Nasty, brutish, and wiki

What is life like when all effective law enforcement breaks down? Hobbes had an answer: life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. And all empirical evidence suggests he was right. When the police go on holiday, the nasties come out to play.

Hobbes then set himself the task of explaining why it is that life isn’t so nasty in the civilized state. He said it’s because there is One Big Bully to rule us all – the State – and calculated self interest tells us we’re better off obeying and cooperating than either battling the Bully or reverting back to the dog-eat-dog state of nature. Self interest is the key.

The Hobbesian view of human nature is pervasive. Political scientists employ it when trying to ground the obligations of political citizenship, and behavioral scientists use it to try to explain a wide range of human behavior. Asking “Why is it rational for humans to do that?” is automatically understood by everyone to mean “What’s in it for them?”

What are we then to say about the wiki phenomenon? On Wikipedia there are over a hundred thousand contributors, and over five thousand editors, who have all volunteered to create history’s largest encyclopedia, with ten million articles in over two hundred languages. It gets used at least twenty thousand times each second. And the users/editors are vigilant; an MIT study found that “an obscenity randomly inserted on Wikipedia is removed in an average of 1.7 minutes” (Tapscott & Williams, Wikinomics, p. 75).

What’s in it for these people? Tapscott and Williams suggest it is partly the geeky thrill of working on a task, and partly self-interest – since somebody might notice the fine work a wiki-person is doing and, I don’t know, throw them a party or something. The self-interest motivation sounds like a reach to me. I think it must be 99% geeky thrill. It’s fun to be part of an unimaginably massive epistemological project – Wikipedia is just Hegel’s Encyclopedia in the flesh, so to speak (topic for a future post) – and to see your work made available to millions. You could call this self-interest, but only in the sense that whatever we do on purpose is something we’d like to see done. More informatively, wiki work is motivated by a desire to see a project flourish. It’s done for the same reason kids work together on a really cool sand castle. It’s fun to build. Call this the wiki motivation.

To what extent is the wiki motivation a component of human nature? My bet is that it is as much a component as the self-interest motivation. Long, long before the computer, people were building, creating, and making just for the sake of doing it. People have always liked creating stuff – along with all the other well-known projects like eating and sex and getting power. And this is true even when the creating doesn’t do anything more for the creator than it does for the “free-riders” who get to make use of it.

The wiki and the self-interest motivations apply at different junctures, though: when survival is at stake, count on self-interest to call the loudest (but with interesting exceptions, note well). Once survival is secured, then the wiki motivation speaks up (though self-interest continues to growl). But if this is true, then that means political science and behavioral sciences need to start complicating their models of human nature. Economics, in particular, needs to start making models which incorporate the wiki motivation. (Tapscott & Williams stop just short of this; they try to sell “wikinomics” as a strategy any modern, self-interested person should take up.)

Indeed, the biggest innovations of the late 20th century – the internet, followed then by the web – are stellar examples of wiki motivation. Their inventors could have acted in a much more self-interested way, to put it mildly. And the creators of all the stuff web work requires (XML, SOAP, FTP, etc) mostly made what they did just for the sake of making a cool thing work. The whole thing makes no sense whatsoever, from a self-interested standpoint. Yet they did what they did, and here we are. The whole open source movement is what happens when you let the wiki motivation go unbridled, and it is without question the lynch-pin holding the entire IT world together.

So Hobbes didn’t have all the answers. He accurately described how nasty life can get when threatened, but couldn’t account for why life gets as civilized as it does when safety is secured. The nobility of human civilization consists in a transition from “what’s in it for me?” to “Whoa, isn’t that cool?”

The 1.0/2.0 distinction, redrawn

Thanks for all the comments in the “Philosophy 2.0” post — they are really helping to give form to the sludge in my mind!

I think the credibility problem (raised in the comments) has less to do with the label “philosophy” and more to do with “academic” or “professional.” Generally, when I tell folks I am a philosopher, they are excited and interested and want to talk. But the last thing they want to hear about is anything connected in any way with most of what goes on at professional philosophy conferences – it is too technical, too abstract, and (let’s be honest) the practical consequences are nil. They want to talk about knowledge, value, truth, religion, etc., in ways that connect with their own lives, or their views of the world. That seems like a reasonable expectation!

This is in fact what I was trying to get at with “Philosophy 2.0″ — philosophy that is more interactive with more people, and with the issues of general public interest. (I hope I needn’t add that I’m not talking about dumbed-down discussions, or discussions about silly pop culture crap; I’m talking about discussions that engage the philosophical interests of educated people who aren’t professional philosophers.) I have focused on the “local change” issues since, from what I see, it seems like that’s where the intellectual action is nowadays. The best and brightest are trying to wrap their minds around the consequences and possibilities of local change, and I think philosophers have something valuable to contribute. But I also think there should be more intelligent public discussion of more traditional philosophical issues as well.

My confusion was to think that the 1.0/2.0 distinction was content-based (traditional vs. new issues). It isn’t. It has to do with interactivity, stupid me!

So here’s how I should have made the 1.0/2.0 distinction. Philosophy 1.0 is professional, academic philosophy as it is currently being practiced (for the most part). It is largely unengaged with the concerns and interests of intelligent, reflective people who aren’t professional philosophers. Philosophy 2.0 is the attempt to join the public discussion of issues the concern intelligent, reflective people. It needs to be informed by new developments in economics, technology, science, etc., and respond with the questions, methods, and insights from its own disciplinary perspective.

Philosophy 2.0

You might sort out two different kinds of important change. The first kind is the sort of change that happens all the time – perennial change. You are born. You grow. You get sick. You get better. Empires rise. Empires fall. Friends come. Friends go. These are the sorts of changes, along with a few thousand others, that characterize human life. Philosophy, in its oldest sense, responds to and explores perennial change. Originally, in ancient times, it was meant as a kind of therapy for dealing with life’s perennial changes.

But then there are the changes that are more specific to our times – local change. Carbon emissions are changing the climate. Worldwide information transfer is immediate. New forms of life and artificial intelligence are being created. Economic and political events around the world are sensitively dependent on one another. Many different kinds of intellectuals are thinking about these local changes, but so far philosophy has largely ignored them and has stuck to the more perennial changes.

Perennial changes are important, of course; being able to navigate through them is what it is to be wise. But philosophy, I believe, also has to start responding to local change, since the local changes we are experiencing have deep and significant consequences. Indeed, our local changes might well change our perennial changes. We need to think about the future of “empires,” and whether nation states will have anything to do with that. We need to think about new life forms, and the ways biotechnology will challenge our understanding of “human being.” Same goes for artificial intelligence – we need to think about moral obligations we will have to the conscious beings we will manufacture. As world cultures meld together into politico-economic units, we need to think about the kinds of new obligations we will have to one another. And throughout all these local changes, new pressures will be brought to bear upon our perennial existential questions: Who am I? What is my life about? What is important?

I call these new challenges for philosophy “Philosophy 2.0.” Of course, the “2.0” bit is a reference to Web 2.0, which is what the web became when it started getting truly interactive. Web 1.0 was basically like television with a million channels: click, watch, click, watch, click, etc. But now, in Web 2.0, you can put your own stuff on the web, or take stuff off and mix it up in your own way and throw it back out there, or use applications and programs that are on the web instead of loaded onto your own computer. It is a profound change in the way we are entertaining ourselves; a transition from a “read only” culture to a “read/write culture.” That’s another local change that may have perennial consequences.

Philosophy 2.0 is about getting interactive with local change. Philosophy 1.0, as we might call it, is occupied with perennial change, and it needs to keep chugging along, for as long as human beings are around. But its “product” is about to get tweaked by Philosophy 2.0. Our philosophical thought about local change will impact our thought about perennial change. This is a genuinely new situation for philosophy, since we do not have a luxury we have had in the past: time. Normally, philosophers can wait until the dust has settled before looking back and making sense of where we have been. But we are going to have to get used to looking through the dust, and making the best guesses we can, since ain’t nothing gonna settle anytime soon. We need direction and big-picture planning like never before, and it is the obligation of philosophers to join into that debate. Besides, philosophers have unique knowledge and skills to contribute. They are most in touch with the big pictures of the past (from Plato to Heidegger), and so are in the best position to assess how the big picture is changing. They are used to thinking in terms of systems, and local change is all about systematic change (whether economic, environmental, or technological). And they are more sensitive than most to all the complexities of moral, epistemological, and social issues.

Part of philosophy’s romantic attraction to me has been its inherent Luddism. Philosophy professors don’t need overheads or PowerPoint or WebCT or any other gizmo; they only need a piece of chalk and an empty afternoon. But this image has to change. Philosophers need to be up on the details of local change, and need to start thinking through them and responding to them. That might not affect the pensive ambience of the philosophy classroom, but it will affect the lesson plans. Many people have been working hard to distill the results of local change to the generally educated public; philosophers need to make use of those efforts and get acquainted with the local world. Things need to get messy. We can not afford cleaving only to the relatively stable regions of perennial change.

What philosophers will bring to the table is a deep familiarity with perennial changes, and keen insight as to how local changes will change them and possibly be informed by them. This is a dimension that is now either being neglected, or carried out by those who don’t really know what they are saying. We need Philosophy 2.0 now more than ever.