Clay Shirky on Love, Wikipedia and Social Order

I’m reading Shirky’s first book Here Comes Everybody (his new book Cognitive Surplus was just released). The fifth chapter, which is largely about why Wikipedia works even though it could become a tragedy of the commons, ends with a section that discusses love in the context of social organization in a way similar to my own use of the concept.

Shirky argues that Wikipedia exists “not as an edifice but as an act of love.” What love does, Shirky argues, is provide those who contribute to Wikipedia not only with a motive to improve the project, but also to defend it. In a manner similar to siblings, wikipedians will argue incessantly among themselves, but will unite to fight a common enemy – those who who hijack, vandalize or undermine the site.

He concludes his remarks this way:

We don’t often talk about love when trying to describe the public world, because love seems too squishy and too private. What has happened, thought, and what is still happening in our historical moment, is that love has become a lot less squishy and a lot less private. … Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material. When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love.

For locals, think about the “we (heart) Izzo campaign.”

One thing I disagree with him about, however. The comments I did not include in the quotation above suggest that our traditional conception of love implied that love had a direct object that was limited in both its time duration and geographic reach. We Spartans could love our basketball coach, but that love was quite circumscribed geographically and would only last for a short span of time. Shirky argued that the internet and social media allow both the duration and reach of our love to expand.
My disagreement does not lie with quite succinct description of Adam Smith’s argument about sympathy. Rather, he seems to imply that it was not until the internet and social media that our reach was expanded. Therein lies the problem in his argument. Smith thought of the expansion of markets as providing the basis for the expansion of sympathy. It is true that we care less about what happens to those far away from us (both in time and space) than those close to us. But Smith realized that the market is one of the ways in which the interests of those far from us become intertwined with our own interests. When the baker we depend upon is located in another town, our butcher operates thousands of miles away, and the brewer is located in another country, our appeal to their interests does not operate directly, but indirectly through markets. Markets are the original long-distance “interest transmission” media!

And here is the connection between Shirky’s comments about “love as a renewable building material” and my conception of innovation as an act of love. Not only is innovation a collaboratively creative activity among those passionately committed to their idea of what’s possible, like unto Shirky’s description of Wikipedia, but it is also a way in which we create value for those we don’t even know.

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