Smart Mobs

by Howard Rheingold

  “Do new modes of communication change the way we see ourselves and how others see us? If you follow the strands of cooperation, public goods, presentation of self, and reputation, you might find that they all tie together.” He placed his Tall ™ half-caf, hi-fat mocha on the table. “The same conundrum—cooperation exists, but it seems like it shouldn’t—has infected discipline after discipline. Biologists, economists, even nuclear warfare strategists became interested in social games.”

  I asked him why he thought of cooperation when I described mobile and pervasive technologies.

  “Whenever a communication medium lowers the costs of solving collective action dilemmas, it becomes possible for more people to pool resources. And ‘more people pooling resources in new ways’ is the history of civilization in . . . ” Pause. “. . . seven words.”

  We ambled over to the company store, where we found Microsoft employees queued up. Marc queried one of the queued, a guy whose baggy jeans reminded me of Shibuya. “Waiting for new X-Box games,” he answered with the happy fervor of a gamer. We skipped the company store and continued our conversation in the Microsoft museum, where we looked at antiques like the fabled Altair, the first personal computer kit. The most amusing exhibit was a photograph of the Microsoft staff in 1978, history’s most motley group of billionaire nerds.

  I interrupted: “What’s a “collective action dilemma?”

  “Collective action dilemmas are the perpetual balancing of self-interest and public goods.” He held out his hands and made the universal gesture for “balancing.”

  “And public goods are . . . ?”

  “A public good is a resource from which all may benefit, regardless of whether they help create it.”

  “For example . . . ?”

  “For example, public television,” Smith answered. “You know those pledge drives?” He dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Not everybody who watches public television sends a check.” He returned to a normal speaking voice. “A lighthouse that a few build but all use for navigation is a classic example of a public good. So is a park. Breathable air. Sanitation systems.”

  Smith, at thirty-six, looks a bit like the actor Jeff Goldblum. He’s lanky, brilliant, and passionate, and he can’t refrain from doing stand-up comedy when he talks. He changes voices to create his own cast of characters. He’ll present a case like a lawyer and then switch the imagined courtroom setting to an imagined vaudeville stage. Sometimes he appears to be asserting a hypothesis to his thesis committee. Occasionally, he sounds like he is defending his budget to Microsoft brass. No wonder he was drawn to the ideas of Erving Goffman—presentation of self, Goffman’s material, is Smith’s natural métier.3

  I learned from ten minutes of shtick-laced pedagogy that the people who succumb to the temptation to enjoy a public good without contributing to its provision (or overconsume at the peril of depletion) are called, appropriately, “free riders.” I recalled the people in Stockholm who cheat on subway fares by exchanging SMS messages about the location of fare police. Some smart mobs can be organized bands of free riders.

  “Does it bother you when someone cuts in front of you at the grocery checkout?” Yes, of course it does. Smith explained that social disapproval of free riders changes the balance of cooperation dilemmas. The notion of reputation, the subject of Chapter 5, “The Evolution of Reputation,” derives from the utility of knowing whom to trust in a cooperative enterprise and how to warn others about cheaters.

  “If everyone, acting in their own interest, free rides, then the public good is never created, or it is overconsumed and goes away. Everyone suffers. There’s your dilemma. What’s good for you can be bad for us.” Smith made the balancing gesture again and then adjusted his gesture to signify “out of balance.”

  We left the museum and cut across a lawn on our way to his office. “Many public goods, like public health, increase in value the more people share them. But managing collective action is always a struggle. Even where common resources occur naturally, like fishing grounds or pasturelands, free riding seriously threatens their continued sustainability. Most collective goods have a carrying capacity, a rate of consumption beyond which the resource cannot replenish itself. Collectively, groups of people have frequently rushed past this point to total ruin, often aware of exactly what they were doing when they did it. Fishing grounds were overfished, water tables dried up, pasturelands became desert because people faced complex multiplayer games that led each to act rationally for their own gain to the detriment of all.”

  “This field we’re walking on might be a remnant of the first public good that humans found important,” Smith declared enigmatically as we walked across a manicured lawn. I could see he was winding up for a story.

  “When our ancestors descended from trees, they found themselves on an African grassland called a savanna. One of the things grasslands made possible were big game animals. Hunger drove our forebears to coordinate their actions to bring down animals so large that all the meat couldn’t be consumed before it spoiled. In those circumstances, everyone in the group was free to eat—even those who didn’t take the risk of hunting. The meat wouldn’t be available in the first place unless a few people mustered the gumption to tackle large creatures, but the benefit of the cooperative activity of a few extended to all, even to those who had not participated in the hunt. I think Matt Ridley nailed it when he wrote, ‘Big game hunting became the first public good.’”4

  We entered Smith’s office building. “Ridley pointed out in The Origins of Virtue that grasslands have been an ongoing theme in human history,” Smith remarked in his “you have to read this” voice.5 Talking with Smith always comes with a price—it can take weeks to finish his reading assignments. After I read the book Smith referred to, I began to see connections between our savanna origins and the desire to own a small lawn, the sport of golf, and the parks we create in the middle of cities. According to Ridley, it’s not far-fetched to say that humans are still working out problems our ancestors first encountered on the African grasslands.

  Smith held his wallet up to a pad next to the door to unlock the door to his part of the building. “The word commons originally denoted pastureland treated as a common resource, where individual herders were free to graze their sheep or cattle. The land can support a limited number of grazing animals. The temptation to graze more than one’s share is a rational strategy for an individual herder. But if everyone succumbs to the same temptation, the grass ceases to grow, and the value of the pasture disappears.”

  I recognized this as the situation Garrett Hardin named in a much-debated article titled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in which Hardin concluded: “Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”6 Hardin’s article provoked a debate that continues to this day: In the face of temptation to behave selfishly, how do people manage to cooperate? Is it necessary to curtail their freedom through some kind of regulatory authority?

  The debate surrounding Hardin’s tragedy of the commons is a contemporary reprise of an older philosophical conflict. In 1660, Thomas Hobbes argued that humans are so competitive that the only way we can cooperate is for a more powerful competitor to impose a truce. Hobbes called this coercive authority Leviathan; subsequently, this logic supported arguments for a strong sovereign.7 In conflicts over the provision or consumption of common resources, arguments continue to focus on the polarized viewpoints of centralized governmental regulation and decentralized, market-based self-regulation. However, the most salient counterargument to Hobbes is that humans obviously do agree to work together. Decades after Hobbes, John Locke, philosophical mentor to Thomas Jefferson, asserted that humans could govern through social contracts rather than coercive authority.8

  Sinc
e the time of Hobbes and Locke, political philosophers, sociologists, economists, and candidates for public office have argued over the role of central authority in governance, markets, and human affairs. The argument became scientific as well as philosophical when researchers began to systematically observe the way people really do work together. Laboratory investigators began to formulate experiments to probe cooperative behavior. The experiments were based on simple games in which experimental subjects can win or lose money (more about game theory shortly). In the 1950s, economist Mancur L. Olson found that small groups are more likely to exhibit voluntary cooperation in these experimental games than larger groups and that cooperative behaviors increase when the games are repeated over and over with the same groups and when communication is permitted among the participants.9

  In 1982, Olson wrote, “Unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests.”10 One unavoidable question remained. Clearly, some groups learn to solve collective action dilemmas to produce public goods or prevent overconsumption. How is this accomplished? Olson provided some hints when he noted that a prominent businessman might finance a lighthouse for the prestige and recognition such an act might win in the eyes of others. Reputation is a recurring leitmotiv in the discourse of cooperation.

  In 1990, sociologist Elinor Ostrom argued that external authorities might not be necessary in governing what she called common pool resources (CPRs).11 Ostrom studied the ways that people shared forestry resources in Japan, pasturelands in Switzerland, and irrigation arrangements in Spain and the Philippines. Ostrom provided examples of communities that have shared public goods for centuries and succeeded in not depleting them. She discovered that in Spanish irrigation-sharing huertas, “a portion of the fines is kept by the guards; the Japanese detectives also keep the sake they collect from infractors.”12 To facilitate cooperation, the Spanish synchronize schedules of adjacent water users so they can monitor each other, the Japanese reward those who report infractions, and most successful CPR groups impose social sanctions on cheaters.

  In comparing the communities, Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles:

  Group boundaries are clearly defined.

  Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.

  Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.

  The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.

  A system for monitoring members’ behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.

  A graduated system of sanctions is used.

  Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.

  For CPRs that are parts of larger systems, appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.13

  In the weeks of reading that followed my visit to Redmond, I learned that Hardin has since stated that he should have called it “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.”14 I also discovered that research continues into the secrets of how successful commons are managed. Ostrom provided an ample and specific agenda for future research: “All efforts to organize collective action, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principals who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems. These have to do with coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules.”15

  An interdisciplinary community of CPR researchers grew out of Ostrom’s work, which built on the findings of Anthony Scott and H. Scott Gordon, who wrote about fisheries in 1954 and 1955.16 In a paper about the application of CPRs to technology-based, human-created CPRs, such as the Internet, Charlotte Hess pointed out the significance of the emergence of a cross-disciplinary convergence:

  There are centuries of intellectual investigations into the nature of property rights, free riding, overpopulation, efficiency, participation, volunteerism, resource management, organizational behavior, environmental sustainability, social equity, self-governance, transboundary disputes, common fields, enclosure, communal societies, and the common good. What has remarkably changed is the merging of disciplines, the methodologies, the international cooperative approach, and the intentionality of the CPR literature.17

  CPR research, still in early stages, might be a step toward the “empirically supported theory of self-organizing and self-governing forms of collective action” Ostrom called for in 1990.18 If people start organizing new forms of collective action through the use of wireless devices, such theories as Ostrom’s might help make sense of what we’ll see around us.

  When I had completed the reading assignments Smith had given me, I called him. The best way to reach Smith is through his mobile telephone. He was waiting to pick up his son from school, trying to log on to an open wireless node from the school parking lot. In addition to being a sociologist, Smith is a hardware and software geek. He pointed out, while walking back and forth in a Redmond parking lot with a handheld computer, that “Ostrom found that some system to monitor and sanction members’ actions was a common feature of every successful community. Monitoring and sanctioning is important not simply as a way of punishing rule-breakers but also as a way of assuring people that others are doing their part. Many people are contingent cooperators, willing to cooperate as long as most others do.”

  Smith reminded me that commitment to cooperate is as important as temptation to free ride; threat of punishment can constrain, but it can’t inspire. Something must motivate people to contribute to a public good. While we were talking on the phone, Smith sent me a paragraph from his Ph.D. thesis. He likes to do things like that from his palmtop in parking lots: “A commons can be more than physical resources like fish or pastureland,” said his email. I read it while talking to him. Perhaps because I didn’t grow up with it, such multitasking tends to require concentration: “A commons,” continued Smith’s message, “can also be social organizations themselves. Some goods are tangible, like common pastures or irrigation systems; others are intangible goods like goodwill, trust, and identity. Markets, judicial systems, and social capital in communities are all common resources. These resources must be actively reconstructed; where fish will remain in the sea whether they are fished or not, a judicial system or other social contract will not persist without the continued contribution of its participants.”19

  Smith added on the voice track that reputation and peer-to-peer social pressure pay a key role in maintaining CPRs: “Social pressure, from insult to incarceration, to make good on debts or obligations helps communities maintain the essential collective good of trust.” Reputation, whether maintained by gossip, ritual behavioral displays, credit bureaus, or online reputation servers, appears to be one of the means by which people negotiate the day-to-day dance of self-interest and public goods.

  Identity, reputations, boundaries, inducements for commitment, and punishment for free riders seem to be common critical resources all groups need in order to keep their members cooperatively engaged. These are the social processes most likely to be affected by technology that enables people to monitor reputations, reward cooperation, and punish defection.

  The interdisciplinary study of CPRs and the continuing sociological debate about collective action turned out to be only one category of cooperation theory. Parallel inquiry came from different parts of the disciplinary spectrum. A mathematical approach took root in the 1950s and began to bear fruit decades later, when more powerful computers became available. Yet another discourse, which converged with computer modeling, grew up around issues in biologica
l evolution. The surprising results might have remained hidden in think tanks and scientific journals if they had not generated such important implications for human group behavior.

  It seemed as if the thread I had started following in Tokyo had turned into a whole ball of yarn by the time I returned from Redmond. My simple inquiry into existing knowledge that might make sense of smart mobs led me to a richer treasury of thinking tools than I had imagined that afternoon Mizuko Ito and I conversed about the thumb tribes of Tokyo.

  Mutual Aid, Prisoner’s Dilemma, and Other Games People Play

  Does cooperation occur exclusively among people, making it the domain of psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists? Is it an emergent property of any population of interacting individuals, landing it in the domain of economists? Or could cooperation be a strategy that genes use to ensure their reproduction, which would make it the domain of biology? The answer to each of these questions appears to be “yes, in part.” I caution against concluding that any theory or model will ever predict human social behavior; I recommend these inquiries from different disciplines as a means of understanding aspects of human social processes, not as oracles. Although the genetic influences on social dilemmas might seem distant from the impacts of smart mob technologies, certain motifs crop up at multiple levels when it comes to the tension between self-interest and collective action.

  Biological arguments about the role of altruism and the origins of cooperation are rooted in Darwin’s discovery of the mechanisms of evolution. If natural selection, a Hobbesian competition to transmit genes to future generations, is the force that sculpts species over millions of years, then genetic disposition toward cooperation should have been bred out of all species long ago. The philosopher who argued for the place of cooperation when evolutionary theory was first debated was a swashbuckling geographer and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin, a Russian prince, was selected by the czar for elite training at an early age and later led a secret life writing pseudonymous anarchist pamphlets until he was arrested. After escaping czarist prison, Kropotkin ended up in London, where he contested the idea that competition was the sole driving force of evolution.