The Freedom to Connect conference concluded with a speech about the new freedoms of the internet and why those who hate the new freedoms will go after ISPs.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 2, 2008]

The concluding talk at the Freedom to Connect conference was by Clay Shirky, who is on a book tour promoting his latest, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

"It's about why the internet is so important to group coordination," he said.

He told a story about a French bus company called TSE that sued several French cleaning women for car pooling and even petitioned the French government to confiscate their cars.

"That's the business model of the musc industry," he said. Businesses could try to take advantages of new opportunities offered by new technology, but all too often, they try to force the new world to fit back into the model of the old world.

And the cleaners? They won the lawsuit but had to spend two years defending themselves.

Don't just blame it on France, either. Shirky said that a ride sharing company that was charging to arrange shared rides in Canada was shut down by a lawsuit from a bus company that said they were, in effect, an unregulated bus company. "Every inefficiency you can find," he said, "is someone else's top line profits. We run into business after business that finds that the inefficiency its business is based on is destroyed by the internet."

"Good line," noted Doc Searls in the back channel.

"We are living in the largest expansion of expressive capability in history," said Shirky. He traced the expansion of expression from the printing press and movable type, to the telephone and telegraph, to, in the 1800s, the beginning of recordable media (first sound, then moving images, then both together), culminating in broadcast media.

"The ones that created large groups did not create two way communications, and vice versa. This does both."

In the back channel, Searls added the open source corollary. "The largest expansion of practical intellectual non-property. There are now over half a million open source code bases. Nearly all are created for practical purposes by hackers who just need to get stuff done."

Three stories
"I want to tell three stories that demonstrate to me, and I think to you, that the tools don't set the conditions for use," Shirky said. "They can be used both for silly things and for useful things."

HSBC
He told the story of how the HSBC bank tried to rip off students in the UK. They offered students penalty free checking, signing them up on campus. Then, when the students were had graduated and were dispersed, they changed their mind and started charging fees. HSBC said that it gave students 30 days to change their accounts.

"HSBC had the advantage of coordination and information. It is hard to research banks, and it seemed there was no way that all the students they had signed up would do it. But they had not reckoned on Facebook."

Someone created a Stop the Great HSBC Rip Off! page and 5,000 students signed up fast.

"People posted really detailed explanations of how to change banks. When one person did the work, everyone could benefit. Then they started online protests. Then the media picked it up. The students were planning a real world protest, in front of HSBC offices, but it never happened because at that point HSBC totally caved. The PR person said they'd backed down because they didn't want to make the customer unhappy but that wasn't the reason. They didn't want to face customers who were both unhappy and organized."

In the back channel, Brad Templeton complained about those IVR systems that businesses still love and users have always hated, "your call is very important to us. Just not important enough to let you talk to a human being right now."

Shirky pointed out that Facebook is not a technological innovation. "The act of serving a web page dates back to 1994." (And the database technology and massively scalable servers, I'd argue, are newer.)

What's new is that more people have internet access. "It's a question of social density. If 10 percent of UK students were online, they'd have had less leverage than if close to 100 percent were online. It doesn't get socially interesting until it gets technologically boring."

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