In these examples, the “one” in first place emerges through the generation of a common field. These commons can be generated in a variety of ways: in comments on a post (think of Reddit and the ways that readers vote posts up and down; Holland’s examples are Slashdot and Kuro5hin), in web articles (think Huf ington Post blogs or other sites offering lots of clickbait), on Twitter (via hashtags), and through competitions (think of contests for the best city tourism app), to use but a few examples. The contest generates a common field that will produce a winner. The more participation there is— the larger the field—the greater becomes the inequality, that is to say, the greater is the difference between the one and the many. Expanding the field produces the one.
Holland, like so many advocates of self-organization, ignores the structure that free choice, growth, and preferential attachment produce. Using Wikipedia to illustrate his point, Holland emphasizes the equality of Wikipedians.<sup>23</sup> Clay Shirky, however, notes that “the spontaneous division of labor driving Wikipedia wouldn’t be possible if there were concern for reducing inequality. On the contrary, most large social experiments are engines for harnessing inequality rather than limiting it.”<sup>24</sup> The so-called wisdom of crowds doesn’t spontaneously generate a free and equitable order. And contra Holland, networked experiments in decentralized self-organization don’t lead in the direction of de-hierarchicized social change but rather toward ever more extreme differentiation between the few and many. Networked communication doesn’t eliminate hierarchy. It entrenches hierarchy by using our own choices against us.
Although it may seem far removed from the brutal mob of the nineteenth century, the twenty-first century’s wise crowd is similar in one crucial respect: both attempt to prevent the crowd from introducing a gap through which the people can appear. Depictions of primitive and atavistic crowds in the nineteenth century naturalize their disparagement and repression. Social order and mob rule are antithetical. These people don’t belong in politics. They are not the people with a divisive claim to justice. Twenty-first century evocations of the wisdom of crowds like Surowiecki’s and Holland’s likewise efface the crowd gap, this time absorbing it into idealized market and networked processes. Militant, disruptive, political crowds become so many selforganizing units, the self-interests of which naturally converge. Nineteenth-century treatments of the crowd as a mob acknowledge antagonism, but try to prevent it from being linked to the people. Twenty-first century versions of smart mobs deny antagonism altogether, substituting the interactions of individuals and small groups for organized political struggle. Surowiecki and Holland try to ensure that these interactions don’t coalesce into provisional heterogeneous beings but remain differentiated singularities.
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