We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity - PICNIC08 Keynote by Charles Leadbeater

Clay Shirky - the "bald Tom Hanks"

It’s 15 minutes into Charles Leadbeater’s opening keynote on collaboration and creativity when I get over my longterm personal issues with Twitter and check the pulse of the room.

Blaming the rush to the venue (running late due to abysmal service by BMI and the crazed antics of Ramon, our Colombian cab driver), I assumed that exhaustion was responsible for my lack of any stimulation.

Surely it couldn’t be a case of getting bored by an opening keynote speaker… ?

Jumping onto the #picnic08 channel quickly reassured me: “Leadbeater is not telling anything new. Audience is nodding off,”is it me, or is Leadbeater repeating himself?, “Keynote with no visuals?”

And so it goes.

Bottom line is it all sounds like over-rehearsed passion and rhetoric.

For example, Leadbeater manages to correlate the current revolution in co-creation with the rise of Gerrard Winstanley’s Diggers in the kingless aftermath of the English Civil War. It’s emotive, memorable, original (as far as I know) and passably passionate, but think about it for a second and it’s a case of “Sorry, no. Not convinced at all.”

Then there’s Leadbeater’s conclusion, an anecdote (shamelessly name-dropping, I felt, but hell, who wouldn’t…) about meeting Tim Berners-Lee.

It ends with the attributed quote: “The danger isn’t that we ask too much of the web, but that we ask too little.” Yes - passionate, inspiring, idealistic, but does it actually give any practical advice to anyone?

But then the tempo steps up…

In ‘89 I saw Steve Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith appear unannounced at the encore of a Bon Jovi show (video at the foot of this post, 80s hair metal fans….). Now, albeit with no raised fists, cheers or drunk chicks on shoulders, we get a similar suprise guest appearance - Clay Shirky (described immediately on #picnic08 as ‘looking like a bald Tom Hanks.’

Off-script and prodded by Shirky, things start to get more interesting.

Shirky’s suggestion that collaborative communities can be ‘gamed’ (”I could post an item entitled ‘7 hottest babes in sci-fi’ to Digg with no expertise and become #1 because of the title”) leads nicely into the real conclusion of the session and it’s hardly a surprise…

…There’s no magic recipe, no 10 guaranteed steps to getting it right around community and collaboration. It is (as Leadbeater says, referencing Karl Popper) a ‘cloud’ rather than a ‘clock’ problem and the best hope lies (thanks Clay for an elegant wrap up) with “tuning
the motivation to the task.”

All I can say is that it reinforces something I worried about for too long as a front-person selling ‘new media’ ’solutions’ to clients; that the passionate, optimistic viewpoint can inspire, sell and provide vital new perspectives but that - if put on the spot - the evangelists and idealists can never give an absolute answer.

Never trust a hippy; never trust a digger; never trust any individual who thinks that they can tell you what the masses can do for you.