Marina Gorbis. The Nature of the Future: Dispatches From the Socialstructured World (Free Press, 2013).
Gorbis’ book is about the transition from the old world of high-overhead, hierarchical institutions like governments and corporations, with most aspects of life monetized in the cash nexus, to a “socialstructured world” — that is, a world characterized by cheap, low-overhead production technologies, network communications technologies with little or no transaction costs for coordination, horizontal organization, and most aspects of life organized around commons-based peer production.
Gorbis begins by recounting the importance of the informal economy of social relationships during her childhood and youth in the USSR. It was these horizontal relationships that made the main difference between the bleakness of the official economy, with state storess whose shelves were either “empty or filled with things no one wanted,” and the comparatively rich lives families quietly enjoyed in their homes.
What filled the gap? A vast informal economy driven by human relationships, dense networks of social connections through which people traded resources and created value.
Her mother, a doctor, provided medical care on an informal basis out of their apartment for a constant stream of friends and friends of friends, free of charge. Return favors from these connections were “my mom’s substitute for money.” Generally speaking, in the Soviet economy it was personal connections of this sort that made food or clothing magically appear from nowhere when the shelves were empty. Most output of the official economy disappeared underground into a sharing and gift economy.
Although the Soviet informal economy was based largely on face-to-face connections rather than modern communications technology, it was in many ways a forerunner of today’s emerging network society.
Today, all around the world, we are seeing a new kind of network or relationship-driven economics emerging, with individuals joining forces sometimes to fill in the gaps left by existing institutions — and sometimes creating new products, services, and knowledge that no institution is able to provide. Empowered by computing and communication technologies that have been steadily building village-like networks on a global scale, we are infusing more and more of our economic transactions with social connectedness.
These new technologies also include reputational mechanisms that largely remove risk from the marketplace.
Gorbis coined the phrase “socialstructuring” to describe the replacement of the old economy of “institutional production” by “a new economy around social connections and social rewards.”
Gorbis’ analysis in many ways parallels that of other thinkers on the networked society. For example, this passage reminds me a great deal both of John Robb’s ideas on the “superempowered individual,” and Tom Coates’ observation on new desktop- and browser-based platforms erasing the quality difference between the work we do at home and in the office.
Socialstructuring is in fact enabling not only a new kind of global economy but a new kind of society, in which amplified individuals–individuals empowered with technologies and the collective intelligence of others in their social network–can take on many functions that previously only large organizations could perform, often more efficiently, at lower cost or no cost at all, and with much greater ease…. [A] world in which a large software firm can be displaced by weekend software hackers, and rapidly orchestrated social movements can bring down governments in a matter of weeks.
Most of the rest of the book consists of anecdotal illustrations of how this socialstructuring process is playing out in one area of life after another.
Network communications are ideal for various special interest communities to aggregate distributed knowledge into common databases, compare notes, and arrive at results that would have been virtually impossible before. For example, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) brings together journalists around the world who have local knowledge and local connections about organized crime, and coordinates the work of citizen journalist volunteers. All this “fine-grained hyperlocal knowledge,” coalesced into “a high-resolution view of global crime and corruption,” is able to track the activities of transnational organized crime networks previously beyond the resources of local jurisdictions.
Communities of people with rare diseases, or parents of children with such diseases, are able to aggregate knowledge from individual medical histories and painstaking searches through medical journals into global databases that tie previously isolated bits of information together, often leading to enormous leaps in progress in treating these conditions.
Open-source biology and genomics networks, equipped with radically cheapening scientific tools, are taking on vital research projects that corporate R&D departments won’t touch because they can’t be effectively enclosed as a source of profit.
Gorbis quotes from Meredith Patterson’s “Biopunk Manifesto“:
Scientific literacy is necessary for a functioning society in the modern age. Scientific literacy is not science education. A person educated in science can understand science; a scientifically literate person can do science. Scientific literacy empowers everyone who possesses it to be active contributors to their own health care, the quality of their food, water, and air, their very interactions with their own bodies and the complex world around them….
Research requires tools, and free inquiry requires that access to tools be unfettered. As engineers, we are developing low-cost laboratory equipment and off-the-shelf protocols that are accessible to the average citizen. As political actors, we support open journals, open collaboration, and free access to publicly-funded research, and we oppose laws that would criminalize the possession of research equipment or the private pursuit of inquiry.
Open knowledge platforms like Wikipedia and MIT’s OpenCourseWare are democratizing knowledge and making it available outside the classroom.
In education, the old institutional paradigm is being supplanted by one characterized by
easy, individualized, and highly contextual learning experiences; ubiquitous free content; community as a driver and enabler of learning; intrinsic rewards….
Microlending and crowdsourced funding are making startup projects less dependent on big institutional investors or rich venture capitalists.
Even government–perhaps the paradigmatic hierarchical institution–is being pressured (albeit with questionable effect) to become less governmentlike through open data and online citizen participation.
Socialstructuring is stigmergic, granular and scalable–that is, it is open to “microcontributions” of any size, contributed independently, and aggregated without any central coordinating authority. Since any scale of effort is welcome, and contributions are motivated entirely by intrinsic rewards, everything that’s done in the socialstructured realm is done by willing and interested participants–something that’s far from the case with most work done by functionaries on a corporate or government paycheck. In the socialstructured world, as opposed to the waged and salaried workplace–where employees are told to leave their values at the door–the essential selves of the participants are what it’s all about. The “economic” overlaps with social connections in ways reminiscent of precapitalist societies.
The shift from hierarchies to horizontal networks, as the dominant mode of organizing human activity, is frequently disruptive — even painful, for those whose livelihoods were tied up in the old paradigm. The music and newspaper industries, for example, are taking enormous revenue hits from file-sharing and Craigslist advertising. At the same time, the old functions themselves are being performed more cheaply and effectively than ever before.
Gorbis presents three speculative scenarios for the transition. The first, the most conservative, forsees an indefinite coexistence between the old, hierarchical and cash nexus society and the new horizontal one, with a simultaneous reduction in the part of the population participating in the old institutional framework and an increase in the part involved in the new network/sharing framework. The other two scenarios are a society organized around some sort of time or sharing currency, and a post-money society based entirely on gifting.
My own assessment is that Gorbis’s first scenario is too conservative insofar as it underestimates the degree to which state and corporate hierarchies will become hollowed out and retreat from society, although she’s correct that they won’t completely disappear for some time to come. On the other hand, the other two are two schematic and monolithic — too close to the classic utopian convention of a fictional society systematically remodelled according to some ideologically based value system — to be believable.
In any case, I recommend this book as a thoughtful, detailed and provocative look at a wide range of present trends that foreshadow the future society.