I must do a proper 'blog all dog-eared pages' about Steven Johnson's The Invention Of Air because it's packed with excellent stuff, but I wanted to mention a particular aspect first. Clay Shirky was in London last week, talking at the ICA and LSE, and making dents around the internet, so while I was reading The Invention Of Air I was thinking about Here Comes Everybody, and an interesting parallel popped up. In answering a question about how to make a living in a world of generosity and unmonetisable content (especially with reference to newspapers) Mr Shirky said something I thought tremendously helpful (and I'm probably paraphrasing badly ):
"We're not going from a world of Business Model A to one of Business Model B, we're going from Business Model A to Business Models A to Z".
That seemed very true and smart to me. So much of the debate about new media, deaths of media, blah blah blah, is about what's the new model going to be? If it's not A, then what's B? when of course, there probably won't be a single dominant model, there'll be tons of different ones. Old ones, new ones, all mixed together, often within the same organisation. At the moment our organisational options are limited: there's Government, The Corporation, The Charity and The Cooperative. And that's about it. The internet means that (as Mr Shirky says) Group Action Just Got Easier but as anyone who tries to start a new sort of organisation will tell you, the legal niceties haven't caught up with that yet.
And then I read this in The Invention Of Air:
"One of the things that makes Priestly's career so interesting to us now is that his work lay at the intersection point of four institutional models of idea production, two of which were just emerging into a recognizable shape during his lifetime, and two there were just beginning a long slide into relative obscurity. Today, we take it for granted that advances in science and technology are cultivated in two primary environments: private businesses or public organizations...
But Priestly was only a tourist in those two soon-to-be-dominant environments; his career mostly flourished in a different soil. First there was the model of the solo, free agent investigator - working alone in this lab, supported by a single patron or small group of patrons who refrained from meddling with his research objectives. And there was the loose connectivity of the small society - the Honest Whigs and the Lunaticks - a group of intellectual allies with different fields of expertise, sharing insight and inspiration (along with the porter and Stilton), supporting one another emotionally and, at times, financially....The amateur and the small society were the two prevailing frameworks for Enlightenment science, and the were uniquely suited for a maverick, cross-disciplinary thinker like Priestly."
The amateur and the small society seem like exactly the organisational models that the web supports so well. Perhaps they're due for a revival and we can find financial and legal frameworks to support them. And perhaps the old idea of subscription might be one such way:
"The eighteenth-century concept of subscribing is one without an exact modern equivalent, falling somewhere between a magazine subscription and a charitable donation to a museum or park or university. The donation came with perks - Priestly's subscribers were sent first editions of all his writing - but the money contributed generally exceeded by a wide margin the market value of the publications. It was nice to be first in line to read Priestly's latest, of course, but one subscribed because Priestly himself was a cause worth supporting. For Priestly, subscription was a way of diversifying the patronage system; rather than tying his fortunes to the whims of a single aristocrat, Priestly was assembling a broader support network to keep his ideas alive."
Which reminds you of Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans idea, but applied to the sciences rather than the arts. Which would be good.
If I had a lot of time and money right now I think I'd be spending it on investigating and inventing new legal frameworks for group activity; commercial, non-commercial and all the interesting hybrids of the two. And perhaps I'd start by looking at some of these Englightenment models.
Anyway. Just a thought.