Commercializing Community
C.S. Lewis used to say that for each new book he read, he would read two old books — books written before he was born, preferably. The point to this seemingly odd reading habit was to avoid the blind spot — every age has a blind spot, a obsessive passion around which everything else must fall or be crushed. Much like ages, each profession also has a blind spot of the same sort.
Technology is no exception.
So what is the blind spot of the technology world? I would say it’s human nature. Engineers have a very bad habit of making people into manipulable objects — for instance, “the soul is software, and the body is hardware.” The analogy might be a good one, but it’s also, like most analogies, decidedly not the whole story.
This belief that we can build a community based purely on technology, or that we can somehow commercialize a community like Reddit, is a symptom of this problem. You just can’t treat communities — people writ large — like an object that can be built, adjusted, and will then cough up a profit on demand. It’ll work for a little while, perhaps, but people just aren’t built that way over the long run. You can try to gain commercial value from such a community, but in trying to manage the community for commercial purposes — commercializing community — you risk destroying the community itself — for many of the same reasons you risk destroying an economic system when you try to control it centrally.
It’s not even a matter of being able to control large, complex, system — humans are a different class of problem than a large network. Life isn’t just a higher order of complexity — it is, as the guard said in The Wizard of Oz, a horse of a different color. It’s unmitigated hubris to think we can “manage” humans in the way a large scale network of computers can be managed or controlled.
Perhaps what we need to do is to read some books that lie outside our immediate world of technology — a little philosophy, or even (God forbid) a bit of religious reasoning, or perhaps a strong dose of economics.
Or maybe just some old books.