Here Comes Everybody

Why do so many powerful new movements, projects, and networks emerge outside of traditional institutions? In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky argues that the defining change of our digital age is not new technology itself, but the collapse of transaction costs—the time, money, and effort once required to coordinate group activity. When coordination becomes cheap, people can do things together that previously demanded companies, governments, or professional hierarchies.

From Costly Coordination to Spontaneous Collaboration

Economist Ronald Coase long ago observed that firms exist to reduce the cost of coordinating work. Shirky extends this logic to the social web: as communication, sharing, and organization become almost free, the monopoly that institutions had on coordination dissolves. What you now see are people self-organizing at scale—for civic action, creative projects, or mutual aid—without needing management layers or formal structure.

Shirky’s emblematic examples—like the “Stolen Sidekick” saga, where a lost phone mobilized thousands online—show how individual motivation plus low-cost tools produce rapid group formation. Publishing globally now costs almost nothing; search surfaces relevant allies instantly; communication is asynchronous, cheap, and borderless. This combination makes new forms of group effort—once below the “Coasean floor”—economically possible.

The Ladder of Participation

Shirky organizes group effort as a ladder with three rungs: sharing, cooperation, and collective action. At the base, sharing (like posting photos on Flickr) spreads awareness with minimal coordination. Cooperation, as in collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, demands adaptation and governance to build something shared. The highest rung, collective action, binds people to mutual risk—like Voice of the Faithful challenging the Catholic Church after the Boston clergy scandals. Each step upward requires deeper trust, negotiation, and collective identity.

Mass Amateurization and Publish-Then-Filter

Once publishing, recording, and distributing information become universal, what counts as “professional” authority changes. Shirky’s phrase “publish, then filter” captures a reversal of the old media order: amateurs now produce first, and social mechanisms—comments, links, votes, and reputation—filter value afterward. The Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond story illustrates this shift: bloggers, unconstrained by newsroom routines, amplified a story that traditional media had largely ignored, forcing political consequences. (Note: this parallels Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, which also links peer production with democratized information.)

Why Institutions Struggle to Adapt

Institutions derive power from control—control of information channels, membership, and agenda-setting. When networks allow people to coordinate freely, that control crumbles. New groups such as VOTF or the Coalition for an Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights scaled from a few angry individuals to national forces in months, simply by removing friction from communication. The “Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” then, is that individuals can now exert collective pressure or create large-scale value using tools previously reserved for corporations or states.

Good and Bad Freedom

This freedom is morally neutral. The same technology that enables democratic uprisings or disaster relief also enables extremist movements or harmful self-help communities (like Pro-Ana forums). Shirky calls this the paradox of freedom: when coordination is cheap, both constructive and destructive groups proliferate. The challenge for society becomes balancing openness with responsibility, favoring reaction and mitigation over prevention and censorship.

Core Message

The collapse of coordination costs lets ordinary people act together effectively, challenging the logic of institutions, redefining media and commerce, and expanding both the possibilities and perils of collective power.

Across its case studies—from Linux to Leipzig, Wikipedia to the Sichuan earthquake—Shirky’s book charts a social transformation: when communication tools become abundant, the constraints that once required formal organization vanish. What remains is the messy, creative, and increasingly decisive world of self-organized collaboration.

Shirky’s central economic argument begins with one simple principle: lower transaction costs create new forms of collective action. Transaction costs—time, attention, search effort, and coordination overhead—determined what groups could exist in the past. When tools like the web, instant messaging, and mobile phones slash these costs, previously latent groups can suddenly act together.

The Coasean Threshold

Ronald Coase’s theory suggested that organizations exist because they reduce the cost of internal coordination. Shirky extends this logic to social life: as coordination becomes nearly free, formal structures are no longer efficient. Ad hoc groups arise faster and scale larger than institutions ever could. He calls this crossing below the “Coasean floor” —a space where collective effort was once valuable but too costly to attempt.

How Latent Groups Emerge

Latent groups are people who share an interest but lack easy connection. The Internet and mobile networks unlock them. For example, when HSBC revoked student overdrafts, Wes Streeting rallied thousands through Facebook, forcing the bank to reverse course. Similarly, Kate Hanni turned anger about an airline delay into the national “Coalition for an Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights.” The key difference from 1990s activism was not greater outrage but cheaper communication and mobilization.

From Planning to Real-Time Coordination

Mobile tools collapse the distinction between advance planning and moment‑to‑moment coordination. The “call me when you get there” habit scales up to spontaneous protests and responses. For instance, Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El Fattah used Twitter to report arrests and summon allies within minutes, reversing power dynamics on the ground. Real-time coordination makes collective action both faster and more flexible than traditional campaigns.

Practical Takeaway

If you want to catalyze a group, remove friction. Make the first action tiny, make participation visible, and allow social amplification to multiply effort. When the cost of joining falls low enough, even people who care only a little can contribute meaningfully—and in aggregate, small efforts create massive impacts.

Key lesson

The lower the barrier to organize, the more previously impossible group behaviors—political, creative, or communal—move from imagination to reality.

Shirky introduces a simple framework for how online groups evolve—a three-step ladder ascending from sharing, to cooperation, to collective action. Each rung requires increasing synchronization, trust, and willingness to subordinate personal preference for group purpose.

Sharing: Low Coordination, High Reach

Sharing is the foundation. On Flickr, hundreds of users posted Mermaid Parade photographs independently but employed the same tag—creating a spontaneous, searchable collection. No central planner; just a shared tag language and minimal friction. Sharing exposes others’ knowledge and sparks new learning interactions (as with HDR photography discussions that turned into informal tutorials).

Cooperation: Mutual Adjustment and Trust

Cooperation demands coordination—people must adapt to one another. Wikipedia editors agree on norms, resolve disputes, and co-author pages. That negotiation process gives birth to governance structures: talk pages, arbitration committees, rollback rights. In coding communities, or open design collectives, similar implicit norms emerge through practice.

Collective Action: Binding Commitments

The hardest step is collective action, where the group acts as one. Voice of the Faithful, born from outrage at clerical abuse revelations, expanded from 30 people in a basement to 25,000 members in months. That scale transformed isolated sentiment into concrete reform efforts against powerful institutions. Success required governance, communication channels, and shared purpose—aligning personal and collective incentives.

Application for you

To organize effectively, diagnose which rung of the ladder your project occupies. Over-manage sharing and it dies; under-structure collective action and it fragments. Align motivation with structure at each stage.

Before the web, content creation and distribution required expensive infrastructure. That scarcity created professional gatekeepers—editors, reporters, producers—who decided what counted as news or art. Shirky calls the new order mass amateurization: publishing is now so cheap and easy that filtering shifts from pre‑publication vetting to post‑publication reputation and sharing.

From Filter‑Then‑Publish to Publish‑Then‑Filter

Traditional newspapers filtered content before release; now, audiences participate in filtering afterward. Bloggers, commenters, and aggregators create a continuous social feedback loop. The Trent Lott case captures this inversion: decentralized bloggers amplified an overlooked remark until major media followed, toppling a political leader. Authority now arises from collective attention rather than institutional credentials.

Legal and Cultural Consequences

When anyone can publish, defining who counts as a journalist becomes legally tricky. The Judith Miller and Josh Wolf cases showed that professional privileges (like reporter’s shield laws) no longer map neatly onto open publishing ecosystems. This echoes the Gutenberg moment: just as printing undermined the scribe’s monopoly, digital distribution reshapes all communicative professions.

Failure for Free

With near‑zero publication costs, experimentation explodes. Most blog posts, wikis, or open‑source projects fail, but failure is cheap. The few successes—Linux, Wikipedia, Groklaw—repay the losses many times over. In open systems, the cost of deciding not to try can exceed the cost of trying. Firms structured around scarce production struggle to match this “failure for free” environment.

Takeaway

You thrive in this ecosystem by publishing early, inviting correction, and letting the crowd filter value. Openness replaces prediction as the engine of discovery.

Wikipedia embodies Shirky’s argument that large, loosely managed efforts can outperform formal institutions when participation costs are low. Born from Nupedia’s failure—a slow, expert-driven encyclopedia—Wikipedia succeeded by making editing open to anyone. Its design leverages the law of large numbers: with enough contributors, errors are reversible and quality trends upward.

Division of Labor Without Management

Hundreds of editors improve even obscure pages over time. Some fix spelling, others add sources. Because each edit is logged, transparent, and reversible, the system tolerates vandalism and error without collapsing. The volunteer base follows Gabriel’s “worse is better” philosophy—imperfect beginnings invite widespread contribution and subsequent refinement.

Governance and Motivation

Wikipedia’s rules—neutral point of view, verifiability, civility—evolved bottom‑up. Enforcement occurs socially, by consensus and reversion, rather than through central authority. Contributors act from pride, curiosity, and affection—a “renewable resource,” as Shirky analogizes to the Ise Shrine’s cyclical rebuilding. That reservoir of intrinsic motivation sustains enormous scale without salary or hierarchy.

Power‑Law Participation

Activity in such communities follows a power law: a few users contribute most content, while the majority contribute little or none. This inequality is predictable, not pathological. Design must therefore empower super‑contributors but accommodate casual users. Recognize that moderation, repair, and leadership often come from a small, stable core—a pattern echoed in open source and online forums alike.

Practical Principle

When contribution is easy and correction easier, an unmanaged collective can rival or exceed professional production over time.

Shirky weaves network theory into social practice by highlighting Small World networks—systems featuring tight local clusters connected by a few long-range links. This structure explains how information, influence, and coordination spread so efficiently in social networks.

Bonding and Bridging Capital

Drawing from Robert Putnam, Shirky distinguishes bonding capital (deep ties among similar members) from bridging capital (connections across diverse groups). Innovation thrives on bridging: Ronald Burt’s research shows that individuals who span “structural holes” often produce the most creative ideas. For you, cultivating connectors across networks multiplies impact far more than merely increasing headcount.

Real-World Illustrations

Services like Dodgeball, invented by Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, turned friend-of-a-friend ties into real encounters. Joi Ito’s #joiito IRC channel similarly blended tight bonding and expansive bridging by welcoming newcomers through contextual tools like “jibot.” In politics, bridging explains both success (cross-community activism) and failure (the Howard Dean campaign’s overreliance on internal enthusiasm without external connectors).

Insight

A few well-placed connectors drastically shorten communication paths, enabling movements and ideas to spread faster than centralized messaging ever could.

When you design any shared project online, its success depends on three interlocking elements—the Promise, the Tool, and the Bargain. Shirky’s model explains why some communities thrive while others collapse despite good intentions.

The Promise

The Promise answers “why should I join?” It must be compelling and plausible. Voice of the Faithful offered a balanced message: “Keep the faith, change the church.” Linux promised a small, fun project; contributors stayed because that modest start proved genuine. Even negative communities like Pro‑Ana thrive because they deliver the promise of belonging and affirmation—they fulfill a psychological, not institutional, need.

The Tool

The Tool governs how the promise is enacted. Tools have natural tempos and sweet spots: small, intimate groups need chat or messaging; large, dispersed ones need archives and asynchronous coordination. Mismatched tools—like trying to run rapid rescue on slow public forums—doom projects regardless of passion. Choosing the right medium for the group’s size and urgency amplifies success.

The Bargain

Bargains define mutual expectations. Linus Torvalds used open licenses (GPL) to guarantee fairness; Jimmy Wales made Wikipedia nonprofit to maintain trust. By contrast, Encarta’s top‑down terms alienated users. Bargains can be implicit—like Digg users’ expectation of openness, which forced management to reverse censorship decisions. Your task as organizer is to make that implicit contract visible and credible.

Guiding Principle

Align motivation (Promise), method (Tool), and norms (Bargain) before scaling. A community built on misalignment collapses under its own confusion.

Speed changes everything. Shirky shows how instantaneous communication transforms power dynamics through information cascades—moments when everyone realizes that everyone else shares the same truth. That visibility can topple fear and produce rapid mobilization.

Information Cascades and Public Awareness

Susanne Lohmann’s study of Leipzig’s 1989 protests demonstrated how repeated safe demonstrations eroded fear of reprisal. Modern tools accelerate this cascade—shared videos, tweets, and updates make success visible instantly. As Shirky explains, transparency acts as fuel for courage.

Flash Mobs and Tactical Innovation

Bill Wasik’s playful flash mobs became a template for serious activism. In Belarus, protestors eating ice cream together used absurdity and visibility to challenge repression. Like radios in Blitzkrieg, digital tools gain real power only when paired with new tactics; technology plus creative use equals strategic advantage.

Global Crises and Visibility

The 2008 Sichuan earthquake illustrated global amplification. Citizen posts on QQ and early tweets spread reports faster than authorities could react. Wikipedia pages, donation sites, and missing‑person boards appeared within hours. The same social cable united Chinese and Western audiences, turning a disaster story into a political reckoning about corruption and transparency.

Lesson

Speed amplifies both truth and risk. When everyone can document and broadcast immediately, governments, corporations, and citizens operate in permanent visibility.

Cheap coordination redefines the relationship between individuals and institutions. Shirky applies Coase’s theory of the firm beyond economics: institutions once existed to manage the high costs of collective effort; now citizens can achieve similar or better outcomes independently. That inversion puts traditional organizations into existential competition with informal networks.

When Institutions Lose Monopoly

Voice of the Faithful, parent protests in China, or grassroots airline reformers all confronted established authorities not by seizing offices but by using independent coordination channels. The church, banks, even governments learned that controlling the message no longer meant controlling action. Authority has moved from location to legitimacy: networks can “de‑locate” allegiance, as in Virginia parishes affiliating with Nigerian bishops through digital ties.

Adaptation or Resistance

Institutions can no longer assume members are passive. Employees, citizens, and customers can self‑organize externally at any time. Survival depends on internal transparency and responsiveness that match network speed. Attempting to suppress participation typically backfires, inviting greater mobilization and scrutiny.

The Policy Dilemma

Because open coordination fosters both reform and extremism, governments face a paradox: prevent harmful groups without stifling beneficial ones. Shirky argues that societies must shift from prevention to reaction—accepting that wide freedom inevitably includes misuse but that suppression costs more than tolerance. This uncomfortable compromise defines modern governance in a networked era.

Strategic Outlook

Institutions survive not by reasserting control but by embracing porousness, supporting self‑organization, and leveraging the same open dynamics that once threatened them.