Copypasta courtesy of Cory Doctorow.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

So, universal access to all human knowledge seems like it may, in fact, be a
reasonable goal at this point.  This is a pretty amazing thing, and it's
understandable that we got very, very, very excited about this, but the thing
that the Internet is even better at than providing universal access to all human
knowledge is nuking collaboration costs - getting rid of the cost of getting
people together to do stuff, and getting people together to do stuff is even
more important that universal access to all human knowledge, because getting
people together to do stuff is what allows us to be literally superhuman.  That
is to say, if you and someone else can do something that transcends that which
you could do alone, then you have done something that is more than one human
could do - it is superhuman.  Every institution that has ever tried to do
something superhuman - and that includes every protest group, every family
that's trying to cook a dinner together, every corporation, every government,
every church - every institution that's ever tried to do something superhuman
has had to tithe a piece of their time to just coordinating stuff.  Just getting
people to all point in the same direction, and march in the same direction and
keep all in lockstep, and not fall too far behind, and not get too far ahead,
and not tear anything important, and not take the potato that the other person
was about to peel out from under their nose.

All of those pieces have been the dead weight on superhumanness.  In fact,
Ronald Coase, who's the First Chief Economist of the American Federal
Communications Commission won the Nobel prize for a 1937 paper called 'The
Nature of The Firm' in which he identified these transaction costs, and more
importantly, solving these transaction costs as the primary job of any firm.
That no matter what it was you were up to, the way that you solved the problem
of getting people to do stuff together was the thing that characterised your
business, or your institution.  So the reason that, for example, General
Electric has bought the National Broadcasting Corporation is not because the
National Broadcasting Corporation is generally electrical, it's because General
Electric thinks that it's very good at getting people to do stuff together, and
one of the things that it thinks it can do is get NBC to do stuff together in a
way that realises more profit than it has been to date - that they can wring new
value out of it. 

So, companies are in the business of getting people to do stuff together. But
the more money you spend on coordinating, the less money there is left over for
profit; or if you're not a for-profit entity, the more time you spend cooking
dinner the less time there is to eat it; the more time you spend figuring out
where you're going to eat, the less time there is to eat there; the more time
you spend figuring out where you're going on holidays, the less time you have to
spend on your holidays.  What the web has done, is it's just kicked the
everloving crap out of the cost of organising people, so for example we now make
encyclopaedias and operating systems the way that ants build hills.

Imagine if you were going to erect a skyscraper, and the way that you were going
to erect the skyscraper was by putting up a notice that said, "I have this empty
lot.  If you happen to have any structural steel, architectural diagrams,
furnishings, rivets or welding guns, and you'd like to come down and help me
build a skyscraper there, I'd love to have you around, because we're going to
build the skyscraper - it'll probably take about 10 years, and when we're done
we'll all move into it."  I imagine you wouldn't get much of a skyscraper out of
it, but this is, in fact, more or less how we built both Wikipedia and Linux,
and say what you will about Wikipedia, it certainly performs a lot better than
that notional skyscraper would.  In fact, when I hear people criticise
Wikipedia, I often think that they're discussing a different Wikipedia than the
one I access, which seems to be chock-full of incredibly useful facts, including
the fact that sometimes people disagree very vehemently about what it is that
has been presented on the front page of Wikipedia.  It's been a long time since
I opened a newspaper and discovered a little sidebox next to the article that
says "6 out of the 9 reporters in the bull-pen thought that this was garbage,
but the Editor In Chief decided to run it anyway", but having worked for
newspapers, I'm here to tell you that there's more than one article in today's
edition of whatever newspaper you've just picked up that fits that very nicely.

So Wikipedia, and the GNU/Linux operating system which is running on this
machine, and probably running on the majority of servers that you've interacted
with today, including the box under your telly that's running your Sky plus, or
Virgin plus, or what have you - most of those systems are running some variant
of GNU/Linux built, if not by volunteers, then by people who weren't being
centrally coordinated in the way that we've historically centrally coordinated
the building of materials.  Same goes for a browser like Firefox, but that kind
of overt collaboration is just the opening act - there's a lot of collaboration
that's so simple, and so cheap, that we don't even notice that we're doing it. 

How many of you use Flickr?  Flickr has tags, as I'm sure you know - everyone's
encountered tags - and tags are an interesting alternative to something like the
Dewey Decimal System, or other notions for top-down organisation.  If nothing
else, it avoids some of the idiosyncratic problems that are inherent to allowing
someone like Dewey to design the universal taxonomy of everything that it's
possible to know, because Dewey for example has, I think, 3 categories for
religion: there's Christianity, Zoroastrianism and 'other'.

So, tags are pretty cool for that, but where tags get really interesting is
where you'd think that they would work worst of all - in things like abstract
nouns.  I subscribe to a Flickr feed of an abstract word, 'decay', and every day
my decay feed has 100 to 200 photos in it of varying quality, most of them
rather good, that are kind of coffee-table book, photo-essay meditations on the
theme of decay, and it starts with the kind of thing that you might expect to
see, like the thing that's turned into a science experiment in the back of your
office refrigerator, but it also covers things like beautifully peeling,
textured old fences, or handsome old barns that have gone down to their knees
and are rotting in someone's paddock, or an old jet, or someone's gran, or a
leaf in a field, and every other conceivable subject.

Now the interesting thing about this is that no-one ever convened a 'decay
working group' to discuss what the parameters of decay would be - in fact the
majority of these people, I'll wager, have never spoken to each other, don't
know what the other ones are up to, and have just kind of stumbled upon this
abstract label, and are playing a kind of collaborative game without rules and
without any co-ordination cost at all.

But even that looks expensive next to the most ubiquitous and cheapest form of
collaboration I know of on the Internet, which is making links to stuff.  You
and me and anyone who's ever made a link between two web pages helped to create
an underlying structure to the Internet - a citational structure that Google and
other search engines come along and hoover up, and then analyse to see who links
to which pages, which pages are most linked-to and therefore thought to be most
authoritative, where those pages link to and how they've had their authority
conferred on them.  This sounds familiar to anyone who's an academic - it's more
or less how citations work if you're trying for a better job at the university,
and of course Google was founded by a couple of PhD candidates: when all you've
got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What this means is that the old approach to organising knowledge which is
embodied by the early Google competitors like Yahoo, who initially - you may
remember that Yahoo used to stand for Yet Another Hierarchical... I think
Obstreperous Oracle... Officious Oracle...  Yet Another Hierarchical Officious
Oracle - and the idea was that Yahoo would pay giant boiler rooms full of bored
people to look at every page on the Internet and sort them into their proper
single category (or multiple categories) in the One True Taxonomy of All Human
Knowledge. And this was outstripped by the web's growth so quickly that it just
kind of fell behind and became a kind of sick joke until Google came along and
figured out how to enlist every person on the Internet who ever makes a link
between two web-pages to collaborate on teaching it what the underlying
structure of the Internet is.  You literally couldn't pay enough money to
organise the Internet - you can only do it for free - you can only do it by
allowing people to make these links. 

So, this is the kind of post-web.  This is the web of cheap collaboration, and
it's given us a billion YouTube videos, blog posts, Flickr photos and every
imaginable piece of what we now call 'user-generated content', and most of them
are shit!  And this is fantastic, because it used to be that if something was
likely to turn out to be shit, you couldn't do it, and if you did do it, you
certainly couldn't do it in a way that would be reachable by other people.  The
cost of failing was so high that you had to be reasonably certain of some form
of success before you'd venture to do anything.  The fact that there are things
that make my five-month-old daughter's nappies look like high art circulating on
the Internet in a field where billions of people can get access to them tells
you just how cheap failure has become on the Internet.

And this is indeed very good news, because the cost of failure is the principal
barrier to innovation.  Most of the things that we now think of today as very
successful and interesting at one point were thought of as ridiculous, and it
was only someone who was confident enough that the cost of failure was
outweighed by the potential benefit of success that allowed these things to come
into existence. From the archway to the railroad, to lighter-than-air travel -
every one of these at one point was pooh-poohed as probably a ridiculous notion,
certain never to catch on, and it was only the fact that someone was convinced
they could afford to fail that allowed these things to come into existence.

[/img]

Sauce

[East Coast Hustle]

tl;dr

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Summary:
The internet is cool because it connects people and archives really really fast, so a really big group can be kind of a single entity, like PD being a really big dude made of internets with fingers made of discordians. A really big dude made of internets is wayy smarter and bigger and more clever than a small dude made out of whatever dudes are made out of, and while previous attempts of making dudes out of other dudes without the internets (McDonalds, Catholicism, the Tennis Court Oath Working Group) sucked because they needed more dudes to do the job of the internets, which needed more dudes to do the job of the internets for the dudes doing the job of the internets, &c. whereas the internets do what they do automagically. QED.

[Jasper]

... like PD being a really big dude made of internets with fingers made of discordians...

*shudder*

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

That's why summaries are fail. QED.

[Jasper]

As walls of text go, this one is pretty good.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I like to think that I have good taste in text walls. It's patently untrue, of course, but it makes me feel better.

[East Coast Hustle]

your summary was good.

"fingers made of discordians" indeed.

[Jasper]

It's a good analogy, but it's one that made me afraid of what I, as a finger, will be used for.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Well, let's say you're a finger and your girlfriend is an ass. Fucking her would amount to the internets scratching its own ass, but to both of you it'd seem like it was your own idea.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

And if it sounds like I thought too much about that, it's probably because I wrote an essay about it the other day.

[Jasper]

...I see.

But back to the OP, and the idea that the cost of failure is the key to success.  Seems like a common trend in human history for failure to cost less and less as things move forward.