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the jazz age 
02.06.2007, 9:28 PM
One of the guiding lights of the Institute over the past few years has been a belief in the increasing value of collaboration, following the open source model the underlies much of the web. This has been something that came up during our very first project, thinking about the Gates; it underlies the concept of the networked book, and our subsequent pushes in that direction. Here's an issue with collaboration, as it tends to happen over the Internet, that's bothered me for a while: collaboration seems, at its face, to be inimical to design. Open source design is almost never good design. It may well be average design – the market is extremely efficient at sanding rough edges off of things – but I have a hard time thinking of instances where collaboration produces what could be acclaimed as good design.
(A pause to explicate my terms: in setting up this binary, I'm using "design" in a loose sense. Certainly I'm talking about how something looks, and the interplay of form and function. But I'm also talking about "design" in the sense of a designed object, a planned object, the disegno that Vasari describes as underlying a painting. Another caveat: this is mostly off-the-cuff writing. If this were if:book, I'd have more sources lined up, as opposed to vague generalizations and half-remembered references. But: this isn't if:book.)
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What do we think of as good design? The canonical example is Apple; it's not original, but I'll take them because everyone's familiar with them. Apple's design is good because they set up the constraints on their products very carefully. An iPod doesn't have as many features as many other MP3 players on the market, but it does the things that it can do very well. The iPod in the hand is the result of a hierarchy of values. Though there are almost certainly a lot of people (probably even a number of companies) involved in designing something like an iPod, we can presume that it's done in an authoritarian manner, with someone in charge of the various stages of the design all the way up the ladder to Steve Jobs, the benevolent despot. It's a top-down methodology.
This authoritarian model of design didn't begin with the corporation. It's roughly analogous to the way in which most art is constructed. To take a supremely designed piece of fiction, Joyce presumably began Ulysses by declaring that there would be three main characters, and each would have a section of the book, and the book would be divided into 18 parts, one for each hour of the day. Readers coming to Ulysses must realize that there have been distinct stylistic choices made in the design of the novel, and that the novel they're making their way through has been carefully constructed by a single guiding intelligence, that of James Joyce.
This isn't simply a matter of design: this is, in a sense, how we come to accord value to something. We think of Ulysses as important in part because we can tell that Joyce went to a lot of work to make it. This is far from the only component in how we come to declare something important, but it is an important part. Maybe what I'm getting at is really the modernist project: Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, a total experience.
Historically, collaboration requires concentrated resources: you generally needed to have all your people in one place. Opera, springing out of the theatrical tradition, is a good example of this. The advent of film wedded the creation of art to capitalism, in which vast amounts of capital and people were required to create a single work, creating an enormous industry. Though Final Cut and YouTube might bring film back from the industry to the people, the model's not dead: look at the game industry.
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"Design by committee" now has its own Wikipedia entry. There are no shortage of contemporary examples of what happens when too many cooks spoil the soup; look at the Freedom Tower; look at Microsoft's video satirizing how they would design iPod packaging; look at the ongoing disaster that is A Million Penguins.
I think the problem with "design by committee" is at the heart of Jaron Lanier's critique of Wikipedia and new forms of collaboration in "Digital Maoism," though I'm not sure his treatment of it is particularly useful. Rather than tarring everything with the same brush, I'd take a more nuanced approach: some collaborative projects work (like Wikipedia or YouTube) and others fail (as A Million Penguins almost certainly will). Why? I think the Institute needs to be looking at this. I would suggest that one major determinant of success or failure of collaborative projects are the constraints built into them: how they are designed.
We've been presupposing books that arise more or less organically, probably with some central idea from which all branches out. I think we need to be paying more attention to what can constitute that central idea. If Wikipedia is a networked book, we could say it centers around an idea something like "everything in the world can be described in summary". Contributors by and large follow this rule, adding and changing information. Wikipedia is based around the idea of objective truth: that whatever's been written can be gauged against the world. This gets Wikipedia into trouble whenever it ventures near areas where there's not really a single objective truth, but it's a decent idea for many things.
Compare A Million Penguins: Penguin's project is built around the idea of making a novel. Penguin seems to have gone into this in good faith; they even went to the trouble of putting together some ethical guidelines. I think there's a conceptual problem here: a novel, which depends on an animating intelligence, isn't the sort of structure that lends itself to being collectively written. You'd probably have the same problem with a cathedral (hey ESR) or a symphony.
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I'm not arguing that collaboration can't create something as grand as a symphony. It certainly can. But the things that collaboration can create are qualitatively different, and should be understood as such. (Bernard Rudofsky's Architecture without Architects could be brought in here, though that's been explored before.) When we think of collaboration in music, we don't think of the classical tradition; we think about jazz. I think that's a useful reference point: collaborators on networked books could be like jazz musicians, not having a score, but knowing how to improvise within predefined structures like twelve-bar blues. Even free jazz isn't free, though: when you listen to those old Ornette Coleman records now, the first thing you notice is how carefully structured they seem.
(There's something interesting about jazz becoming culturally dominant at the height of modernism; perhaps this is a natural response. Around the same time, the Surrealists were denigrating the novel as a form because it was too planned, too rational. They declared a similar preference for the improvised: automatic writing or drawing for example. There's an enormous amount of Surrealist poetry; a near-complete count of Surrealist novels could be made on two hands.)
What we need to be thinking about is how jazz players learn to be jazz players. You can't stick a classically trained trumpeter in a jazz combo and expect he'll do a fine job: he won't. But that's essentially what we're trying to do.
And: we need to be looking at how jazz is designed: what sort of structures lend themselves to improvisation and collaboration?
Posted by dan visel at February 6, 2007 9:28 PM
Comments
Pete Brownell, the School of Everything's coder, is very interesting on the subject of collaboration. He's been instrumental in setting up and running a number of very succesful open-source, rhizomatic art, business and peer learning groups and has more practical experience of how to make these things work than most.
He's very down on consensus decision-making, as he says (and I agree) that it produces nothing but power play, incoherence and mediocrity. Instead, for any group that wants to work seriously together to produce something, whether it's art or code or writing or whatever, you have to define what roles the work needs and then just get on with it. You can swap roles around, by all means, but you need to know what they are. For example, when we're brainstorming hard at SoE we take turns being the person with the right to say 'Just Fucking Do It'. It works very well. The structure stays flat, people self-select for bits of decision-making they feel equipped to lead on, and the work still gets done.
I think the same applies with writing. I posted something to that effect in a comment out front on one of Bob's posts about writing and authorship. (It's at http://sebastianmary.com/wordpress/?p=13 also for the record). The example discussed there is Pick Me Up, which succeeded for a while because it had the algorithms for the product absolutely sorted, but became unsustainable when it reached a certain size because its (offline, social) methodologies for stuff like defining and swapping roles, apprenticing newbies, giving access permissions etc weren't as well developed.
I think this is a huge, huge topic that's about to hit mainstream discussion. Paul Y (founder of Yellowikis, currently European marketing director at Social Text) tells me about the amount of work they have to do to train corporations in the culture required for wiki use before their clients can benefit from it. And Paul M reports from the RSA this morning that their new director's inaugural speech is all about 'Pro-Social Behaviour' - http://www.thersa.org.uk/fellows/social_behaviour.asp - the politics of bottom-up participation. Am currently trying to work out at the moment why I think that my argument the other day that the Web's Authors are not text writers but machine coders is pertinent too.
Sorry for unstructured braindump. Will cooks some more and add something to the Million Penguins Controversy shortly :)
Posted by: sebastian mary at February 7, 2007 7:13 AM
We seem to be dealing with two quite different concepts. One is, as Bob said somewhere, the notion of expanding the boundaries of a book to a much bigger circle of experience with a single author and the readers engaging in an exploration together. This is a text, a book, for which the comments in the margins become as dynamic and pertinent as the text itself. It is still sort of a top-down affair, the author if not omniscient, has an idea of where he is going. The reader is the one who has been empowered, whose questions and comments have resonance in the book. This is the full realization of the communicative act, where writer and reader share text, context, code and decoding. Even the contact, the medium of delivery, acquires a centrality that only editorial exegesis used to allow. Here the act of reading shares in the act of writing, but it is still short of what Borges formulated so many times, "to read is to write." But, beyond his theory of writing as a repetitive act, as tautology, the networked book shares with the scientific method, the "final" result is a product of collective knowledge.
The other one seems to be a question of genre. A myriad of authors, the proverbial too many cooks writing an original work, a novel, the "One Thousand Penguins" being the cautionary tale at hand. Because no expertise is necessary here, too many people are seduced into the act. The resulting chaos underlines a need for editors. Some of the participant writers resource to giving directions of what to do, and please, don't change the characters' names! Or, let's lock the wiki a few hours a day, lock the chapters in order to edit them one by one. The contact demands a structure, it can not be wide open. Let's place each chapter on a separate page to prevent reversion of the entire story. People can create new stories on new pages so multiple stories can coexist without replacing individual ones. Alternative versions of the novel are actually other novels, plagiarism ceases to have a meaning. Synopses show up before the text in written. Borges would have loved this, but on the other hand, this exercise is also the reminder of "La bibioteca de Babel." Its shelves filled with books containing all the possible combinations of the twenty-four orthographic symbols, the interpolation of each book in all books. The final result, the "novel"? An ever-changing text.
When Jaron Lanier http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html talks on "Digital Maoism" about a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all wise, he finds it dangerous. He feels that context has pretty much disappeared in Wikipedia, although he seems to forget that the aggregation there is done by humans, not by an algorithm. His main point, that it is important not to confuse the Internet with the voices it carries; ts beauty residing in its ability to connect people. The final product, he says, must follow some sort of systematic build, democracy as opposed to anarchy. Following Lanier's article, Clay Shirky comments that the value is in the tension created by the increase of the creative autonomy of the individual and the facilitation of group formation in the Internet. While, for Esther Dyson it is the possibility of people "sharpening their ideas against one another," sharing, and bettering, instead of editing. And, for Douglas Roshkoff, "the tags adorning Flickr photographs may never constitute an independently functioning intelligence, they do allow people to participate in something bigger than themselves, and foster a greater understanding of the benefits of collective action. They are a desocialized society's first baby steps toward acting together with more intelligence than people can alone."
The process is conspicuous, the morphing takes place before our eyes, but how to handle the end result? What is it anyway? While great advances in the sciences have been collective efforts, the self-created creators have found good tools in the web to generate and to distribute their products. The shelf life of these products is still to be seen.
The social cohesion of a networked collective lays on the devotion of those in charge of keeping it going and on how unclogged the filters are kept. The collective will collapse without individuals assuring its existence. The computer has fostered individual creation and the Internet has allowed for those individuals to connect, but to "read" the products a new literacy is key. The collective one imagines, and trusts, is assumed to be a learned one, but that is only one of the many elements of the communicative act.
Thinking about musical collaboration, one can think of many variations. Ligeti composed his Violin Concerto for Saschko Gawriloff who also wrote the final cadenza. Ligeti believed in open-ended compositions and the enormously challenging cadenza belongs so much to Ligeti's musical idiom that it is rarely acknowledged to be Gawriloff's. About 13 years later, John Zorn also composed a final cadenza for this concert. Bach's St Mark's Passion, which was either left very unfinished, or had vanished almost entirely, was reconstructed by Tom Koopman in 1999. Koopman used Picander's text (librettist for the St. Matthew's Passion,) and followed Bach's favorite formula; borrowing from himself. He borrowed from Bach and composed some parts himself. The piece, criticized by the orthodox, is quite beautiful, original and definitely in Bach's musical idiom. Then we have the jam session, which in all its exuberance and improvisational character, has been the blueprint for new forms that later have became genre. All variations of collaboration, the final product; a piece in concert.
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