From the Bottom Up

(Photo by Zota)

It pleases me greatly to see how en vogue the expression “From the bottom up” has become lately.

It’s everywhere.  In political movements with the excitement in grass roots organization.  In the arts with participatory forms and guerrilla artwork.  In engineering, with both the Maker movement and soon with personal fabrication spreading to the living room.  One by one, disciplines of human endeavor are being democratized, jerked summarily from the clenched fists of hierarchy and heaved, sometimes with great fanfare and other times as one might chuck a boat anchor, into the sea of crowdsourcing and participatory work.

There are, of course, Royalists everywhere.  Their arguments are rational and they have lots of supporters, particularly among those who worry about the problem of quality vs. quantity.  If one surveys the landscape of any arena experiencing a democratizing influence, the Royalists make the same essential argument:

We are being flooded with terrible ideas, poorly conceived and poorly made, and no one will stop to listen for opinions worth hearing, or look for ideas worth having.  What we have to gain is only more ideas, not better ones.  What we are losing is institutions which stem this tide of bad ideas.

The Royalists argue that democratizing a field removes the disincentives for bad ideas while not doing anything to benefit good ones.  My counterargument to this comes in two parts.  First, I argue that selecting good ideas is problematic, and second, that the problem of having too many ideas, both good and bad, is manageable.

Good ideas are hard to spot at a distance.  There are lots of classic examples, from the discovery of vaccination (would YOU have been the first to intentionally infect people with a disease?) to that great photo of the original Microsoft team with the heading “Would you have invested?”  Bad ideas are everywhere, and even a cursory glance at modern network television will prove decisively that having an institution to narrow down the chosen ideas does not necessarily eliminate the bad ones.  Choosing ideas is difficult.  I would argue that we have little to gain from having fewer people deciding which is which.

And I do not believe the argument that we will lose good ideas in the coming sea of both good and bad ideas.  We will all need to become fishers for ideas, it is true, but one of the all-time great ideas of our age has been the very idea of advanced search capabilities, and thankfully this one has managed alright.  In the end, we will need institutions to find ideas, rather than institutions to kill them.

Once we have the former, I think we’ll do just fine without the latter.