David Weinberger explores the evolving value of the internet, arguing that it transcends traditional business paradigms by fostering decentralized, democratic interactions where individuals and communities share knowledge and resources without centralized control. He suggests that the internet reshapes leadership, customer relationships, and the nature of markets, emphasizing the importance of transparency and collaborative learning in the digital age. Ultimately, he posits that care and shared values have become central to economic interactions within the networked society.

1. What is the Net’s value?
David Weinberger Ph.D.
self@evident.com
www.JohoTheBlog.com
dweinberger@twitter
Harvard Library Innovation Lab
Co-Director
Harvard Berkman Center
for Internet & Society
Senior Researcher
Web Economic Forum
Cesena, Italy
March 23, 2014
I want to ask what the Net’s actual value is, because …

2. Assumption
Business
Internet
Real world
My assumption is not that the Internet is an additional domain businesses have to deal with.

3. Rather, the Internet will absorb everything, and everything will look like the Internet, even things that are off line. [amoeba]

4. What is the Net? It’s not the internet routers, the ISPs, etc.

5. (cc) ChuckP @ Flickr.com
The Net is a set of agreements or protocols … (cc) ChuckP @ flickr.com

6. I will do my best to
transmit your data
packets to their
next stop, without
giving preference
to any.
These agreement say your Net will join the Internet if you agree to this.

7. Democracy of bits
Without central control
We thus get…

8. control
size
That this means giving up on an ancient and quite reasonable assumption that there is a strong relationship between the size of a project and the need for
control. The bigger the project, the more control it needs. As the size increases, the amount of control and management increases even more steeply. This
makes perfect sense, up to a point.

9. Permission
But it fails at web scale. The sheer amount of content, far surpasses the cumulative total of all of human history. Not to mention all of the projects that been
built. And all of this was done in a permission-free zone. No one had to ask permission to join, to add pages, to start a new project.

10. World Wide Web
Connecting Strangers Since 1993
Chris Smith
Manager
chris_smith@web.com
And it was done without there being a single person with the title Manager, World Wide Web. And that’s entirely on purpose. Management does not scale. If
you want something to get really really big, you’ve got to get the managers out of the center. In fact, you have to get the center out of the center.

11. Employees
Decision-makers
Customers
I want to look at what this new architecture means fo employees, decision-makers and customers.

12. SECTION: Employees in the age of connection

13. I want to give you-Net, we wrote memos. Memos were much more formal than how we communicate today.

14. We used to meet once a week.

15. Now we have fewer meetings and far more continuous. Startups even share space, even with competitors. Why? Because they recognize that
the power of the networks is greater than the power of secrecy and winner-take-all competition

16. Iteration
Public learning
We see these values all over the Net. Here’s just one example. At Stackoverflow, developers ask programming questions. Strangers answers and improve
upon their suggested answers. We see two things here: First, the power of iteration at scale (lots of people making small changes). Second, we see the
default switching from learning as a private act between a teacher and a student, to learning in public. If you’re answering my question, it’s selfish for just me
to benefit when everyone could learn from your answer.

17. Imperfect democracy
Favors certain personalities
The old barriers may re-emerge
This is great, but …

18. SECTION: Leadership in the Age of Connection

19. Old style leaders like JAck Welch of GE led…

20. Power
Responsibility
Money
Information?
… by placed at the top of a pyramid. At the top are power, responsibility, and money. But less information. Hierarchical corporations were
built explicitly to limit the flow of info since the person at the top couldn’t possibly handle it all.

21. It’s different on the Net. Instead of seeing decisions as an on-off switch, the Net encourages many small attempts.

22. Imagine this is a map of Wikipedia. jimmy wales could make a decision the way Jack Welch did. Instead, Wikipedia keeps decisions local. The
system contains more information that way

23. SECTION: Customers in the Age of Connection

24. Fort Business
Most businesses confused themselves with forts. The walls of the fort protected against the flow of information. Businesses could control their customers by
selectively releasing info.

25. But now the walls are down. There (basically) are no secrets, because customers are talking with one another.Networked markets know more than
businesses do about products and services because we tell one another the truth, we’re not biased, and because these markets contain surprising expertise.

26. If you want to know how a mini cooper is going to do in the winter in Boston, you’re better off asking this guy than this guy. [car salesman]

27. Markets are
conversations.
Markets are
networks.
Doc Searls said markets are conversations. They are. But these conversations occur across networks.

28. Markets are
networks.
The nature of that network affects the nature of markets, just as the one-way mass communication infrastructure in the Age of Broadcast turned markets into
targets for one-way marketing messages.

29. People tired of their carPeople tired of their car
So, people who are tired of their car and are talking about what to get next are a networked market. Over the next day or hours, the network shifts...

30. Looking for a kids’ cough medicine
Here’s another networked market

31. Advanced Windows 8 Adopters
Or another network forms of Windows users looking to talk about the new operating system release.

32. People angry at a politician
Or people angry at a news report last night. Maybe they get so angry that they organize a protest, as conversation and connection become political.

33. People angry at a politician
Two structural reasons
the Web is hard for businesses
IThere are two structural reasons why the Net is a hard medium for traditional businesses

34. People angry at a politician
These markets are real
And they’re hard for businesses
These markets are not abstractions or a set of people 2% of whom are really in the market. These are people who are actually connected to one another,
even if just for a few minutes. But these markets are hard for businesses, for two structural reasons.

35. Timid
Voiceless
(Body-less)
Slow
1
First, hierarchical organizations don’t fit well on the Web. They are too slow. Too scared. Who speaks for it? They don’t have a mouth because they don’t
have a body. Some companies do succeed on the Web. For example, here’s Comcast’s twitter feed.It works because there’s a named human behind it who
is comfortable acknowledging Comcast’s fallibility.

36. The Net is not a medium
2
Pronto Rponto
A second structural reason business has trouble with the medium of the Net is that the Net is not a medium. A medium is a pipe (e.g.,
telegraph wire) through which messages pass unaltered. If the pipe alters them, it’s a bad medium. But the Net doesn’t work that way. It’s not
a pipe through which messages move.

37. tweettweettweettweettweettweet
Here’s a social network of twitters. Let’s say one person sends out a tweet and it goes to all his followers.

38. tweet
The message only moves on if people are interested, and are willing to express themselves by moving the tweet. We, the people of the Net, are the medium,
but we are not empty pipes. We decide what moves, we tweak the message we move (which no good medium does) and a little bit of our social self -- our
reputation -- rides with each message we move. We are the medium.

39. Interest
The Net returns
to the control of users
And what is the motive force of the Internet moving all those tweets and posts and images and jokes? What moves every message through the Internet?
Interest. It moves if we’re interested in it and it doesn’t move if we’re not. In that way the Net reflects what we actually care about. In the old days of
Broadcast, companies got to assert their interests over ours; they determined what was available, and they made us watch ads. But the Internet returns the
control of interest to users.

40. Business Individual
interests
This is a fundamental change. For hundreds of years we’ve assumed that a business’ interests are different from our interests as customers. Our interests
might be more or less aligned, but ultimately the business wants our money.

41. But that’s changing. So, here’s a well-known page. There’s nothing on it that isn’t about addressing our needs. No ads on this prime piece of Web real
estate. The fact that its home page is completely about meeting our needs is one reason Google has been so successful.!

42. Likewise for Craigslist. It’s a horribly ugly page, but it’s all about what we need. There isn’t anything on this page that isn’t designed to help us do what we
came to do.

43. But, Jeff,
then they’ll buy
fewer books.
No, they’ll buy
fewer books they
don’t want.
Even Amazon. When Jeff Bezos said they were going to start letting customers review books, a manager said that people will write negative reviews, so
people will buy fewer books. Bezos said,. “No. They’ll buy fewer books they don’t want.”

44. Another example. In this sort of blog post on a company’s site we can see the company’s values on display. Also, notice that it’s an individual doing the
talking. This is a company that is acknowledging that it is like us — made up of individuals with their own outlooks and their own unpolished imperfections.

45. Ben & Jerry’s is a premium ice cream in the US, and it isn’t shy about telling us that it has a political point of view. “Here’s our interests. Feel free to
disagree.” The other day Tim Cook of Apple said something similar: If you disagree with our position on global warming, don’t invest in us. And Google even
does what every marketer warns against: It alters its own logo, sometimes expressing its own values as a company — in this case, protesting Russia’s anti-
gay laws. These are companies that are not pretending to be without a point of view. Even if we disagree, we sense that these companies are like us in
caring about the world.

46. HumbleBundle is a game site that lets you pay whatever you’d like for a bundle of games. If you pay more than the current average, you get a couple of
extra games. A portion of what you pay goes to charity, and you get to say what portion. And they’re completely transparent about everything. Then, a week
or so after you’ve gotten an incredible bargain on games, you’re likely to get an email saying that they’ve thrown another couple of games into the bundle, for
free. This is a business that deeply shares our values.

47. Business Individual
interests
What all these examples have in common is that they are a change from a clash of interests…

48. Business Individual
interests
… a realignment in which not only are the users in control of their interests, but something even better is happening: there is an actual and real sharing of
interests and values.

49. The Net is made of care
Care is the fundamental unit of economics, and the Net is care’s purest expression.

50. Care is the fundamental unit of
economics
The Net is care’s purest expression
Care is the fundamental unit of economics, and the Net is care’s purest expression.

51. !
Thank you.
David Weinberger
Blog: www . JohoTheBlog . Com
Email: self@evident . com
Twitter: dweinberger