Tyler Cowen on Information

Tell me about the Clay Shirky book.

First of all, I’m choosing Shirky as a writer and thinker, rather than choosing that particular book. If you had to pick one individual who was the sharpest and most prescient commentator on the web and the internet it would be Clay. I like most of all his notion that the old mode was something like ‘filter then publish’, and the new mode of organising the production of ideas is ‘publish then filter’. Here Comes Everybody is Clay’s very successful attempt to write a popular book for people who weren’t just tech geeks or web nerds, and it’s very clear and very to the point. It’s about spontaneous order and decentralisation, and just how powerful the web can be. I’d say first and foremost that the prize goes to the individual rather than to that book, and Clay’s new book, Cognitive Surplus, is also likely to go down as a classic.

Decentralisation. What do you mean by that? Or, rather, what does he mean by that?

Well, if you think of web production and the producers of ideas, everyone is at a separate node and there’s no central planner. A lot of ideas are put forward and most of them, almost all of them, aren’t very good, or they’re trivial or pointless or they’re terrible or they’re even destructive. But something about the web and its mechanisms of linking and commenting and information being passed along, and use of Twitter and what gets blogged, where in essence there is a process of spontaneous order that selects some of those ideas and that decentralised mechanism is extremely powerful – I think that is the key to understanding ideas on the internet.

So it’s a kind of Platonic democracy?

Well, that’s right, but unlike Plato’s Platonic democracy you don’t need philosopher kings to decide what’s best, so it’s much more competitive.

But wasn’t it all completely chaotic until Google started to give it structure and order and to be a philosopher king?

Search engines have helped a lot, but even before search engines there was an order where some things would get e-mailed around to other user groups and forums and that led more interesting items to get more play. Google, of course, was just the beginning. There’s Facebook, there’s Twitter, there are a lot of other ways to find that which is powerful and ignoring that which is trivial.

Isn’t most content on the internet pornographic?

It depends what you mean by most content. If you count the number of sites, and I don’t know what the numbers are, perhaps. But I would say the ideas on the internet that have impact are mostly not pornographic. If you just count up domain names you might get some other result. Personal journals are the most singular common item but they are not necessarily influential, just more expressive.

Let’s move on to the Hayek book, Individualism and Economic Order.

This is the most abstruse and obscure pick on the list. It has nothing to do with the internet per se, it’s really about decentralisation. The key essays in the book were written in the 1930s and Hayek puts forward a general theory of how decentralised processes work, why they are so powerful and can use and mobilise and distribute information so well. He focused on the price system and the market economy. A lot of these ideas are in Shirky, but if you want to go back and read the ideas in their most powerful original form there’s Hayek and there’s Adam Smith, and that’s a lot of what the web is built upon.

Nobody knows what the price for something is going to be. There will be a price in the store for bananas, for steel, for stocks and those prices reflect information, sometimes accurately, sometimes not, but they are the result of many people bidding and communicating the personal information they have and aggregating it into one tiny small number which everyone watches.

Is he a libertarian? This is basically a conservative thing, isn’t it?

He’s broadly a libertarian, but I don’t think you’d have to read the book in a political way. Most Democrats in America believe in the price system and using markets for a lot of things, and you need a way of explaining how that works and there you look to Hayek.

So you see the internet as working on an economic model?

Economic model is a loaded phrase. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. If the economic man is motivated by the desire to express himself or herself and the desire for recognition, then I would say yes.

And is it a readable book?

In many ways not, which is why I picked it. I think there is a lot to be said in any area for having at least one book which isn’t very readable. And there Hayek is my pick. But it’s brilliant, it won a Nobel Prize, and it’s one of the most important books of the century. Is it clear and fun? No.

David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous.

David’s book is brilliant, but I think it raises an important question. We’re doing five books and not five blog posts or five user threads or whatever, so why is a book the most important organising medium for talking about or reading about the internet? Weinberger is a guy who gets this – that the internet is a way of ordering or not ordering reality, that you stack things in a pile, that it appears to be very chaotic, that this is a fundamental change in information processing and it’s not in every way book-like or driven by narrative.