Book review : Here comes everybody

Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky: Here comes everybody, the power of organizing without organizations

The Penguin press, New York, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-153-0

Among all the different things that inspired us to found Green Life Innovators as a web community driven organization, one source, one book, stands out as the very spark that started it all. It was not a book in my rather large collection of science books, nor was it a book in my even larger collection of books on technology. It wasn’t even a book on environmental issues.

No, it was a book on social interaction and the modern day tools that makes it happen in a whole new way. It was Clay Shirky’s “Here comes Everybody”

Most people have notices that there are big changes going on in the world. Things like Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Delicious bookmarks, Flickr, The open source movement, flash mobs etc. change the way humans interact socially and productively. I believe that most people tend to follow the flow, without really thinking to much on what it is, that is really going on. That is where Mr. Shirky’s book comes in. Here is an author who has really thought it through, what it is that is going on, analysed it with great clarity and written a delightful book about it to share this knowledge with the rest of us.

The book is not about the technology as such, but rather about its effect on people. It argues a strong point that once a technology has gotten to mature long enough to have become woven into the fabric of society, that is when interesting social effects start to emerge.

The phenomena so elegantly described in this excellent book not only shape and change the way we as human beings do things together. They are also opening up a whole new world of opportunities. “What happened to the tasks that were too expensive to form a traditional organization to do in the past,” the author asks. The answer is that they were simply just never done. Mr. Shirky predicts that the next emerging step we will see now that “group forming has become ridiculously easy” is collective action , and he describes a few very interesting examples of the latter already at work. And that is really were our inspiration for “Green Tech the open source way” came from, because as Mr. Shirky puts it: “group action just got easier.”

See the author on YouTube

“Before we could do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now we can do big things for love” Clay Shirky

External links

Wikipedia article about Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky’s home page

The “Here comes everybody” blog

YouTube: Clay Shirky on Tedtalks

YouTube: Clay Shirky talks about the book