Here Went Everybody

This work is less about what was happening in the 2000s and more about what those early signals suggested about seemingly endless possibilities in the future. What was to come — even if we weren’t quite sure what that was — was a bigger deal than what had already happened.

Was the era of "organizing without organizations" a historical blip?

The optimism of Web 2.0 rested in large part on its pure excitement about the web as a fundamentally open-ended technology. In Free Culture, permissive intellectual property and remixing would unleash a wave of as-yet unimagined discourse and expression.

What Here Comes Everybody has me thinking about in 2022 is whether or not the dynamic era of organizational experimentation that flourished in the 2000s was way shorter than we predicted it to be, and if it is now effectively over. The apparently open-ended organizational possibilities of the 2000s web resolved in practice to a limited handful of q... See more

Here Comes Everybody follows this tradition. For Shirky, this essential excitement comes down to an optimism about the open-ended possibilities of organizational forms made viable by the web.

One of the reasons that Here Comes Everybody holds up comparatively well in 2022 against its contemporaries is Shirky’s willingness to recognize how broader social forces might thwart the “inevitable” effects of a technology on society.

If it is true that the era of collective experimentation online was short lived, then the next interesting question is why. One hypothesis that I’m intrigued with is rooted less in technological changes and more in social ones. Shirky’s dictum that revolutions start from behavioral change rather than from technological change helps us also explain ... See more