Here Comes Everybody
The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
What happens to institutions when the cost of getting a group to act together falls to almost nothing.
Clay Shirky’s argument is that the cost of organising a group used to be high enough to require an institution, and that this is no longer true. Flash mobs, Wikipedia, open-source projects and leaderless protests are all instances of the same underlying shift. He is interested less in the technology than in what it does to the institutions built to solve a coordination problem that has largely gone away.
Recommended by 2 People
Anne-Marie Slaughter
It used to be much harder for people to organise. There was a lot of cost to it. But with social media you can organise a group of your friends instantly. So all sorts of phenomena that once would have been too costly to create suddenly emerged. It’s suddenly simple for human beings to come together simply because they share a common passion – it might be a political ideology, it might be the love of surfing.
Interview · May 2018
Alan Rusbridger
Interview · July 2012
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