Whatever Happened to Mass Collaboration?
It was only fifteen years ago, in 2006, that the world was discovering the incredible potential of the rapidly emerging and unprecedented phenomenon known as mass collaboration. The burgeoning digital revolution spawned by the simple act of connecting the world’s computers was creating new and revolutionary ways for people to collaborate and work together. Scores of books were describing how what was then known as the World Wide Web was flattening the world and transforming the planet into a global community. Perhaps the most notable was Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, who in their subtitle enthusiastically proclaimed how mass collaboration would change everything. Through numerous examples, the authors demonstrated how online communities harnessing collective capabilities were using the power of a new form of social organization, the distributed network, to create a better and more collaborative world.
Two of the spotlighted examples in their best-selling book were the two applications that most defined the day-to-day experience of the internet at the time: Google and Wikipedia. Wikipedia disrupted the publishing world by introducing a business model that mobilized the power of the network to accomplish what would have been considered impossible a mere decade earlier: the production of a viable online encyclopedia that is completely self-organized by volunteers, working without assignments and without pay. Google, a late entrant into internet search, had become an overnight success by quickly capturing two-thirds of the market when two Stanford graduate students created an innovative way to determine the value of the plethora of web pages by identifying how many people linked to the various pages.
The secret behind the meteoric success of both Wikipedia and Google was their ability to tap into a game-changing element that is a natural ingredient of distributed networks: collective intelligence. Whereas traditional encyclopedias and the early search engines had leveraged the individual intelligence of experts in centralized operations to accomplish their work, Wikipedia and Google leveraged the collective intelligence of the masses in distributed networks to produce smarter and faster results. The reason that mass collaboration held the promise of changing everything was because we suddenly had the practical means to turn the platitude that nobody is smarter than everybody into an everyday reality, provided we had the organizational discipline to sustain the architecture of the distributed network.
The following year, two more innovations emerged that would further define the day-to-day experience of the internet: the smart phone and social media. On January 9, 2007, Apple introduced the first smart phone, which would forever change the way most people accessed the internet by giving everyone instant connectivity. Google would soon follow with its own Android smart phones. Around the same time, Facebook, which had previously been limited to school audiences, opened itself to the masses, and the microblogging service Twitter provided a new way for us to connect in 140 characters. The hyperconnected world of social media was born with new possibilities for accelerating mass collaboration, which unfortunately would not materialize.
A Lost Opportunity
One of the great ironies of the digital revolution is that, while we continue to expand the digital tool kit that could greatly enable mass collaboration, this opportunity increasingly alludes us because of the failure among the leaders of Big Tech to sustain the organizational architecture of the distributed network. Instead of being the facilitators of mass collaboration and using their digital tools to amplify our collective intelligence to bring us together, the leaders of social media platforms have behaved more like grand manipulators, insidiously dividing us into a collection of fractious tribes that are wholly incapable of even basic compromises.
Over the past few years, this fomenting tribalism has become troublesome as mutual accusations of bias among all the various clans have justified a plummet into a lack of basic civil behavior. Instead of bringing out the best of us, they have fostered the worst of us. Instead of continuing to build highly collaborative platforms by encouraging the pluralism that is essential for cultivating our collective intelligence to create a better world, the elite leaders of Big Tech have chosen sides in the tribal warfare and have devolved into a new form of an oligarchic cartel. Instead of creating the new century by accelerating the collegial dynamics of mass collaboration, they have embraced the rancorous habits of nineteenth-century robber barons and medieval monarchs.
For example, even Google, an early exemplar of the power of collective intelligence, has, like a slow boiling frog, morphed from an egalitarian platform into an authoritarian monopoly. Accordingly, the freedom-loving digital community has been transformed into a draconian kingdom where the founders are the monarchs, the employees are the lords, and the users are the peasants. Google, like so many of the social media companies, is producing entirely new categories of wealth, and none of that wealth is going to the people who produce the riches—the users whose clicks are the bits that are the fuel that drives the Google money machine. Like medieval feudal societies, the wealth goes to the monarchs and the lords.
Social Devolution
Perhaps what is most troubling about this social devolution is how these digital royals have ascribed to themselves the power to silence dissenting voices whose values differ from those of their chosen tribe. In so doing, they behave like totalitarian dictators who manipulate information and spawn cultures of fear and retaliation that are the complete antithesis of the conditions for mass collaboration. Setting aside partisanship, personalities, and passions, it is troublesome when an elite group of unelected, unaccountable people have the wherewithal to do on a mass scale what democratic governments cannot: silence the voices of those who think differently.
Rana Foroohar, in her recent book Don’t Be Evil, quotes a leaked speech from Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search. Gomes said, “China is arguably the most interesting market in the world today.” He pointed out that it was important for Google “to understand what is happening there in order to inspire us.” He went on to say, “China will teach us things that we don’t know.” Apparently, Google has learned a great deal about China’s preference for centralized internet platforms that are designed to control rather than to serve the masses.
In the early days, when Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil,” the user was a customer and the search engine was a model of how collective intelligence could make navigating the web incredibly easy. But over time, Google’s primary customers became the advertisers, and the users are now nothing more than data. If the industrialists of the twentieth century are guilty of de-humanizing people by treating them like machines in running their factories, the social media companies are just as de-humanizing when people are nothing more than data products. In fact, the social media companies may be worse because at least the industrialists paid the people who created their wealth.
Intelligent but Not Wise
While the leaders of Big Tech are highly intelligent, they are not necessarily very wise. Like precocious adolescents, they see no reason to listen to what others have to say when they are convinced they are the smartest people in the room. This false sense of self-righteousness makes it all too easy to glorify those who think like them and to demonize those who don’t. Wisdom appreciates the value of different points of view and understands the importance of resolving polarities. That’s why the wisest leaders are skillful facilitators.
Skilled facilitators understand there is a fine line between facilitation and manipulation. They also know that this is a line that must never be crossed. Wise facilitators never invest in particular outcomes or positions. Instead, they cultivate spaces where people feel safe to express their differing opinions and where there is a balance of voices rather than domination by one or two strong advocates. In the best facilitated sessions, participants often have the sense that they gained an understanding or crafted a solution that no one of them could have accomplished by themselves. Skilled facilitators appreciate that all people have contributions and all voices matter. They understand that, in finding solutions to difficult problems, their role is to help groups uncover their collective intelligence so that bickering factions can move from entrenched thinking to a powerful shared understanding. The facilitator’s primary tools for enabling collaborative action are safety and shared understanding.
Manipulators, on the other hand, are invested in achieving specific outcomes. They believe that they are more intelligent than others and, in solving problems, are convinced of the righteousness of their own thinking. In leading groups, manipulators believe that their role is to influence groups by controlling conversations in an attempt to persuade everyone to their way of thinking. Manipulators, especially those in positions of power, often create unsafe spaces by favoring and rewarding participants who agree with them and dismissing and shunning those who see things differently. Because they overestimate their own intelligence, manipulators are prone to hubris and are blind to the influence that their own biases exert on both themselves, and through their controlling behavior, on the groups they lead. The manipulator’s primary tools for accomplishing group action are coercion and control.
At this time, there is probably little hope that this first generation of digital leaders will have the wherewithal to transform from manipulators to facilitators. The Big Tech elite are most likely too far gone in their hubris. However, this doesn’t mean that Tapscott and Anthony’s vision of mass collaboration is dead. It’s just been put on hold—and not for much longer—while we await a new generation of digital innovators who are building internet applications that cannot be corrupted by grand manipulators who lose their way. In fact, Don Tapscott, in a subsequent book, Blockchain Revolution co-written with his son Alex Tapscott, provides a glimpse into a new wave of digital technology where elites are powerless to exercise coercion and control. That’s because blockchain is an inherently distributed network where centralized power is as impossible as a blizzard in the Amazon. More on the importance of this next wave in future posts.