Another Army of Davids Installment

Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids pp. 121-25.

People used to be ignorant. It was hard to learn things. You had to go to libraries, look things up, perhaps sit and wait while a book was fetched from storage, or recalled from another user, or borrowed from a different library. What knowledge there was spent most of its time on a shelf. And if knowledge was going to be organized and dispersed, it took a big organization to do it....

Things are different today. I’m writing this in a bar right now, and I have most of human knowledge at my fingertips.... If I’m curious about the Hephthalite Huns or the rocket equation or how much money Joe Biden has gotten from the entertainment industry, I can have it in less time than it takes the barmaid to draw me a beer.

What’s more, I can coordinate that sort of information (well, it might be kind of hard to tie those particular three facts together, but you take my meaning) with other people with enormous speed. With email, blogs and bulletin boards, I could, if the topic interested enough people, put together an overnight coalition – a flash constituency – without leaving the restaurant. (And in fact, some folks did pretty much just that recently, and succeeded in killing the “super-DCMA” bill before the Tennessee legislature. Alarmed at a proposed law that would have made it a felony to connect a TIVO without permission from a cable company, they organized, set up a website, and shot down a bill that the cable companies had put a lot of time and money into.)

So what? Everybody knows this stuff, right? It has been the subject of countless hand-waving speeches about the revolutionary potential of the Internet, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. Well, sort of. Everybody knows it. But they don’t know it, yet, down deep where it counts. And even those who kind of get it at that level tend to forget – even as I sometimes do – just how revolutionary it is. And yes, it really is revolutionary, in ways that would have defied prediction not long ago.

Just try this thought experiment: Imagine that it’s 1993. The Web is just appearing. And imagine that you – an unusually prescient type – were to explain to people what they could expect by, say the summer of 2003. Universal access to practically all information. From all over the place – even in bars. And all for free!

I can imagine the question the skeptics would have asked: How will this be implemented? How will all of this information be digitized and made available? (Lots of examples along the line of “a thousand librarians with scanners would take fifty years to put up even a part of the Library of Congress online, and who would pay for that?”) Lots of questions about how people would agree on standards for wireless data transmission – “It usually takes ten years just to develop a standard, much less put it into the marketplace!” – and so on, and so on. “Who will make this stuff available for free? People want to be paid to do things!” “Why, even if we start planning now, there’s no way we’ll have this in ten years!”

Actually, that final statement is true. If we had started planning in 1993, we probably wouldn’t have gotten there by 2033, much less before 2003. The Web, Wi-Fi, and Google didn’t develop and spread because somebody at the Bureau of Central Knowledge Planning planned them. They developed, in large part, from the uncoordinated activities of individuals….

There are two lessons here. One is that skeptics, despite all their reasonable-sounding objections, would have been utterly wrong about the future of the Web, a mere ten years after it first appeared. And the second is why they would have been wrong: because they didn’t appreciate what lots of smart people, loosely coordinating their actions with each other, are capable of accomplishing….

As the world grows more interconnected, more and more people have access to knowledge and coordination. Yet we continue to underestimate the revolutionary potential of this simple fact. Heck, forget potential – we regularly underestimate the revolutionary reality of it, in the form of things we already take for granted, like Wi-Fi and Google....

But I'm not a wild-eyed visionary. As a result, I'm going to make a very conservative prediction: that the next ten years will see revolutions that make Wi-Fi and Google look tame, and that in short order we'll take those for granted too. It's a safe bet.

An Army of Davids pp. 121-25.