Yule Heibel's Library tagged interview →  View Popular

This is really a reply to all of those media outlets who are writing disparagingly about user-generated content, saying that the content of a weblog is dreck that no one would bother to publish in the print world. All of which is true, but irrelevant, because, of course, the people who are publishing the little observations about their trip to the mall in LiveJournal – they're not talking to you.

The really big change here is that we've got a medium which scales from small groups – me talking to a group of my friends – all the way to "now I am making a public declaration." And because previously, we had a world where, if somebody said "I love you" on the phone, you knew it was meant for you. And if somebody said "I love you" on the TV, you knew it was specifically not meant for you, because the mode of carriage lets us figure out how that message should be interpreted.

And that's now broken. There are people having relatively personal conversations with their friends, yet they're doing it in a public medium. But that's no different from sitting around talking with friends in the food court at the mall. If you want to go down and find a group of teenagers chatting to each other at the mall, you can sit at the next table over and listen in, but then it's pretty clear in that situation that you're the weird one.

For the last hundred years, the key organizational conversation was, are big challenges better taken on by the state, by the government, raising taxes and spending the money, or are they better taken on by businesses operating in the marketplace. But the dot dot dot at the end of that sentence was because obviously people can't get together and do these things for themselves.

There was a basic assumption, both in capitalist and communist theories of large scale action, that the complexities of ordinary life would defeat the ability of groups to come together and do things on their own.

It seems to me that what's happened is that this thesis has now been rendered false in a surprising number of cases, and, maybe more importantly, a growing number of cases. There are places now where people are coming together and creating value for one another without doing it in either the framework of government or the framework of business.

neoclassical economics assumes that most human motivations can be backed into money, so that you can use money as this kind of universal calculator, even if there's no money involved in the actual transaction. And we now know that to be false, from a lot of research and behavioral economics. There are some jobs where people will do the job better if they're not paid, which is to say if they sense they're being asked for a favor and are participating in community building, they'll actually do a better job than if they're simply given money to do the work.

Jon Lebkowsky: Isn't this like the work of Etienne Wenger and Nancy White with communities of practice?

Clay Shirky: That's exactly right.

Jon Lebkowsky: It seems to me that one of the real problems of filtering is that, to the extent we feel that we have to filter and set up filters, that we're liable to exclude things that we didn't know we would find interesting.

Clay Shirky: That's right. And designing filters with a certain amount of serendipity involved is a key part of this. But even then, even with some serendipity, it is so easy to have the amount of content radically overflow any strategy that we've got for sorting the stuff that we care about from the stuff we don't care about. Even with a serendipity meter built in, we still have to work hard to get this right.

What makes the Santa Fe quarter ideal for that?

Santa Fe is an old, marginal neighbourhood in downtown Bogota, plagued with problems such as prostitution, stealing, drug dealing and child abuse.
Throughout 2007 we worked to reclaim this space: a place where we could offer an element of diversity to the neighbourhood and share another reality with its inhabitants for a few days.

How did you get all these street artists together?

That’s what makes Desfase interesting: the gathering of people with different intentions, images, techniques and lastly languages all using the streets as a common space.
Our challenge is to offer interesting and sufficient spaces for them, to inspire work and dialogue. Both the friendliness that the streets generate and the interest that many urban artists have in meeting and visiting other places helps us achieve this. Additionally, we rely on the institutional and private support from those that have believed in our project.

How tough are the controls on graffiti in Colombia in general?

Over here, street art is not such a big phenomenon. Even though the city has lots of free spaces for graffiti and advertising, there is no rigorous control on this art form and its diverse manifestations.
In this way, the street art scene is very peaceful.

That’s great to hear! But still, do the police take sprayers in?

This rarely happens. We have created a peaceful street art environment: in abandoned spaces, we can paint freely – even during the day. As a result, most graffiti and street artists do it this way.

However, if they take you in, many things can happen. Sometimes you can talk to them, explain what you’re doing and nothing bad happens – they let you go and finish what you were doing. At other times, they may detain you for a few hours and take note of your ID. And, in the worst-case scenario, they’ll take you to a Permanent Justice Unit (UPJ) for twenty-four hours.

You go so far as to call the spiky world "tricky and even treacherous."

Right. We can see it in this election. It's really giving rise to class
conflict. We are starting to see a backlash against cities, and a
backlash against people who live in them. Urban conglomerations are the
single most important thing to our competitiveness, yet people won't
talk about it. And the second thing that worries me is we're unable to
talk about those being left behind. We're stuck in a stalemate. I would
like to see everyone live better.

Do people realize their happiness is closely linked to place?

Absolutely not. People don't even think about it. But when you ask them
you begin to discover their place is a critical contributor to their
happiness. Generally speaking, place tends to the positive side of the
happiness ledger. That was surprising to us. When we asked people about
the source of stress in their life, place came in last. If you find a
place that fits you, it gives you more energy. People have always been
attracted to aesthetics. The other thing is infrastructure. Maybe you
like to go outside, or ride your bike. Those things are critically
important. What people are saying is they are not going to be fulfilled
in a place that just has a good pipe system. They want to live in a
place that gives them excitement and energy.