Sustainability Essentials | Futurs.org

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pp20-21 […] we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.

p22
Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms for getting things done, those institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise.

p47
[…] prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive. For the last hundred years the big oranizatinal question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses commpeting in a market. This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn’t simply self assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed that there was no third alternative. Now there is. Our electronic networks are enabling novel forms of collective action, enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed than at any other time in history. The scope of work that can be done by noninstitutional groups is a profound challenge to the status quo. The collapse of transaction costs makes it easier for people to get together - so much easier, in fact that it is changing the world.

p122
And the key to creating those individual actions is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user. […] Never have so many people been so free to say and do so many things with so many other people. The freedom driving mass amateurization removes the technological obstacles to participation.

p125
Fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users.

p127
… most participants are below average.

pp133-134
There’s an increasing amount of evidence, in fact, that specific parts of our brain are given over to making economically irrational but socially useful calculations. […]relying on nonfinancial motivations may actually make systems more tolerant of variable participation.

pp139-140
Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process; if enough people care enough about an article to read it, then enough people will care enough to improve it, and over time this will lead to a large enough body of good enough work to begin to take both availability and quality of articles for granted, and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.

p141
Wikipedia is a Shinto Shrine; it exists not as an edifice but as an act of love.

pp210-211
When it is hard to form groups, both potentially good and bad groups are preventing from forming; when it becomes simple to form groups, we get both the good and the bad ones. This is going to force society to shift from simply preventing groups from forming to actively deciding which existing ones to try to oppose, a shift that parallels the publish-then-filter pattern generally. […] What are we going to do about the negative effects of freedom?

p220
As a result, tools that rely on FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) networking work better when they augment human social choices rather than trying to replace them. […] Once you’ve understood this pattern-that a larger network is a sparsely linked group of more densely linked subnetworks-ou can see how it could operate at multiple scales. […] Connections in these larger networks are still between individual people, but now those individuals have become even more critical; in fact, the larger the network is, the more important the highly connected individuals are in holding the overall structure together.

p221
Small World networks operate as both amplifiers and filters of information.

p225
Perhaps the most significant effect of our new tools, though, lies in the increased leverage they give the most connected people. The tightness of a large social network comes less from increasing the number of connections that the average member of the network can support than from increasing the number of connections that the most connected people can support.

p246
Open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost of failure; it essentially gets failure for free. […] As with mass amateurization of media, open source relies on the “publish-then-filter” pattern. In traditionnal organizations, trying anything is expensive, even if just in staff time to discuss the idea, so someone must make some attempt to filter the successes from the failures in advance. In open systems, the cost of trying something is so low that handicapping the likelihood of success is often an unnecessary distraction.

p249
In the traditional world, the cost of publishing anything creates not just an incentive but a requirement to filter the good from the bad in advance. In the open source world, trying something is often cheaper than making a formal decision about wether to try it.

p254
… as Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, once put it, “No matter who you are, most of the smart people work for someone else.”

p303
The net value argument is simple - increased flexibility and power for group action will have more goods effects than bad ones, making the current changes, on balance, positive.

p307
Our principal challenge is not deciding where we want to go, but rather in staying upright as we go there. The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is less like ordinary technological change, and more like an event, something that has already happened. […] One of the biggest change in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction.

p318
Governments and even companies are accustomed to being the target of protests, so as protests coordinated by social media become normal, their effectiveness will fall. A more remarkable and longer-lived change will be in offing, though, if people are able to start using these tools to bypass government or commercial entities in favor of taking on problems directly. If this happens, it will be far bigger challenge to the previous institutional monopoly on large-scale action than anything we have seen to date.

p319
…the future belongs to those who take the present for granted.

Page numbers are from paperback edition - Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (February 24, 2009)