Here Comes Everybody

Clay Shirky argues that social tools such as e-mail, mobile phones, weblogs, and wikis (collaboratively editable websites) have collapsed the barriers to group action, enabling people to share, cooperate, and organize collectively without relying on traditional institutions. Drawing on examples from lost phones to political revolutions, Shirky traces how this shift challenges businesses, governments, religions, and professions, while creating new social dilemmas that society has only begun to confront.

Shirky opens with the story of Ivanna, who lost her Sidekick phone in a New York City cab in May 2006. Her friend Evan Guttman, a programmer, discovered through transferred data that a teenager named Sasha in Queens was using the phone. When Sasha refused to return it, Evan created a webpage called StolenSidekick, posted Sasha's photos, and told friends. The page attracted massive attention after appearing on Digg, a collaborative news site. Evan's readership, eventually exceeding a million viewers, performed detective work and pressured the police, who had classified the phone as lost. After media coverage and public complaints, the police arrested Sasha and returned the phone. Shirky uses this episode to introduce core themes: the power of group action, the transfer of capabilities from professionals to ordinary people, and the moral ambiguity of these new powers, since Evan's leverage allowed a well-off adult to mobilize a massive online audience against a teenager.

From this case, Shirky builds his theoretical framework. He invokes the Birthday Paradox, a mathematical principle showing that the number of possible connections in a group rises far faster than the number of members, to illustrate why coordination grows exponentially harder as groups increase in size. Drawing on economist Ronald Coase's 1937 paper "The Nature of the Firm," Shirky explains that organizations exist because managing labor within a hierarchy is cheaper than negotiating every transaction in an open market. But management itself has costs, creating a "Coasean ceiling" on organizational size. Shirky also identifies a "Coasean floor": Activities that have value but not enough to justify institutional overhead simply do not happen under traditional structures. Social tools now fill this gap.

Shirky illustrates this with Flickr, a photo-sharing platform. During the 2005 Coney Island Mermaid Parade, over 100 photographers pooled thousands of photos using user-generated tags, without anyone at Flickr coordinating the effort. The same mechanism enabled early documentation of the 2005 London Transport bombings and citizen photography during the 2006 Thai military coup. Social tools reversed the old order from "gather, then share" to "share, then gather," allowing groups to form around shared content without prior coordination.

Shirky then addresses what he calls the "mass amateurization" of publishing. Professions like journalism exist because scarce resources require gatekeepers who both provide and control access. When the scarcity disappears, the profession's rationale erodes. He cites the case of Trent Lott, then the U.S. Senate majority leader, whose praise for Senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential campaign at Thurmond's hundredth birthday party in 2002 was largely ignored by the mainstream press but kept alive by bloggers until Lott announced he would not seek to remain majority leader. He draws a parallel to Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim, who in 1492 published a defense of scribal copying but had the book printed on a press. The collapse of the distinction between personal communication and public publishing creates what Shirky calls a "publish, then filter" world: Now that anyone can publish, filtering must happen afterward through social mechanisms rather than professional gatekeeping.

Shirky devotes substantial attention to Wikipedia as the paradigmatic example of collaborative production. Wikipedia emerged from the failure of Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2000, whose rigorous expert review process produced fewer than 20 finished articles in nine months. When Sanger suggested using a wiki as a drafting tool, the advisory board objected, and the wiki was moved to its own site, where it immediately surpassed its parent. Wikipedia's success relies on spontaneous, unmanaged division of labor with a power law distribution of effort: A small fraction of users creates value for millions. It survives vandalism because edits are provisional and committed community members defend articles they care about. Legal scholar Yochai Benkler calls this model of nonmarket group value creation "commons-based peer production."

Collective action, the hardest form of group effort, receives sustained attention through the Catholic Church abuse scandal. The Boston Globe's 2002 reporting on Father John Geoghan, who had abused over 100 boys while being repeatedly relocated by Cardinal Bernard Law, ignited public outrage. Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), a lay organization founded by physician James Muller, grew from 30 people in a church basement to 25,000 members in six months using websites and e-mail. Shirky asks why 2002 differed from 1992, when a nearly identical scandal produced extensive coverage but no lasting institutional challenge. By 2002, the Globe was online, readers had e-mail and weblogs, and the church's strategy of treating abuse as an internal affair could no longer contain information that spread globally in hours.

Speed matters as much as scale. The 1989 Leipzig protests in East Germany illustrate the concept of an information cascade: Small weekly marches grew as each unpunished demonstration signaled that protest was safe, eventually reaching 400,000 people and precipitating the government's collapse. In Belarus, youth organized flash mobs via the blogging platform LiveJournal to eat ice cream or read books in public squares. Police detained participants, but images spread globally via cameraphones and photo-sharing sites, making the state look absurd. Shirky also contrasts a 1999 Northwest Airlines ground delay in Detroit, where passengers' fury dissipated without effect, with a 2006 American Airlines delay in Austin, where passenger Kate Hanni founded the Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights within days, prompting congressional action.

Shirky acknowledges that falling transaction costs benefit all groups, not just those society approves of. The Pro-Ana (pro-anorexia) movement, in which teenage girls traded tips on maintaining extreme thinness, migrated from YM magazine's forums to blogs and social networking sites whenever shut down, operating beneath the Coasean floor where disapproval can no longer prevent group formation. Shirky examines how social tools generate social capital, drawing on political scientist Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and entrepreneur Scott Heiferman's founding of Meetup, a service helping people connect online and meet in person. He explores Small World networks, in which highly connected individuals link local clusters through long-range ties, and distinguishes bonding capital (ties within groups) from bridging capital (ties between groups), using Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign as a cautionary tale of a movement that built bonding capital among ardent supporters through Meetup and weblogs but failed to bridge outward to less engaged voters.

A key insight is that successful open systems tolerate enormous failure. Most open source software projects—in which source code is made freely available for anyone to use or modify—fail, yet the ecosystem challenges commercial software because it "outfails" commercial efforts: The cost of trying is so low that rare successes more than compensate. Linus Torvalds's Linux operating system, which began as a modest hobby project announced in 1991, grew into world-class infrastructure through global volunteer collaboration.

The book's arguments converge in Shirky's framework of "promise, tool, bargain," the three interdependent elements any successful use of social tools requires. The promise is the reason to participate. Tools must fit the task. The bargain sets expectations and must be part of the lived experience of interaction. Formal commitments can be essential: Torvalds adopted the GNU General Public License (GPL) to assure contributors their work could never be appropriated, and Wales moved Wikipedia to nonprofit status after Spanish-language contributors threatened to fork the project (that is, copy it and develop it independently) over commercialization concerns. Without governance, even well-intentioned projects fail, as shown by the Dutch anarchist group Provo's 1960s White Bicycle program in Amsterdam, which offered free communal bicycles that were all stolen or thrown into canals within a month.

In the epilogue, Shirky uses the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to show how social media carried news of the disaster globally before any news site reported it. When parents of children killed in collapsed schools protested corrupt construction practices, the Chinese government attempted censorship but could not fully suppress the protests, because every citizen with a camera-phone was a potential global media outlet. Shirky argues that society must shift from prevention to monitoring and reaction, because the ability to prevent group formation has been permanently diminished. He concludes with Aldus Manutius, a Venetian printer who in 1501 took the printing press for granted and improved upon it by creating portable, affordable books. The future, Shirky argues, belongs to those who take the present for granted.