FT Alphaville has been taking a closer look at the collaborative economy, and noting the stellar growth this mysterious sector has been experiencing of late.
An important question to consider, however, is to what degree is this growth being driven by a genuine rise in reciprocity and altruism in the economy — or to what degree is this just the result of natural opportunism.
Many of these collaborative models do after all offer a tempting opportunity to cheat or exploit the model. In home exchanges, there’s the temptation to steal or damage your fellow swapper’s house. In shared car schemes, there’s the temptation to damage or abuse the shared equipment. In file sharing, there’s the temptation never to reciprocate and just to take, take, take. In timebank job swapping there’s a temptation to under perform. And in car pooling or couch-surfing there’s the temptation for an unsavoury sort to totally take advantage. And so on…
What’s more, put a ‘free’ good or ‘free’ money in front of anyone and it’s hard for them to refuse it. In that context it’s arguable that anything less than stellar growth would be illogical.
Which begs the question why should anyone put a free good out there for the taking anyway? And why is it that in most collaborative models there are very few examples of people abusing the system?
With respects to the free issue, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier believes this is because there isn’t really any such thing as free at all.
What appears free is usually a veiled reciprocity or exploitation in disguise.
Take the Facebook model as an example. Here we see users receiving free access to a platform they like to use, mostly because the content they produce on the platform can be harnessed by Facebook and monetised. There are other monetisation mechanisms in the Facebook model, but this is one of the best known ones.
Lanier controversially believes users should be paid for that contribution. But in doing so we would argue that he forgets that the relationship Facebook has with its users is in fact much more reciprocal than exploitative. Users get a free platform, Facebook gets their data.
What’s more, as the BBC’s tech expert Bill Thompson has commented before, user content doesn’t really have much value on its own. It is only when that data is pooled together on a massive scale which allows the economies of scale to make sense. At least in a way that “the system” feels keen to reward.
It is not independent data that has value, it is networked data that the system is demanding.
Consequently, there is possibly some form of social benefit associated with contributing data to the platform, which is yet to be recognised.
If you apply the rules of evolutionary game theory to the problem, and treat money — like Richard Dawkins does — as an evolved form of delayed reciprocal altruism devised to manage potential cheats in the system (opportunists who try to take something for nothing), then you realise the rise of a collaborative economy, in which money plays a smaller part, could be reflecting a very interesting evolutionary phenomenon.
Could the value of holding delayed reciprocity rights be decaying? Is the system favouring instant reciprocity over the delayed form due to lack of trust and concern over a growing number of cheats? Or perhaps society is becoming more ambivalent towards opportunists who choose to cheat or take advantage of the system?
As Dawkins himself noted in the Selfish Gene (citing the work of evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers):
A long memory and a capacity for individual recognition are well developed in man. We might therefore expect reciprocal altruism to have played an important part in human evolution. Trivers goes so far as to suggest that many of our psychological characteristics— envy, guilt, gratitude, sympathy etc.—have been shaped by natural selection for improved ability to cheat, to detect cheats, and to avoid being thought to be a cheat.
Of particular interest are ‘subtle cheats’ who appear to be reciprocating, but who consistently pay back slightly less than they receive. It is even possible that man’s swollen brain, and his predisposition to reason mathematically, evolved as a mechanism of ever more devious cheating, and ever more penetrating detection of cheating in others. Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism.
Either way, from an evolutionary standpoint then it would appear that *something* is definitely going on.
In social media’s case — which best reflects the growing value of data — one could say the system is making a choice about how it wishes to spend its delayed reciprocity rights and that the altruistic work already done by the system is seeking to be repaid not in individual user content, but in networked data.
Could it even be that Facebook (and equivalent platforms) are the ones that are performing the altruistic duty of pooling the data on behalf the system and drawing important — potentially survival-related — meaning from it, which therefore need to be repaid?
To the contrary, individual content is not altruistic at all, for it is in fact self-serving.
The evolutionary message being: time spent on Facebook does not compromise your chances of survival, if anything it improves them.
And what used to be a zero-sum game of has effectively turned into a prisoner’s dilemma-style conspiracy on a multi-player basis.
After all, according to evolutionary theory, most species claim reciprocity rights from others (specifically strangers and non-kin) for any time they spend grooming, feeding, and protecting their territory because it comes at the cost of their own survival.
A rise in collaboration, however, suggests there is more chance of personal survival if everyone collaborates together (and does not cheat the system). There is less incentive to cheat the system.
In the current human economy context then, has collaboration ended up being the best pay-off for all ?
And in that context has social media, big data and the rise of networked communities simply encouraged participants in the universal survival game of prisoner’s dilemma to take the option that’s best for all?
We obviously have no idea if that’s the case, but it seems a useful thought experiment for us all to run through.