The Web We Weave

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
By Charles Leadbeater
290 pages, London: Profile Books, 2008

Wikipedia. Howard Dean. YouTube. Open-source software. eBay. Google. MySpace. "You" as Time magazine’s person of the year. Craigslist. Facebook. Amazon. Dan Rathergate. The long tail.

It’s only taken the Web about a decade to create its own canon. But all canons hide at least as much as they reveal. That is especially true with the Web, an unfiltered, explosive medium. Its social dynamic actually encourages the production of more cultural artifacts than ever. As a result, the Web is more of everything: More love, more hate. More romance, more porn. More brilliant analysis, more head-banging stupidity. How to sort it all out?

Charles Leadbeater, a British journalist, author, management consultant, and former advisor to Tony Blair, makes a reasonable and socially admirable decision about which story to tell about the Web. For him, the Web means "more people can collaborate more effectively in creating new ideas." In his new book, We-Think, released in Britain in March, Leadbeater describes a world in which people, companies, and entire societies gain more from sharing information than from owning it. Curing disease, educating the illiterate poor, spreading democracy to every corner of the planet: All are made more likely by the organic transfer of knowledge and ideas that the Web enables. True to form, he released a portion of an early draft of his book online, open to comments, revisions, and criticism from his audience.

For Leadbeater, the importance of the Web is that it lets us think together. He spends a chapter discussing the five key principles that "We-Think" requires: a core group of people dedicated to an idea or a problem to solve; a broad network of contributors whose diverse points of view provide more lenses through which to view an idea; connections and tools to communicate between those groups; harmonious and organized collaboration; and raw creativity. But his definition of "We-Think" is quite loose: It’s "my term to comprehend how we think, play, work and create, together, en masse, thanks to the web."

Leadbeater is a good writer with a wide range of interests and knowledge. He makes his points via lively accounts of people and projects engaged in We-Thinking. Many are well known, including international scientists toiling independently on the Human Genome Project, the evolving work on the Linux open-source system, and the mass writing and editing of Wikipedia, but he finds plenty that are fresh or at least not yet bruised from being handled. In the course of claiming that the Web sprang from a mix of nerd, academic, hippie, and peasant cultures, he draws a direct connection between Douglas Engelbart, the nerd visionary who 40 years ago anticipated the Internet, and Stewart Brand, the hippie visionary who gave us the revolutionary Whole Earth Catalog, a blog-like compendium of tools and oddities. Leadbeater tries to steer clear of cyberutopianism, noting that "The web’s potential to create collaborative, largely self-organising networks has been taken up most skillfully by terrorist groups" as well as "religious zealots and neo-Nazis, paedophiles and pornographers, gamblers and organised crime syndicates." Of course, all that’s at the beginning of a chapter that concludes We-Think will be good for democracy, equality, and freedom after all.

The result is a tour of the Web that takes us past the familiar landmarks with a guide who is more interesting than most. In practice, though, We-Think turns out to be nothing more rigorous than how we will "organise our shared intelligence ourselves" now that the Web is making us more collaborative and participative. With such obvious examples as Linux and Wikipedia, it would be hard to claim that We-Think points to a phenomenon we’ve entirely missed. In fact, Leadbeater doesn’t even think We-Think is necessarily characteristic of the Web. Even at the sites that are explicitly about the "We" or about the "Think" — the Facebooks, YouTubes, and eBays — We-Thinking as he defines it is rare: "People gathering on social-networking sites, downloading user-generated videos or spouting off into the blogosphere do not create anything resembling collective intelligence. More often than not they produce a deafening babble or a deadening consensus." He chooses to write about We-Think not because it’s a novel idea or characteristic of the Web, but because he says it’s the agency through which the Web may transform real-world institutions and economies. The book largely consists of an examination of whether those transformations will actually happen and what the world will look like if they do.

Leadbeater is an optimist overall, predicting that real institutions will begin to take on the nonhierarchical, looser, and more creative characteristics of the Web at its best. "We-Think’s style of organisation is particularly well suited to the developing world, where professionals are in short supply, and centralised, top-down solutions will not work in far-flung villages," he says, pointing to Brazil’s enthusiastic support of open-source software and the success of OhmyNews’s citizen journalism in South Korea. He can be overly optimistic about specific projects — such as the RepRap machine, a photocopier-like device that can fabricate mechanical parts based on images in its computer. Leadbeater likens it to the replicator in Star Trek. But, more importantly, it’s not clear that the undeniable utility of the Internet in the developing world is going to be primarily due to We-Thinking.

In fact, the book is weighed down by its central conceit. We-Think is a rubric, a way of stringing materials together. We are left with the suspicion that We-Think is not so much a concept as a useful title. It’s hard to consider We-Think as a well-formed idea when Leadbeater says that blogs are a poor example of We-Think — because they are often one-sided conversations — but the popular multiplayer game World of Warcraft is "full We-Think" because of its emphasis on collective creativity.

Although a loose rubric is preferable to a Procrustean rigor with a phenomenon as complex as the Web, are we confident that the Web will affect our world primarily because it changes how we think and create together? There’s no doubt that collaborative thinking is important, and Leadbeater does a good job laying out the case. But, perhaps the Web only looks like a place for thought and creative collaboration if you’re a writer whose day is spent thinking and creatively collaborating. Most of the Web is not about thinking; it’s about playing, flirting, making friends, showing off, trying on new selves, looking things up, daydreaming, fantasizing, indulging our curiosities, and taking care of one another. Might not all of that which falls outside the scope of collaborative thinking have an even greater influence on existing institutions? Might the "babble," as Leadbeater characterizes the Web when it’s not We-Thinking, be what truly shapes our democracy, economy, and culture?

This line of thought is not necessarily an argument against Leadbeater’s ultimate optimism. It only seems that way because through the lens of We-Think, non-We-Thinking looks like the usual frivolous activity of the riffraff. It is entirely possible that the Web as a connective medium itself — and not just because of We-Think, We-Play, We-Shop, or any other particular behaviors — is tending to improve our institutions and way of life. The focus on any one aspect of the Web as the most important indeed reveals high points worthy of notice. Readers of We-Think will enjoy the tour. But if the Web is as important as Leadbeater and many of us think, its abundance escapes the clarity — and the canon — any of us would impose upon it.