>> Female (didn’t have a name): Welcome to this joint venture talk with Microsoft Pak and Microsoft
Research. Given the topic today welcoming back Steven Johnson who spoke into Microsoft Research many times. But talking about a topic that would also resonate really well with Pak members we felt like this was a good opportunity to sort of bring the two groups together. So thank you everyone for the different time for the Research folks but the different venue for the Pak folks, you all figured it out, so thank you. Congratulations on the Windows 8 launch.
So we’re here today to welcome Steven Johnson. He is the author of seven best sellers include “Where
Good Ideas Come From” and “Everything Bad is Good for You”, along with many others. He writes for a variety of publications including Time, Wired, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and has founded several influential websites most recently outside.in. He’s here today to talk about his latest book “Future Perfect” which is very timely here in the election season and hopefully will give us all a bit more optimism as we walk out today and face the next two weeks of news and things like that. So, thank you so much Steven and welcome Steven Johnson.
>> Steven Johnson: Thank you.
[applause]
>> Steven Johnson: Thanks. Thanks everyone. I feel like given everything that’s going on today in this company it’s nice to see so many people here. I would like to play with a Surface, please someone bring me one. I want to check it out. I haven’t touched one yet.
[laughter]
So it’s awesome to be back at Microsoft. I have, this is the only organization in the world where I have spoken about all eight of my books. You guys have been so supportive from the very beginning. I even wrote about this building in the Laugh book as a way of thanking you. I said nice things about it.
[laughter]
So it’s great to be back. Ha-ha, I want to tell you with our time together then we can open up for some conversation. I want to tell you a little bit about the argument of this book. This book is an upbeat polemic. It’s trying to persuade you of something in a way of kind of viewing the world. So I’m going to walk through that argument and tell you a few of the stories in the book. But I want to say just this one funny thing about the book that has never happened to me before. There’s kind of a preface in this one at the beginning about progress, it’s called “Progress” actually. It’s in large part about the fact that we have a strange kind of bias in our, both in our brains but particularly in the media where we’re not very interested in stories of slow incremental progress. So stories about things that have improved by one percent or two percent a year are staggeringly boring. Right, that’s the least interesting news story you could possibly imagine.

The great new break through, the new Windows 8, the new Surface, or the terrible catastrophic thing that gets a lot, you’re guaranteed headlines with that kind of news. For some reason we’re also more interested in stories of slow and steady decline. You know if you write an op-ed saying that things are just getting slowly worse and worse people really like to run stories like that. But stories about things getting slowly better are almost never covered. This is a misguided thing because in fact most progress takes the shape of that slow incremental advance. Which when it goes on for twenty years, or thirty years, or fifty years stacks up into major sometimes orders of magnitude. It’s improvement in our lives but we don’t hear about it enough which gives us a skewed sense of how we’re doing as the society.
In fact in this opening chapter I have this long kind of social studies quiz which is basically like a survey of what do you think the last twenty years kind of trend lines are for the following fifteen things? It’s divorce rates, it’s violent crime, it’s teenage pregnancies, it’s drug use, it’s drunk driving, traffic fatalities, just a whole long list of things and all of them are positive. All of them are trending, some of them more than twenty or even some cases more than fifty percent over that period. But there’s no incredible break through so we don’t hear about it. It’s just lots of people tinkering with the system in small ways.
Some of them in the private sector, some of them in the public sector, some of them in the non-profits, some of them governments, some of them just word of mouth improving our lives and our standards of living in all these kind of subtle ways.
So, all which is to say is an example that there’s kind of a set piece of the beginning of the book about aviation safety, right, one of the great success stories of modern life. It is staggeringly safe to fly on a commercial airplane, right. It was safe when I was a kid now it’s far, far, far safer. I go through a bunch of different ways to try and visualize this. One of the things I do is to say over the last twenty years if planes had gotten as fast as they have gotten safe it would now take five minutes to fly from New York to Paris, right, that’s the improvement in aviation safety.
It’s an amazing thing, so, I tell you all this, ha-ha, to tell you this story about when my book, the final copies were done I was on vacation, this was in August and so I was at the beach and they shipped up four copies that arrived in their Day-Glo orange splendor. I have a ten year old son and for the first time he said, Dad I want to read your book. So we’re sitting at our little beach house and he picks it up and starts reading through the book. He asked me about a couple of the words but he seems to be understanding it, and so it’s kind of cool. At a certain point about twenty minutes into it he says, hey
Dad how close are London and Paris? I’m like, oh they’re pretty close. So, what it takes like an hour to fly between them? I’m like, yeah, yeah that’s about right. He says, so in this little section here shouldn’t it be much faster than five minutes to fly from London to Paris? I said, no, no, it says from New York to
Paris. He says, no it says from London to Paris. I go and look at the book and sure enough it says from
London to Paris.
I go back and look at the original manuscript that I wrote and it says from London to Paris and I just thought some how in my head I was saying New York to Paris. I probably read that paragraph twenty times. My editor read, my wife read it, ten other people read the book in draft form. Nobody noticed

that the numbers were kind of off for New York, from Paris to London. So, I tell you this for two reasons, one this is still the first printing so the book is flawed, ha-ha.
[laughter]
That error remains on page whatever. I hope you accept my apologies in advance for that. But the second one is a life lesson thing which is that the window of time from when your children are old enough to read your book to when they’re old enough to fact checks your book is apparently about fifteen minutes. So cherish those minutes they just fly by if you get in that same situation. Anyway, but the main part of the book after the preface is really an argument about what I see as a, is a new vision of progress, of change, and of politics really. I have kind of slowly but steadily seen emerging all around me and all these people, projects, and organizations that are really doing interesting things that all seem to share a common sensibility that didn’t easily fit the existing kind of vocabulary or definitions of politics as we know it. They were all very encouraging what they were doing so I decided to write this book. It’s a short little punchy book deliberately not to be comprehensive. In some ways is a book about something that hasn’t happened yet. It’s a book about a movement that’s just getting started.
But to do it in order to kind of give this sensibility and these various different projects some unified a definition or connection.
So the argument of the book really it ultimately kind of comes down to four steps. Let me kind of walk you through the steps and see if this makes any sense to you. I’d love to hear your thoughts; love to hear other examples of this, or your own observations because I’m still collecting ideas for this very much in some sense a work in progress even though the book is done despite its one mistake. So the first stage of the argument is this, we have agreed for the most part as a society that there are certain institutions, certain ways of organizing people that it’s useful for us to have a word for even though the specific instances of each institution or each organization are always a little bit different. There’s a kind of messiness in the details.
But we agree that we can talk about government. We can talk about the market. We can talk about corporations. We can talk about public sector, private sector. We can talk about these kinds of institutions, the state versus the market. Even though every government is a little bit different, and every corporation is a little different, and markets have different ways of interacting. But it’s useful enough for us to be able, to kind of point to, these things so that we don’t have to get into the weeds every time we talk about a government specifying exactly what kind it is and what flavor it is. Indeed, most of our basic kind of political values and, in fact, most of what we’ve seen in particularly in the first two debates are about the relative kind of ratio that we think is proper to have in society, right. People on the left think that we want to have a stronger government. We think that the government should be there to build infrastructure, to provide a safety net, or to kind of reign in the excesses of the market.
The people on the right, particularly the libertarian right want the market to be kind of unleashed to do its work and to have the government get out of its way. That’s a big part of our, you know when you ask people where do you fit on the political spectrum one of the key ways that they think about it is the kind of ratio of the balancing act between those two big institutions.

So the first rung of this argument is that there is another kind of organization that is out there and that has been out there for a very long time. But that we have new understanding of and new technology that allows us to kind of amplify the power of this organization. That it deserves to have a place in that spectrum and that there are a growing number of people who really believe in this particular kind of organization, and think that in some ways it may be better than the polls of the market and the state.
That organization is what I’m calling the peer network. I’m borrowing the language of peer to peer network. So peer network is a group of people decentralized without traditional kind of leadership, top down structures.
For those of you who read my book “Emergence” many years ago this is an idea that was first incubating in my head then, when I was writing about decentralized systems in ant colonies, and city neighborhoods, and so on. So it’s a system that is decentralized in its control structure. It is diverse in its perspectives. Diversity is a key value of these systems. They aren’t an echo chamber where everybody is thinking similarly. It brings a lot of different kind of, sometimes professional perspectives to bear on a problem. It involves some kind of measure of some mechanism for rewarding good ideas or amplifying good ideas but also it doesn’t traditionally have traditional economic relations. In many cases, so you don’t have ownership over these ideas so that it’s easy to kind of build on top of other people’s ideas or improve on them.
So, it’s just this kind of open network of collaboration, right. Now, since I was last here I think I had moved from New York to Northern California. If we’d been having this conversation forty years ago and
I’d gotten in front of you and said, there’s a new form of open collaboration without traditional owner and people come together and share ideas and freely build on top of their ideas you would have said,
I’m sure life is going well for you in your commune in Mendocino weaving baskets or whatever you’re doing there but the truth is in reality, you know you need other big states or big corporations to make things happen. But now forty years later we have the history of the Internet, and the web, and of
Wikipedia, and of Open Source, and all these projects where people have come together sometimes with visionary early government funding and sometimes with contributions, important contributions from the private sector, and companies like Microsoft. But in many cases we have these success stories of entities that exist and have been so successful precisely because nobody owns them. Precisely because everybody’s contributing a small amount to the system and because they’re open and collaborative environments where people can build on top of other peoples ideas, right.
So, we can, I mean I have this kind of thought experiment that I wrote about in The Times magazine just to give some sense of like how dependent we are, because I don’t think people realize this. If you could, if you were some kind of like doctor evil and you could build a magnetic pulse device that would shut down every piece of kind of peer network or peer produced software in the world I mean this room I don’t have to explain what would happen, all the things that would go dark, starting with the Internet itself and what a devastating thing that would be a global catastrophe, right. I mean, markets would go down, energy infrastructure would go down, and people’s lives would be heavily disrupted. Thankfully you can’t build such a device but it shows how dependent both the markets and the state have become

on peer network collaboration, right. They’ve created these platforms that then the private sector and the public sector can build upon in all these interesting ways.
So the point here, the kind of first rung of the argument is that it’s not that I; and I spent a lot of time as well trying to make it clear that this is not a cyber utopian argument. This is not about technology being our salvation, right. This is not about, you know, if we could just get everybody on Facebook the world would be better, you know. People should maybe spend a little less time on Facebook, right. It’s rather the idea that we can now point to the way that these open networks were kind of built as a role model, not necessarily just as a tool, but as an example that we can point to and say this is not some utopian fantasy. This is something that actually has worked in the real world, right. So that’s part one, that there is this organizational form of the peer network that is meaningful and gets, and builds things. It’s not just some kind of naïve fantasy.
The next step is, that you can use peer networks to solve problems that aren’t necessarily technological in nature. The best example of this, which all of you I’m sure are familiar with in the last few years is
Kick Starter. Actually, it’s been interesting, I’m touring around the country talking about this book how in a non-tech savvy audience actually how many people have heard of Kick Starter. It’s really become a big deal, almost seemingly over the course of this book tour it’s amazing how more and more people seem to have heard about it. But Kick Starter is an example of taking a peer network to solve a different kind of problem, which is the problem of how do you fund creative ideas that don’t yet have traditional backing from the market. So, if you’re a musician and you’re trying to finish your album but you don’t yet have a record deal what do you do? We’ve agreed as a society, most of us, that it’s worth it for us to figure out ways to fund creative ideas that aren’t yet supported by the market place in the long run that’s health, one, some of those ideas become financially viable on their own. In other ways, we just think it’s good for society to have people pushing the envelope of creativity for a whole host of other kind of less tangible reasons. So, we have institutions like the National Endowment for the Arts. We don’t have a national endowment for detergents, because we’ve decided as a society that the market is doing great at giving us infinite variety of detergents.
So, but we’ve built up philanthropical organizations or state organizations to support the arts. Well, Kick
Starter came along and said, okay those things are great but the world is probably filled with far more people who would be willing to give ten dollars, or fifty dollars, or a hundred dollars to support a creative work just because they want to see it in the world. They kind of unlocked all this interesting kind of demand and it created a very interesting kind of gift economy, right. With Kick Starter the economics of it are funny, right. You can, you get reward from and a lot of the creativity of Kick Starter is built into the reward system. So its ten dollars I’ll give you a signed copy of the CD, a hundred dollars and I’ll come to your house and serenade you with my acoustic guitar. You know you can create these different kinds of layers, but most of the time in traditional economic terms people are vastly overpaying for things. Particularly since they’re paying for things that don’t exist yet, right, by definition in Kick Starter if you’re giving money the thing that you’re buying hasn’t been built yet, right.

So and there’s no investment structure here. It is by law not an investment vehicle, right. So if you back that musician and they go on to have a number one billboard record you see no upside, right. There’s no return on investment in a traditional way in that kind of exchange. Yet, Kick Starter interestingly is itself a for profit company, right. It’s a venture back start up like the very apex of modern capitalism.
But what it creates is this kind of gift economy. This crowd funding gift economy where people are contributing in part because they want the thing they’re paying for, but they’re overpaying because they want to help the artist and they want the feeling of participating in helping things that they think the world should have and being seen helping. There’s a social kind of dynamic as well to it. People are always talking about how they back this or that on Twitter or Facebook, right.
So in a strange way it’s this bizarre thing where like this venture back start up creates as its product a kind of gift economy as its output. It would be like some nineteen century factory that creates a socialist collective as its product. It’s a bizarre concept, right. Again, this is one of these things you all know this
I’m sure, you know where five years ago we would have all said well that’s a lovely idea but I’m, it’s not really going to work in practice, I kind of doubt, right. Now of course Kick Starter this year is on track to give away more money than the entire budget of the National Endowment of the Arts, and it’s three or four years old, right. So the question is now, you know, could it be ten times the size of the NEA? Not whether it could ever rival the NEA.
So that’s a peer network that is unlocking all this demand. Now, I do not mean to suggest that we should then do away with the NEA. I mean I adapted the book for the Wall Street Journal at one point.
We did a lot of excerpts of the book in different places and one place was the Wall Street Journal. They kept, I was talking about Kick Starter in the article and they kept saying, yeah I think our readers would like to know how peer networks can be used to eliminate funding for the NEA. I think that would be really good, ha-ha. Well that’s not really my point here, you know. It’s not that we want to replace those state institutions. The state institutions maybe fine, it maybe that we want to make the NEA a little bit more like Kick Starter for instance. Or maybe that the NEA starts to have kind of matching grants that can work alongside Kick Starter donations, or any number of things. But it’s not that I’m saying lets get rid of these state institutions and replace them entirely with peer networks. But that they now can have rivals in that peer network architecture in the case of crowd funding art is pretty impressive. So that’s rung two of the argument.
Rung three is this, that we don’t even necessarily need technology to form these kinds of networks of collaboration. Next week actually I’m going to be going to the town of Portalegre in Brazil. About twenty-three, twenty-four years ago Portalegre was this, you know, kind of classic developing world city that had gone from two hundred thousand people to two million people in a shockingly short amount of time. It had all the usual infrastructure problems that a city like that has. You know, the sewer lines were un-extended; the electrical grid wasn’t extended to all of these places. You had these shanty towns of favelas where people were living in kind of improvised communities and there was tremendous waste and corruption and all that kind of stuff.

So in this really interesting move the city decided to experiment with this thing that in translation is called participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting is basically a peer network but it’s a peer network that works without really any technology in its original form. So the idea is this, every year there is a significant slice of taxpayer dollars that gets set aside for neighborhoods all over the city to specifically kind of ear mark the funds for specific projects. So neighborhoods get together, they have this kind of council meeting where they all, members of the community get together and they have these public discussions where they talk about what are the needs in that neighborhood? We need the sewer line extended here; we need this road paved; we need another room in the school house; we need a community garden here; we need a playground here. It’s through these discussions the neighbors come up with a rank list of priorities for the community that they submit to the city. The city then kind of doles out the money based on those specific asks, with a slight skew towards the poor parts of the neighborhood. So there’s a little bit of redistribution from the wealthier neighborhoods that are paying the taxes to the ones that aren’t.
The money is still again, the money is coming from the state. This is not a thousand points of light; let the state stop working because charity organizations will take over. This is still taxpayer dollars funding things. But the decision of what to fund is coming from the street from the folks who live in these communities. This is one of the reasons why this kind of peer network strategy I think in terms of politics is already working and is going to be incredibly powerful on that local level. Because when you talk about peoples neighborhoods the true experts in a neighborhood are the people who live there, right. Yeah.
>>: [inaudible] a little bit what it’s doing now in New York through Open Plans –
>> Steven Johnson: Yeah, yeah, so I’ll get to that. I’m headed that direction that’s exactly right. So, you’re able to basically, you know, you know what the needs are. So every community has all this, you know, kind of untapped expertise that’s happening there kind of on a ground level that if you give people the right tools they can actually contribute. Sometimes those tools are high tech, sometimes they’re not. In Portalegre what they found was that the whole system got much more efficient. It got much more efficient for a couple of reasons. The first one was it was so much harder for dollars to disappear. So when, you know, some bureaucrat somewhere ear marks, you know, five million dollars for sewer repair but no one really hears about it and, in fact, the sewer doesn’t get repaired and the five million dollars goes to build someone’s villa. It’s just the accountability is hardly there because nobody really knew about the project in the first place. But what they found in Portalegre is that because people were like hey; hold on, we asked for the sewer extension where is it? So things got built and the whole system became more responsive and then it created this positive feedback loop where people had shown up at a council meeting, asked for something, and wow five months later there it was. So they came back for more.
It’s been a huge success and it’s now spreading. It’s actually in; they’re experimenting with specifically participatory budgeting in Brooklyn and in Chicago. It’s in more than ten percent of European cities and towns. So, but again this is 1989 in Brazil there’s no smart phones, there’s barely any Internet, it’s not

technological. The platform is human beings getting together face to face in a room. But it’s still that peer network. It’s a network of neighbors, kind of, collaborating and solving problems. There’s another example that’s not in the book which you all probably know about because it’s close to here. There’s a great story that I stumbled across just in the last couple of weeks about this guy, Mark Lakeman who lived in Portland. He lived in this residential community in Portland and it was, you know, your ordinary kind of residential street. He went off on a trip to Central America. He came back and he was kind of looking at this intersection that he lived at the corner of and he said, Jesus this is such a dead space, the cars kind of own it, nothing ever happens here but if you go back to these traditional cultures and you see the crossroads, crossroads are where kind of civic life happens, where two roads intersect that’s where people gather. That’s where kind of communities form. They’re kind of sacred spaces in a funny way and kind of neighborhoods and communities. He thought how can I capture some of that in my own kind of banal anonymous intersection in front of my house?
So he went to all of his neighbors and he said I really want to paint our intersection. I want to create a big elaborate kind of intersection wide, somewhat psychedelic looking painting, just to give it some identity. I think it would be really cool. So he got all of his neighbors, his peers kind of to come around to this idea. Then he goes to the city, he goes to Department of Transportation and they have this beautiful Aurelian moment where they say, you can’t do that, that’s public space, no one can use it, which is pretty nice.
[laughter]
But eventually actually the Mayor got word of it and kind of like it so he got approval to do it. Then you know all these things started to pop up around it so. You know, there’s, like a community lending library was set up there where people could bring books and share books. Then somebody created, because this is Portland they created a twenty-four hour solar powered tea station where you could go and have some tea.
[laughter]
Gotta love it. Then other intersections, ha-ha, around Portland started saying, hey that’s pretty cool; I want to do that too. So they created this thing they call Intersection Repair. Now there’s intersections like this is Seattle and a bunch of other places. It’s created this organization now called City Repair.
What’s great about it is, again, this is not, they didn’t solve, they didn’t create that identity by going to the state, in fact the city tried to shut them down initially. They didn’t go to Starbucks and say could you build a coffee shop here so that we have some community here, right. It was coming from the neighbors themselves in this kind of bottom up way. So, and again the most advanced technology was the paint really. It wasn’t, I suppose once they put the solar powered tea station that was more advanced. But mostly it was a very low tech affair. So that’s the third rung that peer networks particularly on a local level are a great kind of powerful mechanism for improving our lives and making decisions that sometimes are much better off and more responsive than the ones we make in the private sector or through governments.

So the fourth rung of the argument is this. If you buy that, if you buy that peer network are an important organizational force, we should understand more, we should explore more. They should be part of that inter-ratio that I was talking about at the beginning. Maybe some of us might be strong enough to say that our default assumption should be to try and build peer networks where we can. To make governments more like peer networks in some sense to make corporations internally the architecture, corporations to make them more like peer networks.
If you believe in that where are you on the political spectrum? What is your natural home in kind of the left and right in the two party systems we have in this country? I would argue that there really isn’t a natural home because of a couple of reasons. The first reason is this, if you believe in the power of peer networks you do fundamentally believe in the power of decentralized decision making. In that sense you take seriously the kind of libertarian idea that comes from hierarch in the Austrian school. That decentralized systems in the libertarian argument. Market places will in the long run out perform, and out innovate, and be more responsive and resilient than centrally planned top down systems.
So the libertarian argument has always been, the world is to complex, the market is to complex, the economy is to complex for a small elite group of planners to figure it all out. Every time a small elite group of planners tries to figure out this complex thing the plan economies fail, because they have to compress down all that data through this little bottleneck of kind of ten minds or a hundred minds. All the nuance, and subtlety, and complexity of the thing itself get kind of rendered into this caricature. So the planning fails because it doesn’t understand the totality of the thing it’s trying to plan. So what markets do is, you know, kind of break up all that knowledge into, you know, millions or hundreds of millions of individual people not one of whom understands the economy in its totality. All they have to focus on is the thing they’re making, the thing they’re selling, the thing they’re consuming, the thing they’re buying. But out of all those collective decision, all those individual decisions a larger kind of collective pattern, this is kind of an invisible hand.
So if you believe in peer networks there’s a part of that argument that you buy, right. You believe in the power of decentralization, you believe in the resilience and the innovation of decentralized system. The part you don’t buy is that the only version is a market. The only version of that is the private sector.
What a lot of the people that I write about in the book, that what I think defines them, is they believe in decentralization but they also believe that markets have limits. That there are things that markets don’t do very well and there are things that, in fact, other kinds of systems do better than the private sector.
While the market gets incredibly powerful at lots of things there are a whole host of parts of human experience that are not particularly well served by markets, or where markets just kind of indifferent.
So we need other institutions. In the past that was a vacuum that was filled by big governments and by the state. But this new sensibility says no, no, no there are other forms of decentralization.
Actually Hayek famously called a market a system of telecommunications. That’s what he talked about, and he used this kind of technological communications theory language to talk about how markets work. But the irony is, when it came time to build the global systems of telecommunication that

connect all the minds on the earth and to form the Internet and web it turned out that actually well markets played a role, and governments played a role. It turned out that the ultimate solution that bound us all together was, actually came from somewhere outside the market. It was better off to build a system that no individual corporation owned than it was to build something inside a private sector entity. So that’s kind of the irony of Hayek’s original ideas or at least a metaphor he used. On the other hand, while you may say that the market has its limits on the other hand, you know, you’re not a big champion of top down big institutions and big governments. You’re trying to make governments more bottom up, as well.
So in trying to figure out where you are on the political spectrum it’s tricky if you believe in these things.
So I’ve tried to kind of reach for a word, or a kind of a term, an umbrella category for these people who share these values and I knew early on that peer was a key word here. It’s a lovely word it plays both in the tech world and the low tech world, right, a jury of our peers, the respect of our peers, peer review in academic world. So I started calling these people because some of them come out of the traditional, progressive tradition. Because fundamentally they believe in progress, they have this kind of optimistic assessment of the world that they think that positive change is possible. So I started calling these people peer progressives. That’s the kind of umbrella term, whether that sticks or not I think there’s value in seeing them as a group and having that short hand ability to say, well if we apply the peer network how would it work here? Or what would a peer progressive take be? There’s a certain kind of economy and efficiency in having terms that we can point to and use. That’s what I’m trying to do with this book.
I’ll give you one example of this which I think was really interesting and wasn’t fully understood at the time which was the battle against the Stop Online Privacy Act, SOPA. This was a really interesting case study where you had this major attempt to kind of rein in the decentralized, you know, structure of the
Internet, probably one of the single, kind of, biggest attempts by both kind of states and corporations to rein in the Internet however you feel about the actually bill. What was striking about it initially was here we live in this terrible hyper-partisan gridlocked political situation. The by-partisan support for SOPA was unbelievable. I mean you would have thought this bill was a support your troops initiative, right.
The one thing that both parties can agree on is that too many people are downloading music illegally, right. That was the flag that both parties could rally around, right. So this thing was sailing through the
House and the Senate, right, SOPA and FIPA. They were going; it was absolutely going to pass and then this weird thing happened; the network became self aware, right. The strange, then people started posting things on RedEd, and Boing Boing, and BOD Post started appear and it built up until all of a sudden there was this kind of historic blackout day. Wikipedia went dark; all these other sites went dark and within two days the bill was dead in the water.
Now, what I think was really interesting about it, whether you think it was a good idea or bad idea what was so interesting about it was the way it was covered in the media. Because the media wants to, everything is the horse race. Ever thing is like; alright something just happened what does it mean for the score? Was this good for the Democrats or good for the Republicans, victory for Obama, victory for
Boehner? Who was winning, who’s out, and who’s down? Here you have this middle and they couldn’t

figure out how to score it. You know, like okay, it was defeated because it was a really, because Chris
Dodd was a Democrat so it must be a, but wait a second it was backed by all these Republicans. Who defeated this thing? What I think it really was is in some ways it was this kind of the first, kind of sound of the peer progressive sensibility. It was this silent nerd majority out there. That with all these people who fundamentally felt that the decentralized structure of the Internet was one of the best things that we’d come up with as a species in the last thirty years and the big top down institution shouldn’t mess with it lightly. But that group, that sensibility doesn’t have a nature home in either party. So when they started to kind of raise their tentacles, I mean really handsome tentacles, ha-ha, the traditional media couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, like who are these people, what’s going on? Now that was a case of that power, that kind of decentralized movement being used to kind of stop something.
What I tried to do in this book is talk about all the other experiments, and projects, and initiatives that are out there trying to start something, try to build things, whether it’s Kick Starter, whether its open plans like projects that are actually out there and making the world actually better, not just kind of standing in the way of things. I’ll give you just one last example of maybe my favorite story from the book which is an incredible example kind of a hybrid peer network model which is 311, the 311 service in many cities, is 311 in Seattle? I don’t know, okay, so 311 it’s in lots of cities. In New York they have kind of the finest version of it brain child of our entrepreneurial Mayor Michael Bloomberg. What 311 does is a couple of things, it’s a number you can call to report problems or ask questions. You’re guaranteed a live human being on the phone within thirty seconds. They speak over a hundred and eighty different languages, not just one person but lots of different people speak different languages.
[laughter]
It’s a, yeah one really fluent person, ha-ha, who answers the phone.
[laughter]
They, you can call in and say, there’s a pothole on my street. It hasn’t been filled for two months. There is a bar down the street that’s making too much noise; it’s two in the morning. Is it alternate side parking today? Are schools closed? I need to recycle my air conditioner, where do I do it? I need a battered women’s shelter. I need Children’s Advance in Prospect Park, are there any today? It turns out they’ve done this analysis and, you know how this works, ninety-five percent of the calls are about a finite number of questions so they can just pre-load all the operators with the answers. For that five percent that aren’t in that short list they’re instructed which departments will have the answers. It’s a huge success, a hundred million, over a hundred million calls since they started in I think 2003. They did a survey of consumer satisfaction in comparing it to other call center programs in both the public sector and private sector. It tied for first with high-end hotel and retail chains, with the IRS was kind of in the middle in the ranking and at the very bottom were the cable companies, right, not surprising.
[laughter]

But think about that this is a government agency call center that is coming out number one in terms of customer satisfaction, right. That is crazy, have you been to the DMV recently? People don’t come out of there being like that was so satisfying. I really had a good time, thank you so much for your responsive [indiscernible].
[laughter]
But here’s what makes it a peer network. Here’s what makes it so radical is it’s a two way system. So you call in and you get an answer but the city takes in all this information and is geo-tagging, and tagging, and organizing every single call that come in. They use it to create this kind of real time dashboard that shows everything that’s happening in the city. They, in a sense, are using it to solve this great information overload problem of trying to figure out where the problems are in a city of eight million people. The old way of doing it is to say alright we’re going to hire a lot of people, put a lot of people on our pay. We’re going to hire a team of pothole inspectors who are going to go around from block to block and find the potholes and report them, and we’ll go and fix them. What 311 said is let’s deputize anyone who can dial three numbers on a phone to be part of this process, and to do it in their own selfish interests. So they’re calling in to say I need this but the city takes that in and says here’s a need. How many other needs are like that in this particular neighborhood maybe there’s something we need to do there? They can learn and adapt and be much more responsive because they’ve decentralized and diversified the voices that are talking to them. They’ve suddenly given everybody this little megaphone to talk back to the city.
My favorite example is this, which I experienced first hand, there was this bizarre thing that happened in
New York when I was still living there that would happen on the west side of Manhattan, by the river.
Where every now and then starting around 2004 a neighborhood would smell overwhelmingly like maple syrup. So you’d be walking down the streets in Chelsea and you’re like pancakes. Why does it smell like pancakes? You keep walking for like three blocks and you’re like, it still smells like pancakes.
That’s really odd. So this is, you know, New York after 9-11 so people are, there’s a strange smell saturating a neighborhood. People are nervous, they’re like, is this a chemical attack from like the Aunt
Jemima wing of al-Qaeda and so they’re calling in.
[laughter]
So literally 311 starts getting these calls that are like, it smells like syrup in Chelsea. People are like, there’s a crazy person on the phone, I know.
[laughter]
But they kept getting the calls. So they sent out some city official to test the air and found out it was fine. So they instructed the operators to just let people know that the smells were nice smells and they should enjoy them, and it wasn’t a big deal. But it kept happening and, you know, a month would pass and then it would erupt somewhere else. The Times wrote about it and local bloggers wrote about it.

Nobody could figure it out. It became so common that inside of 311 the city became officially, began officially referring to them as maple syrup events, capital M, capital S, capital E which is like the worst
Hollywood Thriller you’ve ever gone to, like the Maple Syrup Event. So it went on for like four or five years, or three or four years. Finally somebody inside the city said, hey wait a second these calls we’ve been tracking them all this time they’re clues, right we know the day they called, we know exactly where they were. Let’s figure out, let’s go back and look at all these outbreaks. So they aggregated all the data and they looked at the wind conditions for each day. When you looked at all the outbreaks, as they weren’t in all the same neighborhood, but when you looked at the wind pattern for each day and you analyzed everything it created this very clear vector that pointed back to this specific spot in New Jersey.
The smells were coming from New Jersey, nice smells, nothing against New Jersey.
[laughter]
So they literally got in their van and drove over the bridge and went to this spot in New Jersey. Where they found this kind of industrial plant that processed kind of artificial flavor, and smell things, and every now and then they processed the fenugreek seed which is used in artificial maple syrup, kind of cheap maple syrup knock offs. So they solved the mystery. Now look it was not a chemical attack, right. It was not a, thank God it was not a life or death matter. But what I love about this story is when they were designing 311 nobody said, we should make sure the system can identify syrupy smells when they erupt and locate their source, right.
[laughter]
It was not part of the spec for the software. But because it was built on a peer network, a diverse decentralized network where anybody can call in with a potential problem and where that information could be aggregated, and analyzed, and where patterns can be detected in it. The software turned out to be great at solving this mystery even though it was not at all a part of the initial kind of planning of its creators. That’s the power of these kinds of networks is that they end up solving all these problems that their creators never dreamed of.
In a way that’s how I feel about this book, right. This is a book as I said that’s about something that hasn’t really fully happened yet, right. It’s about the beginning of something; it’s not comprehensive.
There are a whole host of kind of questions I have about the extent and the limits, and the capabilities of these kinds of solutions. But I wrote it and I wrote it quickly, and I wrote it to get it out there because the time was right for it. Because I wanted to amplify the people and the organizations that I write about in the book and kind of push it forward. My hope is and this has happened with a couple of my books that, you know, five years from now I’ll look back and some folks who read part of it were inspired by some of the stories in it will have gone on to create things that I never dreamed about. That solved problems that maybe I didn’t think that peer networks could solve. So, you know if you get a chance to read the book that would be great; if you get a chance to be one of those people that would be even better. Thank you very much.

[applause]
So I think we have some time for questions or comments or thoughts, or just bringing up a Surface for me to play with, ha-ha.
[laughter]
>>: Have you thought about the forces that drive these social networks or their literal supply and demand kind of analogies?
>> Steven Johnson: Yeah, well it’s a really good question why people get involved, right. What is it, in some of the cases one thing I didn’t talk about for instance in the book, is a whole chapter on prize back challenges, prizes. An incredible mechanism for these kinds of things whether it’s x-prizes, whether it’s the premiums of the world society of the arts which were a big part of innovation in the enlightenment.
Where you create some kind of prize and whether it’s coming from a philanthropic organization or a government, or you know a corporation like the Netflix algorithm. It’s a great example of peer networks because what a prize does, like the longitude prize was a great example of this. What a prize does is that it; with economic reward it creates a new pool of people who are kind of thinking about a problem trying to solve it. But a lot of the prize is the best prize is having a condition of kind of openness and non-ownership if you win the prize.
So the RSA in the early day’s enlightenment gave away in today’s money millions and millions of dollars to encourage all sorts of important problems in engineering, and technology, and so on, in agriculture in eighteen century England. The deal was if you won the prize you could not patent your creation. So you created a system that was basically funding things that the market wasn’t quite yet ready to fund. But you ensured that, so you brought a lot of new minds to solving this problem, you diversified the network of people trying to solve the problem. But once the problem was solved the idea itself, the solution was free to circulate and other people could build on it. So you created a network of people building on it.
So in that instance you have economic rewards concentrating and motivating people. But it’s not a traditional kind of market place in the way that we normally talk about it.
In other cases, you know, I mean the whole mystery of why Wikipedia works. Why do people spend, it’s not even, you know we talk a lot about kind of social prestige, right. That people will do amazing things just to have their friends see them doing it. That is an incredibly important, you know, part of our growing understanding of kind of neural economics. That people aren’t just rational economic actors so they have all these kind of social biases built into their decision making. But we all know what Wikipedia is like. It is really hard to tell who wrote what on Wikipedia. I mean it’s not like there are pictures of people saying like I am one of, I’ve written over three percent of this entry on Charles Dickens, here’s my picture, ladies. You know, I mean it’s not part of the reward, right. So why do they do it? It’s a really interesting thing.

I think there are all these mechanisms that vary I think from site to site. Kick Starter I think does use social prestige for instance. People do like to tweet about the thing they backed on Kick Starter and so that’s part of it. The rewards are another kind of motivating factor. On Wikipedia there’s not that but there are other mechanisms. Wikipedia, one very powerful thing that Wikipedia does that I think should be studied more is the convention of the stub on Wikipedia, right. So Wikipedia has always had this thing where you create a stub of an entry that says there is no entry for prize back challenges but there should be. That creates this little flag in the ground saying there’s a hole here could somebody fill it. I personally can’t fill it, or I have a day job so I don’t have time to fill it, or I’m not a loser who goes around filling out Wikipedia entries but I’m smart enough to know that there is this hole that needs to be filled.
Then there are people who just sit there and watch the stubs come in and they’re like, aha, I know something about prize back challenges I’m going to fill it. Think about that in a, imagine that in a community with Wikipedia stubs and Kick Starter as a crowd funding mechanism.
So the community is saying here’s a stub here, here’s an empty lot that needs to be filled with something, literally an empty lot, an abandoned lot. So here’s a stub that we plant here and we say something needs to be done about this. They’re reporting it maybe via 311 kind of system and they are doing it because they want to see it filled. Their motivation is I live across the street from that empty lot and it’s filled with beer cans, or it’s filled with kids smoking pot, or whatever it is it’s being filled with. So they create the stub and then there’s a mechanism whereby people Kick Starter style can propose solutions to that problem, propose kind of ways to fill the empty lot. Then there’s a mechanism for people to crowd fund those solutions to decide on which solution to take because it gets the most funding. In fact there are a lot of projects that, I mean there are things like Neighborly and Neighbor
Land, something like C-Click Fix that are out there right now trying to build that kind of model.
So in that case you would have layers of motivation like it’s in my backyard so I want to see it fixed. I actually, you know, build community gardens for a living and so I would like to fix it because I probably would get paid. Then the funders are contributing because maybe their social prestige and because they also want to see it fixed. But each network is going to have different kinds of motivation. I think we have a lot to be studied on what motivates some but I think those are some of them. I could keep answering that forever but I won’t, okay, yes.
>>: Where do you think vouchers fit into this? Because, you know, you mentioned the New York Times and the NEA. That it occurred to me as you were saying that, that the New York Times should have suggested that the NEA can be replaced by a voucher system where you can spend your voucher on Kick
Starter.
>> Steven Johnson: You know it’s really interesting –
>>: It’s also similar to the, I forget what you called it the neighborhood system –
>> Steven Johnson: Yeah.

>>: Where you know instead of everybody showing up voting, you know, in a council maybe they should just, you know, go drop their token in saying I vote for filling the potholes, or I want a newer park spend my money on that.
>> Steven Johnson: It’s a fascinating question. One of the funny things that happened, ha-ha, with this book is that I spent all this time right before it came out trying to get the excerpt for the Wall Street
Journal kind of through the editorial biases of the Wall Street Journal so that it would run. So I was kind of arguing with the write though in my mind for like a week before the book came out. Then the first thing I did on book tour is that I did a local NPR interview with an NPR station in Baltimore Maryland, and was like the third thing out of the interviewers mouth was, it sounds like you might support charter schools. You know, how dare you, and I was like oh wait oh I gotta argue with the left too. I’ve got to remember I’m offending everybody here.
[laughter]
I can’t just, so part of it, were you talking about school vouchers particularly or just any kind of vouchers? But –
>>: [indiscernible].
>> Steven Johnson: Yeah, yeah, so I think that vouchers, I mean the one proposal that is fascinating that’s in the book. It’s fascinating not because it comes from me it’s one of the other people’s, other ideas; it comes from Larry Lessig, actually who spent a lot of time here and this guy, Bruce Ackerman.
Which is this idea of what they call democracy vouchers in campaign finance reform. So, you know, right now the way that campaigns are financed is in large part a great betrayal of peer progressive values. Precisely because you have a tiny sliver of the population that has a disproportionate stake in funding all these things and particularly in the age of Super Packs, right. So the people who the percentage of the population that have maxed out their campaign donation is, it makes the one percent look like the proletariat, right. This is the one percent of the one percent, right. So you have this situation where all this decision making among our leaders are being steered by this tiny part of the population.
So, if you believe in diverse decentralized networks, government is not going to work because they’re kind of the sway of these small numbers of donors. So the traditional left approach to that would be to say okay public funding, the government should take it over, publically fund campaigns. You shouldn’t, you know, figure out some constitutional amendment that over turns Citizen United and all these different things. Which is really hard to do and that to kind of offend peer progressive values because then you got big government taking it over. So what Lessig and a few other people have proposed is this idea of democracy vouchers. Democracy vouchers idea is that you give every citizen fifty dollars worth of vouchers of their tax dollars that they’re going to pay, or if they’re in the forty-seven percent, you know they get a credit for fifty dollars. They can use those fifty dollars to back any candidate they want, or split between different candidates, or back a party, or if they don’t specify it, it will go to the party

that they’re aligned with, or if they aren’t aligned with a party it will go to fund the mechanisms of running campaigns and running the election process which is expensive. You can match that with a hundred dollars of your own money.
What that would create would be this giant pool of money that any candidate could get access to. That would be pledged to the candidate like they were pledged to a Kick Starter campaign, if they swore off any other traditional private funding. The premise is, and they’ve done the math on this, that the pool would be so large that any rational candidate would not want to raise money from additional sources.
So you could get people to kind of go towards this much more diverse crowd funded pool of money without a constitutional amendment, without questioning whether campaign finance is free speech and so on. So that’s a voucher approach.
I think there’s, the whole school question is another one. There has to be some kind of diversification and experimentation that happens in the school system. The way it works and the role of traditional kind of top down teachers unions in this is a complicated thing. I don’t think, I think that the unions have some issues but I think they’re also sometimes vilified unnecessarily. The book gets into this in some detail. I don’t want to take up too much time on that but it’s an excellent question.
Right up front.
>>: [inaudible] whole bunch of systems, and a whole bunch of examples, and a whole bunch of things but I haven’t heard anything about pretty successful ones that have been going on for that twenty-five years as the desert Burning Man. Is that on your radar or have you talked to Larry Harvey? Have you done any research in that?
>> Steven Johnson: That’s a really good story. I’ve never been to Burning Man. All of my friends, my new friends in California are such believers in it. Actually I had this great; this is one of the things about
California I love. I had, I don’t mean to name drop here but I had lunch with Stewart Brand in California and he was saying have you been to Burning Man? I said, no I haven’t, he said, well now that you’re out here you really should go and you really should bring your kids, it’s great for kids. I thought there is a difference between New York and California. In New York the seventy-two year olds aren’t saying you really should bring your children, your young children to Burning Man, right, that’s, ha-ha, the difference between the east coast and the west coast.
Yeah but as a kind of self organizing gift economy it’s an incredible story. That’s a great example and that that’s become such a big deal and seemingly, you know, how the one thing I haven’t done in this book just because I haven’t had time and I didn’t want, it’s not comprehensive is you look at how these things fall apart potentially and how they keep themselves from falling apart. Because Burning Man had this, it was constantly battling, as far as I understand from the outside, you know, the kind of destructive success or something like that where it gets too big for it’s own good, or it’s, and city neighborhoods have that problem all the time, right. They self organize into something that’s really great and then no one can afford to live there anymore. They kind of implode for all these different reasons. So networks

that figure out a way without traditional leadership or without a real executive authority to nonetheless build up these interesting forms of exchange and then stay somehow balanced. How they do that is one of the things we’re going to have to study. I don’t know enough about it to have all of the answers but it’s a great example. Alright, I’ll add that to my repertoire, thank you for that, ha-ha. It is a whole –
Alright, anything else or should we go and sign books and – you can sign the books or I’ll sign them which ever you want.
[laughter]
Alright thanks guys for coming out I really appreciate it, always great to talk to you.
[applause]