Barack's List

It seems like two basic rules of the natural world and the Web 2.0 computing world are the following:

1) Let the users do the work of creation, invention and operation
2) create a framework of mathematical patterns/rules/formulas within which the organisms/users/market participants operate, and guide a light maintenance system that can come in and clean things up if there are major problems.

For a take on how "light governance" rules the natural world, consider this NYT piece on how cities are formed without any strong hand -- other than mathematical formulas -- guiding them:

The mathematics of cities was launched in 1949 when George Zipf, a linguist working at Harvard, reported a striking regularity in the size distribution of cities. He noticed that if you tabulate the biggest cities in a given country and rank them according to their populations, the largest city is always about twice as big as the second largest, and three times as big as the third largest, and so on. In other words, the population of a city is, to a good approximation, inversely proportional to its rank. Why this should be true, no one knows.

Even more amazingly, Zipf’s law has apparently held for at least 100 years. Given the different social conditions from country to country, the different patterns of migration a century ago and many other variables that you’d think would make a difference, the generality of Zipf’s law is astonishing.

Keep in mind that this pattern emerged on its own. No city planner imposed it, and no citizens conspired to make it happen. Something is enforcing this invisible law, but we’re still in the dark about what that something might be.

There are dozens of other natural examples of this phenomenon in a book that I've flagged before called Emergence, by Steven Berlin Johnson. As Johnson hints at in his book, this emergent phenomenon also applies to a totally different part of our society -- Web 2.0 companies. Union Square Ventures, in a post I've flagged before, expands on this concept. According to them, Web 2.0 is a perfect example of letting users generate the content while the rulers generate and maintain the rules (often extensive) within which the users act:

We have marveled more than once on this blog about the remarkable efficiency of Craigslist. That service is essentially a very lightweight governance system that manages an enormous collection of users who contribute all of the content and much of the oversight that makes the service work. It is because Craig and Jim focus on managing the efforts of their users instead of doing the work of those users that Craigslist is so phenomenally efficient. Many of the most interesting web services are like Craigslist, at their core, lightweight governance systems. Facebook and Twitter come to mind.

Now compare this to Franklin Foer and Noam Schrieber's insightful post from The New Republic discussing Obama's guiding political philosophy. They write:

In Obama's state, government never supplants the market or stifles its inner workings--the old forms of statism that didn't wash economically, and certainly not politically. But government does aggressively prod markets--by planting incentives, by stirring new competition--to achieve the results he prefers.

I think that the fog of the financial crisis has obscured some of President Obama's general attitude toward liberal governance. To my mind, there's no way that Obama's philosophical side is pleased with the government's role in General Motors or the financial markets in general. I think he'd love to emulate the elegant way that some of these web services have made themselves relevant in people's lives. I think that in Obama's ideal world, government would look like the Union Square Ventures' description of the ideal Web 2.0 company:

Today, no one tells you to use Facebook. There are no employer sponsored training sessions on the use of del.icio.us. The burden is on the designer of the system to meet a need, entertain, or inform their users. They also have to seduce those users, hiding complexity, revealing one layer at time, always enticing, never intimidating, until the user one day finds they are intimately familiar with power and the pleasures of the service.

If one day we find that we are "intimately familiar with the power and the pleasures of government services," it would be pretty much a 180 degree turnaround from our normal conception of government. The government that Reagan railed against was a government that was impersonal, unsustainable, and distant. If Obama can get us to trust government like we trust Facebook -- that is, to trust both its power and its empowerment -- he'll go a long way toward defanging Reagan's old anti-government arguments. If he does that, he'll set the groundwork for an entire generation to trust government again.