Charles Leadbeater: We Think Therefore We Are

Charles Leadbeater has advised everyone from Tony Blair to the BBC on collaboration and innovative thinking. RJ Thomson asks him about the ideas and practices behind his challenging new book We-Think

Feature by RJ Thomson | 28 Apr 2008

Wikipedia gets a bad rep. It is frequently said to be too inaccurate, too amateur, or simply too easy to be a good encyclopaedia. But Charles Leadbeater, the influential author and thinker behind We-Think, a new book on the collaborative potential of the web, suggests there’s more to it than that.

For instance, senior BBC executives (he gets to talk to everyone) have acknowledged that the account of the 7 July 2005 terrorist bombings in London was as well constructed on Wikipedia as by their own news professionals. Leadbeater also cites an example of a study carried out by Nature magazine, which found that the esteemed Encyclopaedia Britannica has only 30% fewer errors; and then there is the scale of it: when you consider that Wikipedia has 125 million words of content, compared to the Britannica’s 44 million, it certainly makes up in other areas. Oh, and it’s free. Which is pretty amazing.

It’s not that Leadbeater is an absolutist supporter of Wikipedia, or collaborative thinking, more that he can see its considerable benefits. He points out that certain Wikipedia pages, notably those on George W Bush, Israel, and the Iraq war, are now no longer able to be edited by the public – there was too much abuse going on. That’s just it: to be most effective, collaboration, whether on the web or otherwise, needs to be organised and monitored. This, he proposes, is a great way to work, whether as a profit seeking business, a forward-looking artistic collective, or socially-minded focus group.

Fascinating in its own right, Leadbeater's concept of We-Think (Wikipedia is just one example in what is an extended and fascinating study) fits closely with the concerns of ‘Hyperculture’ – the series of interviews The Skinny is running on contemporary thinking and culture. I caught up with Leadbeater to ask about some the issues that seemed to overlap.

RT: You came to my attention when I saw your talk on TED.com, which was fascinating.(1) It really clicked with the idea I've been working on called 'Hyperculture', which is based on the belief that there's not much of a counterculture any more, and that we might look to an extreme form of the mainstream as a way of pushing ideas forward. The way I'm working on it at the moment - because I haven't fully formed the idea - is a series of interviews with people whose ideas seem close enough to inform it in some way. Which is I guess a limited form of We-Think in it's own right.

Your book was written collaboratively, at least to an extent:(2) how important do you think that is for understanding the project?

CL: I think it's a part of it; what I learned from writing it is that these things are a kind of mix - at the end of the day I did a lot of writing on my own at my desk. But that process of opening things up and getting people's opinions was important: it provided me with quite a lot of encouragement, but more importantly it sparked a lot of ideas that changed the way I thought about the book and the way I wrote it. People pointed out other books I hadn't read; I found that to be helpful.

I've enjoyed reading We-Think very much, but I slightly wonder who it's for. With me it's slightly preaching to the converted, but is there the hope that those who would otherwise have rejected the idea of collaborative working will buy into it because of the arguments you're making?

I suppose so. What I'm trying to do is argue that what's important about the web is not technology, it's what people can do with it and how they can organise themselves socially. And that we should think about that in broader terms - which are usually just about business and technology. We should think about its impact on politics, democracy, society at large. So the intention is to broaden the argument out and get people to think of the web from a more social point of view.

I've really enjoyed the historical examples in We-Think. You see early examples of open-source software in eighteenth century Cornwall, and We-Think in Ancient Greece.(3) To what extent do you think We-Think might be a state of mind that's always with us, and to what extent do you think it's a cultural phenomenon that's returning to strength after industrialisation?

I think some people would argue that there's a deep social impulse in us that never faded but that might have taken slightly different forms. I'm not an expert at that, but what I do think quite strongly is that point you've just made: part of [We-Think’s] strength is that it's really old rather than really new. It's reviving old ways of organising which were pushed to the sidelines by industrialisation, hierarchy, and all the rest of it. So I think that is very interesting, and it's something that I had thought about a bit before I wrote the book, but really discovered in the process of writing it. Particularly the echoes in culture, the thing that interests me - I don't think it interests many other people - is this notion of 'folk' culture; it's kind of recreating folk culture. And I think that touches on your concern about where is the counterculture and where is the mainstream.

There's a small section on the avant-garde and the web, on Guy Debord and the ‘society of the spectacle’ and what have you.(4) And in a way YouTube and similar things have taken up those ideas and distorted them and made them their own, in a very particular and peculiar way.

That link is definitely one of the things I wanted to ask about.(5) The breakdown of copyright is something a lot of contemporary 'avant-garde' artists use as one of their main modes of operation. But to what extent do you think technology developers have stolen a jump on them as the driving force behind new ideas?

I don't know - it just struck me that there are lots of echoes in the way people talk about the web and the way the avant-garde talked about itself. If you look at Wired magazine, in the typography there's definitely an echo of avant-garde magazines. And I think many of those ideas about interaction and breaking down the barriers between artist and audience, which were avant-garde ideas, are now the mainstream language of the web. What I think people who know more about the avant-garde would say is that there isn't the equivalent of their political and cultural creativity, which is true I suppose: the avant-garde was more of a critique of society than a sort of… jamboree.

Guy Debord thought that we had to get away from the passivity of the society of the spectacle, and now with YouTube, everyone can turn themselves into a sort of spectacle…

There are also those who have identified a fundamental problem in modern society that is not so much passivity as illusory activity: people running around keeping 'busy' but not achieving much. Do you think that perspective could be a challenge to We-Think?

You're right, there are different ways of looking at the web, and one says that this is all completely pointless activity: people 'make friends' on MySpace and they're not really friends, that sort of thing. But I think the riposte to that is twofold. A lot of that stuff is everyday social interaction. And secondly, what struck me about the communities that I've been writing about is how they work by people wanting recognition: there's a desire to be recognised for the quality of work that they did and the quality of the contribution they made. And so I think there is something slightly deeper than just those trivial, narcissistic entertainment-driven things; it’s speaking to a desire to get recognition that people couldn't get from work or from consumerism.

You advocate the sharing of ideas very enthusiastically, but this casts serious doubt over the notion of copyright, or at least enforced copyright. Copyright is still the law; how do you think it will be upset? Will it be through large companies like Nokia and IBM making more and more of their rights open,(6) because it's in their best interests, or will individual acts of rebellion still have something to do, or will it be something else?

Again I think that comes back to your point about counterculture being invaded by the mainstream - open-source, well, everyone's doing it now, or wants a bit of it. Where I think we've got to is that we need more creativity about how we share; simply to be abusing current copyright, or doing little experiments like mine, they're just that really - the question is 'could you get to new ways of sharing ideas that would allow people to collaborate more effectively?' Creative commons licensing and open-source licensing are attempts to refashion copyright so we can have more collaboration; and that's where things will get interesting for me. Not just in terms of individual acts of rebellion, but whether you can imagine much more structured forms of collaboration emerging.

How extreme do you think We-Think can get, in terms of the extent of collaboration, and how extreme would you want it to get?

What do you mean by extreme?

One of the other speakers at TED - I don't know if he was there the same year as you - was a guy called Ray Kurzweil, who specialises in ideas of transhumanism, and how we're approaching a singularity of technological understanding.(7) Is that something you see this leading to or as worlds apart really?

I think I'm in a slightly different place to him, but one of the key issues is that my account of We-Think is very social - it's about people choosing to do things together. Many of the accounts about the future of the web are about the web becoming more semantic, intelligence being imbedded in the web, conceiving things for you, so on and so forth. I think it's going to be critical that people use the web to collaborate - not just the web doing stuff for us as if it was some sort of machine. And I think the real challenge and interest of We-Think is how far we can develop this collaborative capacity to address the really big challenges that we face.

Is that something you're looking to work on?

I am. We've just had a Social Innovation Camp in London for people using web technologies to address social challenges. I think there's a huge appetite for that; I'm very interested in this 'We' campaign around global climate change,(8) and just in general about how younger people are using it not just to create businesses but to create new ways of organising around social issues.

...

Presenting this interview in question and answer format posed no challenge, as Leadbeater is just as articulate as he comes across. This carries over into his text, which is light and readable; and whatever your interests are, there’s sure to be something of value in We-Think: it’s about exploring the possibilities of the digital ‘jamboree’, and Leadbeater manages to give a sense of vitality and importance without resorting to ‘this is urgent’ style clichés. The arguments for the effectiveness of collaboration (vs knowledge greed) are all around us (Google is another biggie), and it is rewarding to read an optimistic yet serious account of where we’re at now.

(1) TED is a California-based conference that features talks from leading thinkers in all kinds of fields, including Stephen Hawking, Al Gore, Larry Lessig and Amy Tan. The talks can be viewed online at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks - Charles Leadbeater is on page 14.

(2) Leadbeater posted an early draft on his website www.charlesleadbeater.net, and received around 350 comments and emails about his project.

(3) ‘We-Think’ is the name of the book, but also its central concept, which Leadbeater describes as a distinct thing. There is a very good YouTube video that covers the basic principles of We-Think to be found at http://youtube.com/watch?v=qiP79vYsfbo

(4) Guy Debord was a leader of the Situationist International group in France in the 1960s; their thought and actions are still a major influence on avant-gardists today, and The Society of the Spectacle (1967) is considered to have been a major catalyst for the Parisian riots of 1968.

(5) Leadbeater gave a talk about the link between the 20th century avant-garde and web culture at the British Library earlier this year. His notes are available on his website.

(6) Examples Leadbeater cites explain that IBM have donated over 500 software patents to the Open Source Foundation and fund Linux development with $100m a year, and Nokia has announced it will not take legal-action action against open-source applications of its patents: both companies hope to benefit from what will effectively be cost-free research by volunteer developers.

(7) Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur and futurist whose ideas on transhumanism and the technological singularity have both a cult following and bitter detractors. He has spoken at leading universities in America and at TED, and is well worth looking up.

(8) www.wecansolveit.org

http://www.charlesleadbeater.net