Adam Smith and Web 2.0

The way we express our self-interest on Web 2.0 is something new and also as old as humanity itself. Why do millions of us blog? For the same reason we talk and write e-mails, SMSs, instant messages and letters (remember them?). We do it to communicate our feelings, ideas, needs and experiences with others who might understand us. They might even write back! Whether it’s the evolution of language itself (a subject on which Smith penned a separate treatise) or the evolution of culture and social mores, such interaction and communication builds communities of shared meaning and understanding.

In fact even Smith’s description of a market was inherently social - he toyed with the idea that the fundamental human drive behind bargaining was the desire we each have to persuade others to see it our way. Smith would have understood the foundational proposition of an early Web 2.0 credo, “the cluetrain manifesto” - “Markets are conversations”.

And now, as Web 2.0 burgeons, its denizens pursue their interests like the merchants in Smith’s Wealth of Nations, posting and commenting on blogs, authoring and correcting Wikipedia, making and exchanging programming code and mashups of each others’ content, making connections based on social or practical needs. Some are serving practical needs - perhaps they need some software bug fixed. Others are “know-alls” proving their superior knowledge. Some are expressing their love of a subject. As a blogger and an unpaid guest columnist I guess I should come clean. Most of us are after honour and glory - though we usually settle (however forlornly) for a bit of attention.

And just as the miracle of a healthy market enables the merchant’s self-interest to serve the common good, so this new alchemy of the web aggregates individual efforts into freely available public goods. Likewise this unruly mix of motives gives us glimpses of our better selves. And to use Smith’s description of the psychology of ambition, it lures us on our quest for an “easy empire over the affections of mankind”. But once achieved its satisfaction ebbs away until we embark on that larger quest towards which it hints, towards that more distant and difficult ultimate destination - virtue itself.