Mele, Nicco. The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
Big Political Parties
Howard Dean’s presidential campaign provided a blueprint for how a candidate might use the Internet to challenge the establishment. Key elements include a compelling narrative, an appeal to people’s frustration with the growing insularity of the political establishment, a grassroots campaign ethos, and an embrace of the fundamental technologies and ideas that have fueled radical connectivity. …
To date, radical connectivity has opened up the political system to grassroots movements by offering new ways of organizing and shaking the money tree, yet the Internet has so far not managed to bring back what we lost with the opening of the two Big Parties during the 1960s: a system for producing crops of generally decent, competent, civic-minded political leaders. In fact, radical connectivity is proving quite dangerous by pushing our political system to unprecedented levels of polarization—a problem that is worsening by the day.
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Of course, politics is about more than money. A functioning democracy requires a certain level of civic engagement—a subject of some concern among political scientists. As the Harvard professor Robert Putnam has famously observed, Americans have seen a generational decline in civic engagement. …
Inspired by Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, two young Internet entrepreneurs in the wake of 9/11 designed a Web service that let people find affinity groups in their neighborhood. People would be able to go to Meetup.com, type in their zip code and an interest, and find out if a nearby group existed dedicated to that interest. …
Meetup quickly took off, and it continues to grow at an impressive clip. Somewhere along the line, it became a crucial vehicle for American politics, validating Putnam’s theory that social engagement corresponds linearly to political engagement. The first major political meetups occurred around Howard Dean’s candidacy for president. In many ways, the Dean meetups formed the backbone of the campaign, a grassroots infrastructure that fueled much of our fund-raising success. People who thought they lived in conservative Republican neighborhoods would go on Meetup.com and discover a group of Deaniacs meeting right near their house. By the campaign’s conclusion, more than 140,000 people were attending more than 600 Dean meetups in every part of the country. Meetup attendees turned out to be incredible online contributors, since the face-to-face interaction created an intense bond with the campaign.
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Big Opportunities
We’re at the beginning of a similar epochal change in human history. Scan the headlines every morning—through your Facebook and Twitter feeds—and you can feel history shifting under your feet. Every day I find more and more evidence that we are in the twilight of our own age, and that we can’t quite grasp it, even if we can sense something is terribly amiss. This transformation transcends any one realm of life—it’s all-encompassing, even if, as we’ve seen, it proceeds unevenly and paradoxically. Our twentieth-century institutions, which seem as foundational or ahistorical as hereditary monarchy, are on the cusp of collapse—or, if not outright collapse, of irrelevancy and anachronism.
Frequently these institutions have had a hand in their own demise. Then along came radical connectivity to hasten it by shifting immense amounts of power and influence toward everyday individuals—and to a few huge, Even Bigger platforms that dominate our digital world. What might have been a fifty-to one-hundred-year process has been compressed into a decade or even less. The End of Big replaces the elite, formal, highly capitalized, institutionally backed provider of goods or services with your neighbor the poet/journalist/lawyer/soldier/ designer/(insert craft here). Soon, with 3-D printing, it won’t just be media or intellectual property that anyone can create and disseminate; it will be anything—shoes, mobile phones, vehicles. And once anyone can create anything, brands and elite notions of excellence in any field really will be obsolete. It will all come down to relationships, to my neighbor (physical or digital) and my neighbor’s work. If any of our institutions persist, it will be by virtue of sheer financial heft (although that didn’t help monarchy), violence (also didn’t work so well for the monarchy), or ingenuity. Let’s hope for the last of these.
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We face a monumental task helping our institutions recover from their failings so that they can serve their core purposes once again. Giving in to the anxiety and depression that accompany the decline of everything that makes our lives stable and safe seems a perfectly understandable response. But it’s not the only response. In closing this book, I’d like to suggest that we can just as easily—and as realistically—think of the End of Big as an opportunity. No, the technology itself is not a miracle cure to everything that ails us, as some overly euphoric technologists think. But neither is it the insidious enemy enshrined in novels like Frankenstein and movies like Terminator. There is a middle ground. We, not the technology, can bring about the cure by assuming control of the technology, embracing where it is taking us while also having the collective determination and strength of mind to steer it where we want. Instead of lamenting the death of something (“The loss would be incalculable!”), we can learn to celebrate the creation of a radical new way of organizing the world, taking steps to align it with democratic values and with our need for social order.
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As individuals and as a society, we need to acknowledge small as our future but simultaneously rediscover and embrace values such as limited government, the rule of law, due process, and individual freedoms of religion, speech, press, and assembly. While it may seem like a giant task, the first step is simple: start talking. A good way to staunch the decline of our existing institutional culture is by having a series of conversations with civic, political, and intellectual thought leaders who would in turn discuss the End of Big in their own ways with their audiences. Countless democratic efforts across the country would be emboldened if voices in the national media and Washington confirmed the discomfort most Americans feel with the state of our politics, our government, our commerce, our systems. Such confirmation would encourage Americans to become engaged in new and creative ways, on a grassroots level, feeding into a nationwide process of institutional renewal and reinvention. Talking would bleed quite naturally into doing.
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In case calling for a new discourse about our institutions seems too vague, I’d like to help structure the conversation and subsequent efforts at reform by suggesting some ways of engaging that will help you and our country better inhabit the End of Big. First, in revising institutions, focus on making them more amenable and responsive to individuals. Every single citizen, customer, client, employee, listener, reader, student, patient— every person your organization touches—is powerful, almost beyond measure. Treat them that way. Our institutions are necessarily designed to subvert individuals, to bring order1 through hierarchy, but it is not at all clear that this approach makes sense anymore. We might as well embrace individuals and make the most of what a more diffuse, nonhierarchical decentralized orientation has to offer. As Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom wrote in their book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, “Decentralization has been lying dormant for thousands of years. But the advent of the Internet has unleashed this force, knocking down traditional businesses, altering entire industries, affecting how we related to each other, and influencing world politics. The absences of structure, leadership, and formal organization, once considered a weakness, has become a major asset.
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As leaders become more sophisticated in their understanding of radical connectivity, our society can proceed to a fourth area of focus: imagine in ever-finer detail what future institutions will look like. Some existing institutions will simply go away: others might well be preserved in some form. As I outlined in chapter 2, the future of newspapers, our primary generators of accountability journalism, is bleak. They are going away, and we need to think about and imagine where accountability journalism will come from in the absence of journalism. Big Government, on the other hand, might be saved if we reorganize government and reimagine its process in the age of radical connectivity. The key to making our institutions relevant again is to look at them with new eyes, recognizing again that every person they touch—the people they serve, and the people who work within them—carries enormous personal power thanks to their digital life. How do we reimagine representative government with this insight in mind? How about big companies or big media? We must move institutions from the hub-and-spoke model—the “big will do this for you,” the small, powerless individual—to new models that acknowledge and harness the individual’s intense power and connectivity.
At the same time, we need to retain and reconstitute elements of the big institutions that we’re losing: accountability journalism, national security, courts and justice, fiscal policy, safety regulations and quality control, to name a few. Resisting a radical, insular individualism, we must build institutions that encourage collaboration and accountability, locating such accountability in vast networks of small groups that share common culture and motives. Wikipedia is one model for this kind of distributed network with a shared common purpose and culture; open-source technical projects provide another model. Even the distributed chaos of the hacker collective Anonymous may provide a template for creating and shaping a new institutional force in the End of Big.
Beyond updating and salvaging our larger institutions, we must strengthen and reimagine local community—the fifth item on my suggested agenda. With the End of Big, our communities remain the fundamental building blocks of society. In fact, they have always reigned supreme; we’ve been misled these past few centuries by the delusions of the nation-state and global geopolitics. Clay Shirky has written a book about “cognitive surplus,” the idea that people are using digital technology for creative acts rather than consumptive ones like watching television. The average American spends twenty-two to twenty-four hours a week watching television; you only need to devote a few of those hours to cultivating local community online or off-line to have an enormous impact. The notion of cognitive surplus underlies Wikipedia, the greatest collection of human knowledge ever assembled (even if it is incomplete!)—and it was also to some extent behind the 2008 Obama campaign’s strategy. Take three or four hours a week and use the inherent power of your smartphone or laptop to contribute to a small-scale civic enterprise. The digital technology we carry around with us can be harnessed toward building new institutions (and reforming old ones) with surprising ease; we just have to watch a little less television.
Ultimately, small will save us—that is, if we commit ourselves to it. We can only hope to transform our current fossil fuel-based economy into a more sustainable system if we move collectively to small, sustainable, local energy sources. Food distribution today depends substantially on oil—flying in grapes from Chile, trucking oranges from Florida. We need to build more sustainable, local food production and distribution—a change that is already happening with the significant increase in farmers’ markets and the rise of the local food movement. Our national economy will not resume its former glory if we; aim policy making at Big Industry; large-scale manufacturing in the United States is to all intents and purposes dead and not returning. But the End of Big and the return to craft offers a potential pathway to sustainable economic growth. Moving to more local ways of approaching industry, commerce, agriculture, and government offers a future full of possibility—a, bright future, one fully within our grasp.
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At first glance, the End of Big does seem dark, maybe even apocalyptic. Yet for a wide range of issues, from climate change to fighting corruption, the here and now of our local communities point to solutions to these challenges. We need the End of Big to bring us back to our communities, to our neighbors—that’s how we’ll remake the world and build a better future. Together, let’s engineer structures that bring the hard-won values of the twentieth century together with the brilliant, game-changing technology of the twenty-first. It can be difficult to see the opportunity amid the chaos and fear that abounds, but make no mistake: The next decade will belong to those who can take the ground-up, grassroots energy unleashed by radical connectivity, marry it with effective, engaged leadership, and craft stable and responsive institutions. In other words, it will belong to those who gaze beyond the chaos of the End of Big, glimpsing one last big that stands unscathed: Big Opportunities.