Everything I knew about the structure of information convinced me that knowledge would not spontaneously emerge from data without a lot of energy and intelligence deliberately directed to transforming it. All the attempts at headless collective writing I had previously been involved with generated only forgettable trash. Why would anything online be any different?
So when the first incarnation of the online encyclopedia launched in 2000 (then called Nupedia), I gave it a look, and was not surprised that it never took off. While anyone could edit it, Nupedia required a laborious process of collaborative rewriting by other contributors that discouraged novice contributors. However, the founders of Nupedia created an easy-to-use wiki off to the side to facilitate working on the text, and much to everyone’s surprise that wiki became the main event. Anyone could edit as well as post without waiting on others. I expected even less from that effort, now renamed Wikipedia.
How wrong I was. The success of Wikipedia keeps surpassing my expectations. At last count in 2015 it sported more than 35 million articles in 288 languages. It is quoted by the U.S. Supreme Court, relied on by schoolkids worldwide, and used by every journalist and lifelong learner for a quick education on something new. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better. Both the weaknesses and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules. Wikipedia works because it turns out that, with the right tools, it is easier to restore damaged text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damaged text (vandalism), and so the good enough article prospers and continues to slowly improve. With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.
It has always been clear that collectives amplify power—that is what cities and civilizations are—but what’s been the big surprise for me is how minimal the tools and oversight that are needed. The bureaucracy of Wikipedia is relatively so small as to be invisible, although it has grown over its first decade. Yet the greatest surprise brought by Wikipedia is that we still don’t know how far this power can go. We haven’t seen the limits of wiki-ized intelligence. Can it make textbooks, music, and movies? What about law and political governance?
Before we say, “Impossible!” I say: Let’s see. I know all the reasons why law can never be written by know-nothing amateurs. But having already changed my mind once on this, I am slow to jump to conclusions again. A Wikipedia is impossible, but here it is. It is one of those things that is impossible in theory but possible in practice. Once you confront the fact that it works, you have to shift your expectation of what else there may be that is impossible in theory but might work in practice. To be honest, so far this open wiki model has been tried in a number of other publishing fields but has not been widely successful. Yet. Just as the first version of Wikipedia failed because the tools and processes were not right, collaborative textbooks, or law, or movies may take the invention of further new tools and methods.
I am not the only one who has had his mind changed about this. When you grow up having “always known” that such a thing as Wikipedia works, when it is obvious to you that open source software is better than polished proprietary goods, when you are certain that sharing your photos and other data yields more than safeguarding them—then these assumptions will become a platform for a yet more radical embrace of the common wealth. What once seemed impossible is now taken for granted.
Wikipedia has changed my mind in other ways. I was a fairly steady individualist, an American with libertarian leanings, and the success of Wikipedia led me toward a new appreciation of social power. I am now much more interested in both the power of the collective and the new obligations stemming from individuals toward the collective. In addition to expanding civil rights, I want to expand civil duties. I am convinced that the full impact of Wikipedia is still subterranean and that its mind-changing force is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existent proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible.
More important, Wikipedia has taught me to believe in the impossible more often. In the past several decades I’ve had to accept other ideas that I formerly thought were impossibilities but that later turned out to be good practical ideas. For instance, I had my doubts about the online flea market called eBay when I first encountered it in 1997. You want me to transfer thousands of dollars to a distant stranger trying to sell me a used car I’ve never seen? Everything I had been taught about human nature suggested this could not work. Yet today, strangers selling automobiles is the major profit center for the very successful eBay corporation.
Twenty years ago I might have been able to believe that in 2016 we’d have maps for the entire world on our personal handheld devices. But I could not have been convinced we’d have them with street views of the buildings for many cities, or apps that showed the locations of public toilets, and that it would give us spoken directions for walking or public transit, and that we’d have all this mapping and more “for free.” It seemed starkly impossible back then. And this free abundance still seems hard to believe in theory. Yet here it is on hundreds of millions of phones.
These supposed impossibilities keep happening with increased frequency. Everyone “knew” that people don’t work for free, and if they did, they could not make something useful without a boss. But today entire sections of our economy run on software instruments created by volunteers working without pay or bosses. Everyone knew humans were innately private beings, yet the impossibility of total open round-the-clock sharing still occurred. Everyone knew that humans are basically lazy, and they would rather watch than create, and they would never get off their sofas to create their own TV. It would be impossible that millions of amateurs would produce billions of hours of video, or that anyone would watch any of it. Like Wikipedia, YouTube is theoretically impossible. But here again this impossibility is real in practice.
This list goes on, old impossibilities appearing as new possibilities daily. But why now? What is happening to disrupt the ancient impossible/possible boundary?
As far as I can tell, the impossible things happening now are in every case due to the emergence of a new level of organization that did not exist before. These incredible eruptions are the result of large-scale collaboration, and massive real-time social interacting, which in turn are enabled by omnipresent instant connection between billions of people at a planetary scale. Just as fleshy tissue yields a new, higher level of organization for a bunch of individual cells, these new social structures yield new tissue for individual humans. Tissue can do things that cells can’t. The collectivist organizations of Wikipedia, Linux, Facebook, Uber, the web—even AI—can do things that industrialized humans could not. This is the first time on this planet that we’ve tied a billion people together in immediate syncopation, just as Facebook has done. From this new societal organization, new behaviors emerge that were impossible at the lower level.
Humans have long invented new social organizations, from law, courts, irrigation systems, schools, governments, libraries up to the largest scale, civilization itself. These social instruments are what makes us human—and what makes our behavior “impossible” from the vantage point of animals. For instance, when we invented written records and laws, these enabled a type of egalitarianism not possible in our cousins the primates, and not present in oral cultures. The cooperation and coordination bred by irrigation and agriculture produced yet more impossible behaviors of anticipation and preparation, and sensitivity to the future. Human society unleashed all kinds of previously impossible human behaviors into the biosphere.