Howard Rheingold, author of the excellent Smart Mobs, says his theme will be: Every time power decentralizes, there’s an opportunity for innovation. How might the new decentralization give rise to new forms of collective action?

He points to Seti@home, the growth of cell phone messaging in Scandinavia and Japan, and the Web itself as examples of what happens when centralized control is loosened.

Markets, says Howard, are a form of collective action. eBay, he says, is a market that really shouldn’t exist because of the “prisoner’s dilemma.” But eBay’s reputation system has enabled it to work.

Cory Doctorow: We’ve been good at initiating decentralized actions but not at sustaining them. We have yet to slashdot Congress. How do we organize ourselves in a sustainable way? Howard says he doesn’t know. (Fair enough.) Kevin responds that when there was a move at the FCC to allow the phone companies to levy a modem tax. Kevin sent out a notice with an email address to respond to, and got 350,000 messages.

Cory: Yes, but there were 50M Napster users and 50M voted for Bush, and no one stepped forward to say “What are you doing to my Napster?” That is, we haven’t been able to organize.

Killer quote on requiring people to fill out forms to learn about them: “Only geeks change their preferences.”

Adina Levina offers the following in the discussion of this blog entry:

on the prisoner’s dilemma

social science researchers, axelrod and onward have shown that the prisoner’s dilemma works differently when people play the game over and over again.

when people can earn a reputation, they tend to behave more cooperatively themselves, and are more likely to act, even against their immediate-self-interest, to punish non-cooperators

see Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation
also a good article last spring I think on SciAm — will maybe hunt down a link

Categories: Uncategorized dw