Jeremy Heimans: What new power looks like

152,266 views ・ 2014-10-31

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:12
So this is Anna Hazare,
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and Anna Hazare may well be the most cutting-edge
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digital activist in the world today.
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And you wouldn't know it by looking at him.
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Hazare is a 77-year-old Indian anticorruption and social justice activist.
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And in 2011, he was running a big campaign
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to address everyday corruption in India,
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a topic that Indian elites love to ignore.
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So as part of this campaign,
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he was using all of the traditional tactics
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that a good Gandhian organizer would use.
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So he was on a hunger strike,
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and Hazare realized through his hunger
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that actually maybe this time,
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in the 21st century,
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a hunger strike wouldn't be enough.
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So he started playing around with mobile activism.
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So the first thing he did is he said to people,
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"Okay, why don't you send me
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a text message if you support
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my campaign against corruption?"
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So he does this, he gives people a short code,
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and about 80,000 people do it.
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Okay, that's pretty respectable.
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But then he decides,
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"Let me tweak my tactics a little bit."
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He says, "Why don't you leave me a missed call?"
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Now, for those of you who have lived in the global South,
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you'll know that missed calls
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are a really critical part of global mobile culture.
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I see people nodding.
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People leave missed calls all the time:
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If you're running late for a meeting
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and you just want to let them know that you're on the way,
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you leave them a missed call.
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If you're dating someone and you just want to say "I miss you"
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you leave them a missed call.
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So a note for a dating tip here,
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in some cultures,
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if you want to please your lover,
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you call them and hang up. (Laughter)
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So why do people leave missed calls?
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Well, the reason of course is that
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they're trying to avoid charges
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associated with making calls and sending texts.
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So when Hazare asked people to leave him a missed call,
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let's have a little guess how many people actually did this?
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Thirty-five million.
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So this is one of the largest coordinated actions in human history.
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It's remarkable.
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And this reflects the extraordinary strength of the emerging Indian middle class
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and the power that their mobile phones bring.
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But he used that,
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Hazare ended up with this massive CSV file of mobile phone numbers,
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and he used that to deploy
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real people power on the ground
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to get hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets in Delhi
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to make a national point of everyday corruption in India.
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It's a really striking story.
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So this is me when I was 12 years old.
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I hope you see the resemblance.
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And I was also an activist,
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and I have been an activist all my life.
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I had this really funny childhood
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where I traipsed around the world
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meeting world leaders and Noble prize winners,
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talking about Third World debt,
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as it was then called,
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and demilitarization.
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I was a very, very serious child. (Laughter)
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And back then,
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in the early '90s,
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I had a very cutting-edge tech tool of my own:
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the fax.
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And the fax was the tool of my activism.
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And at that time, it was the best way
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to get a message to a lot of people
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all at once.
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I'll give you one example of a fax campaign that I ran.
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It was the eve of the Gulf War
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and I organized a global campaign to flood the hotel,
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the Intercontinental in Geneva,
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where James Baker and Tariq Aziz
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were meeting on the eve of the war,
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and I thought if I could flood them with faxes,
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we'll stop the war.
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Well, unsurprisingly,
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that campaign was wholly unsuccessful.
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There are lots of reasons for that,
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but there's no doubt that one sputtering fax machine
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in Geneva was a little bit of a bandwidth constraint
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in terms of the ability to get a message to lots of people.
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And so, I went on to discover some better tools.
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I cofounded Avaaz, which uses the Internet to mobilize people
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and now has almost 40 million members,
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and I now run Purpose, which is a home for these kinds of
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technology-powered movements.
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So what's the moral of this story?
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Is the moral of this story,
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you know what, the fax is kind of eclipsed by the mobile phone?
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This is another story of tech-determinism?
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Well, I would argue that there's actually more to it than that.
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I'd argue that in the last 20 years,
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something more fundamental has changed
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than just new tech.
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I would argue that there has been a fundamental shift
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in the balance of power
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in the world.
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You ask any activist how to understand the world,
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and they'll say, "Look at where the power is,
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who has it, how it's shifting."
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And I think we all sense that something big is happening.
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So Henry Timms and I —
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Henry's a fellow movement builder —
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got talking one day and we started to think,
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how can we make sense of this new world?
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How can we describe it and give
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it a framework that makes it more useful?
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Because we realized that many
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of the lessons that we were discovering in movements
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actually applied all over the world
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in many sectors of our society.
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So I want to introduce you to this framework:
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Old power, meet new power.
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And I want to talk to you about what new power is today.
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New power is the deployment
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of mass participation and peer coordination —
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these are the two key elements —
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to create change and shift outcomes.
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And we see new power all around us.
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This is Beppe Grillo
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he was a populist Italian blogger
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who, with a minimal political apparatus and only some online tools,
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won more than 25 percent of the vote
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in recent Italian elections.
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This is Airbnb,
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which in just a few years
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has radically disrupted the hotel industry
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without owning a single square foot of real estate.
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This is Kickstarter,
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which we know has raised over a billion dollars
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from more than five million people.
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Now, we're familiar with all of these models.
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But what's striking is the commonalities,
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the structural features of these new models
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and how they differ from old power.
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Let's look a little bit at this.
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Old power is held like a currency.
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New power works like a current.
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Old power is held by a few.
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New power isn't held by a few, it's made by many.
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Old power is all about download,
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and new power uploads.
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And you see a whole set of characteristics that you can trace,
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whether it's in media or politics or education.
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So we've talked a little bit about what new power is.
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Let's, for a second, talk about what new power isn't.
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New power is not your Facebook page.
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I assure you that having a social media strategy
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can enable you to do just as much download
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as you used to do when you had the radio.
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Just ask Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad,
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I assure you that his Facebook page
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has not embraced the power of participation.
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New power is not inherently positive.
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In fact, this isn't an normative argument that we're making,
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there are many good things about new power,
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but it can produce bad outcomes.
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More participation, more peer coordination,
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sometimes distorts outcomes
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and there are some things,
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like things, for example, in the medical profession
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that we want new power to get nowhere near.
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And thirdly, new power is not the inevitable victor.
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In fact, unsurprisingly,
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as many of these new power models get to scale,
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what you see is this massive pushback
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from the forces of old power.
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Just look at this really interesting epic struggle
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going on right now between Edward Snowden and the NSA.
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You'll note that only one of the two people on this slide
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is currently in exile.
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And so, it's not at all clear
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that new power will be the inevitable victor.
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That said, keep one thing in mind:
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We're at the beginning of a very steep curve.
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So you think about some of these new power models, right?
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These were just like someone's
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garage idea a few years ago,
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and now they're disrupting entire industries.
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And so, what's interesting about new power,
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is the way it feeds on itself.
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Once you have an experience of new power,
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you tend to expect and want more of it.
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So let's say you've used a peer-to-peer lending platform
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like Lending Tree or Prosper,
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then you've figured out that you don't need the bank,
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and who wants the bank, right?
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And so, that experience tends to embolden you
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it tends to make you want more participation
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across more aspects of your life.
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And what this gives rise to is
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a set of values.
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We talked about the models
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that new power has engendered —
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the Airbnbs, the Kickstarters.
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What about the values?
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And this is an early sketch
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at what new power values look like.
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New power values prize transparency above all else.
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It's almost a religious belief in transparency,
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a belief that if you shine a light on something,
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it will be better.
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And remember that in the 20th century, this was not at all true.
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People thought that gentlemen should sit behind closed doors
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and make comfortable agreements.
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New power values of informal, networked governance.
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New power folks would never have invented the U.N. today,
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for better or worse.
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New power values participation,
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and new power is all about do-it-yourself.
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In fact, what's interesting about new power
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is that it eschews some of the professionalization
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and specialization that was
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all the rage in the 20th century.
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So what's interesting about these
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new power values and these new power models
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is what they mean for organizations.
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So we've spent a bit of time thinking,
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how can we plot organizations
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on a two-by-two where, essentially,
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we look at new power values
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and new power models
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and see where different people sit?
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We started with a U.S. analysis,
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and let me show you some interesting findings.
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So the first is Apple.
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In this framework, we actually described Apple
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as an old power company.
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That's because the ideology,
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the governing ideology of Apple
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is the ideology of the perfectionist
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product designer in Cupertino.
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It's absolutely about that beautiful, perfect thing descending upon us
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in perfection.
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And it does not value, as a company, transparency.
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In fact, it's very secretive.
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Now, Apple is one of the most succesful companies in the world.
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So this shows that you can
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still pursue a successful old power strategy.
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But one can argue that there's real vulnerabilites in that model.
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I think another interesting comparison
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is that of the Obama campaign
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versus the Obama presidency.
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(Applause)
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Now, I like President Obama,
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but he ran with new power at his back, right?
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And he said to people,
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we are the ones we've been waiting for.
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And he used crowdfunding
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to power a campaign.
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But when he got into office,
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he governed like more or less all the other presidents did.
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And this is a really interesting trend,
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is when new power gets powerful,
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what happens?
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So this is a framework you should look at
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and think about where your own organization
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sits on it.
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And think about where it should be
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in five or 10 years.
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So what do you do if you're old power?
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Well, if you're there thinking, in old power,
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this won't happen to us.
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Then just look at the Wikipedia entry for Encyclopædia Britannica.
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Let me tell you, it's a very sad read.
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But if you are old power,
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the most important thing you can do is to occupy yourself
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before others occupy you,
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before you are occupied.
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Imagine that a group of your biggest skeptics
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are camped in the heart of your organization
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asking the toughest questions
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and they can see everything inside of your organization.
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And ask them, would they like what they see
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and should our model change?
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What about if you're new power?
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Is new power kind of just riding the wave to glory?
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I would argue no.
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I would argue that there are some very real challenges
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to new power in this nascent phase.
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Let's stick with the Occupy Wall Street example for a moment.
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Occupy was this incredible example of new power,
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the purest example of new power.
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And yet, it failed to consolidate.
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So the energy that it created
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was great for the meme phase,
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but they were so committed to participation,
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that they never got anything done.
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And in fact that model
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means that the challenge for new power is:
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how do you use institutional power
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without being institutionalized?
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One the other end of the spectra is Uber.
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Uber is an amazing,
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highly scalable new power model.
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That network is getting denser and denser
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by the day.
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But what's really interesting about Uber is
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it hasn't really adopted new power values.
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This is a real quote from the Uber CEO recently:
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He says, "Once we get rid of the dude in the car" — he means drivers —
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"Uber will be cheaper."
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Now, new power models live and die
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by the strength of their networks.
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By whether the drivers and the consumers
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who use the service actually believe in it.
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Because they're not an exercise of top-down perfectionism,
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they are about the network.
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And so, the challenge,
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13:01
and this is why it's in no way surprising,
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is that Uber's drivers are now unionizing.
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It's extraordinary.
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Uber's drivers are turning on Uber.
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And the challenge for Uber —
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this isn't an easy situation for them —
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is that they are locked into a broader superstrcuture
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that is really old power.
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They've raised more than a billion dollars in the capital markets.
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Those markets expect a financial return,
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and they way you get a financial return
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is by squeezing and squeezing
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your users and your drivers
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13:32
for more and more value
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13:33
and giving that value to your investors.
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So the big question about the future of new power, in my view, is:
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Will that old power just emerge?
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So will new power elites just become
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old power and squeeze?
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Or will that new power base bite back?
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Will the next big Uber
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be co-owned by Uber drivers?
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And I think this going to be a very interesting
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structural question.
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Finally, think about new power
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being more than just an
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entity that scales things
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that make us have slightly better consumer experiences.
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My call to action for new power
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is to not be an island.
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We have major structural problems in the world today
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that could benefit enormously
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from the kinds of mass participation
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and peer coordination
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that these new power players
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know so well how to generate.
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And we badly need them to turn their energies and their power
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to big, what economists might call
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public goods problems,
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that are often beyond markets
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where investors can easily be found.
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And I think if we can do that,
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we might be able to fundamentally change
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not only human beings' sense of their own agency and power —
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because I think that's the most wonderful thing about new power,
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is that people feel more powerful —
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but we might also be able to change
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the way we relate to each other
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and the way we relate to authority and institutions.
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And to me, that's absolutely
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worth trying for.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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