Steven Johnson's Blog

It’s pub day for my new book.

In normal times I would be sitting in an airport somewhere, posting a list of upcoming bookstore events here. But these are obviously not normal times.

And yet in many ways, I feel genuinely fortunate, because book publishing (and book reading) has continued through the COVID-19 crisis even if traditional book tours have not. And so I’m very happy to announce that my twelfth book is officially on sale today: Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt.

Enemy tells the story of the 17th-century pirate Henry Every, for a time the most notorious criminal on the planet, who ends up triggering a global crisis involving the East India Company, the Mughal Empire in India, the British government, and the nascent media ecosystem in London. For me, it’s a return to the style of my book The Ghost Map — a page-turner that also tries to convey a broader understanding about how the systems of the modern world came into being. (Only this one has pirates instead of intestinal disease at the center of its story!)

We’re off to an encouraging start in terms of praise for the book. USA Today called it “the perfect book to cozy up with during the pandemic.” And today’s New York Times features a lovely review of the book:

“A kaleidoscopic rumination on the ways in which a single event, and the actions of a handful of men with no obvious access to the levers of state power, can change the course of history. . . . Steven Johnson treats us to fascinating digressions on the origins of terrorism, celebrity and the tabloid media; the tricky physics of cannon manufacture; and the miserable living conditions of the average 17th-century seaman… A remarkable story… populated with concepts and consequences that resonate across the centuries.”

I should have news about some virtual events that we are working on soon, but in the meantime, I hope you'll give Enemy a read...

Steven

I’m very excited to announce my next book — Wonderland: How Play Made The Modern World, to be published in November by my long-time publisher Riverhead Books. The book is in many ways a sequel to How We Got To Now, though it also has some thematic links that connect it back to Everything Bad Is Good For You. Wonderland deploys the same overarching structure as How We Got To Now: six chapters, each focusing on one facet of the modern world, tracing the history of brilliant ideas and forgotten innovators and unintended consequences that led to our present reality. Wonderland explores the history of fashion and shopping, the spice trade, musical instruments, illusion, games, and physical spaces like taverns or parks designed for the pursuit of pleasure. But unlike How We Got To Now, Wonderland also makes a larger argument about the disproportionate impact that delight and wonder have had on our history. There’s a longer post introducing the book at Medium if you’re interested. Pre-ordering the book is a great way to support authors you like, so if you’re planning on buy it when it comes out, a pre-order now would be greatly appreciated. This page has links to all the major booksellers.

In the months leading up to the publication date, we’re going to be releasing episodes of a new podcast, also called Wonderland. The podcast will feature a few stories from the book, but also many special guests discussing the connection betwen play and innovation. Episode one, “Babbage and the Dancer,” is live now, featuring guests Ken Goldberg and Kate Darling. Thanks to Microsoft and Riverhead Books for their support in making the podcast a reality.

Last Tuesday was the publication date for How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made The Modern World. It’s my ninth book, but the first to be accompanied by a TV series, airing on PBS beginning on October 15. It’s also by a wide margin the most appealing physical book I’ve ever published: Geoff Kloske and the team at Riverhead did an amazing job with it--great design, full-color images throughout, nice paper stock. (It will make an excellent Christmas present, if you’re into that kind of thing.)  I wrote up a few thoughts about the relationship between the book and show at our new site, How We Get To Next. 

It has been a busy week! I thought I would try to round up all the initial reactions and appearances before the rollout of the TV series begins in earnest. But to start, I should mention two appearances coming up this week: on Wednesday, Oct. 8, I will be giving a talk and signing at the legendary Powell’s in Portland at 7:30 PM. (CSPAN BookTV will  apparently be filming if you’d like to ask a question in front of a national TV audience.) The next night, Oct. 9, KQED is sponsoring a special screening and conversation with my friend Biz Stone (of Twitter fame) at the Castro Theater in SF. (It’s free but you need to get tickets in advance here.) 

So far the reception to the book has been very enthusiastic. I did the Daily Show with Jon Stewart last Thursday, which is always a blast. We talked time zones, random pigs, and why New Jersey residents are pioneers in drinking poisoned water. The Guardian’s review said that the book was “readable, entertaining, and a challenge to any jaded sensibility that has become inured to the everyday miracles all around us.” In the Wall Street Journal, Philip Delves Broughout put together a great overview of some of the journeys the chapters take the reader on:

In "Cold," we move from air conditioning, to the flocking of American retirees to the now habitable Sunbelt, to the shift of political power from north to south. Freezing leads him to the creation of sperm banks, which have given many more women the opportunity to conceive and changed our notions of marriage and parenthood. "Sound" begins in the reverberating cave dwellings of Paleolithic man in Burgundy and ends up with the ultrasound technology being used to determine the sexof unborn children. "Clean" takes us from Chicago's sewer system, the first urban system in America, to the growth of household cleaning products like Clorox and the hypersanitized plants where microchips are made. 

The Daily Beast called it a “mind-expanding read.” In the Washington Post, Fred Vogelstein wrote, “Johnson is an engaging writer, and he takes very complicated and disparate subjects and makes their evolution understandable,” while noting -- accurately, I think -- that some sections could have been treated in more depth. Back in the UK, in the Sunday Times, the wonderful science writer Matt Ridley began his review with this:

The meteorologist Edward Lorenz famously asked, in the title of a lecture in 1972: “does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”, and the phrase “the butterfly effect” entered the language. If Steven Johnson’s book How We Got to Now catches on — and it deserves to — then the “hummingbird effect” will also become common parlance.

Speaking of the “hummingbird effect” -- my term for the unlikely consequences of new innovations -- I am running a collection of short essays on this topic at Medium over the next few weeks. 

There’s more, but I think those are the headlines. It’s off to a great start, which is nice to see, given that I have been working on this project for almost four years now. I hope you get a chance to pick up the book over the next few weeks.

A few months ago, I found this strange white mold growing in my garden in California. I’m a novice gardener, and to make matters worse, a novice Californian, so I had no idea what these small white cells might portend for my flowers. 

This is one of those odd blank spots -- I used the call them Googleholes in the early days of the service -- where the usual Delphic source of all knowledge comes up relatively useless. The Google algorithm doesn’t know what those white spots are, the way it knows more computational questions, like “what is the top-ranked page for “white mold?” or “what is the capital of Illinois?” What I want, in this situation, is the distinction we usually draw between information and wisdom. I don’t just want to know what the white spots are; I want to know if I should be worried about them, or if they’re just a normal thing during late summer in Northern California gardens. 

Now, I’m sure I know a dozen people who would be able to answer this question, but the problem is I don’t really know which people they are. But someone in my extended social network has likely experienced these white spots on their plants, or better yet, gotten rid of them.  (Or, for all I know, ate them -- I’m trying not to be judgmental.) There are tools out there that would help me run the social search required to find that person. I can just bulk email my entire address book with images of the mold and ask for help. I could go on Quora, or a gardening site. 

But the thing is, it’s a type of question that I find myself wanting to ask a lot, and there’s something inefficient about trying to figure the exact right tool to use to ask it each time, particularly when we have seen the value of consolidating so many of our queries into a single, predictable search field at Google. 

This is why I am so excited about the new app, Jelly, which launched today. I’ve been beta-testing for the past few months, and I love it because it becomes a reflex response for those fuzzier questions, the ones that don’t fit well with Google. You can ask questions with pictures, and the whole service is designed to seek out the people in your extended network who might have the answer.  “How much is the new Battlefield 4 game?” is a great question for Google. “Is the Battlefield 4 game appropriate for a ten-year-old?” is a great question for Jelly. Not because it’s going to link you to some review page on Commonsense Media, but because it’s going to connect you to another parent with a ten-year-old who has played Battlefield 4 -- someone you know, directly or indirectly.  

Jelly, if you haven’t heard, is the brainchild of Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders.  The service launches today with apps on iOS and Android. (Biz himself has a blog post and video, which you should check out.) I’ve known Biz since the early days of Twitter, and I’m excited to be an adviser and small investor in a company that shares so many of the values around networks and collective intelligence that I’ve been writing about since Emergence.

The thing that’s most surprising about Jelly is how fun it is to answer questions. There’s something strangely satisfying in flipping through the cards, reading questions, scanning the pictures, and looking for a place to be helpful. It’s the same broad gesture of reading, say, a Twitter feed, and pleasantly addictive in the same way, but the intent is so different. Scanning a twitter feed while waiting for the train has the feel of “Here we are now, entertain us.” Scanning Jelly is more like: “I’m here. How can I help?”

 

Every now and then in life you find yourself in a situation where you have to pause for a second and ask yourself: what unlikely sequence of events has led me to this point? I had one of those moments a few weeks ago, when I found myself standing in front of a television film crew, 300 feet above the city of Dubai, harnessed to the sloping roof of a giant indoor ski slope, wearing a parka in 110 degree heat. 

I was there for the very first shot of a television series I’ve been working on, quietly, behind the scenes, for two years now. It’s been killing me not being able to post anything about it here or on Twitter, but as of this morning, the cat is finally out of the bag. Just a few minutes ago at the Television Critics Association Press Tour, PBS announced a new six-part series that will air in the fall of 2014: How We Got To Now with Steven Johnson. 

The show builds on many of themes in the innovation history trilogy of The Ghost Map, The Invention Of Air, and Where Good Ideas Come From, but is based on new material with a completely different structure. Each hour-long episode takes one facet of modern life that we mostly take for granted -- artificial cold, clean drinking water, the lenses in your spectacles -- and tells the 500-year story of how that innovation came into being: the hobbyists and amateurs and entrepreneurs and collaborative networks that collectively made the modern world possible. It’s also the story of the unintended consequences of these inventions: air conditioning and refrigeration didn’t just make it possible to build ski slopes in the desert; they also triggered arguably the largest migration of human beings in the history of the species -- to cities like Dubai or Phoenix that would otherwise be virtually uninhabitable. 

We’re trying to weave together many historical strands in the series, but at the same time make it more dynamic and visually arresting (and funny.) There will be no historical re-enactments, no solemn voiceovers with archival photographs, no talking head interviews with historians. We’ve got some amazing visual FX (somewhat inspired by the animated video we did for Good Ideas), and we’ll have sequences all around the world in visually stunning locations. I’m the host and storyteller and tour guide; I’ll be the one descending into the sewers or staring through the telescope at the top of Mauna Kea. Or looking totally ridiculous dressed up as a 19th-century gentleman in a carriage in Savannah.

We have put together an amazing team for the series. The UK studio Nutopia (responsible for hit shows like America: The Story Of Us) is producing, led by the brilliant Jane Root, former controller of BBC2 and president of Discovery Networks. Jane’s brought in a team of other award-winning producers and directors to create the episodes. The series itself is being funded by both PBS/CPB, and the BBC, and will be distributed worldwide by BBC International. I’m co-authoring the episodes, and I’ll be writing a book to accompany the series for my longtime publisher Riverhead.

I’ll have much more information about airtimes around the world next year as we get closer to the finish line. In the meantime, I’ll be tweeting updates from the shoots at @stevenbjohnson and @howwegottonow. Stay tuned -- I think this is going to be a lot of fun...   

Several years ago, my friend and now collaborator Beth Noveck began developing a program that she called Peer-to-Patent, a software platform that allowed outside experts and informed amateurs to contribute to the prior art discovery phase of patent review, both through tracking down earlier inventions that might be relevant, and through explaining those inventions to the overwhelmed examiner in the patent office. (As late as 2009, the blacklog of unreviewed applications in the US Patent Office had reached 1.2 million.) Based on its success in reducing the backlog (now down to 600,000 applications) and expanding the range of discovery, the U.S. patent office last year launched a full-scale version, "Patent Exchange," that allows citizens to participate in every patent under review. Pilots of Peer-to-Patent have also been launched in the U.K., Japan and Australia. Noveck herself went on to oversee the Open Government Initiative in the first years of the Obama Administration.

Peer-to-Patent stands as one of my favorite examples of peer progressive thinking at work. It brings in outside minds not directly affiliated with the government to help the government solve the problems it faces, effectively making a more porous boundary between citizen and state. Just as Kickstarter widens the network of potential funders for creative work, Peer-to-Patent widens the network of discovery and interpretation, bringing in people who do not necessarily have the time or the talent to become full-time examiners, but who have a specific form of expertise that makes them helpful to some patent cases. Yet it is clearly not some kind of stealth libertarianism: the state function of reviewing and approving patents remains vital; Peer-to-Patent simply creates a channel through which outside experts can help the state do its job better. And its implementation was not just a case of social media me-tooism -- “let’s put the patent office on Facebook!” -- but a carefully crafted program focused on genuine results.

I say all this to explain why I’m excited to be flying to NY tonight to help Noveck with her latest project, the Governance Lab at NYU, an extended, multidisciplinary investigation in new forms of participatory governance, backed by the Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. (They’re holding a two-day conference Thursday and Friday that should be fascinating.) I wrote Future Perfect in large part to capture all the thrilling new experiments and research into peer collaboration that I saw flourishing all around me, and to give those diverse projects the umbrella name of peer progressivism so that they could be more easily conceived as a unified movement. But I also wrote the book with the explicit assumption that we had a lot to learn about these systems. For starters, peer networks take a number of different forms: crowdfunding projects like Kickstarter are quite different from crowd-authored projects like open source software or Wikipedia; prize-backed challenges are a completely different beast altogether. For movement-building, it’s important to stress the commonalities between these different networks, but for practical application, we need to study the distinctions. And we need to avoid the easy assumption that decentralized, peer-based approaches will always outperform centralized ones.

One of the key values of peer progressivism is intellectual and professional diversity; groups that draw on different conceptual frameworks consistently outperform more single-minded groups. I’ve tried to live by those values in my own work -- diving into long-form historical studies, covering contemporary science or popular culture, building web platforms -- and the GovLab has been conceived in very much the same spirit. We need academic research from political science and other disciplines to make sense of these new opportunities, but we also need the invaluable experience of tech-sector innovators who have built these kinds of platforms. And we need a close engagement with political leaders and activists who understand the problems -- and opportunities -- of today’s governance more clearly than anyone. GovLab is going to be the point of intersection between those three essential fields. Beth talks about GovLab triggering a shift from “faith-based” explorations of participatory governance to an “evidence-based” model. That’s a transformation that I think we’re all ready to make. Part of my involvement will be trying to synthesize and share what the group ends up discovering -- and what we end up trying to build. So stay tuned. We may need your help!

If you have patience for this kind of online debate, The New Republic is now running my extended response to Evgeny Morozov's review (along with a new response from him). It cites a number of the misleading or innacurate quotes that I reviewed yesterday, but the key passages come at the end. I'm quoting them here on their own because, irrespective of Morozov's essay, I think they capture what brought me to write Future Perfect in the first place, and where I see peer progressivism in the spectrum of political thought today:

I can understand why Morozov wants to see Internet-centrism in my work: he’s built his career around debunking that belief system, after all. And yes, I’m glad the Internet and the Web were invented; I think that the world is, on the whole, better off for their existence. I would be surprised if Morozov doesn’t feel that way himself. But Future Perfect goes to great lengths to separate the promise of peer networks from some naive faith in Internet liberation. The main lines of its argument arose in part out of two book-length studies of peer collaboration in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries: The Ghost Map and The Invention Of Air. My last book, Where Good Ideas Come From, ended with a survey of hundreds of peer-produced innovations from the Renaissance to today. The deep roots of the idea date back to reading Jane Jacobs on the “organized complexity” of the city in my twenties, which ultimately led to my arguments for decentralization in my 2001 book Emergence. I’m giving Morozov the benefit of the doubt that he just hasn’t bothered to read any of those books, since he doesn’t mention them anywhere in the review. But if you added up all the words I’ve published on peer network architecture, I wager somewhere around ninety percent of them are devoted to pre-digital forms of collaboration: in the commonplace book or the 18th-century coffeehouse, or urban neighborhood formation, or the traditions of academic peer review, or in the guild systems of Renaissance Florence. If Morozov were only a little less obsessed with the Internet himself, he might have some very interesting things to say about that history. Instead, he has decided to reduce that diverse web of influences into a story of single-minded zealotry. He’s like a vampire slayer that has to keep planting capes and plastic fangs on his victims to stay in business. 

The point I tried to make explicit in Future Perfect is one that I’ve been implicitly making for more than a decade now: that peer collaboration is an ancient tradition, with a history as rich and illustrious as the more commonly celebrated histories of states or markets. The Internet happens to be the most visible recent achievement in that tradition, but it is hardly the basis of my worldview. And there is nothing in Future Perfect (or any of these other works) that claims that decentralized, peer-network approaches will always outperform top-down approaches. It’s simply a question of emphasis. Liberals can still believe in the power and utility of markets, even if they tend to emphasize big government solutions; all but the most radical libertarians think that there are some important roles for government in our lives. Peer progressives are no different. We don’t think that everything in modern life should be re-engineered to follow the “logic of the Internet.” We just think that society has long benefited from non-market forms of open collaboration, and that there aren’t enough voices in the current political conversation reminding us of those benefits. For peer progressives, the Internet is a case-study and a role model, yes, but hardly a deity. We would be making the same argument had the Internet never been invented. 

 

Evgeny Morozov has written a long and entertaining critique of my book Future Perfect in last week’s issue of The New Republic. It’s mostly an attack on the “quasi-religion” of “internet-centrism” that he sees in my work. I’ve written a longer response that TNR is apparently going to publish momentarily, but I thought it would be illuminating to do a purely cut-and-paste response here: quoting Morozov’s cartoon version of my argument, and then actual passages from Future Perfect. I think that gives the best sense of how much Morozov has to ignore or distort in the book to make his argument stick. Everything attributed to me below is a direct quote from the book that Morozov was allegedly reviewing:

Morozov paraphrasing me: Projects such as Wikipedia are just another reminder that Internet logic is the correct way to run the world

Me in Future Perfect: This is one crucial way in which peer-progressive values are distinct from the stereotype of cyber-utopianism. There is nothing intrinsic to the peer-progressive worldview that says social problems can be wished away with some kind of magical Internet spell.

Morozov paraphrasing me: Now that the costs have fallen, there are no good reasons for hierarchies to exist.

Me: No doubt there will be places where the [non-hierarchical] approach turns out to be less effective. It may well be turn out that certain pressing problems—climate change, or military defense—require older approaches or institutions. The peer-progressive framework is in its infancy, after all. We don’t yet know its limits. 

Morozov: For all his talk about political philosophy, Johnson makes no effort to ask even basic philosophical questions. What if some limits to democratic participation in the pre-Wikipedia era were not just a consequence of high communication costs but stemmed from a deliberate effort to root out populism, prevent cooptation, or protect expert decision making?

Me: The American Founders had endless debates about the right balance between federal and state authority, but they were united in the belief that direct democracy would be a mistake. For the most part, that assumption has remained in place for more than two centuries. The few instances in which direct democracy has erupted—most notoriously in California’s proposition system—are generally considered to be disasters. [Then after a long quote from the Federalist papers]: The Founders took the threat of tyrannical majorities very seriously. In the system proposed in the U.S. Constitution, the people are sovereign, but the sovereign has to be protected from its own excesses: the herd mentalities and the subtle (or not so subtle) repressions of minority opinions that inevitably arise when the intermediaries are taken out of the mix. So voters don’t propose or vote on legislation directly—unless you count the ballot initiatives that have drawn so much criticism over the past decade or two. The voters choose the lawmakers, but the lawmakers make the laws. [The discussion goes on for about 5-6 pages.]

Morozov: But Johnson is completely blind to the virtues of centralization. In discussing 311, he lauds the fact that tipsters calling the hotline help to create a better macro-level view of city problems. But this is a trivial insight compared with the main reason why 311 works: Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to centralize—not decentralize—previous models of reporting tips... Johnson’s internet-centric worldview is so biased toward all things decentralized, horizontal, and emancipatory that he completely misses the highly centralized nature of 311.

Me: It should be said that 311 is not a purely decentralized system. There are both literal and figurative headquarters, where the call center is located. In this sense, it is a hybrid form, somewhere between the pure peer network and the older state model. The 311 service vastly increases the number of participants in the system, and gives them the opportunity to set priorities for the city’s interventions. But those interventions are still triggered via a top-down mechanism. To a certain extent, that top-down element may be inevitable.

Morozov: The same criticism applies to his treatment of the Internet. Had Johnson chosen to look closer at any of the projects he is celebrating, he would find plenty of centralization efforts at work.

Me: Facebook is a private corporation; the social graph that Zuckerberg celebrates is a proprietary technology, an asset owned by the shareholders of Facebook itself. And as far as corporations go, Facebook is astonishingly top-heavy: the S-1 revealed that Zuckerberg personally controls 57 percent of Facebook’s voting stock, giving him control over the company’s destiny that far exceeds anything Bill Gates or Steve Jobs ever had. The cognitive dissonance could drown out a Sonic Youth concert: Facebook believes in peer-to-peer networks for the world, but within its own walls, the company prefers top-down control centralized in a charismatic leader.

Morozov: But even assuming that Johnson is right and the idea of the Internet does indeed inform how social movements form and operate these days, it is not immediately obvious why this is a model worth pursuing. Not everyone believes that Occupy Wall Street was a runaway success.

Me: But [Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring] have all proved to be somewhat disappointing at actually proposing new solutions and making those solutions reality. They are brilliant at swarming, building feedback loops of energy and attention. They are less adept at steering. The grand spectacles of Occupy or Arab Spring have turned out to be something of a distraction, averting our eyes from the more concrete and practical successes of peer networks.

Morozov: The totalizers would happily follow Johnson in seeking answers to questions such as “So what does the Internet want?”—as if the Internet were a living thing with its own agenda and its own rights

Me actually quoting Morozov of all people: “Perhaps it was a mistake to treat the Internet as a deterministic one-directional force for either global liberation or oppression, for cosmopolitanism or xenophobia. The reality is that the Internet will enable all of these forces—as well as many others—simultaneously. But as far as laws of the Internet go, this is all we know. Which of the numerous forces unleashed by the Web will prevail in a particular social and political context is impossible to tell without first getting a thorough theoretical understanding of that context.”

Morozov: This anti-institutional bias is most visible in Johnson’s discussion of American politics. He sincerely believes that one way to improve it is to get rid of the hassle that comes with political parties, leaders, and other mediating institutions... Johnson believes that the old party system is bad simply because it is Internet-incompatible. 

I don’t actually have a quote for this one, because nowhere in the book do I propose eliminating political parties. Morozov seems to have just conjured this one out of thin air. I think the current parties do not share enough values with the peer progressive worldview, but if someone wanted to start a peer progressive party -- or reform an existing party to make it more compatible with the peer network approach -- I would be delighted. 

Yesterday marked the opening day of the Clinton Foundation’s “Health Matters” conference in Palm Springs. I had heard a bit of advance word about the conference from a friend who was headed down there, and I had armed him with a copy of Future Perfect to give to Clinton if the opportunity arose. But the gift turned out to be unnecessary. Apparently, Clinton had just finished reading Future Perfect on his own, and spontaneously brought up a number of its arguments in an opening conversation with NBC’s Nancy Snyderman. Along the way, he managed to say kind words about three other books of mine. 

This is not the first time that Clinton has spoken about my work; he did a series of speeches that discussed The Invention Of Air in 2009, and to this day lists Invention as one of his all-time favorite books his Facebook page. Needless to say, it’s always thrilling to hear a person of Clinton’s stature and intellect riffing on your work. We’ve never actually met, and other than one or two short snail mail letters, we’ve never had a conversation. But somehow this strange, wonderful dialogue has emerged between us, entirely through the mechanisms of my books and his speeches. 

This morning I transcribed the relevant passages from his talk yesterday, and I thought it would be good annotate them with a few comments and related reading suggestions, since in several places he is talking about other people’s research that I cited in Future Perfect:

The great thing about the modern world -- and the Internet is both an instrument and a metaphor for it -- is that everybody’s connected and everything is connected. It’s like I said if you look at this precipitous drop in life expectancy among white high-school dropouts, there are clear medical reasons for it but there are also psychological and social reasons that have reinforced it. And if you look at what’s working where the places that are growing economically in America, places that are doing best around the world, you have these creative networks of cooperation. There are some things that governments are really good at, and they have to do that; there are some things that the private sector and NGOs are better at, and they have to do that. And then they have to figure out how to keep changing. We are moving into an era, for example, where the only way you can create enough jobs for people, and to generate enough wealth to have decently rising wages is to have creative networks of cooperation. And I think that’s true of this health challenge. It’s the only thing that works. It works everywhere in the world. 

That’s the argument of Future Perfect in a nutshell, the driving principle behind what I call peer progressivism in the book: the power of “creative networks of cooperation.” 

And by the way, there’s a lot of research on groupthink which proves that. For example, just last week I saw another study, the third I’ve read about in the last decade, that said if you put a group of people with average IQs together and asked them to work on a problem for a year, and you give the same problem to a genius, the group of average intelligence with great numbers working together will work better than one genius acting alone. 

I’m not sure if Clinton is referring to another study that he found, but in Future Perfect, the work I cite is the incredibly important research by Scott E. Page. The key to Page’s various experiments is that the “lower IQ” group is diverse in its perspectives and intellectual background. There’s great material on this in Page’s book The Difference, but here’s the summary from Future Perfect:

Diversity does not just expand the common ground of consensus. It also increases the larger group’s ability to solve problems. The pioneer in this line of research is the University of Michigan professor Scott E. Page. Page has spent the past twenty years building a convincing case for what he calls the “diversity trumps ability” theory, demonstrating the phenomenon in sociological studies and mathematical models. Take two groups of individuals and assign to each one some kind of problem to solve. One group has a higher average IQ than the other, and is more homogeneous in its composition. One group, say, is all doctors with IQs above 130; the second group doesn’t perform as well on the IQ tests, but includes a wide range of professions. What Page found, paradoxically, was that the diverse group was ultimately smarter than the smart group. The individuals in the high-IQ group might have been smarter, but when it came to measuring collective intelligence, diversity matters more than individual brainpower.

A few minutes later in the Clinton interview, the conversation turned to the role of corporations in global change:

I think first of all more of our companies are involved globally, and more of our citizens are involved through non-governmental organizations, even if it’s just through Internet giving, modest amounts of money. But I think that a lot of these companies will continue to lead the way. There’s an interesting book -- if you want to be optimistic about the future -- by Steven Johnson, who’s a great science writer. It’s called Future Perfect. His first two books, one of them is called The Ghost Map, which is about how the cholera epidemic was solved in London; and one’s called The Invention Of Air, which is about the discovery of oxygen. But he’s turned his attention to the modern world. The book points out that companies that branded themselves as being good for their employees and their health and wellness, and their children’s aspirations, good for their customers and communities -- over the last up and down craziness of the last twelve years, [those companies] had a rate of return to their shareholders that was almost ten times as much as companies that had only a quarterly focus on quarterly returns and cared about their shareholders here [raising hand high] and their employees, and customers, and communities here. [lowering hand.] So I think more and more companies are going to adopt this model within the United States and beyond our borders. 

This argument draws on the research of Rajendra Sisodia, David Wolfe and Jagdish N. Sheth, original published in their excellent book, Firms of Endearment. The chapter in Future Perfect that deals with it takes its name from a phrase coined by Whole Foods founder, John Mackey: “conscious capitalism.” As it happens, an entire book called Conscious Capitalism--on the movement to make corporations answerable to more diverse networks of stakeholders--was just published this week. I’ve just started reading it myself, and I suspect it will be a great conversation starter this year. 

As if those three book mentions weren’t enough, he even squeezed in a nod to Where Good Ideas Come From, when Snyderman asked what he was reading lately:

Well, I just finished -- I’m reading a new book by this guy Steven Johnson, on the history of innovation, and what really makes it work. And I’m looking forward to getting through that...

He’s also reading Nate Silver’s book, like everybody else I know. (Including me.) 

The whole session is of course worth watching: some very interesting remarks about progress in the obesity epidemic, along with some revealing (and quite moving) discussion of Hillary’s current health (it’s fine, apparently) and her political future. And now that you’ve read this post, you can fast-forward through all the bits about me...

 

 

 

 

I've been so crazed with the book tour for Future Perfect that I haven't had a chance to put together some account of the response the book is receiving. I've tried to capture at least some of this on Twitter, but I finally got some time this morning to put it all in one place. There's more to come in the next few weeks, but this is a snapshot of how the conversation has developed thus far.

Two weeks ago, a handful of adaptations of the argument ran in a few different venues. In The Wall Street Journal, I laid out the basic argument for "peer progressive" politics, and in the NY Times Magazine, I discussed the question of who invented the Internet, and why we should care. Interestingly, Deepak Chopra asked me to write a post for his site on the "power of peers."

Reviewing the book for The Wall Street Journal, John Horgan wrote, "If you're a pessimist—and chances are you are—you should read 'Future Perfect' by the technophilic science writer Steven Johnson. In fact, read it even if you're an optimist, because Mr. Johnson's book will give you lots of material to brighten the outlook of your gloomy friends." Horgan then wrote a follow-up post for Scientific American, called, "Comrades, Join the “Peer Progressive” Movement!" It included this criticism from his colleague, Andy Russell, a historian of technology at Stevens Institute of Technology: "Andy objects to Johnson’s claim that the Internet is itself the product of a peer network. Johnson calls Arpanet, the Pentagon-funded network that gave rise to the Internet, a 'radically decentralized system' and a 'network of peers, not a hierarchy.' Wrong, says Andy, who has done lots of research on the development of standards for the Internet. 'The evidence is pretty clear that the Arpanet and Internet were designed and built through a hierarchical process,' Andy writes. 'In fact its hierarchy (and well-heeled sponsor, the Department of Defense) was the single factor most responsible for the Internet’s success: it kept at bay the factions unleashed by democracy in international standards committees.'" (I will try to dive into this more deeply when I have a bit more time, as it's a very important point.)

Writing for the SF Chronicle, Glenn C. Altschuler ends his review with these lines: "Johnson knows that direct democracies sometimes elect corrupt or incompetent leaders and spend money on trivial, dangerous or damaging policies. He recognizes that market-based economies sometimes produce grotesque income inequalities and catastrophic bubbles. And yet, despite an analysis that can be rather facile, "Future Perfect" serves the estimable service of arguing persuasively that direct democracy is more feasible in a networked age than it has been for a very long time - and prompting one to ask whether, despite its imperfections, it beats the alternatives." Reviewing the book for Reuters, Bernard Vaughan calls the book "a refreshing tonic to fears that the Web is dehumanizing." The Boston Globe called it a "buoyant and hopeful book" though included this one "quibble": "Johnson’s notion of armies of peer progressives changing the world sounds mighty familiar. They’ve had a less-flashy name for decades: grass-roots community organizers." Maria Popova at Brain Pickings called it "an absorbing, provocative, and unapologetically optimistic vision."

Future Perfect was designed from the beginning to be a conversation starter, so it's appropriate that the tour has included a series of delightful public discussions with some of my favorite thinkers and makers. (More to come in the next month or two.) We have video of almost all them, starting with this panel discussion sponsored by Personal Democracy Media, featuring Beth Noveck, Tina Rosenberg, and Clay Shirky. Last week, I talked about the personal and social impact of networks with MIT's Sherry Turkle at the New York Public Library. There's an entertaining pre-debate chat between us, conducted by The Verge's Paul Miller. And then this week, I had the great pleasure of appearing on BookTV's Author In-Depth series, where we talked about all of my books (and many other topics) for three hours!