Supernova2007: Clay Shirky on Love

UNESCO turned down a Shinto shrine in Japan for a World heritage site because it’s about solidity of process: getting rebuilt regularly, rather than solidity of edifice. They rebuild it on the same site, to the same plan.

 Tells story about how his group was able to get support from a Perl newsgroup on Usenet, but the C++ engineers from AT&T not only didn’t believe that it could happenm, but even after it happened, didn’t think that it would work, because they knew it couldn’t in theory.

 Today AT&T is in trouble, but Perl is a Shinto shrine, because millions of people love Perl and love one another in the context of Perl. No contracts, no money changes hands.

 Love seems too squishy to talk about at these sorts of conferences. But what we have is a set of tools to aggregate things people care about, in ways that are unpredictable – simple things like mailing lists, and Usenet, nothing fancy. Love becomes a renewable building tool.

 You will make more accurate predictions about software and services, if you ask not what is the business model, but whether the people who like it take care of each other. Linux gets rebuilt every night by people whose principal goal is that it exist the following morning.

 Future commercial opportunities will be inextricably intertwined with this practice. When Torvalds posted his first message, he got a global network of collaborators within 24 hours. And that pattern was new – but now it is Wikipedia, the immigration stuff coordinated on mySpace, Flickr to coordinate after natural disasters.

 This pattern will go way more places than it is today. We will always love one another, we’re human. With love alone you can go far, but coordinating tools take it farther. In the past love did big things, but now we can do big things to love.