The Blog of Curtis Chambers

A trend that I’ve noticed with the rise of “Web 2.0″ and open source software is something that I call Digital Communism.  The concept is similar to regular Communism in the sense that everyone pitches in for the good of the populace, but doesn’t relate to economic systems as much as it does our digital lifestyles and software.  Here I will present the different classes of users that power Digital Communism so that I can better illustrate what it all means.

Contributors

There are many ways that people contribute to the Digital Collective.  People write articles in Wikipedia, upload videos to YouTube and submit news articles to Digg.  None of the people doing this get any sort of financial gain, but rather do it because they want to share their knowledge and media with others.  In reality, a lot of it is probably powered by the narcissism of the current generation wanting to be noticed in an increasingly anonymous society, but it’s a different type of currency than money; it’s social currency.

In the realm of open-source software, these are the people that submit their code to the world for scrutiny and improvement.  They are people like Linus Torvalds, who started a small software project as a hobby that eventually turned into Linux, which is the operating system that powers the Web 2.0 revolution.

Contributors make up about 1% of a particular community’s user base.

Participants

There are also many users that don’t necessarily contribute to the Digital Collective, but they actively participate by leaving opinions, correcting mistakes or tagging items.  Rather than create uniquely new content, they edit, critique and help organize the contributions of others.  In some communities, this has the great benefit of improving the work and offering alternative perspectives.  In others, it is not so valuable.

Participants in the open-source community are extremely valuable as they find and report bugs, help fix bugs or even assist with documentation.  Some might say that the participants are even more valuable than the contributors as they help improve the quality of the raw contribution.

Participants make up about 10% of a particular community’s user base.

Passive Users

The major critique of Communism is that not everyone does their fair share and that holds true in Digital Communism.  The passive users of the Digital Collective are the ones that absorb the information but do not interact with it.  They read, they watch and they listen but they do not want to be heard.  However, that does not mean they are without value.  Without consumers, production would be for naught.

Users in the open-source community give a particular product a base of users, which increases its clout as a product.  Firefox claims to have almost 400 million downloads, which gives it a lot more exposure than if it was only used by some guy in his basement.

Also, over time users tend to become participants, who then in turn become contributors.  One example of this is Facebook, which used memcached to make its site faster, but then needed to make it better so they fixed some bugs and now they’re the biggest contributor of code to the project.

Passive users make up about 89% of a particular community’s user base.

As you can see, the different types of users reflect the different statuses of the users.  In fact, the distribution of users sort of resembles the distribution of the medieval caste system.  Back then, you had one ruler with a small group of advisors and aristocrats, and a huge lower class of peasants working in the fields.

The industrial revolution then brought many of the lower class up into the middle class.  The real question is if the same will happen with Digital Communism.  If a large majority of the users start participating with the media, what would happen?  It could either trigger the Golden Age of Information or perhaps go the complete other way and degrade the quality of information by saturation.  It will be interesting to see how it all turns out.

I just got back from a week in Michigan for a wedding, so that’s why I haven’t been able to post in awhile.  That said, I learned a lot from that trip as I hadn’t been to the midwest before.  I’ll summarize it all in a list:

1. The travel industry needs some major reform.  It’s such a ridiculously complex system for something that really isn’t that complex.  Fare codes, price changes, etc.  I nominate Apple to create iLine, the new lickable, streamlined airline that doesn’t cause major headaches and makes you actually want to travel.
2. Michigan is actually pretty cool.  I met some great people there, saw some beautiful scenery and ate some great tasting, horribly unhealthy food.  Which brings me to point #3.
3. America has a huge health problem.  As much as I’d love to have national healthcare here, I really think that the culture has to change first for it to be economically viable.  The “all-you-can-eat” mentality needs to be destroyed and our sense of value needs to be represented by quality instead of quantity.  However, a mindset change is much harder to do than just throwing money at a problem.  I’m not really sure how to approach this as western culture has a “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality, but our personal health and healthcare systems are both broken but no one realizes it.
4. People in rural areas get married much younger than in metropolitan ones.  I knew this before, but I didn’t see a single girl in her 20’s in Traverse City that didn’t have a wedding ring.  I started thinking about it and I think there’s two things that contribute to this.  The first is basic economics.  Since there’s only a few girls in the city, the demand for them is much higher because of the fundamental lack of supply.  In big cities, there’s a virtually unlimited supply of new people to meet, so the pressure isn’t really there.  The second thing is that the local culture that enforces what the economics dictate.  People get married just because other people are.  I know I personally never even think about marriage until I realize that a bunch of my friends are getting married.  I think, “uh oh, I better get on this before I’m Weird Uncle Curtis to all their kids!”
5. Almost everyone in Michigan drives an American car, which is inversely proportional to California.  Similarly, a lot of people in California have Apple computers, but that’s not really the case in the midwest as they see them as “those hippie computers.”  I just find it interesting how products have such strong geographical influences.

That’s pretty much all I learned. I had a great time at Emily’s graduation party and at Shayna’s wedding.  I’ll upload the pictures to my Flickr account soon.  I’ll be back to posting more regularly now as I have several topics ready to talk about.

Is capitalism really a sustainable economic system in an age of environmentally friendly practices and declining growth rates of populations? This question came up in my mind after reading about San Francisco’s ban of both plastic grocery bags and plastic water bottles. The move by the city makes for less waste and forces people to reuse materials as opposed to just throwing away single use containers. However, the companies that produce these plastic bottles and bags are crying foul about the whole thing because it will cut into their profit margins. Hence my question about the viability of our current system, because capitalism promotes consuming more and more, while environmental practices promote consuming less and less.

The other factor against capitalism is declining growth in population. There have been many people closely studying the growth of the world population and the most common consensus is that we’re seeing a phenomenon very similar to the shape of an arc tangent.

Now while population is still growing, the concern comes when it starts growing at much slower rates. Wall Street doesn’t reward growth, it rewards growth beyond what is expected. So according to the above graph, we’re rapidly approaching the cusp of the exponential growth we’ve been experiencing for the last 100-200 years, which coincidentally is about how long capitalism has been around.

So what’s next? What economic system can support a slowly declining populous that reduces, reuses and recycles? And once we determine a system that can support that, when will the revolution come and how violently will it be opposed by those with money?