Is this book the work of an individual or of a team? Charles Leadbeater is keen to credit, at least up to a point, the 257 people who helped him to finish a book that was first put up as a draft for comment on the web, before being printed and distributed. Since this is a book about sharing, he could do no less. But even at this early stage, invidious distinctions and hierarchies appear. Only some of these collaborators get a name-check in the introduction. While three full chapters of the book are now up on the website, the printed version carries a perfectly normal copyright warning at the front. Sharing has limits; publishers need to sell books.

That sets the tone for a book which describes innovation with excitement but cannot quite make up its mind how deep the changes will go. In visionary mode, Leadbeater welcomes the recasting of capitalism and society. The social contract underpinning work and production is “fractured”. The rapid, very low cost distribution of information by digital means and the habits of wide collaboration thus encouraged, which he christens “We-Think”, offers capitalism a way to “recover a social – even a communal – dimension that people are yearning for”. But as Leadbeater describes the tools created by Web 2.0, the growth of social entrepreneurship, open-source software, multinational cooperation to map the genome, “pro-am librarians” and Medium We-Think, the chapters often end with a skid to a stop in front of realities. What has been called the “wisdom of crowds” often turns out to be control by a digitally adept elite which sifts and edits: what a writer in slate.com recently called the “wisdom of chaperones”. Sharing between strangers will only work under certain conditions and rules. Global collaboration is not prospering in arms manufacture. Open-source is not a helpful principle when handling instructions for building nuclear weapons.

Two problems afflict books driven by the hurricane force of digital change. Because innovation is so fast and various, few authors can avoid breathless awe. New material and techniques are being created faster than anyone can catalogue: almost every book highlights something of value previously hidden in the torrents of sites, code, networks and data. Having rushed the reader round the latest developments, the author then wants to apply these innovations to as much as possible. Something so exciting must have universal significance. Everything is bound to be altered.

We-Think suffers both these defects – which is a pity because the book has two very powerful points. In the affluent post-industrial world, digital communications accelerate and enrich an individual’s freedom to get, use and share information. But the changes in quality of life or outcomes are not transformative, or not usually so. In the developing world, the impact of so much information will be vastly greater. Societies in Africa and Asia not saturated with iPods, broadband connections and wireless hotspots are very rapidly becoming societies linked by cheap mobile phones. Better connectivity does not guarantee good outcomes: text messages are as useful for organizing ethnic cleansing as for adjusting a cleaning rota. But Leadbeater is right that the odds favour a favourable balance of change. He includes the delicious example of the downfall of Gloria Arroyo, the Harvard-trained economist who became President of the Philippines after her predecessor had been drummed out of office by demonstrators summoned to the streets by mobile messages. Arroyo herself was finished by a downloaded, seventeen-second ringtone which was a recording of her arranging to rig the next election. Backed by accurate information, accountability does improve.

Leadbeater’s other good challenge, almost an afterthought, lies in asking what will happen to culture. If an animated film will soon be as easy to assemble as a PowerPoint presentation, if anyone can call themselves a journalist, an artist or a publisher, if software called Sibelius will write the musical score from the notes you play – what does culture become? Better or worse? Either way, is society happier because more people can express themselves creatively? Leadbeater’s answer is firm: “In the decades to come a mass, digital folk culture will emerge, in which people will create, borrow, share, adapt and imitate one another. That will make our economy and society better”. Quite apart from the fact that this may well not create any art of lasting value, those assumptions about economy and society are fragile. To promote the claims of social entrepreneurship and capital, Leadbeater sets up a straw man of destructive market capitalism and corporations too rigid and addicted to private property to understand the rules of the new game. Digital communications are influential agents of change, but they have not yet rewritten the rules of supply and demand or the creation of value, or rewired the human character.

Many companies have been wrongfooted in the digital era because they have failed to see how they can get advice, inputs, contributions from a wider range of people at very low cost. Electronic Arts, the publisher of The Sims, the most popular computer game ever sold, reckons that it owes 60 per cent of its content to user-developers. And they have mostly given that for free. But Leadbeater does not ask if this makes human or economic sense indefinitely. Might there come a point, either because of simple second thoughts or because these volunteer programmers might have lost their day jobs in a recession, when some of these free freelancers ask for payment? Electronic Arts might then still be a viable company, but it will be a less profitable one.

The book is striking for the almost complete absence of the words “market”, “specialization” and “competition”. Barriers to entry may have fallen, communication costs may have tumbled, and social entrepreneurs may be growing in number, but companies did not come into existence because of the perverse, greedy whims of tycoons. They came into existence because companies were the fashionable information networks of their day: they were the most efficient way to concentrate and allocate the information and relationships needed to produce goods at the lowest cost. While they shared information with suppliers, they paid salaries to keep specialized knowledge inside the company to compete in a market. And companies are still doing it: Google shares stuff but also guards certain secrets.

The challenges of complex information systems, the service economy and new sciences such as bio-engineering or nanotechnology will forces changes to the shape of companies, governments, curriculums and civic society. Collaboration and sharing will be part of that because of the intricacy and multi-disciplinary issues involved. But “we-thinking” is a strand of change, not the whole shift. Open societies constantly refresh and renew themselves by testing old assumptions to destruction. Digital communications have their most profound effect when they force people to question what they are doing and why they are doing it – whether the thinker is solo or with thousands of others. The results are always unpredictable. To think, it is not compulsory to be “we”. This review, I fear, is me-think.

Charles Leadbeater
WE-THINK
Mass innovation not mass production
256pp. Profile. £12.99.
978 1 86197 892 9

George Brock is the Saturday Editor of The Times and President of the World Editors Forum.

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