I’ve recently read We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, having attended one of his talks a couple of months ago. I thought I’d record my thoughts on it.

Books about the socio-political or cultural effects of the Internet are rolling fast off the presses right now. I’m now feeling a little less like the pallid geek I once was. The penny has dropped, even in the hallows of Downing Street (Leadbeater was a Labour advisor under Tony Blair for a while), that something rather important is happening out there in cyberspace. Territory is now being claimed by everyone from the plainly trivial likes of Macolm Gladwell and Andrew Keen, to the highly constructive, if sometimes baffling, Clay Shirky and Seth Godin.

Leadbeater sets about documenting the various phenomena he finds on the net to support his formulation of what he calls “we-think.” In a nutshell, we-think is the practice of solving problems or enhancing the quality of life by the free exchange of ideas and resources. Such activity tends to move from the periphery to the centre until – if it survives – it pervades the normal way of doing things. Examples of course are free/libre and open source software, but also offline activity evident in grass-roots initiatives in developing countries that spring up independently of governmental or official sanction. All this, he says, may be a new phenomenon in modern history, but a return to aspects of ancient modes of life which hitherto had been sunk beneath the waves of industrialism and refinements of capitalism that came with it. Well, I’d by that for a dollar, even if I can’t understand Leadbeater’s connection between a third-world micro-loans system and playing World of Warcraft.

Continue reading We-Think: Documenting the Present →