Crowdsourcing is NOT Your Knight in Shining Armor

Techies love to hail every advance of technological tools as the next best thing since sliced bread. This was the clear impression I received from author Jeff Howe's video on Crowdsourcing. When not making pop-technological youtube videos, Jeff Howe is a writer, most recently publishing "Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business". Crowdsourcing by the way is defined by Mr. Howe as:

The application of the open-source idea to any field outside of software, taking a function performed by people in an organization, such as reporting done by journalists, research and product development by scientists, or design of a T-shirt, for example, and, in effect, "outsourcing" it through an open-air broadcast on the Internet.

Mr. Howe makes some very important points about how the internet has revolutionized how people connect to other people in their profession, hobby or identity. The points he makes however, for someone like myself that grew up with the internet as a given, seem like a statement of the obvious. Yes we have seen new content produced by a mass of people (i.e. Wikipedia) so many times in our generation, yet crowdsourcing is often made out to seem as some egalitarian technological utopia just arriving to save the human species, when in fact it is not.

Mary Joyce, co-founder of the blog DigiActive, which helps grassroots activists around the world use the Internet and mobile phones to increase their impact, issued a scathing indictment of crowdsourcing as a cureall:

"The key is that crowdsourcing is still centralized: the producer is still a cog in a machine, only the machine is bigger... the task is defined at the center, produced at the edge. It is no coincidence that the term crowdsourcing derives from another practice of hierarchical labor distribution: outsourcing."

Initially Mary's analysis sounded too theoretical and abstract for my tastes. However I sat with Mary's analysis and recognized how it applies to, say, the political realm. A key example of crowdsourcing is clearly my.barackobama.com, Candidate Barack Obama's innovative use of a social networking and crowdsourcing to allow people a space to contribute in many ways to his campaign in a decentralized manner. Nevertheless, it was still controlled by his campaign.

The website was owned and patrolled by the Obama Campaign, to ensure that potentially embarrassing user produced content within the site was regulated. Now obviously my.barackobama was an astounding success, however that does not take away the fact that the users did not have as much control on the campaign as the campaign wanted you to think. For example, users on my.barackobama.com banded together to create what was at one point the fastest growing and largest group on that site: "Get FISA Right". The group sought to make Obama oppose Telecom Immunity for industries that illegally participated in state-sponsored domestic spying campaigns under the Bush administration.

Take a look at how active the members of "Get FISA Right" were in the overall Obama for President campaign.

# of Members 23,178
Events Hosted 5,103
Events Attended 40,610
Calls made 225,373
Doors Knocked 5,296
Number of blog posts 123,109
Amount raised $730,212.32

Despite all this pushback on this one issue by the most active members on his site, who so clearly contributed nearly a million dollars and a quarter million calls for his campaign, the only concession Obama made was a half-hearted statement saying that he and the group members of "Get FISA Right" can "Agree to Disagree". The power dynamics at play are very clear.

In contrast, think about the recent Tea Party Protests. Now those protests kinda came out of nowhere. Who would have thought we'd all be looking at a bunch of angry people carrying tea bags while marching on our nation's capitol? Sure, recently the Tea Party movement has shown signs of centralization, however at its early pinnacle it was one of the most powerful political movements created by what Mary at DigiActive would call this Peer to Peer Production:

Peer to peer production is different: it is center-less and it is non-hierarchical. Even if someone is organizing, that person has no more power than any other member of the project. There is no center and edge. There is only the network... It is all about who benefits and where the power lies...

For example, the current state of the Tea Party movement in the United States, though espousing conservative political views, is not centrally organized by traditional powers of the right, including the Republican party.

When power is concentrated in groups of citizens rather than institutions, there is a potential for lack of accountability as the group may rely on no one but its members for resources. However, the lack of connection to traditional power structures could also mean the group is not beholden to institutions that are accountable to special interests such as corporations or economic, religious, or political elites.

Perhaps crowdsourcing, already long praised as an innovative new technology, is already being overshadowed by user peer to peer production. Just as institutions are beginning to utilize crowdsourcing, new parts are beginning to self-assemble into new institutions through the power of peer to peer production, to rival their predecessors.

Perhaps I set up a false dichotomy in alluding to a competition between crowdsourcing and peer to peer production. Both tools have very real applications, albeit in different settings. One can however, see how easily these two tools can become a proxy war in the fight for domination and influence in our societies, battles played out since the very beginning of humankind.

In this battle, Crowdsourcing may be the dragon, representing old, established institutions, while peer to peer production plays the role as the knight, rising from the fearful masses to challenge and topple the existing social/political/class structure.