The power of the powerless
In the intro to the spectacular primer “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” Bill Bryson congratulates you, the reader, for being here.
To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you… It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.
Interestingly, he goes on to point out that none of the individual atoms care a jot about you; in fact, they haven’t the slightest idea that you’re even there. And that’s one of the ironies that lie in the power of numbers: the sheer volume of efforts enabling the achievement of monumental tasks mean that the impact of the individual can’t be felt. If you want to tap into that power, you have to be willing to become practically powerless.
I didn’t vote in the 2000 election. I was out of town and I figured it was just too complicated for me, and, anyway, one vote doesn’t make a difference, right? You all know the results, and one of the most hotly contested counties in Florida was the one I lived in at the time, where I would have been registered to vote, where my voice could have been one of only 500-odd needed to swing the balance of history in a dramatically different direction.
It’s a an obvious and cliched theme that appears over and over, in crowd-surfing and non-violent protests, in Bill Bryson’s biology and the emergence of YouTube:
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Even events which appear to be one-man shows — a gymnast pulling off a particularly daring feat at the Olympics — become more special when you’re part of a big honking group of people going “ooh, aah,” rather than just you by yourself. Part of this is because we recognize the increased pressure from the audience, but another part of this is that it’s just more fun to share the appreciation.
The direction of the Web, and the reason that it continues to get better, is towards ever-greater participation in a giant community. Web 3.0 (or whatever you want to call it) is us, and, just like Bryson’s atoms, the vast majority of us only know our own meager existence. We don’t recognize that the avatar we put up on MySpace is a part of developing the next generation of the Web — but it is, as much as an atom in your eye is a part of helping you to see.
Developers, take heed: Web 3.0 will be owned by apps that recognize that a billion small contributions are more powerful than a single behemoth. The meek are indeed inheriting the Earth, bit by incremental byte.
