Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age | Steven Johnson | Talks at Google

Thank you. This is day three of the book tour for Future Perfect so I'm at that lovely stage where I'm still excited to listen to myself talk about this book. In a couple weeks, I'll be very tired of my own voice on this topic. This is a very optimistic book, and already just in this first week I'm realizing how odd that seems to people now. I did an interview on NPR last week where they started the interview saying, 'Our next guest is an actual optimist.' Like I was a Giant Panda they had found somewhere. And I think inside a company like Google we're more likely to find people who feel there is progress going on, but outside we see a lot of people who are not so optimistic. This is a book making a case for reasons to be encouraged. But it's specifically a political book, my first real foray into the political conversation. It's not about one side bashing the other, but an attempt to map out a new emerging worldview I call the Peer Network. The first rung of the argument is that we have institutions: the corporation, the marketplace, the government. I argue there is a third social architecture: the Peer Network. The easiest way to think about its power is the Internet itself. In the 'You didn't build that' speech, President Obama talked about government providing infrastructure, and The Wall Street Journal argued that the government's role was overstated. But the most important organizational structure was the loose, decentralized affiliation of computer scientists collaborating in an open way, sharing ideas without private ownership. This peer-produced code is now essential: if it all shut off, the Internet, markets, energy, aviation would go dark. That shows how much that open structure has shaped our world. The second stage is using peer networks to solve other problems. The best examples are Wikipedia and Kickstarter. Wikipedia used peer networks to create a global encyclopedia that rivals Britannica. Kickstarter solved the problem of funding creative work. It's a for-profit company that creates a peer network gift economy. It is on track to give more money to artists this year than the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. The key is decentralizing and diversifying the decision makers. The third stage is that this works in low-tech environments too. In Vietnam, the Sternins used 'positive deviance' to find families whose children were better fed and then had those families share their practices through peer network potlucks. Childhood malnutrition decreased and stayed lower a generation later. Another example is participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where neighborhoods decide how to spend a slice of taxpayer dollars. It reduced corruption and created a positive feedback loop of engagement. Now it's spreading worldwide. The final rung is the political implications. People who believe in these systems take seriously Hayek's argument that decentralized systems outperform centralized ones, but they aren't libertarian because they recognize non-market forces are also needed. I call these people peer progressives. Let me tell you one more story, my favorite, about 311 in New York. 311 is an information concierge service that handles non-emergency calls. It geotags and maps every complaint. The city used this to solve the mystery of a maple syrup smell that plagued Manhattan for years. By aggregating call data and factoring in wind patterns, they traced it to a flavor plant in New Jersey processing fenugreek. This shows the power of a decentralized peer network: it noticed and solved a problem the designers never anticipated. That's where extraordinary innovation comes from. So my hope for this book is that it triggers things I never imagined. If Google can be one of those organizations, I'd be incredibly happy. So, if there are any questions, I think people will want to go to the microphone because this is being recorded. And I'm happy to hear other stories. Yes?

Yeah. It's a great question and I do try and talk about this a little bit in the book, although I'm also trying to be provocatively utopian because I feel like we need a bit of that. It's not as though you set up a decentralized network and you're golden. What happens when you create more diverse unplanned networks is it introduces more noise and chaos. The beautiful thing about perfectly planned environments is they're controlled, but when you open up a platform to anybody, it's filled with cranks, scam artists, and people who are just wrong. You have to design the architecture to subdue that as much as possible. Kickstarter is constantly tweaking things, just as Google has been tweaking PageRank. The objections people make are similar to objections about democracies. Democracies work in the long run because they involve a more diverse set of decision makers. Wikipedia is another example: the media focuses on failures, but the system trends toward accuracy despite lacking top-down experts. Each network is unique, but there are common best practices. It does involve a loss of control and more unpredictability, but we've gotten smart enough to find ways around some of those problems.

Yeah, that's a really good important observation. The common theme is that people are motivated by a much wider range of rewards than traditional economics believes. Dan Pink writes about this in Drive. Sometimes offering money reduces motivation. Esteem and peer recognition can be big drivers. These systems have shown that we have a much wider range of incentives, from money to the silent satisfaction of fixing a Wikipedia entry. The amazing thing about Wikipedia is that it works as well as it does with so little recognition. Kickstarter, maybe because it started post-Facebook and Twitter, assumed activities would be amplified and shared. It would be interesting to think what Wikipedia would have looked like had it been created in that era.

Yeah. I think there is a role for experts. Look, I didn't crowd source the book, I wrote it as an individual author. Books generally work better with one author. So it's not that the crowd can solve everything. In terms of experts, one of the enduring successes of the blogosphere is that it extended the realm of expertise. During the 2008 financial crisis, academics and economists who were not pundits were able to weigh in via blogs. It created a much wider pool of informed experts to draw upon. That's an incredible resource we didn't have ten years ago. It amplifies the voices of experts but creates a much bigger pool. All right. Thank you so much for visiting. I'm happy to sign books and I really appreciate you guys coming out.