In an interview on The World Wide Web

This brings us to Here Comes Everybody: The Power Of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky. A book which appears to be about decentralisation and the empowering of hitherto marginal groups – which seems to be quite positive about the Net’s ability to afford a kind of benign anarchy perhaps?

Yes, a benign anarchy. But a benign anarchy which oddly also resolves itself on other levels as very orderly and purposeful. A lot of ink has been spilled, much of it by me, about the Web 2.0 revolution, and how it changes the way business and art and socialising and political organisation get done. Shirky is simply the best person at articulating what’s very weird and new about what’s going on.

Shirky talks about revolutionaries in Belarus, blogging their way to mass public demonstrations. Is that something you could talk about?

The Net’s power to facilitate popular political organisation?

Because everybody has access to an equally powerful means of communication.

Well, I think that’s very real. Certainly there are authoritarian governments working very hard to restrict that aspect of the Internet, with limited success. We haven’t seen an authentic Internet revolution. The effect, I think, isn’t that dramatic. But, even in this country, the way Obama used the Internet to raise funds was quite extraordinary. There’s a level on which the Internet is also a mass tool for pacification. I think it allows people to play out their lives in a fantasy context, which is very politically unthreatening. So the effect goes both ways, certainly.

In an interview 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.