-
So this is Anna Hazare,
-
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,
-
and Hazare realized through his hunger
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that actually maybe this time,
-
in the 21st century,
-
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,
-
"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,
-
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.
-
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.
-
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,
-
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,
-
that campaign was wholly unsuccessful.
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There are lots of reasons for that,
-
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,
-
and I now run Purpose, which
is a home for these kinds of
-
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,
-
you know what, the fax is kind of
eclipsed by the mobile phone?
-
This is another story of
tech-determinism?
-
Well, I would argue that there's
actually more to it than that.
-
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.
-
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,
-
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?
-
Because we realized that many
-
of the lessons that we were
discovering in movements
-
actually applied all over the world
-
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.
-
And I want to talk to you about
what new power is today.
-
New power is the deployment
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of mass participation
and peer coordination —
-
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.
-
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,
-
which in just a few years
-
has radically disrupted the hotel industry
-
without owning a single
square foot of real estate.
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This is Kickstarter,
-
which we know has raised over a billion dollars
-
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,
-
the structural features of
these new models
-
and how they differ from old power.
-
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,
-
and new power uploads.
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And you see a whole set of
characteristics that you can trace,
-
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.
-
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
-
has not embraced the power
of participation.
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New power is not inherently positive.
-
In fact, this isn't an normative
argument that we're making,
-
there are many good things
about new power,
-
but it can produce bad outcomes.
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More participation, more peer coordination,
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sometimes distorts outcomes
-
and there are some things,
-
like things, for example,
in the medical profession
-
that we want new power
to get nowhere near.
-
And thirdly, new power is not
the inevitable victor.
-
In fact, unsurprisingly,
-
as many of these new power
models get to scale,
-
what you see is this massive pushback
-
from the forces of old power.
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Just look at this really
interesting epic struggle
-
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
-
that new power will be
the inevitable victor.
-
That said, keep one thing in mind:
-
We're at the beginning of a
very steep curve.
-
So you think about some of
these new power models, right?
-
These were just like someone's
-
garage idea a few years ago,
-
and now they're disrupting
entire industries.
-
And so, what's interesting
about new power,
-
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.
-
So let's say you've used a
peer-to-peer lending platform
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like Lending Tree or Prosper,
-
then you've figured out that
you don't need the bank,
-
and who wants the bank, right?
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And so, that experience tends
to embolden you
-
it tends to make you want
more participation
-
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
-
that new power has engendered —
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the Airbnbs, the Kickstarters.
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What about the values?
-
And this is an early sketch
-
at what new power values look like.
-
New power values prize
transparency above all else.
-
It's almost a religious
belief in transparency,
-
a belief that if you shine
a light on something,
-
it will be better.
-
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.
-
New power values of informal,
networked governance.
-
New power folks would never
have invented the U.N. today,
-
for better or worse.
-
New power values participation,
-
and new power is all about do-it-yourself.
-
In fact, what's interesting
about new power
-
is that it eschews some of
the professionalization
-
and specialization that was
-
all the rage in the 20th century.
-
So what's interesting about these
-
new power values and these
new power models
-
is what they mean for organizations.
-
So we've spent a bit of time thinking,
-
how can we plot organizations
-
on a two-by-two where, essentially,
-
we look at new power values
-
and new power models
-
and see where different people sit?
-
We started with a U.S. analysis,
-
and let me show you
some interesting findings.
-
So the first is Apple.
-
In this framework, we actually
described Apple
-
as an old power company.
-
That's because the ideology,
-
the governing ideology of Apple
-
is the ideology of the perfectionist
-
product designer in Cupertino.
-
It's absolutely about that beautiful,
perfect thing descending upon us
-
in perfection.
-
And it does not value, as a
company, transparency.
-
In fact, it's very secretive.
-
Now, Apple is one of the most
succesful companies in the world.
-
So this shows that you can
-
still pursue a successful
old power strategy.
-
But one can argue that there's
real vulnerabilites in that model.
-
I think another interesting comparison
-
is that of the Obama campaign
-
versus the Obama presidency.
-
(Applause)
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Now, I like President Obama,
-
but he ran with new
power at his back, right?
-
And he said to people,
-
we are the ones we've
been waiting for.
-
And he used crowdfunding
-
to power a campaign.
-
But when he got into office,
-
he governed like more or less
all the other presidents did.
-
And this is a really interesting trend,
-
is when new power gets powerful,
-
what happens?
-
So this is a framework you
should look at
-
and think about where your
own organization
-
sits on it.
-
And think about where it
should be
-
in five or 10 years.
-
So what do you do if you're old power?
-
Well, if you're there
thinking, in old power,
-
this won't happen to us.
-
Then just look at the Wikipedia
entry for Encyclopædia Britannica.
-
Let me tell you, it's a very sad read.
-
But if you are old power,
-
the most important thing you
can do is to occupy yourself
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before others occupy you,
-
before you are occupied.
-
Imagine that a group
of your biggest skeptics
-
are camped in the heart
of your organization
-
asking the toughest questions
-
and they can see everything
inside of your organization.
-
And ask them, would they
like what they see
-
and should our model change?
-
What about if you're new power?
-
Is new power kind of just
riding the wave to glory?
-
I would argue no.
-
I would argue that there
are some very real challenges
-
to new power in this nascent phase.
-
Let's stick with the Occupy Wall Street
example for a moment.
-
Occupy was this incredible example
of new power,
-
the purest example of new power.
-
And yet, it failed to consolidate.
-
So the energy that it created
-
was great for the meme phase,
-
but they were so committed to participation,
-
that they never got anything done.
-
And in fact that model
-
means that the challenge for new power is:
-
how do you use institutional power
-
without being institutionalized?
-
One the other end of the spectra is Uber.
-
Uber is an amazing,
-
highly scalable new power model.
-
That network is getting denser and denser
-
by the day.
-
But what's really interesting
about Uber is
-
it hasn't really adopted new power values.
-
This is a real quote from
the Uber CEO recently:
-
He says, "Once we get rid of the dude
in the car" — he means drivers —
-
"Uber will be cheaper."
-
Now, new power models
live and die
-
by the strength of their networks.
-
By whether the drivers and the consumers
-
who use the service actually believe in it.
-
Because they're not an exercise
of top-down perfectionism,
-
they are about the network.
-
And so, the challenge,
-
and this is why it's in
no way surprising,
-
is that Uber's drivers
are now unionizing.
-
It's extraordinary.
-
Uber's drivers are turning on Uber.
-
And the challenge for Uber —
-
this isn't an easy situation for them —
-
is that they are locked into
a broader superstrcuture
-
that is really old power.
-
They've raised more than a billion
dollars in the capital markets.
-
Those markets expect a financial return,
-
and they way you get a financial return
-
is by squeezing and squeezing
-
your users and your drivers
-
for more and more value
-
and giving that value to your investors.
-
So the big question about the future
of new power, in my view, is:
-
Will that old power just emerge?
-
So will new power elites just become
-
old power and squeeze?
-
Or will that new power
base bite back?
-
Will the next big Uber
-
be co-owned by Uber drivers?
-
And I think this going
to be a very interesting
-
structural question.
-
Finally, think about new power
-
being more than just an
-
entity that scales things
-
that make us have slightly
better consumer experiences.
-
My call to action for new power
-
is to not be an island.
-
We have major structural
problems in the world today
-
that could benefit enormously
-
from the kinds of mass participation
-
and peer coordination
-
that these new power players
-
know so well how to generate.
-
And we badly need them to
turn their energies and their power
-
to big, what economists might call
-
public goods problems,
-
that are often beyond markets
-
where investors can easily be found.
-
And I think if we can do that,
-
we might be able to fundamentally change
-
not only human beings' sense of
their own agency and power —
-
because I think that's the most
wonderful thing about new power,
-
is that people feel more powerful —
-
but we might also be able to change
-
the way we relate to each other
-
and the way we relate to
authority and institutions.
-
And to me, that's absolutely
-
worth trying for.
-
Thank you very much.
-
(Applause)