RuslanManzhula: переводы

→Now when I started looking into collaborative action, the considerable literature on it is based on what sociologists call social dilemmas. And there are a number of dilemmas that couple a mythic narrative of social dilemmas. I am going to talk about two of them: the prisoner’s dilemma and the tragedy of the commons.

→Now of course, the enabling technologies are based on the internet. And in the many to many era [picture of complex network mesh of connections between nodes], every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community, or a marketplace.

→Now, commerce is ancient. Markets are as old as cross roads. But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies such as the joint stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double entry book keeping,

→We saw scientific revolutions, the protestant reformation, constitutional democracies possible where they had not been possible before. Not created by the printing press, but enabled by the collective action that emerges from literacy. And again, [picture of Wall St. and One Way sign] new forms of wealth emerged.

→And again, we have no way of knowing, but it’s clear that a new form of wealth must have emerged. More protein than a hunter’s family could eat before it rotted. So that raised a social question that I believe must have driven new social forms. Did the people who ate that mastodon meat owe something to the hunters and their families? And if so, how did they make arrangements?

→And we don’t know exactly how they did this. Although, they must have solved some collective action problems. It only makes sense that you can’t hunt mastodonts while you are fighting with the other groups.

→And then, another communication technology enabled new media: the printing press came along. And within decades, millions of people became literate. And from literate populations, new forms of collective action emerged in the the spheres of knowledge, [picture of Newton, Luther and Jefferson] religion, and politics.

→Not too much longer after that, the alphabet was invented. And this powerful tool was really reserved for thousands of years for the elite administrators [shows picture of Rheingold in monk suit scribbling on parchment; laughter in audience] who kept track of accounts for the empires.

→Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires [image of huge palace in stone mountain wall]. And it was the administers of these empires who begin hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and water and wine that was owed, and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks [picture of clay tablet with cuneiform script (spijkerschrift)] marks on clay at that time.

→Again, we can’t know but we can be pretty sure that some form of symbolic communication [shows one hand holding up while other points finger into palm] must have been involved.

→And again, we have no way of knowing, but it’s clear that a new form of wealth must have emerged. More protein than a hunter’s family could eat before it rotted. So that raised a social question that I believe must have driven new social forms. Did the people who ate that mastodon meat owe something to the hunters and their families? And if so, how did they make arrangements?

→And we don’t know exactly how they did this. Although, they must have solved some collective action problems. It only makes sense that you can’t hunt mastodonts while you are fighting with the other groups.

→In small family groups, nomadic hunters bring down rabbits, gathering food.
The form of wealth in those days was to have enough food to stay alive.
But at some point they banded together to hunt bigger game [picture of mastodon with Rheingold in from pointing at it in scare].

→In fact, if you look back, human communication media and the ways in which we organize socially have been co-evolving for quite a long time. Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately ten thousand years of settled agricultural civilization.

→I started thinking about the relationship between communication, media, and collective action when I wrote Smart Mobs, and I found that when I finished the book I kept thinking about it.

→It’s a narrative spread across a number of different disciplines in which cooperation, collective action, and complex interdependencies play a more important role, and the central, but not all important role of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a little bit to make room.

→[picture of mutilated face of Lech Walesa] Politics is about your side winning at all costs. But I think we can see the very beginnings of a new story beginning to emerge.

→Here is the old story. We have already heard a little bit about it. Biology is war in which only the fiercest survive. [picture of two lizards or dinosaurs fighting] [picture of two business men talking] Businesses and nations succeed only by defeating, destroying, and dominating competition.

→I’m here to enlist you [picture of Rheingold pointing at you like Uncle Sam’s drafting for the army] [laughter in audience] in helping reshape the story about humans and other critters get things done.