Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
Portfolio, $25
Wikinomics belongs to a now venerable tradition of books about the world-altering powers of the Net, from the pie-in-the sky prophesies of the late Nineties to Web 2.0 cheerleaders like Tapscott and Williams. The sense of intoxication with the Internet is still there, but the claims are refined and the narrative fleshed out with nods to Wikipedia, MySpace, Craigslist, Creative Commons, etc: the ways in which we, the people, have moulded the Web in our own image.

Wikinomics tells the story of how “billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth-creation, and social development in ways we only once dreamed of”, and that companies who have wised up to this collective genius are the ones that will count in the future.
No matter how jaded we are to words like sharing, peer-to-peer production, openness, or global platforms (the four-fold truths of wikinomy), they have wrought wonderful things — unprecedented amounts of the world’s cultural wealth is available, on tap, because we put it there. You can remix music, tinker with software, edit encyclopaedias, sequence the human genome and even build a motorcycle. InnoCentive is an almost-perfect marketplace that connects companies seeking R&D solutions to a vast pool of experts, something the authors call an “ideagora”. Staking out territories like “the global plant floor”, this book explains how this collaboration and openness have bent industry strangleholds, and set people free to compete and contribute their talents on an equal footing. We’re scrambling the rules as we “prosume” (produce-consume) artistic and intellectual content. And to prove the point, the last chapter is an open invitation to us, to continue the story — “join us in peer-producing the definitive guide to 21st century strategy on www.wikinomics.com”.

But as a story told, Wikinomics is a rather underwhelming book about an overwhelming sense of possibilities. Compared with, say, David Weinberger’s Cluetrain Manifesto, it rarely lifts above a jargon-laden overview of business opportunities afforded by this technology. But overviews have their uses, and if you’re not already fed to the teeth with Web 2.0 happytalk, Wikinomics is a handy compendium of all you need to know. Of course, all such wisdom has been refuted by self-styled culture protectionists who draw exactly the opposite conclusion from the same facts. The most notable contribution to this downer genre is Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, which insists that some hierarchies exist for a reason and once expertise gets invaded by this avalanche of free, half-baked experiment, true creativity and rigour are bound to go down the (you)tubes.

Unfortunately, whatever side they’re on, chroniclers of this “change everything” revolution tend to a sort of technological determinism, ignoring the social practices that surround the tools. Technologies like the Net construct new publics and are constructed by them. So while the next century will be marked by the values of this great digital commons, the effects of this experiment are unclear. Besides, to nick a line from William Gibson, if the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.