This is about sheep. Well, actually it’s about the irony of the online left, but sheep play a role. Stick with me. When I teach I often make use of the economic metaphor, The Tragedy of the Commons. It’s an old idea made popular by ecologist Garrett Hardin in his 1968 essay for Science. Here it is in a nutshell.

A group of farmers graze their sheep on a common field of grass. All is well until one farmer decides he wants to increase his herd to boost his profit at market. So, his herd eats more of the common pasture. He benefits individually but the collective bears the weight of the disadvantage (less grass for the other herds). Everybody watches the guy and realizes that their net gain in increasing their herd is greater than their distributed net loss and, well, things go to hell in a handbasket rapidly and the common good of the pasture is turned into a mudslide. It’s a classic story of human greed despite the inevitable consequence.

So, it was interesting for me to run across the metaphor in social economist Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody. Shirky argues that a safeguard against the “tragedy” is a set of social rules that, in this case, forbid overgrazing. In the absence of those rules effective collective action is unlikely.

And, for Shirky, collective action is the Holy Grail of the new types of communities that are being spawned by the communication power of the Web. He views social interactions online as rungs in a ladder.

The first, simplest rung is Sharing. Photographers worldwide, for example, who use common tags on the photosharing site flickr, share. They do this independently of others and may be wholly unaware of other photographersâe(TM) actions. Nonetheless, they relatively passively can create a shared resource of images about poverty, homelessness, pregnancy or, more often, cute babies.

The next rung is cooperation, where people associate themselves with a group and engage in social discourse. On flickr or You Tube this is done by commenting on photos or videos, joining photo groups or pools on flickr. It can also result in collaborative production, which Shirky views as more complex as it requires that group members give over individual credit to a collective. Co-writing/editing a wikipedia article is a good example.

The final rung is Collective Action, where a group not only shares content, and collectively creates and comments on content, but also works together toward a collective goal selflessly. As Shirky points out, collective action means that different members of a group will differ in opinion and not all the decisions in service to the final vision will be agreeable to all the members.

Shirky says that the Web has made all these forms of organization almost frictionless, in the sense that the cost (in terms of time, resources or money) is so dramatically low that undertakings impossible using traditional, corporation-based hierarchies are now feasible. Try managing a team of hundreds of international photographers shooting images of Olympic flame protests, for example, without flickr.

So, here’s the sheep I’ve been counting while I couldn’t sleep. The Web is an ideal tool for collective action. And, collective action is the progressive left’s best tool to really make a difference instead of just dreaming about it, or deluding ourselves.

And yet, the Tragedy of the Commons rears its head. In my experience organizations on the left, ironically far more than the right, are quick to horde audience and opportunities in the name of ideological purity. Here the common pasture is not grass but the hearts and minds of Canadians on the edges, or the distant plains of our aspirations for a fair and sustainable future.

Examples? The NDP and the Green Party in Canada. Or, this week, Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society pissing in the same pool Greenpeace swims in.In the U.S., the way Ralph Nader monkey-wrenched the Democratic option in Florida.

Instead of working together for a deeply resonant collective action that could make ripples beyond our own small circle, we too often are willing to bifurcate at a sneeze. Instead of seeing that a shared long term vision requires short term disappointment and disagreement, we often take our ball and go home, viewing some other faction as “the man” or having sold out to commercial, ideological or political false gods.

The right is far less guilty of this. The cabal of neo-conservatives around George Bush know that Southern fundamentalist Christians are often nutbars. But they are useful nutbars, long-term, so they put up with goofy ranting about Creationism, gather that support and move on.

So, it could be that the progressive left has been handed the most anti-establishment tool for frictionless social action that has ever been created, and we might not have the wit to use it. There are some hopeful signs, I think. The relatively young Canadian media alliance that includes representatives from The Tyee, New Internationalist, Briarpatch, Geist, Shameless, rabble.ca and others is a wonderful initiative that should see us pooling technologies, content and perhaps audiences in the future.

I’m heartened by the multi-national Olympic torch relay protests, which as I write this have turned the London and Paris torch bearing into PR nightmares for the Chinese government. And, I really like the work the CitizenShift fuelled Cinema Politica is doing knitting together film exhibits, festivals and sites from across the country in one online uberculture jam.

But, despite those bright lights, I worry that, ironically, for groups that care about the environment, when too many of us get into a room we are eager to let our dogmatic sheep graze with abandon, making a metaphorical mudslide of our own.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...