In Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirky argues that the rise of Web 2.0 technologies has fundamentally transformed the basic economics of organisational activity. Through a series of informal case studies of well-known efforts such as Wikipedia as well as some new anecdotal material, Shirky makes the case that acting together to make things happen is now ‘ridiculously easy’. 

Easy, of course, does not mean free. Shirky’s hypothesis is that the spread of technologies such as email, mobile phones and social networking sites has radically decreased the transactions costs of forming organisations, lowering the ‘Coasean floor’ so that many organisations that previously would not have existed are now able to emerge and function. This gives rise to a new world of easy ad hoc organisation formation, and Shirky discusses the consequences for both the individual, in terms of sharing and learning, and for collective forms of action such as petitioning against bad customer service and political activism.

Humans, Shirky explains, are naturally social. With the new low cost of organising to achieve more than any of us can on our own, he asserts that we have entered a new epoch of social transformation on par with the emergence of the printing press or broadcast television. The difference now is that the power – to publish, find information, communicate and collaborate – is literally in the hands of the people, or more specifically in the gadgets which increasingly keep most of us continually connected to each other.

Shirky makes some excellent points about the implications of this new world for the publishing industry in general, and the profession of journalism in particular, predicting a demise as inevitable and necessary as that faced by the scribe when the printing press emerged. However, it is his discussion of the lowered cost of failure brought about by the new technological landscape that is the most important part of the book. He emphasises that the price of experimentation beneath the old Coasian floor is now much reduced, enabling people and groups to cheaply and effectively test whether new ideas have what it takes diffuse and take hold in the newly global and interconnected social system.

However, the thesis is incomplete because it fails to assess the economic and business implications of this new social paradigm. Shirky does provide an anecdote or two on friends who’ve started businesses to exploit the new social technologies, but does not discuss the implications for business models more generally, nor for individuals’ experiences of everyday work.

In fact, there is an implicit prediction that organisational forms that incur overhead costs – ie the businesses that most of us still rely on for jobs – will sooner or later be displaced by the new ‘bottom-up’ social organisations facilitated by Web 2.0. This in turn implies that profit motives and market price feedbacks will no longer be required for the purpose of co-operating with each other to get things done. Yet this ignores the fact that many of the new social organisations that have gained attention in recent years have arisen precisely because profit-seeking institutions had already mapped out the economic territory: Linux was possible because Microsoft already existed, and Wikipedia was created to provide an alternative to commercial encyclopaedias. It also ignores the fact that markets and the price signals they generate provide feedback on what people value and where new opportunities lie. The business-based form of organisation, in other words, is still a crucially important part of the systems in which we live and create value.

The world of social organisation is an exciting one and Shirky does a good job of charting some of the logic behind the recent proliferation of activity in this space. However markets, the incentives to trade and the economic necessity of generating income are likely to remain a permanent feature of our lives and Shirky fails to recognise this. The new social capabilities of Web 2.0 will meet economic imperatives.

Jason Potts

School of Economics, University of Queensland, Australia

Kate Morrison

ThinkPlayDo Group, London