decade did we realize that we learn faster and do better work when we share our failures as well. So in all the collabs I work with, we keep and share all the email, all the chat logs, all correspondence, all intermediate versions, all drafts of everything we do. The entire history is open. We share the process, not just the end product. All the half-baked ideas, dead ends, flops, and redos are actually valuable for both myself and for others hoping to do better. With the entire process out in the open it is harder to fool yourself and easier to see what went right, if it did. Even science has picked up on this idea. When an experiment does not work, scientists are required to share their negative results. I have learned that in collaborative work when you share earlier in the process, the learning and successes come earlier as well. These days I live constantly connected. The bulk of what I share, and what is shared with me, is incremental—constant microupdates, tiny improved versions, minor tweaks—but those steady steps forward feed me. There is no turning the sharing off for long. Even the silence will be shared.
7 FILTERING
There has never been a better time to be a reader, a watcher, a listener, or a participant in human expression. An exhilarating avalanche of new stuff is created every year. Every 12 months we produce 8 million new songs, 2 million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 182 billion tweets, 400,000 new products. With little effort today, hardly more than a flick of the wrist, an average person can summon the Library of Everything. You could, if so inclined, read more Greek texts in the original Greek than the most prestigious Greek nobleman of classical times. The same regal ease applies to ancient Chinese scrolls; there are more available to you at home than to emperors of China past. Or Renaissance etchings, or live Mozart concertos, so rare to witness in their time, so accessible now. In every dimension, media today is at an all-time peak of glorious plentitude.
According to the most recent count I could find, the total number of songs that have been recorded on the planet is 180 million. Using standard MP3 compression, the total volume of recorded music for humans would fit onto one 20-terabyte hard disk. Today a 20-terabyte hard disk sells for $2,000. In five years it will sell for $60 and fit into your pocket. Very soon you’ll be able to carry around all the music of humankind in your pants. On the other hand, if this library is so minuscule, why even bother to carry it around when you could get all music of the world in the cloud streamed to you on demand?
What goes for music also goes for anything and everything that can be rendered in bits. In our lifetime, the entire library of all books, all games, all movies, every text ever printed will be available 24/7 on that same screen thingy or in the same cloud thread. And every day, the library swells. The number of possibilities we confront has been expanded by a growing population, then expanded further by technology that eases creation. There are three times as many people alive today as when I was born (1952). Another billion are due in the next 10 years. An increasing proportion of those extra 5 billion to 6 billion people since my birth have been liberated by the surplus and leisure of modern development to generate new ideas, create new art, make new things. It is 10 times easier today to make a simple video than 10 years ago. It is a hundred times easier to create a small mechanical part and make it real than a century ago. It is a thousand times easier today to write and publish a book than a thousand years ago.
The result is an infinite hall of options. In every direction, countless choices pile up. Despite obsolete occupations like buggy whip maker, the variety of careers to choose from expands. Possible places to vacation, to eat, or even kinds of food all stack up each year. Opportunities to invest explode. Courses to take, things to learn, ways to be entertained explode to astronomical proportions. There is simply not enough time in any lifetime to review the potential of each choice, one by one. It would consume more than a year’s worth of our attention to merely preview all the new things that have been invented or created in the previous 24 hours.
The vastness of the Library of Everything quickly overwhelms the very narrow ruts of our own consuming habits. We’ll need help to navigate through its wilds. Life is short, and there are too many books to read. Someone, or something, has to choose, or whisper in our ear to help us decide. We need a way to triage. Our only choice is to get assistance in making choices. We employ all manner of filtering to winnow the bewildering spread of options. Many of these filters are traditional and still serve welclass="underline"