I'm so bored with Web 2.0.... aka Saving Humanity Part II

You can imagine a Richter Scales style skit on this using the Clash's "I'm so bored with the USA".....anyway, this post by Fred Wilson on A VC caught my eye:

I read a comment on my “Looking For Inspiration” post this morning that suggested I was just getting bored with Web 2.0 like many others. It’s something I’ve considered a lot lately....

....I am a bit jealous of friends who are working on finding and funding alternative energy or biomedical technologies that have the potential to address the serious problems facing the world. At times it seems that helping the web become more social, intelligent, mobile, and playful is not as impactful.

....And certainly there is much about “web 2.0” that doesn’t seem to address that need. Throwing food at your friends on Facebook or twittering about the length of the line at the shake shack lands squarely in the “banality” camp that Kirby railed about in his essay on “pseudo modernism” that I blogged about last week.

Fred has been seduced by Umair's thoughts about using the Web to:

Organize the world's hunger.
Organize the world’s energy.
Organize the world’s thirst.
Organize the world's health.
Organize the world's freedom.
Organize the world's finance.
Organize the world's education.

I commented on this last week (see here), and have been mulling a Part II for it - the issue is in how do we organise - ie what structures are used - so here are the thoughts on how this might be done. First, the caveats - technofix is not for everything, nor is the hammer of Big IT - but one of the benefits of the more modern technologies is that they have a lighter touch, ie they avoid these issues better:

People would rather live with a problem they can't solve than a solution they don't understand
One of the professors on my MSc program used to say this about implementing successful change programs - ie an externall imposed solution seldom takes root as well as something developed by people in the situation. Ie its not enough to give people fishing rods etc, they have to be left to define which ones to use, how they will fish etc.

There is a risk of applying the most modern technologies to problems that can be more simply solved....
In the early 70's E F Schumacher wrote "Small is Beautiful", which showed how simple, locally produceable technology trumped large scale technology in developing countries. The lessons were largely ignored by aid organisations then (as most aid programs require recipients to spend money on the donor countries' technology) and by and large still are.

That said, I think there is quite a bit modern technology can do to drive change. A cursory glance at history will tell you that shifts in economics drive huge sociopolitical change. Communication technology has driven huge changes in these economics since the Industrial Revolution, but the benefits, like the future, are unevenly distributed. In my view Web media have especially high impact potential as they:

- Reduce Transaction Costs
- Give people access to correct information
- Allow people to self-organise
- Impact energy and resource usage
- New financial structures

Reduce transaction costs
Reducing transaction costs doesn't just allow people to be banal on Twitter - the uses are far more transforming than that, Ronald Coase showing in the 1930's that reducing transaction costs allow much smaller organisations, with lower capital formation, to be sustainable. In other words people can now create change with small organisations that don't need high capital formation. This is driving the Web 2.0 startup scene, but its also driving for example home-working, micro-credit, global action networks (of which terrorism is the dark side example) and should allow major increases in the ability of small groups of people in developing countries to organise themselves.

In many ways this is the Prime Mover for much of what we see today, but there are some of the specific benefits of reduced transaction costs that have major magnification effects - these are the ones noted below:

Access to Correct Information
One of the downsides of "social media" is that groups can become infected with "groupthink", ie "This is the way we have always done this" - so being able to independently acquire correct information, at low cost, must have a major part in any plans to impact these issues. Not only this, but ease of information transfer allow a greater understanding of global issues so hopefully allows the formation of systems that can re-allocate resources etc to where they are required, allows people to reign in dangerous leaders, etc. Today Wikipedia, what can tomorrow bring?

There is another side to correct information - there is a lot of cr*p information out there, but as more data is digitised and exposed, it can be crunched to hopefully ascertain the real facts rather than opinion broadcast by those who have access to media, which pervades too many areas today.

Allow people to self organise
Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" is the latest book from a long line of people who have understood that allowing people to self organise to solve their own problems is a powerful tool. Web 2.0 systems based around social networks will be one of these tools as they evolve - in fact in my view the only way we are going to mobilise sufficient resources to solve the issues Umair lists is by using these sorts of tools. (This is also a long wave system - long after Facebook and Twitter have gone the way of telex and faxes, these systems will underpin much of the underlying comms structures we use.)

This is not to say that self organising is a panacea, history shows this is best used for protest/resistance movement structures and not to actually run things, but to run things ongoing probably also requires derivations of these social media tools.


Energy and Resource Usage
One cannot of course have a discussion about "saving humanity" without talking about climate change etc. I'm still sceptical about mankind's alleged influence on all this, but I do buy the argument that continuing consumption of resources at the level of today's Rich West and then expanding it to the rest of humanity is unsustainable. I personally think we'll run out of resources (and water) long before we bake and/or drown ourselves in any new global Jurassic period. The comms technology we are building must have some capability to help here in terms of, for example:

- reduce energy usage by removing the need for so many journeys - online ordering / home deliver in urban areas is more efficient that car journeys, a flight saved by a webcast is always useful

- allow us to redistribute used goods far more effectively - it is always far more resource intensive to make something new than use something already made (take cars for example - ignore the Pious, buy a good second hand sports car and be virtuous ). Today eBay, tomorrow the world

- there must be all sorts of other small efficiencies possible just by accessing correct infomation and being connected to other people

New Financial Structures
You don't have to be a banker or economist to sense that there is something seriously wrong with the world's financial structures (in fact it probably helps not to be) but the combination of reduced transaction costs and being connected may help us to avoid if not replace the worst of the financial system's excesses. By this I don't mean makin' whuffie (too fluffy imho, we evolved out of gift economies for good scalability reasons) but by making it easier for people to find correct information and organise effectively sans middlemen (think of replacing brokers by online trading etc and magnify that) and having more say in distribution of our money. Imagine if you could vote for where your tax money went - how many foreign wars would we see?

This is not to say that new ICT alone helps - and just getting networked is an issue still in much of the world, as is affording the gear - but the arrival of the $5 mobile phone and $100 PC can't but help, as is the emerging skein of global wireless networking, brought about by sheer scale economics. initially paid for by richer people. My thought is more that people building a large ecosystem of Web 2.0 services that cut their teeth by throwing sheep etc allows the darwinian evolution of robust, low cost services that become very useful ongoing. Top down services designed to fix big problems always seem to struggle. That said however, I think if Fred and his fellow VC's are prepared to fund "GreenWeb 2.0" businesses that could be very interesting.