 Welcome, everyone, and thank you all for being here on this wonderful occasion, marking the appointment of Yochai Benkler as the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies. A special welcome to Miles and Carol Berkman, who have done so much for the law school and are here with us today. Thank you, Miles and Carol. Because of the generosity of all of the Berkman's, Jack and Lillian and Miles and Carol, Harvard Law School is home to both the Berkman Professorship and the Berkman Center, an innovative pioneering research and teaching program that is exploring the ways in which the internet and other new technologies and the law surrounding them affect every aspect of our lives, economic, social, political, and cultural. In the 10 years since the Berkman Center was created, it has become one of the crown jewels of Harvard Law School and the leading center of its kind at any university in the world. It's no wonder that we've been able to attract the world's leading scholars to come here and be a part of the Berkman Center. A perfect example is Yochai Benkler, now a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center and the holder of the associated Berkman Chair. As Miles has said in the past about the Berkman Chair and the Berkman Center, and I'm quoting him, they are and will be a reflection and legacy of my father's passion for the information age, new technology, and the businesses built around them, and the law. So first let me say a few words about Jack Berkman, Harvard Law School class of 1929 and his wife, Lillian Berkman. Jack Berkman was a pioneer and a hugely successful entrepreneur in the communications industry. Born in London, he grew up in Ohio and received his college degree from the University of Michigan. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he went back to the Midwest and practiced law in Steubenville, Ohio. In 1940, he became interested in the communications field and he established an AM radio station in Steubenville. From that first station, he went on to become one of the most entrepreneurial and successful players in the communications industry. As chairman of the Associated Group Inc, and together with his son, Miles, a 1961 graduate of Harvard Law School, Jack Berkman converted a vision of the future of communications into a wealth of innovative businesses. These included a portfolio of radio and television broadcasting stations, paging systems, cable television systems, and one of the nation's first cellular telephone companies. Jack Berkman also was an active philanthropist participating on many nonprofit boards. He was particularly active at Harvard, serving on the Committee on University Resources and the Law School's Dean's Advisory Board. He died in 1995. Jack's wife, Lillian Berkman, was herself a pioneering businesswoman. She co-founded the American Tractor Corporation, becoming one of the first woman executives in heavy equipment manufacturing. She served on the boards of many corporations, became an expert art collector, and ardently supported educational and social causes. She was a charter member of the Dean's Advisory Board at Harvard Law School until she passed away in 2001. Jack and Lillian's bequests to Harvard Law School established the chair that bears their names, as well as the Berkman Center itself. Since then, the Center has been generously supported by Miles and Carol Berkman. The apple does not fall far from the tree, and Miles has been a visionary, creative, executive, and entrepreneur in the communications industry. Every time I'm with Miles, I feel my mind expanding with new knowledge and new ideas until I fear it will burst. He is, I think, a kind of genius, and we are fortunate indeed that he is a devoted graduate and supporter of the Law School. There is no one better suited to honor the Berkman's legacy or to hold the Berkman Chair than Yochai Benkler. Over the past decade, Yochai has emerged as one of the world's leading intellectuals of the information age. His studies of the digitally networked world and how it has changed all of our lives have illuminated and indeed transformed our most fundamental understandings of our economy, democracy, and society. In particular, his path-breaking book, The Wealth of Networks, How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, traces the new ways in which we produce and share ideas and information, including the important role played by commons-based peer production, the kind of production that generates a phenomenon like Wikipedia. And the book demonstrates the promise of these new developments for individual freedom, cultural diversity, democratic discourse, and social justice. Winner of the American Political Science Association's best book in three years on science, technology, and politics, winner of the American Sociological Association's best book on sociology and communications, hailed by the Financial Times as perhaps the best book about the internet, termed the best book about the future by the magazine, Strategy and Business, granted the Internet Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Professor Benkler's The Wealth of Networks is one of the most important books of the new 21st century. Leading scholars in a wealth of disciplines have acclaimed it. Leading players in both civil society organizations and high-tech businesses have looked to it for ideas and inspiration. Yochai's new work gives every indication of proving similarly transformative. Studying the nature of cooperation in partnership with scholars from the fields of neuroscience, computer science, and psychology, Yochai is plumbing the depths of human motivation, illuminating why we act and choose the way we do. A new project called The Law Lab is designed to take these insights and apply them to some of the thorniest problems of institutional and legal development. The world may never look the same. Formerly a professor at Yale Law School and at NYU Law School, Yochai graduated from HLS in 1994. And it has been one of the highlights of my deanship to lure him back home. So that's my contribution to describing Yochai Benkler and his work. But really to honor Yochai, I thought a bit of peer production would be in order. A collaborative effort along the lines of Wikipedia. So here's what some of the other faculty co-directors of the Berkman Center say of Yochai. Rights one, Yochai is the consummate, teacher, and intellectual. He looks the part with that long beard. But he also acts the part in every possible way. He is endlessly generous with his time and his support to his colleagues. Says another, tidbits, a beaver has to chew to survive. Yochai has to write to survive. The longer he's away from his writing, the more frustrated and grumpy he becomes. He's deeply devoted to his two kids, Noam and Ari. His screen savers feature them. There's nothing he likes better than spending a summer morning at his cottage in Fire Island, writing, and then spending the afternoon playing at the beach with his sons. Finally, he's a brilliant, devoted, caring mentor. And finally, Yochai possesses an extraordinary early warning system for transformative phenomena. He saw the potential of Wikipedia while the rest of us still thought it would never go beyond 10 articles about Star Trek. He foresaw the trajectory of Hollywood's battle and now engagement with amateur writers and artists. Never have lengthy sentences with 18 dependent sub clauses been so worth the parson. Now, don't you know more about Yochai than if you had just relied on me? But I'll give you a little bit more of my description. A brilliant thinker, whose scholarship changes the way we see the world and whose very presence brings new excitement and dynamism to Harvard Law School. The Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies. Yochai Benkler, who will speak this afternoon about what happens after selfishness. Wikipedia one, Hobbs zero at halftime. I have no idea who you are describing, but how can I fail to disappoint now? Thank you, Miles and Carol, for this opportunity, for your support. I will say this, I don't think there's a share in the world that I would rather hold, given the business that I'm in. You should know, this is an okay institution, but many people heard when I was moving here and they didn't say, oh, so you're moving to Harvard Law School or you're moving to Harvard University. They said, you're moving to Berkman. So you should know that. It's a great privilege. Thank you. So here's what I'm going to try to do. I'd say the last decade of my life and I think many other people who are interested in the phenomena that I'm interested in has been devoted to trying to diagnose and explain, sorry, diagnose and explain why the phenomena we were seeing, free and open source software, Wikipedia, online collaboration in general, was not just a fad, but was in fact a stable outcome of the particular technological economic moment we were in, where effectively, because of the reorganization of capital in the information and network environment, the fact that we all own the core physical means of production, as well as the core inputs of knowledge, insight, creativity. Social practices that have always been part of human life moved from the periphery of the economy to its core and understanding why that was a stable part of the particular technological moment we were in. What I want to try to do today is outline the project that I see certainly for myself, hopefully for others who will be interested going forward and that is to say, okay, now that we know that social production is here, how do we begin to harness it? How do we begin to think in a stable way about how to structure relations that integrate the social with the productive and that build a more realistic model of human motivation and human action than those that have in the past dominated our systems for organizing production? So a couple of former students of mine show up about a year and a half ago and say, look, we've got this great idea for a collaborative video editing platform. How are we going to get people to use it? So here's what's happening now. What's happening now is there are these other companies that are trying to move into the YouTube space, Revr, MetaCafe, what they're all trying to do is say, how do we get people to produce good stuff? We'll pay them. So this one is get paid, the other one top producers, how do we do the same thing? Should we have a set of prizes? Should we have competitions? How do we get people to contribute? And then we talked and they're both, and okay, why is it that people contribute? What is successful, YouTube? People want to express themselves. People want to collaborate. What's unique about what you're doing is allowing them to collaborate. Is it really about getting ways to pay them or is it about creating a context where they feel confident and secure in their ability to collaborate with each other so as to build a new system? And so Kaltura, this new startup that they started, began to piece together a strategy that included a variety of commitment mechanisms to the community of users, not that we will make ways for you to make money, but we will make ways to assure that when you produce, you will be able to continue to control that which you produce and that the social process for which you are producing will be sustained. So they begin by having the collaborative system be open source. That is to say, license such that others can contribute to it, change it, modify it. They can never in some sense take it back. Then they add that the content itself is under creative commons. So anybody who contributes contributes the materials under creative commons share alike so that others can build on it as well. Then they go and embed themselves in an organizational strategic partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation so that the player now will become the player that's embedded in Wikipedia that will allow people to create documentaries embedded in the Wikipedia pages and editable by anyone who wants to use it. Why is this important? Because there are few organizations in any that are more radically committed to open us on the net than the Wikimedia Foundations and few more shameful things that could happen to a company than the Wikimedia Foundation will stand up and say, we reject you. You were our partner, but now you're no longer true to the principles of openness that we have. So what you see is a series of mechanisms for binding a commercial company that is trying to engage people in a social collaboration ever more tightly to maintaining its platform free for the social process to use without being able to turn around and control it. A very different model than saying, let's find a way to pay people to contribute because what we think people care about is affordances of collaboration and security in the social relationship that allows them to collaborate rather than what gets them to pay. So the core challenge, I think, that we are facing now going forward in the next years is how to take what we found on the net, which was large-scale collaboration happening all over the place in effective ways and learn from it more generally to human collaboration, to systems more generally. How do we move away from the idea that people are either extremely selfish and therefore in constant battle with each other and less controlled, or at the minimum to be fairer, selfish, but also envious and also parochial, but in any event consistently within battle with each other unless within a tightly controlled system? And to give a sense of how this might look in a completely different system, let's look at this problem. So what's this problem? Standard problem of motivation and control, workers. So this is the image that underlies a lot of traditional models of firm, hierarchical organization. Workers want to rest, companies want them not to rest and to work to their full capacity. How do you solve this problem? Beginning with a hundred years ago, Frederick Taylor with Scientific Management answers the question in terms of setting up a tightly bound system that specifies every single action, monitors its pursuit and rewards and punishment based on deviations from that pursuit. Then we have Ford embedding this organizational theory in a technology, that is to say the assembly plant that takes these prescriptions in the organizational process and builds them into a technical system of the assembly line that forces the speed and the rate and the particular action for each individual, embedding the organizational system in a technological system, both of them controlling the flow of work. Then more recently, you have adaptations of the theory of the firm. In this case, Oliver Williamson's adaptation of Ronald Coase that takes transactions costs theory of the firm and says the core differentiator is that the firm is more efficient than the market or the firm exists where it is more efficient than the market at controlling opportunism. The operative concept here is opportunism. Employees will do their best to suck out whatever value they can. They need to be in a system that controls them. But who will do the controlling? It's not turtles all the way down. At some point, there will be a manager at the top who will need to be controlled as well and who can control them. And the answer there, more recently, this is a famous Jensen and Murphy article about performance pay for top executives. There, what you need to do is use the same model of selfishness that you can no longer control. What you need instead is to align the incentives of the executive with the firm and you do that by giving them stock options so that they do well when the stockholders do well. In other words, what we have is a completely integrated system that builds on this basic model of human motivation as being self-interested, withgyle, opportunistic, either controlled through hierarchy or precisely incentivized through markets. Now, this is not the only way to do things, although this is certainly the GM way. In 1980, something very new happened to management, science, and organizational sociology. The GM Fremont plant in Fremont, California was one of the company's worst. 20% absenteeism, low quality, lateness. It was shut down, opened up two years later under Toyota management. 85% of the same employees, 100% of the union leadership, organized in completely new ways. Instead of individuals at their station, teams at station, each team led by union member and leader, embedded, moving from an organizational system of Taylorism embedded in a technical system of Fordism with 70-some process engineers on the shop floor to no process engineers on the shop floor, much more control over experimentation and flow at the team level, union negotiations to different, more stable tenure, but also more flexible role definition in team production. Within two years, the NUMI plant was the most efficient in the United States. It's continued to be one of the most efficient, and it launched to a great extent the study of Toyota production system in American business schools because it eliminated the supposed cultural explanation. These were American workers who had previously worked at GM, were on a completely different organizational system performing in measurable terms very differently. A similar phenomenon happened with Toyota supplier relations. In the move to the United States, the Toyota producers have to move from the caretzu, the very closely owned set of suppliers to a less owned, less close ownership, but still long-term relations based on trust. Because of this competition and the higher quality, the big three also had to move to longer-term relations. But what happened was that the practices were different. The big three found themselves occasionally demanding 5% rate cut. They occasionally would take designs that were disclosed to them under a relationship of trust and give it to a competing bidder and then create competitive bidding. When one of the suppliers at an industry conference said, look, the same suppliers are making money and producing well when they're working with your competitors, the American, the Japanese plants in the United States. And we're losing with you and we're not producing what you want. And Rick Wagner's response was stop whining. And the last piece, this is the ratio of the 2006 income for Rick Wagner and the 2005, I didn't have 2006 numbers of Toyota's CEO. And yet it's Toyota that has taken over as the largest automobile producer in the world. So what do we have? We have a competing system. We have a competing system of hierarchy plus high-powered incentives for executives that implements a particular model of human motivation that requires either perfect control or perfect monetized incentives versus a more complex system. Let no one think suddenly that everybody's sitting around holding hands in a Toyota plant. But nonetheless, a system that is more complex includes greater autonomy for workers, greater teamwork, more of an emphasis on norms and trust both in the worker relations and in the trust relations. I went into this so deeply because the critical thing that's important for me to get across at this stage is that we shouldn't be thinking purely about the net anymore. The net allows us to see things that we didn't see before, but these are things that are everywhere. And I look at the core of the economy, at the core of the old economy where these older models were developed precisely to show the transition and work, for example, by John Hegel and John Sealy Brown on Chinese manufacturing processes suggests even greater flexibility and more looseness along these lines. This doesn't only happen in business. So the classic Gary Becker penalty times the probability of detection equals deterrence is what drives a sense of policing that is very punitive as opposed to an idea of community policing where engagement and community engagement and building communities is the more significant approach to trying to resolve crime before it happens as opposed to deterring it at the individual level. And of course, Britannica and Wikipedia, what's important to see is the structural similarities between tightly coupled systems based on a motivational model that people act with self-interest and guile in tightly coupled system through control and incentivization can be made to act acceptable, maybe even efficiently, as opposed to system that loosen up the coupling but try to use different kinds of levers to get people to act in concordance along the same lines. These cooperative human systems integrate communication, they integrate other regarding motivations, normative appeals and commitments, they accept the continuation of calculation and self-interest don't just disappear. This is the situation where everybody is nice. The problem is how to build a system that integrates all of them as well as social dynamics as we begin to stop thinking purely in terms of methodological individualism and start to look at social dynamics as well, which is hard and as you'll see by the end of the talk, mostly what I do here is wave my arms rather than actually give answers. So, a very quick line. The 19th and 20th, particularly 20th century saw the rise of rationalization, both in firms and governments, different stages in Europe and the US, but the basic idea is inputs, behaviors, processes and outputs are sought to be fully characterized, monitored and delivered over the lifetime of the interaction. Failures of efficiency or perhaps changes in associations with the Soviet Union lead to a shift away from the idea of the possibility of perfectly produced, of perfectly rationalized system and instead what we see is the introduction of high-powered incentives. The idea that you can simplify human motivation to a point where you could specify the inputs, processes and outputs so precisely and capture all of human behavior and motivation so completely that you could retain the persuasion and the belief that you knew how the system would function but without the support. Simplification allows the removal of the planner without removing the idea that you can plan based on distinct inputs, outputs and that the processes are simple, fixed and universal. Now, I'm not going to be the first or last person to offer critiques of either markets or organizational processes. What I do want to emphasize is that there is an increasing wave of books, some more popular than others that are all within the mainstream that all take as their main problem how do we become more efficient? How do we become more productive? How do we sustain innovation and build innovation? Whose basic teaching is an inevitable reorientation of the relative roles and advantages of markets hierarchies and what's critical here, social processes. Essentially, the increasing complexity of a globalized world and the rate of innovation have made both planning ex-ante and perfect specification of inputs and outputs for pricing impossible. They were never possible but it's clearer now that they're impossible. And so what's been driving this broader acceptance is that the need for faster learning and innovation everywhere all the time is driving the idea of loosely coupled systems. Essentially, if you know exactly what to expect, you can build a tightly bound system, you can constrain people's freedom to act only as expected and you can deal with known conditions. As conditions change very rapidly, you need people to be able to experiment. You need people to be able to make assessments. You need people to be able to learn, teach each other, experiment, adopt, adapt, experiment, adopt, adapt. To do this, you need to put them in systems that are much more free and less tightly coupled. Systems that are less fully specified in terms of what happens when you do something. But when you do that, people make mistakes, people invent new things, you have greater change in unpredictability and you shift to even greater dependence on freedom as practical human agency to learn and innovate and adapt. And this is the shift that we're seeing. And what's driving it, or at least what's driving the broad acceptance of it on the business side of things is precisely this sense of impending doom if we don't learn how to learn. Now what I did in Wealth of Networks was also talk about how this was connected to a more participatory culture and a more democratic public sphere. But what I want to focus on here is why this drives us and enables us to focus on human motivation on a more complex model. Loosely coupled systems need motivated participants because you cannot trust the system to constrain them and guide them. Which means you have to develop the human social layer and this has to happen at the technical, organizational, legal, administrative and social relational. The background to this work occurs on an intellectual arc that has been happening in several disciplines. In evolutionary biology, the 50s, there was a very strong group selection theory. The 60s, 70s and 80s, we see the rise of very individualist conceptions of cooperation with the idea of the selfish gene being the icon of these ideas. And what we're seeing in the last 15 years is a return of multilevel selection which is a modern version of group selection, of gene culture co-evolution, of cooperation as a distinct driving force in evolution as opposed to the other way around. In economics, of course, we see the rise, the most prominent rise in this regard of selfish rationality as the basic operating assumption. But again, over the last 15 years, a lot of work on experimental economics, not only what we all know in law about deviations from rationality, the Kahneman and Tversky line of work, but also deviations from selfishness where you can be completely rational, but your behavior will be inconsistent with a selfish model. We see it in political theory again from the late 50s and 60s, the rise of self-interest as the model that explains politics to much more tentatively now work on sustainable commons, role of human rights and moral economy. And again, we already talked about management science and what we're seeing there. Part of what is making this possible is a confluence of forces. The end of the Cold War reducing the need for scientific individualism as a basis for our belief in selfish rationality as a way in which we enact our political identity. I talked already about globalization and rapid innovation. The fact that so many of us, so much now, both rely on and participate in collaborative practices makes this phenomenon more of a habit, more of an acceptable habit, as well as what internal disciplinary dynamics within many of these disciplines where the old ways of thinking are more or less running dry and here are new and exciting ways to look at things. So what does that give us? It gives us a harder set of things to think about. A more complex motivational is difficult to specify for analysis, much in theory as compatible with a rational actor model but actually translating it into a tractable set of answers is very difficult. And so we need to render all of these different disciplines practically usable so that we can apply them, try them, see what works and learn from there. So, lots of different disciplines. The critical elements are, first of all, people are diverse. Some do behave like home economists, about 30% give or take. More than half behave on some model of cooperation or either conditional or unconditional. In no human society examined under controlled experimental conditions have the majority of people consistently behave as predicted by plugging a self-interested actor and self-generated preferences into the standard rational actor model. Nowhere. The other thing is a cooperation is sensitive to context. I talked about the 30% but we don't know that it's stable types. We just know there's a probability that people will behave. It may be dispositional, this is the way I am, I'm selfish, I'm not. It may be just that each of us has this proclivity and under certain conditions this will come out or that. We don't have good data one way or the other. We do know that it is situational as well. It is sensitive to the system we're functioning through. So the building blocks as I mentioned are communication, the question of who matters, I, thou, we, them. The question of what's right, fair and normal. How we build in calculation, both material and social relationship, relational and social dynamics. So communication. We have a lot of experimental analysis that shows that when all you do is introduce communication, what's called cheap talk, no commitment, into prisoner's dilemmas game and to other social dilemma games, you get much higher levels of cooperation. And similarly in organizational sociology, horizontal discursive lines as compared to lines of authority are central. Quality circles, talk pages on Wiki, even excluding settlements in the context of negotiation from later litigation is a way of getting people to talk in a non-confrontational way. I want to focus on the fact that communication could be an indication that preferences, principles and goals, could be a product of communication and dialogue. That is to say it's not just that we don't only care about ourselves, we're not the sole source of what we care about. We learn how to care about things in communications with others. So there's a wonderful experiment that basically takes a finite prisoner's dilemma, same exact lineup and tells people, you're playing the community game, that's the name of this experiment. 70% of them open cooperating and cooperate during the entire thing. You take the exact same set of exact same populations, you tell them you're playing the Wall Street games, 33% cooperate, the rest defect. Now, we all know framing effects from Frisk and Kahanaman, but of course it's not only behavioral economics from Urban Goffman and sociology and frame analysis. We know the basic answer is principles, policies and preferences are not frame independent. So when you include communication, part of what we do is we negotiate what's right, what's fair, what's desirable. Communication is critical to defining both what we want in context and what counts as cooperation. Now, who matters? We'll talk about self-interest and mention it in calculation. But empathy and solidarity, again, there's a tremendous amount of work now on trying to nail down what this means in practical, effective terms. So you see experimental games where actually getting a little bit of information about who the person is or just seeing their face will vastly change the degree to which people will be willing to part with money out of their pocket and put it in that of another completely anonymous player in the game. Face-to-face in meta-analysis of prisoners' dilemma games, face-to-face has large effects. We're beginning to see FMRI studies, even though they're not, they're far from perfect, showing that people light up completely differently when they're playing with a machine as opposed to when they're playing with a human being. This is not about payoffs, the payoffs are identical. It's the fact that you're with another human being that makes you respond differently. Again, how does this play out? Company picnics. Profile pages online. Think for a moment what this new set of laws for the past three or four years on excluding apology statements made by hospitals and physicians to patients who were injured as part of medical malpractice. What does this mean? It means I recognize you. We're no longer in a situation where I'm out to make the most money at your expense and it's only the law that with a cudgel makes me behave. It's not that you are out to get all of my money and only the law keeps a cudgel over your face. Let's create a safe space for cheap talk. Cheap in the sense of commitment, valuable in terms of making the relationship a human one that we can actually talk to each other. So there are direct implications in terms of institutional change that can go into these models. Another important component, there's a lot of work on social identity and group identity. Going back to the 70s, that people behave more generously toward people they see in their own in-group. There's work in psychology and social identity. There's work in evolutionary biology. I'm actually doing a good bit of work with people both at the program in evolutionary dynamics and at the computer science department on trying to actually look at solidarity, how it's constructed, how it's reframed, what the role of symbolic performances in what it is that means that together, that was yesterday together as opposed to tomorrow. For example, looking at different behavior patterns of Clinton and Obama supporters before and after the convention, you'll be happy to find that, or I suspect you'll be happy to find, that there were large changes of reforming the strategy. One point I want to emphasize and I want to speed through because I want to leave time for questions. It's important to understand I use the term cooperation and like any decent culture we code cooperation as positive. But cooperation in this sense, since this is a positive descriptive project, is about deviations from the predictions of selfish rationality. Predictable, usable deviations from the selfishness hypothesis, which includes bad stuff, which includes suicide bombers and gang members who sacrifice themselves in order to be members of the group. The project at this stage is a positive or descriptive project and what we learn from it can help us as much disrupt cooperation that we deem negative as much as help cooperation we deem positive. After all, the original game is called the prisoner's dilemma about avoiding admitting. Another thing that's extremely important is that people care about what is right, what is fair and what is normal. The idea here is not to develop a theory of what's right or what's fair or what's normal, but to see how people actually, independent of what's good for them, individually, materially, care about what's doing what's right, care about being treated fairly and treating others fairly, and care about behaving in ways that comply with norms. There's a lot of work in several disciplines people care about, outcomes, but what people think about them is culturally contingent. It's constructively diverse and it's susceptible to framing. Critically, what it means is that when people think they're treated fairly, they are more motivated to act in a certain way, which means that the core idea of separating fairness and justice from productivity and incentives misses the reality of what people care about. You cannot separate these. And none of these are immune to norms and to negotiation. And so what we understand as a society or as an organization to be fair becomes accepted as fair. And so the ideas about, for example, arguing about the core battle of feminism to talk about the fairness or unfairness of traditional gender roles is precisely to put people on the same plane of what counts as fair and unfair to change our assumptions about what is acceptable and what is not. People care about intentions, people care about processes. One of the interesting things I think we're doing now with another pair of students, Lea Belsky and Byron Carr, is we're looking at online music sites that give their music away in a format that anybody can use, but implement various mechanisms to say, okay, you're enjoying the music, but I need to make a living. What sort of interventions can you make to actually get people to say, hey, piracy is cool and move to say, I like this artist. I respect them. I need to support them. And so we're working in ways in which kinds of appeals. Appeals to right, to justice, appeals to fairness. Work with that. The last thing I want to say before I wrap up is none of this eliminates the fact that we continue to be calculating beings, imperfectly calculating for sure. But we don't only care about material payoffs, we care about material payoffs. One of the main things I saw early on in peer production was that as you structure the work so that it's cheap for people to cooperate, they cooperate more. It's not that surprising. It used to be thought that punishment, there was a lot of good five years when punishment was considered to be the major successful intervention in assuring public goods games. And it was cooperative because to be a punisher was costly. So you had to overcome a public goods problem to get people to punish because it was costly to punish. And only then could you overcome the punishing. But actually it turns out different societies, different cultures punish at different levels. Some have a lot of antisocial punishment and people punishing people even when they cooperate. And it turns out to be quite costly. But people also care about social payoffs, both functional and related and emotional payoffs. And the critical thing to see is that the relationship is not a simple one. The relationship is not a simple one. You can invite people to dinner and they come and they leave a check on the table at the end. You don't invite them more often. You're rejected by that. The same is true in blood donation and blood markets that have moved from markets to donation. The same is true in many, many other markets. As we see, for example, with distributed computing, companies that years ago tried to pay people for their leftover computer cycles. They did not succeed. What succeeded were projects that said, give us your leftover computer cycles. We're not using them. We'll predict the climate, fight AIDS, figure out protein folding. Similarly in efforts to harness people, companies like Weblogs that tried to pay people didn't make it. Companies like Dig the Didn't, but made them a community did. Google Answer tried to pay people. That was only marginally successful. Yahoo Answer said, the depth of your knowledge is deep. Share it. Create a community and share it. Google Answer's about a year ago stopped accepting questions. But, but, but, but, when a careful study looks at it, money actually does matter. It just doesn't matter as much and in a more complicated set of ways. And of course, with free and open source software, about half of people get paid. But the organizational model is very different. They can't be told essentially by their employer what to do. They have to be paid and in some sense trusted to be there. So it changes very differently. And the motivations people report are many, but they're not about, I'm trying to make the most money that I can. They're about enjoyment. They're about fairness and reciprocity and giving back to the community. They're about a primary source of identity. Over 80% of people surveyed say that it's a primary source of identity, but we don't have crowding out, which is to say the relationship is complex. It's not clearly if you add money, you'll get less contribution. If you add money, you'll get more. It's complex and it's susceptible to framing and structuring. So let me skip over the necessity of trust and transparency. Not because they're not important, but because they are. And I'm happy to get into them later if people want me to. But the critical point to see is that our model used to be an agent who is self-interested and we can focus on the material. And you can see the attraction of this model. It's simple. You can model it. You can write a tractable equation. And you can get deterministic predictions. What we need instead is to think of an agent that is in the context of multiple forces operating upon them. Self-interest that is both material but also social and emotional with potential for crowding out. Normative commitment to what's fair and right and normal. Capable of regarding others, embedded within a set of social dynamics, all of these mediated by communication. Life has become too complex and rapidly changing to settle on the simplified model. We're seeing in the social sciences and human behavior increasing elaboration of cooperation. We're seeing more in practice of collaboration. But we don't at the moment have a theoretical framework to match the sophistication of the older models. The task is to develop a general and flexible framework for analyzing human systems of all forms that will be complex enough to include the richness that the core older forms lacked but tractable enough to offer discrete predictions to allow us to build integrated systems, technical, organizational, institutional, and social that will allow us to work together. Enabling us to design systems that are both more effective and more resonant with being human. Questions? Thoughts? Comments? It's actually likely to come out of this because actually as I look at this it seems to be the idea that there'd be some unified theory at the level of generality that would reach across all the kinds of institutions in context of which you talked about from the, you know, from the workplace and the achieving efficient production to some open collaborative idea of community building or knowledge building that seems to be inconsistent actually with the core dynamic you're talking about which is that it's so complex, so fast-moving, so contextual that it seems quite unlikely that you get that kind of generality. A middling one is the answer, right? That's what's basically necessary is a mid-level abstraction. Part of the problem with what we take to be standard economic analysis as we've mostly seen it in law, for example, is precisely that it's a very high-level theory that's supposed to explain everything with a relatively thin model. And part of the limitations, for example, of close historical analysis is that it's so fully contextual and rich that it's hard to do things with it. And if you just look, for example, at what's happened in legal academia over the last 20, 30 years and the enormous strength of both of these disciplinary approaches, what we don't have as well is a system that is both rich and usable in a direct way. And so that's the challenge. And that's why, in some senses, so it depends in different forms of this presentation, I'll sometimes come up with 13 design levers. Now I'm trying to simplify and bunch them into buckets of who matters and normative commitments. So that's a little simpler to think about how they relate to each other. But at the moment, at least, the way that I'm working is not a very, very thin single unified theory, which is to say, people are a lot more complex than we think. A set of methodological commitments to say, let me weave together the range of practical, descriptive disciplines that I know of that are trying to answer these questions. Some of them will be more detailed and give us more tacit knowledge about what it is that's happening. Some of them are more abstract and tractable and will allow us to build models and predict across multiple domains. And let's make provisional statements about what's likely to work and let's continually try them out in actual real context by building systems like the Law Lab, by looking at thousands of sites like the one that I'm doing with a bunch of people sitting here in the room. And then let's try also to experiment. Let's try to change this, let's try to change that. Will we ultimately get to a point that we can have a theory that is as plain and all-encompassing as the traditional rational act model? And at the same time, as sensitive to context, I don't know. That's not my ambition at the moment. My ambition at the moment is to find something that is abstract enough to let us learn about contexts that seem completely different and transfer to relevant contexts and at the same time close enough to the practice to give us usable tractable inputs. Lonnie. Well, it's actually not so much in law schools or necessarily in law writ large. One of the places where I see this happening most significantly is in contract law in licensing, in end-user license agreements of websites. What you're seeing is... So one of the things we're doing in this study that we're looking at a couple of thousand... What are we up to now? A couple of thousand sites is trying to see which aspects of governance people put in a formal license. Which aspects do they put in informal language that is explicitly stated as norms? Do they know that they're making unenforceable in order to not bind themselves but at the same time make normative claims? And so there's a lot of very interesting practice. There are debates within, for example, the open source community between using the GPL, the GNU General Public License, versus using the BSD license. One that is more forcing and controlling but at the same time assures against defection. The other that is more open and basically lets you do what you want and relies much more on trust and community enforcement for people not to defect but also has a much looser definition of what it counts to defect. So you're seeing it much less... I'll take that back. I'm seeing it because that's where I'm looking. I'm seeing it much more in spaces that are people using law to construct their own institutions on the fly as they're cooperating than in general. But I think if you look, for example, at the rise of mediation and and not restitution, restorative justice, those are movements within law that are moving precisely in the direction toward a more collaborative, a more open, a less forcing, a more humanized communication based mode of conflict resolution from the very adversarial court. So you're seeing it there. I was trying to focus when I focused on the safety created for apology in medical malpractice cases as a space within law that tries on purpose to create cheap talk so that you can actually humanize the other person and come to a conflict resolution rather than standing. So those are the places where I see it happening in law as well roughly at the same period. And you're right that interestingly I present that as an example of an application as opposed to an input into the analysis which is wrong. Yeah. The closest literature that I know to that question is the literature that has grown around the phenomenon of university patenting because that's where you see a lot of the conflict between a model of researchers and universities being driven to innovate by seeking the patent revenues versus the traditional mertonian science approach. So people who have been looking at the ways in which patents have or have not affected academic production. Sociologists like Woody Powell or Jason Owen Smith have done work on trying to look at that question. Artie Rye looking at patents has tried to look at that question but that's the primary place that I see that kind of research. I come across statements about the hierarchical structure and the problem with the guild structure but less as a structured response like this. But that's the closest that I know of that literature. The poor single-author texts, large-reviewed journals or books in fact look quite different than some years ago. That's a big and important question. I think one of the things you have to see is law in this regard still is more like the humanities than it is like science for sure where in some places in physics you have longer author lists than article. I mean Mario Biajoli has beautiful work from History of Science about beautiful work on the rise of collaborative authorship. And essentially what's happened there is that the internal institutional mechanisms for recognizing work have changed but even science is now in its own boundaries because when you move from 17 people each doing a little bit to thousands of people annotating in the haplotype mapping project each one of them doing maybe half an hour's work it's impossible. And so you have people like Science Commons trying to build metadata systems that will allow each contribution to be tagged but then bumping up against an institutional framework that doesn't recognize those traditions. We have a real problem because in our hiring and promotion we discount co-authored work. You know I find myself with students on who I know have academic ambitions within law as opposed to in other disciplines and we'll start working and we'll start bantering and then we come to a certain point. And the point is how much do you like this project? Do you like it enough to really carry it through and will it be part of your oeuvre? In this case go and do it by yourself because if I spend too much time with it it will be a lie to say that you authored it alone. And if I spend time with it together and we co-author it you might as well put it in the drawer because it won't count. And so we need to change our institutional model of what we understand to be valued scholarship in order to align with the fact that increasingly we are becoming at least on the scholarship side something like the engineering school of the social sciences and we need to turn around and see that collaborative authorship is happening everywhere. So in my drawer in my virtual drawer I have a paper that I haven't quite digested enough to put out there that is entitled in praise of illegality for that reason. But the critical thing to see here is that I don't actually see law either as exogenous or as a tool I see it as a system which is to say an entire system of affordances of constraints each maybe including multiple tools through which we act. Now we can't act outside of systems and so it's always there it's part of the way we can actually make things stick but it's also part of the way there are impediments. There are also affordances and constraints. A car allows you to do certain things and disables other things. A train allows certain things and disables certain things. Law enables certain things and disables certain things. Certainly one of the driving motivations behind this project is to diagnose what aspects of law get in the way of certain kind of behaviors because they imprint a certain model of constraints behavior. So again just to use the example that I did talk about as opposed to examples I didn't if any statement of apology counts as evidence against you that is a piece of law that disables communication that disables humanization that disables a certain kind of cooperation. If law places in just a second a precondition on asserting trade secret protection against employees that are leaving that you put a piece of paper in front of them and say you have to sign this I don't trust you which is one set of jurisdictions that frames the employment relationship as a non trusting one. If you don't require it but you require certain practices that could just as well as aim toward external competitors not against employees and that's enough then you don't force the firm to be in the position where it immediately says I don't trust you here sign this and so there are so yes one of the objectives is to help us diagnose how different elements of the legal system act on a given relationship in ways that disable cooperation because they're intended to implement a model that is wrong. So I see Esther smiling here because she spent the last five years debunking the idea that generational opposed to class is the divide on that particular one but so this is a hard question to which we have no good answers this is the question of perfectability essentially. I have one paper with Helen Nissenbaum who's a philosopher at NYU trying to look at commons based peer production and virtue and the question of how we understand virtue as a set of practice experiences of others and relations with others that in the context of being habitually enacted day to day become ours that's the optimistic version of habituation so what are things that go towards that there are a couple of studies they're not literally tongue in cheek they sort of read like their tongue in cheek looking at economic students before and after and not quite knowing whether it's people who behave more selfishly, select into economics or people who go through economics end up behaving more selfishly but as I said they're slightly tongue in cheek except that they're done by economists sources of evidence there's a beautiful paper from science in February or March this year that was done by a group led by Simon Gechter in Nottingham that took 15 or 17 cities around the world and developed economies because there was a very important study that came out as a book in 2005 that did it in 15 small scale societies and showed substantial deviations from the practices of market integrated societies there's not enough less cooperative not more with anonymous others but then with a good deal of anthropological work explaining why it maps on to local practices but let's put that aside and talk just about the Gechter study so what they found was when they did public goods games with punishment and they allowed multiple rounds of punishment they found very large differences between different countries in terms of the degree to which you saw antisocial punishment is defined as I cooperated in the last round and you still spent money to smack me over the head you'll be pleased to know that Boston was the most cooperative city in the study which also means that all of our experiments that we do here are invalid and overstate the degree of cooperating but let's ignore that one the nice thing they did hasn't been replicated it's brand new I don't know is that they found the rule of law and social capital indicators in those countries which does suggest that there is room for perfect ability though the perfect ability happens not through the online practices but simply through living your day to day I'll take that back I'm about to say something that is wrong and then I'll explain why it's wrong living in a country where rule of law is relatively high is correlated with less antisocial punishment in these experiments I succeeded in saying it not incorrectly because what we don't know is causation we don't know whether the absence of rule of law is because there's a baseline cultural set of practices or whether it's the habit of living in a society where you have to look over your shoulder all the time makes you keep looking over your shoulder when you're in an experimental setup but all of these suggest that perfect ability is feasible and makes turns this from a purely descriptive project into one that could be quite normatively appealing politics? Just the facts man So there is a sense that what's right in this not thing that many people have personally been always in question I think that that's happening on my kind of a single account it's increasing technical complexity increasing sort of volatility in the realm of production they aren't simply going to be treated um they're not going to be treated they're not going to be treated they're not going to be treated they're not going to be treated they're not going to be treated um which pushes forward new organizations new relations to production more open-ended less hierarchical more autonomy necessitated by technological changes technological moments now on the Marxian account one of two things kind of been unfolded either there is inevitable transformation in the social world and you have a set of contradictions and possibilities emerge but how sort of human actors social groups lay it out is not for perhaps even an image but in both cases the sort of technology creates conditions of possibility in the one case it was the possibility of socialism out of the government in your case that's clear but the resemblance seems strong so as opposed to the question that is is there also this goes with something like Gaby's question features of the old work that rests on older concessions of human issues seems to be getting an environment small question um so a few things I mean this question of determinism is one that I had to face also in wealth of networks um because there's an obvious uh interpretation that's very deterministic um um of um and um um several ways in which I would differ and then I think make a difference the first is I don't think determinism I think the latter aspect of a set of possibilities that are easier and harder to happen and therefore a set of options that are open and actually a study that I'm doing now with Victoria and Aaron on the left and right wing blogosphere is going to show very nicely how different cultural adoptions of an identical possibility set of technologies uh lead to very different social cultural practices um that can then be mapped on to what we understand them to be in political terms um but I don't think it's only technology I think uh culture, political structure uh social uh practice each of these is a system and these systems function in an integrated form so that there are long periods of stability where uh some where all of the systems affect each so for example when I showed uh Taylorism Fordism, NLRA um and a certain uh cultural expectation of uh work and work life were a cultural legal, technical and uh organizational set of systems integrated to stabilize that old model of production things can go out of whack on any one of these you can have an external shock like Perry arriving uh in Japan which is not a technological shock but a political shock that then moves as when things move they take all sorts of changes to all of these systems and they'll clash and they will fit and they won't fit and we see the battle over uh copyright digital copyright in the last years exactly a battle of an effort to take something that was broken in the technical system that was built on the phonograph and fix it in the legal system um so that to basically force the technical system into a well known mode um so there's no determinism but there is effect which of these systems works how they work affects the set of practices that you can practice through them and then after periods of perturbation what we see is that things settle some possibilities get shut off and some are open that's what makes this a political moment because it's precisely the fact that you can have arguments about whether or not you will have to certify the screen to the CPU to get trusted computing is central to democratic and in a critical culture it just requires 500 pages to explain why um but that's precisely the idea do we have existing structures of power and wealth that are very comfortable under contemporary conditions and are resisting changes that are made possible by the technology so that you have them reaching over absolutely this is what the battle of the institutional environment of the digital economy of the digital network is all about it's about structuring the system so as to stabilize a certain set of practices and their attendant sources of wealth and power over an ascending set so in that regard yes it's political very much so I think this is political I think building for ourselves I think harnessing to ourselves the authority of positive social science and data in the service of a conception of human relations that is more cooperative more susceptible to caring about what is right and what is fair is not a politically neutral act even if the methodology succeeds in keeping itself neutral in the practice it is not a politically neutral act it's not intended to be sure that with physical care never seen you before