How do groups get anything done? Right? How do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value, instead of just being chaos? And the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs. And a coordination cost is essentially all of the financial or institutional difficulties in arranging group output. And we've had a classic answer for coordination costs, which is, if you want to coordinate the work of a group of people, you start an institution, right? You raise some resources. You found something. It can be private or public. It can be for profit or not profit. It can be large or small. But you get these resources together. You found an institution, and you use the institution to coordinate the activities of the group.
一群人要如何完成某项任务? 如何管理一个团体 才能使其产出 和谐一致并且富有长久价值 而非混乱不堪? 此问题在经济学术语中, 被称为“协调成本”。 协调成本基本上是 在安排群体产出时,所遇到的财务和机构问题。 对于协调成本,我们有一个经典的答案, 那就是,如果你想要协调一个一群人参与的工作 首先要成立一个机构,对吧?收集一些资源。 建立一个组织。这个组织可以是私有的或公共的, 也可以是营利或非营利性质的,大型或小型的组织。 但你筹集好所需的资源 成立了一个机构, 便可以利用这个机构去协调组织活动。
More recently, because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor -- and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination -- there has been a second answer, which is to put the cooperation into the infrastructure, to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system, without regard to institutional models. So, that's what I want to talk about today. I'm going to illustrate it with some fairly concrete examples, but always pointing to the broader themes.
就在近期,因为 用于机构成员之间交流的花费下跌到谷底 -- 而交流所需花费是协调工作中的重要组成部分, 从而,人们给出了第二种解决策略, 即把合作设计到机构的底子里, 设计一种系统, 在其运作的同时协调其产出成果 而不再诉诸于机构的模式。 这就是我今天所要探讨的内容。 我将用一些实例来解释这个观点, 但是这些实例都表明同一个更开阔的主旨。
So, I'm going to start by trying to answer a question that I know each of you will have asked yourself at some point or other, and which the Internet is purpose-built to answer, which is, where can I get a picture of a roller-skating mermaid? So, in New York City, on the first Saturday of every summer, Coney Island, our local, charmingly run-down amusement park, hosts the Mermaid Parade. It's an amateur parade; people come from all over the city; people get all dressed up. Some people get less dressed up. Young and old, dancing in the streets. Colorful characters, and a good time is had by all. And what I want to call your attention to is not the Mermaid Parade itself, charming though it is, but rather to these photos. I didn't take them. How did I get them? And the answer is: I got them from Flickr.
首先,我来回答一个问题, 我知道你们每一个人一定向自己或别人提出过这个问题, 而网络也正是为了解决这个问题而建立的, 这问题就是:我从哪儿能找到一张美人鱼滑旱冰的照片? 在纽约,每年夏季的第一个周六 在我们当地萧条的游乐园——科尼岛 都会为业余爱好者举办一次美人鱼游行。 来自城市各个角落的居民都会盛装打扮, 当然也有些人不怎么“装扮”。 老幼相携,在大街上跳舞, 大家一同享受缤纷的角色与欢乐的氛围。 虽说游行本身也不错,但是我更想让大家关注的 却是这些照片。 我没有亲自去照这些照片,但是我是怎么得到它们的呢? 答案是:我是从Flickr上找到的。
Flickr is a photo-sharing service that allows people to take photos, upload them, share them over the Web and so forth. Recently, Flickr has added an additional function called tagging. Tagging was pioneered by Delicious and Joshua Schachter. Delicious is a social bookmarking service. Tagging is a cooperative infrastructure answer to classification. Right? If I had given this talk last year, I couldn't do what I just did, because I couldn't have found those photos. But instead of saying, we need to hire a professional class of librarians to organize these photos once they're uploaded, Flickr simply turned over to the users the ability to characterize the photos. So, I was able to go in and draw down photos that had been tagged "Mermaid Parade." There were 3,100 photos taken by 118 photographers, all aggregated and then put under this nice, neat name, shown in reverse chronological order. And I was then able to go and retrieve them to give you that little slideshow.
Flickr是一个照片分享的网站 人们可以在此上传自己拍摄的照片 与其他人分享等等。 最近,Flickr新增了一项叫做“标签”的功能, 此功能首先由Del.icio.us发明人Joshua Schachter推广开来的 Del.icio.us是一个社会书签服务。 专业化的分类管理是传统的解决方案,而加标签即是合作性的基础建设。 如果我去年演讲这个内容, 我是无法将刚才这一切展现给大家的, 因为我一定找不到这些照片。 但是 我们不需要一群专业的图书管理员 在上传之后对这些照片进行分类管理, Flickr将这个问题移交到各个用户, 从而完成了对这些照片的分类。 于是,我可以找到那些有“美人鱼游行”标签的相片。 有这个标签的相片共有3100张,分别来自118个摄影者, 全部归于这个简明的标签之下, 按上传时间由近到远排列。 这样我就可以检索到它们 并给大家做刚才那样的演示了。
Now, what hard problem is being solved here? And it's -- in the most schematic possible view, it's a coordination problem, right? There are a large number of people on the Internet, a very small fraction of them have photos of the Mermaid Parade. How do we get those people together to contribute that work? The classic answer is to form an institution, right? To draw those people into some prearranged structure that has explicit goals. And I want to call your attention to some of the side effects of going the institutional route.
那么,在这里我们解决了一个怎么样的难题呢? 从概略的可能性观点来看, 是一个协作的问题。 网络上的人太多了, 只有一小部分人拥有美人鱼游行的照片。 问题是我们怎样能将这一群人组织到一起,让他们提供这些照片。 一个传统的答案便是建立一个机构,对吧? 用这个机构来吸引这些人到一个预先设计好的组织形式, 这个组织形式拥有明确的目标。 我想提醒你注意到 走机构这条路的一些弊端。
First of all, when you form an institution, you take on a management problem, right? No good just hiring employees, you also have to hire other employees to manage those employees and to enforce the goals of the institution and so forth. Secondly, you have to bring structure into place. Right? You have to have economic structure. You have to have legal structure. You have to have physical structure. And that creates additional costs. Third, forming an institution is inherently exclusionary. You notice we haven't got everybody who has a photo. You can't hire everyone in a company, right? You can't recruit everyone into a governmental organization. You have to exclude some people. And fourth, as a result of that exclusion, you end up with a professional class. Look at the change here. We've gone from people with photos to photographers. Right? We've created a professional class of photographers whose goal is to go out and photograph the Mermaid Parade, or whatever else they're sent out to photograph.
首先,建立一个机构, 就会产生管理上的问题。 不仅仅是雇用员工而已, 你还必须雇用一些人员来管理管理那些员工 来执行实现机构的目标,等等。 其次,还需要建立层级结构 一个机构需要有经济结构, 法制结构, 和具体的实体结构。 这些都会造成额外的成本。 再次,建立一个机构本身就具有排他性。 你会注意到,不是每个拥有照片的人都在我们的机构里。 一个机构是不可能雇用所有人的,对不对? 你是不可能将所有人都纳入一个组织中去的。 这就决定了有一些人会被排除在外。 第四,由这个排除性所造成的结果, 我们最终只拥有一个专业摄影组。请注意这里的改变-- 从拥有照片的广大群众,变成了专业摄影师们。 是吧?我们成立了一个 以拍摄美人鱼游行为目的的摄影师团体, 或者不管他们去拍摄什么
When you build cooperation into the infrastructure, which is the Flickr answer, you can leave the people where they are and you take the problem to the individuals, rather than moving the individuals to the problem. You arrange the coordination in the group, and by doing that you get the same outcome, without the institutional difficulties. You lose the institutional imperative. You lose the right to shape people's work when it's volunteer effort, but you also shed the institutional cost, which gives you greater flexibility. What Flickr does is it replaces planning with coordination. And this is a general aspect of these cooperative systems.
但是,当你将协作放入基础建设中, 也就得到了Flickr (Flickr拥有广大群众并且)让人们做自己的事, 让每个个体去解决这个问题, 而非让每个人被这一个问题牵着鼻子走。 只需要安排协调这些群众, 便省去了组建机构一切难题,于此同时,得到同样的产出。 当然,你会失去机构的控制力量, 当这一切工作都是志愿者在完成,你就不会拥有令他们优化工作质量的权利, 但是与此同时也减少了建立机构的成本, 从而让令你拥有更大的灵活性。 Flickr所做的正是用协调取代规划 这是合作性系统中的普遍方面。
Right. You'll have experienced this in your life whenever you bought your first mobile phone, and you stopped making plans. You just said, "I'll call you when I get there." "Call me when you get off work." Right? That is a point-to-point replacement of coordination with planning. Right. We're now able to do that kind of thing with groups. To say instead of, we must make an advance plan, we must have a five-year projection of where the Wikipedia is going to be, or whatever, you can just say, let's coordinate the group effort, and let's deal with it as we go, because we're now well-enough coordinated that we don't have to take on the problems of deciding in advance what to do.
人们在生活中,一定有这样的经历-- 当你买了第一台手机之后, 便不再做计划。 你只需要说,“我到了给你电话”,或者 “下班了给我打电话”。是吧? 这个点对点的协调行为取代了对事情进行规划。 那么现在,我们可以对一群人进行同样的协调。 不需要再强调“我们一定要做个先进的计划”, “我们要对维基百科未来的五年会怎样有个设想“ 什么的, 只需要说,让我们协调这个有组织性的活动, 并在这个活动的过程中进行协调, 因为,我们现在可以充分地彼此协调, 所以不需要把问题都集中在预先决策上。
So here's another example. This one's somewhat more somber. These are photos on Flickr tagged "Iraq." And everything that was hard about the coordination cost with the Mermaid Parade is even harder here. There are more pictures. There are more photographers. It's taken over a wider geographic area. The photos are spread out over a longer period of time. And worst of all, that figure at the bottom, approximately ten photos per photographer, is a lie. It's mathematically true, but it doesn't really talk about anything important -- because in these systems, the average isn't really what matters.
我这有另外一个例子。这个例子令人更郁闷。 这些是Flickr上标注有伊拉克的照片。 从协调成本的困难程度讲, 这个比美人鱼游行要困难的多。 有更多的照片,也有更多的摄影师参与。 这个过程跨越了更广泛的地域, 这些照片也分布在一个更广泛的时间段中。 最糟糕的是,看看这个在下方的数据, “每个摄影师平均贡献了10张照片”,这并不是真的。 从数学角度讲,这个数据是真实的, 但是这并不说明任何实质性问题, 因为在这个系统中,平均值并不是个重要的因素。
What matters is this. This is a graph of photographs tagged Iraq as taken by the 529 photographers who contributed the 5,445 photos. And it's ranked in order of number of photos taken per photographer. You can see here, over at the end, our most prolific photographer has taken around 350 photos, and you can see there's a few people who have taken hundreds of photos. Then there's dozens of people who've taken dozens of photos. And by the time we get around here, we get ten or fewer photos, and then there's this long, flat tail. And by the time you get to the middle, you've got hundreds of people who have contributed only one photo each.
下面我来讲一下真正重要的是什么: 这是个在Flickr上标注有伊拉克图片的曲线图, 一共由529个摄影者上传了5445张照片。 以摄影者拍上传照片的数量进行排序。 你可以在这一端看到, 贡献最多的摄影者上传了350张照片, 有一小部分人上传了几百张照片, 还有数十个摄影者上传了数十张照片, 直到这里, 摄影者们只提供了10张或更少的照片,然后,我们看到的便是个长长的,平坦的尾部线条。 当看到这个尾部线条中部时, 你会发现有数百个 仅仅提供了一张照片的摄影者。
This is called a power-law distribution. It appears often in unconstrained social systems where people are allowed to contribute as much or as little as they like -- this is often what you get. Right? The math behind the power-law distribution is that whatever's in the nth position is doing about one-nth of whatever's being measured, relative to the person in the first position. So, we'd expect the tenth most prolific photographer to have contributed about a tenth of the photos, and the hundredth most prolific photographer to have contributed only about a hundred as many photos as the most prolific photographer did. So, the head of the curve can be sharper or flatter. But that basic math accounts both for the steep slope and for the long, flat tail.
这叫做幂律分布。 幂律分布在没有限制的社会系统中是很常见的。 就是说当一种系统对人们贡献的多少没有任何限制时, 你往往会得到这样的结果。 幂律分布的数学原理是,相对于第一个位置上的个体而言, 在第n个位置的个体, 贡献了1/n的力量。 因此,我们会期待第十个贡献最多的摄影者 提供10%的照片, 同样的,相对于第一个贡献最多的摄影者而言, 我们期待第100个摄影者 提供1%的照片。 所以曲线的顶端可以更锐或更平, 但是,基础数学对这个陡斜率 和长而平的尾部曲线都有所囊括。
And curiously, in these systems, as they grow larger, the systems don't converge; they diverge more. In bigger systems, the head gets bigger and the tail gets longer, so the imbalance increases. You can see the curve is obviously heavily left-weighted. Here's how heavily: if you take the top 10 percent of photographers contributing to this system, they account for three quarters of the photos taken -- just the top 10 percent most prolific photographers. If you go down to five percent, you're still accounting for 60 percent of the photos. If you go down to one percent, exclude 99 percent of the group effort, you're still accounting for almost a quarter of the photos. And because of this left weighting, the average is actually here, way to the left. And that sounds strange to our ears, but what ends up happening is that 80 percent of the contributors have contributed a below-average amount. That sounds strange because we expect average and middle to be about the same, but they're not at all.
令人感兴趣的是,在这种系统中,随着规模的加大, 它并不会收敛,反而会更发散。 在更大规模的此类系统中,顶端会变的更大, 而尾部会变的更长,于是更加剧了整体的不平衡。 你可以看这条曲线的重心严重左倾,让我们看看有多严重。 如果我们取前10%的摄影者贡献的作品, 他们占据了照片总数的75% -- 注意,这仅仅是前10%的摄影者而已。 如果我们将数字减少到前5%的摄影者, 依然可以得到60%的照片。 如果排除掉99%,而只取前1%的摄影者, 我们依然可以得到几乎25%的照片, 因为这个曲线的重心左倾, 所以平均值实际上是在这里,非常靠近左端。 即使这听起来很奇怪, 但是到头来我们得到的结果是,80%的摄影者 只提供了少于平均值数量的照片。 这听起来怪是因为我们的预期是平均值与曲线中部的数值相等, 但是它们却是截然不同的。
This is the math underlying the 80/20 rule. Right? Whenever you hear anybody talking about the 80/20 rule, this is what's going on. Right? 20 percent of the merchandise accounts for 80 percent of the revenue, 20 percent of the users use 80 percent of the resources -- this is the shape people are talking about when that happens. Institutions only have two tools: carrots and sticks. And the 80 percent zone is a no-carrot and no-stick zone. The costs of running the institution mean that you cannot take on the work of those people easily in an institutional frame. The institutional model always pushes leftwards, treating these people as employees. The institutional response is, I can get 75 percent of the value for 10 percent of the hires -- great, that's what I'll do. The cooperative infrastructure model says, why do you want to give up a quarter of the value? If your system is designed so that you have to give up a quarter of the value, re-engineer the system. Don't take on the cost that prevents you from getting to the contributions of these people. Build the system so that anybody can contribute at any amount.
这就是80/20法则背后的数学逻辑。 不管什么时候你听到有人谈到80/20法则, 就是在谈论这个情形 -- 20%的商品带来80%的收益, 20%的用户占用了80%的资源。 这就是当这些情况发生时大家所谈论的曲线。 机构只有两种工具 --胡萝卜和棍子(奖励和惩罚)。 80%的区域是没有胡萝卜也没有棍子的区域。 所以,若采用机构的模式,机构的运作成本就决定了 想要拥有这一部分人的贡献是不可能的。 采用机构的模式正如这条曲线重心左倾一样, 只把左边这部分人当作员工对待。 采用机构模式的人们对此的回应是, 我可以利用10%的雇员实现75%的价值,太好了。 我这么作就可以。 合作性基础建设模式的回应则是: 你为什么要放弃25%的价值呢? 如果在设计系统的时候 就决定了你要放弃25%的价值, 那么就进行系统改造吧! 别让高成本来成为 阻止这一部分人贡献力量的拦路虎 建立一个系统,让任何人都可以随意贡献,无论多少。
So the coordination response asks not, how are these people as employees, but rather, what is their contribution like? Right? We have over here Psycho Milt, a Flickr user, who has contributed one, and only one, photo titled "Iraq." And here's the photo. Right. Labeled, "Bad Day at Work." Right? So the question is, do you want that photo? Yes or no. The question is not, is Psycho Milt a good employee?
所以合作性基础建设的方式回应道,我们并不是 要了解这些人是什么样的雇员,我们只要知道 他们所能贡献的是什么。 在这里,有个Flickr的用户叫做Psycho Milt, 他上传了一张,且仅上传了这一张标注有“伊拉克”的图片, 照片在这里,命名为:“糟糕的工作日”。 所以,问题就在于: 你到底要不要这张这张照片?要还是不要? 问题的关键不在于Psycho Milt是不是个好员工,
And the tension here is between institution as enabler and institution as obstacle. When you're dealing with the left-hand edge of one of these distributions, when you're dealing with the people who spend a lot of time producing a lot of the material you want, that's an institution-as-enabler world. You can hire those people as employees, you can coordinate their work and you can get some output. But when you're down here, where the Psycho Milts of the world are adding one photo at a time, that's institution as obstacle.
这里的矛盾存在于,到底机构是个促成者 还是个阻碍者。 当我们处理 此类函数左侧的数据时, 当我们涉及这些花费大量时间 为制造你需要的材料的人们时, 机构便是促成者。 你可以雇用这些人作为员工,协调他们的工作, 并得到一些产出。 但是,当你面临像Pshycho Milts这样 一次只传一张照片的情况时, 机构就成了阻碍者。
Institutions hate being told they're obstacles. One of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self-preservation. And the actual goal of the institution goes to two through n. Right? So, when institutions are told they are obstacles, and that there are other ways of coordinating the value, they go through something a little bit like the Kubler-Ross stages -- (Laughter) -- of reaction, being told you have a fatal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance. Most of the cooperative systems we've seen haven't been around long enough to have gotten to the acceptance phase.
机构讨厌被别人成为阻碍者。 当我们将一个问题机构化的时候, 首先发生的事情之一是 这个机构的第一目标 会立即从原本被确立的目标变为 自我维护。 而机构真正的第一目标会变成第二甚至排到更后面去。 当机构被告知他们是阻碍者, 并且告诉他们有其他的办法来协调价值时, 他们就会经历一些有点类似Kubler-Ross理论中的那几个阶段, (笑声) 当你被告知身患绝症的时候的的反应是, 否认,愤怒,讨价还价,接受。 我们所知的合作系统,大部分 还没有足够的时间 达到最后这个接受的阶段。
Many, many institutions are still in denial, but we're seeing recently a lot of both anger and bargaining. There's a wonderful, small example going on right now. In France, a bus company is suing people for forming a carpool, right, because the fact that they have coordinated themselves to create cooperative value is depriving them of revenue. You can follow this in the Guardian. It's actually quite entertaining.
很多很多机构还沉浸在否认的阶段, 但是最近,达到愤怒和讨价还价阶段的也有很多。 目前,有一个特别能说明问题的小例子。 在法国,一个汽车公司控诉一些“拼车”的人, 因为通过这些人彼此之间的协作 所创造的价值,导致了他们的收入下降。 你可以在《卫报》上跟踪这条新闻, 还是很有娱乐效果的。
The bigger question is, what do you do about the value down here? Right? How do you capture that? And institutions, as I've said, are prevented from capturing that. Steve Ballmer, now CEO of Microsoft, was criticizing Linux a couple of years ago, and he said, "Oh, this business of thousands of programmers contributing to Linux, this is a myth. We've looked at who's contributed to Linux, and most of the patches have been produced by programmers who've only done one thing." Right? You can hear this distribution under that complaint. And you can see why, from Ballmer's point of view, that's a bad idea, right? We hired this programmer, he came in, he drank our Cokes and played Foosball for three years and he had one idea. (Laughter) Right? Bad hire. Right? (Laughter)
更重要的问题是, 对于这些人创造出来的价值,你要怎么做? 你要怎么才能取得那部分价值? 就像我说的,机构本身就在阻止这些价值。 微软(Microsoft)的首席执行官Steve Ballmer 在几年前曾经批评Linux,他说: 有几千个编程人员 对Linux作出了贡献,这简直是个神话。 我们检视过都为Linux贡献力量的人, 大部分修补程序都是由 只为Linux编辑了一个程序的设计师提供的。 你可以从他的抱怨中听到这个函数图形 你还可以从Ballmer的角度出发而明白这为什么 Linux的办法是不可取的。 我们雇用了这个编程师,他来到公司,喝了我们的可乐, 玩了三年桌上足球,然后他只设计出一个修补程序。 (笑声) 雇错人啦。 (笑声)
The Psycho Milt question is, was it a good idea? What if it was a security patch? What if it was a security patch for a buffer overflow exploit, of which Windows has not some, [but] several? Do you want that patch, right? The fact that a single programmer can, without having to move into a professional relation to an institution, improve Linux once and never be seen from again, should terrify Ballmer. Because this kind of value is unreachable in classic institutional frameworks, but is part of cooperative systems of open-source software, of file sharing,
像Psycho Milt这样的问题是,这到底是不是个可取的办法呢? 如果这个程序员设计出来的是个维护系统安全的修补程序呢? 如果是个缓存溢出错误的修补程序呢? Windows在这方面的漏洞还不少呢。 问题是你到底要不要这个修补程序? 一个程序员可以 不必正式被一个机构雇用, 而是仅仅编辑出一个修补程序来改善Linux 之后便消失不见,这个事实应该吓到Ballmer。 因为这种价值在传统的组织形式中是 遥不可及的。但这种价值却是合作式系统的一部分, 例如于开放源代码软件、计算机文件分享,
of the Wikipedia. I've used a lot of examples from Flickr, but there are actually stories about this from all over. Meetup, a service founded so that users could find people in their local area who share their interests and affinities and actually have a real-world meeting offline in a cafe or a pub or what have you. When Scott Heiferman founded Meetup, he thought it would be used for, you know, train spotters and cat fanciers -- classic affinity groups. The inventors don't know what the invention is. Number one group on Meetup right now, most chapters in most cities with most members, most active? Stay-at-home moms. Right? In the suburbanized, dual-income United States, stay-at-home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local, small-scale neighborhoods. So they're reinventing it, using these tools. Meetup is the platform, but the value here is in social infrastructure. If you want to know what technology is going to change the world, don't pay attention to 13-year-old boys -- pay attention to young mothers, because they have got not an ounce of support for technology that doesn't materially make their lives better. This is so much more important than Xbox, but it's a lot less glitzy.
及维基百科(Wikipedia)等。我已经举了很多个Flickr上的例子, 但是实际上这种例子遍地都是。 Meetup是个为了方面人们在自己的区域寻找到 志趣相投的人。 他们在生活中还有聚会呢,比如在咖啡馆 或者酒吧等等。 当Scott Heiferman建立Meetup的时候, 他认为使用群体应该是, 喜欢"猜火车"的人和爱猫的人群 --典型的有共同兴趣的分享团体。 创造者并不知道创造产物是什么。 Meetup上第一名的团体, 地方分会最多,会员最多,最活跃的团体, 是家庭主妇们。 在市郊化,双薪收入的美国, 家庭主妇们并没有享有 来自大家庭 和紧邻的社会基础设施, 所以她们利用这些手段来重新创造这种价值。 Meetup只是个平台, 在这种情况下传递的价值却存在于社会基础建设中。 如果你想知道什么样的科技可以改变世界, 别去关注13岁的男孩子们, 把注意力集中在年轻的妈妈们身上, 因为,每一点科技支持 都使他们的生活变的更好。 这比Xbox重要太多了, 只是没有那么抢眼罢了。
I think this is a revolution. I think that this is a really profound change in the way human affairs are arranged. And I use that word advisedly. It's a revolution in that it's a change in equilibrium. It's a whole new way of doing things, which includes new downsides. In the United States right now, a woman named Judith Miller is in jail for not having given to a Federal Grand Jury her sources -- she's a reporter for the New York Times -- her sources, in a very abstract and hard-to-follow case. And journalists are in the street rallying to improve the shield laws. The shield laws are our laws -- pretty much a patchwork of state laws -- that prevent a journalist from having to betray a source. This is happening, however, against the background of the rise of Web logging. Web logging is a classic example of mass amateurization. It has de-professionalized publishing. Want to publish globally anything you think today? It is a one-button operation that you can do for free. That has sent the professional class of publishing down into the ranks of mass amateurization. And so the shield law, as much as we want it -- we want a professional class of truth-tellers -- it is becoming increasingly incoherent, because the institution is becoming incoherent. There are people in the States right now tying themselves into knots, trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists. And the answer to that question is, it doesn't matter, because that's not the right question. Journalism was an answer to an even more important question, which is, how will society be informed? How will they share ideas and opinions? And if there is an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism, it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class. So as much as we want the shield laws, the background -- the institution to which they were attached -- is becoming incoherent.
我认为这将会是一个重大变革。 我认为,从人类行为安排的角度讲, 这将是一个意义重大的改变。 我非常谨慎的使用这个词。 它是一场改变平衡关系的革命。 这是一种全新的做事方式,同时也包括新的不利因素。 在美国有一位Judith Miller女士, 因为拒绝为联邦大陪审团提供她的资源而被囚禁起来, 她是纽约时报的记者, 并且她所持有的资源是个非常抽象和难以追踪的案件。 新闻记者们结合起来当街抗议,希望改进庇护法。 庇护法基本是一种我们国家法律的修补法案, 可以防止新闻记者们被强制泄露新闻资源。 但是,这件事的发生 与兴起的网络日志(博客)的背景相违背。 网络日志是一个大规模业余化的经典例子, 是非专业化的发表方式。 想把自己任何的想法公布于世界? 你只需按一个键就可以轻松做到,而且还是免费的。 这就使得专业级出版/发表地位下滑 至大规模业余化的等级中。 所以关于庇护法,无论我们有多么想要 专业级的新闻记者, 它也变得越来越不具备一致性了,因为 机构本身就逐渐变得前后矛盾。 现在在美国,有一些人 费劲全力要搞清楚 发表博文的人到底是不是新闻记者。 对于这个问题的答案是: 这根本不重要,因为这个问题本身就不对。 新闻本身是一个更重要的问题的答案, 那就是,信息要如何传递给社会? 人们如何分享想法和意见? 如果我们在新闻的专业机制之外 可以得到这个问题的答案, 那么把这些 分散的个体们扣上专业的帽子就完全没有意义。 所以,无论我们多么想要庇护法, 但是这个背景--也就是他们所依附的机构本身, 已经开始不和谐了。
Here's another example. Pro-ana, the pro-ana groups. These are groups of teenage girls who have taken on Web logs, bulletin boards, other kinds of cooperative infrastructure, and have used it to set up support groups for remaining anorexic by choice. They post pictures of thin models, which they call "thinspiration." They have little slogans, like "Salvation through Starvation." They even have Lance Armstrong-style bracelets, these red bracelets, which signify, in the small group, I am trying to maintain my eating disorder. They trade tips, like, if you feel like eating something, clean a toilet or the litter box. The feeling will pass.
这还有另外一个例子: Pro-ana, 支持ana的团体。 有很多青少年团体, 利用博客,公告板 或其他种类的合作基础设施, 建立了 自愿支持厌食的团体。 他们发表超瘦模特的照片,称之为“瘦”启示/励瘦(Thinspiration)。 他们有自己的口号标语,例如“饥饿是种救赎”, 甚至有Lance Armstrong式的手镯, 在这组女孩中,这些红色的手镯意味着, 我要继续坚持厌食。 他们互相交换技巧,比如,如果你想吃东西了, 就去清理厕所或垃圾箱,这样就吃的欲望就会消失。
We're used to support groups being beneficial. We have an attitude that support groups are inherently beneficial. But it turns out that the logic of the support group is value neutral. A support group is simply a small group that wants to maintain a way of living in the context of a larger group. Now, when the larger group is a bunch of drunks, and the small group wants to stay sober, then we think, that's a great support group. But when the small group is teenage girls who want to stay anorexic by choice, then we're horrified. What's happened is that the normative goals of the support groups that we're used to, came from the institutions that were framing them, and not from the infrastructure. Once the infrastructure becomes generically available, the logic of the support group has been revealed to be accessible to anyone, including people pursuing these kinds of goals.
我们习惯于支持对我们有利的团体, 我们有一种观念是,支持的团体总是有益的。 但是到头来,对支持团体的合理解释是中性的。 支持团体就是一个在较大团体中 想要保持自己生活方式的小团体。 当那个较大的团体是一群醉鬼时, 这个小团体却要保持清醒,那么我们认为, 这是个非常好的支持团体。 但是当这个小团体的成员 是一些想要保持厌食状态的十几岁的女孩们时,我们就吓坏了。 这个中的原因是,我们已经习惯了的 那些支持团体的目标准则 都是被机构订造好的, 而并不是来自于基础建设阶段。 当人们可以轻松运用基础构架, 支持团体的概念显得 任何人都可以灵活运用,包括追求这种目标(支持厌食状态)的人们。
So, there are significant downsides to these changes as well as upsides. And of course, in the current environment, one need allude only lightly to the work of non-state actors trying to influence global affairs, and taking advantage of these. This is a social map of the hijackers and their associates who perpetrated the 9/11 attack. It was produced by analyzing their communications patterns using a lot of these tools. And doubtless the intelligence communities of the world are doing the same work today for the attacks of last week.
所以我说,这种变化在有积极因素的同时, 也存在着重大的负面因素。当然,在现今环境中, 试图影响国际事务并利用这些, 我们只需要稍微影射非国家行为体。 这是个911事件的劫机者和他的同僚们 的社交关系图。 人们利用这些工具分析他们的通讯模式。 无可置疑地,对于上周的袭击,全球的情报部门 也在做同样的工作。
Now, this is the part of the talk where I tell you what's going to come as a result of all of this, but I'm running out of time, which is good, because I don't know. (Laughter) Right. As with the printing press, if it's really a revolution, it doesn't take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos. The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the sort of organizing political force to the Treaty of Westphalia, when we finally knew what the new unit was: the nation state.
那么我现在该告诉你 我前面所讲的那些造成的结果是什么了, 但是我现在没时间了,这很好, 因为我也不知道。 (笑声) 就像印刷一样,如果这真的是一个变革, 它并不是简单地把我们从A点带到B点, 而是把我们从A点带到混乱。 印刷曾经陷入一个200年的混乱阶段, 从天主教堂 管理政治势力到威斯特伐利亚和约, 直到我们最终知道所建立的新的国家体系是单一民族国家。
Now, I'm not predicting 200 years of chaos as a result of this. 50. 50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage, and the more those groups forego traditional institutional imperatives -- like deciding in advance what's going to happen, or the profit motive -- the more leverage they'll get. And institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure, and the more rigidly managed, and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be. And that's going to happen one arena at a time, one institution at a time. The forces are general, but the results are going to be specific.
这里我并没有由此预测200年的混乱局面,我说是50年吧。 50年内,松散的合作团体 的影响力将大大增加, 机构有机构的规则,例如预先决策制度或确定利润动机是什么-- 这些团体超越机构的控制规则越多, 他们的影响力也就越大。 而机构将会面临 日益增加的压力, 管理越严密,对信息垄断依赖性越大, 他们的压力就会越大。 这将会一个战场接一个战场, 一个机构接一个机构地发生。影响力是笼统的, 结果将会是明确的。
And so the point here is not, "This is wonderful," or "We're going to see a transition from only institutions to only cooperative framework." It's going to be much more complicated than that. But the point is that it's going to be a massive readjustment. And since we can see it in advance and know it's coming, my argument is essentially: we might as well get good at it. Thank you very much. (Applause)
所以这里的重点并不是 ”这太好了“或者”我们将会看到一个从 单纯机构到单纯合作机制的变革“, 而是比这个复杂多了。 但是问题是,我们将面临一个巨大的重整 既然我们已经预见到了这一点, 那么我的论点便是我们要做好准备迎接它。 谢谢。 (鼓掌)