Toward a Literacy of Cooperation: Jan 5-Mar 16 begins in person at Stanford, or online via our groupblog, this Wednesday. Guest lecturers include Peter Corning, Paul Hartzog, Bernardo Huberman, Peter Kollock, Ross Mayfield, Howard Rheingold, Zack Rosen, Andrea Saveri, Jimmy Wales, and Steve Weber. Video archives of lectures will be available, we’re working on providing podcasts of lectures, and registered participants can post their notes on the course wiki.

Biology is a war, where only the fit survive. Businesses and nations succeed by defeating, destroying, or dominating competitors. Politics is about winning. The omnipotence of competition is a story we tell ourselves about the world – an old story, based on centuries-old science, that looks more and more outmoded as more recent evidence emerges from a dozen different disciplines.

Rooted in the sensibilities of Adam Smith’s and Charles Darwin’s eras ‚Äö√Ñ√¨ the zeitgeist of the British Empire — the scientific, social, economic, political stories of the 19th and 20th centuries overwhelmingly emphasized the role of competition as a driver of evolution, progress, commerce, society. Are the first outlines of a new narrative becoming visible in biology, sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and political science? Is it possible to imagine a story in which cooperative arrangements, interdependencies, and collective action play a more prominent role and the essential (but not all-powerful) story of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a bit?

The evolution of cooperation, the dynamics of social dilemmas, the economics of peer production, the role of reputation in electronic markets, the design of institutions for collective action, the structure of social networks, the forecasting capabilities of prediction markets, the power of distributed computing ‚Äö√Ñ√¨ can these frontiers in previously unconnected disciplines be mapped onto a broad interdisciplinary discourse? This course is a first and very wide look at this possible new discourse, research field, policy tool, meta-narrative of human behavior. It’s part of a broader effort called the Cooperation Project.

In biology, the mechanisms of symbiosis, group selection, and evolutionary psychology are hotly contested, but there is little argument that cooperative arrangements have moved from a fringe role to a far more significant place in explanatory frameworks from molecular biology to ecology.

In economics, experiments with Prisoner’s Dilemma and public goods games have provided evidence that humans do not always act in the strictly rational self-interest assumed by classical economics, but often act to punish cheating and encourage cooperation. Neurophysiological imaging has demonstrated significant activity in the brain’s reward centers when people punish cheaters ‚Äö√Ñ√¨ a finding that caused one prominent researcher to remark that “altruistic punishment” may be “the glue that keeps societies together.”

In the technology business, the open source movement showed that world-class software like Linux and Mozilla could be built without corporate oversight or market incentives. Google and Amazon built fortunes by drawing on‚Äö√Ñ√Æeven improving‚Äö√Ñ√Æthe Internet by facilitating and building on the collective actions of millions of web publishers and reviewers. eBay’s online reputation system and online matching of sellers with buyers enables a multibillion-dollar market to exist where none had been possible before.

Anthropologist Elizabeth Jean Wood has revealed that both sides in El Salvador’s civil war made moves in their withdrawal from conflict that mirrored classic game theory strategies. Other anthropologists have shown that people’s responses to the Ultimatum Game, which demonstrates an inexplicable dedication to fairness even at the expense of self-interest, varies remarkably, depending on whether the people playing it are American, European, or Japanese college students, hunter-gatherers in South America, or nomadic pastoralists in Central Asia.

Empirical examination of data about people’s attempts to create institutions to protect grazing pastures, fishing grounds, watersheds from overuse reveal design principles that tend to be present when these institutions succeed, and absent when they fail.

Knowledge collectives are springing up: Thousands of volunteers have contributed more than one million articles in more than 100 languages to Wikipedia, a free, Internet-based encyclopedia. Millions of people have pooled their computer power to help create new medicines, crack codes, forecast the weather, or search for life in outer space. “Clickworkers” analyze martian photographs for NASA.

Sharing economies, facilitated by resource-linking computer networks, emerge daily – ThinkCycle is a network of design students around the world who address pressing practical problems in developing countries; Bittorrent turns every downloader into an uploader – enabling the exchange of digital files to become more efficient as usage increases; community purchase card InTerra enables people to link their values to their daily purchases and keep money flowing in their local community.

In the Kenya, Korea, Philippines, Spain and the United States, citizens used the Internet and mobile telephones to organize mass demonstrations, monitor elections, support political candidates, or get out the vote – deposing heads of state and electing others. In Korea, 27,000 reporters put together a collective online newspaper, Ohmynews, which wields considerable influence.

I believe these different findings are connected. Political smartmobs, computational communities, online sharing economies, knowledge collectives, citizen journalists, altruistic punishers are all different manifestations of a new and largely unmapped domain. I believe that a very high payoff would result from a broad-based, interdisciplinary Apollo project of cooperation studies.

My interest in catalyzing such a study grew out of the research for my book, Smart Mobs. In that book, I claimed that texting teenagers who flocked to the same malls in Tokyo or Helsinki had something in common with the Philippine citizens who used SMS messages to organize political demonstrations. The teenagers and demonstrators are using mobile devices and the many-to-many capabilities of the Internet to organize collective action in new ways, with people they weren’t able to organize before, in places and at paces they weren’t able to organize before.

My interest in the social dynamics of collective action – and the possibility that certain uses of certain technologies can amplify the power of collective action – continued after I finished the book. I began to understand that the coevolution of information/communication media and collective action has been underway for some time – and that smart mobs are only one manifestation of a broader phenomenon that affects cultural and economic production as well as political action and interpersonal socializing.

Homo sapiens lived as hunter-gatherers in small, extended family units for 90,000 years before we started living in agricultural settlements, less than 10,000 years ago. For most of that time, small game and gathered foods constituted the most significant form of wealth ‚Äö√Ñ√¨ enough food to stay alive. At some point, larger groups figured out how to band together to hunt bigger game. We don’t know exactly how they figured this out, but it’s a good guess that some form of communication was involved, and however they did it, their banding-together process must have solved collective action problems in some way. It is unlikely that unrelated groups would be able to accomplish huge-game hunting while also fighting with each other.

One immediate effect of this new, more socially complex, more dangerous way of hunting must have been the social dilemma presented by sudden wealth. Suddenly, more protein was available than the hunters’ families could eat before it rotted. Did those who ate the result of the hunt but did not themselves hunt owe something to the hunters? Did they pay them something in exchange? In any case, social relations must have become more complex. Undoubtedly, new ways of using symbols were enlisted to keep track of these increasingly complex social arrangements.

When growing numbers of humans began to settle and cultivate crops instead of continuing nomadic hunting and gathering, large-scale irrigation projects must have required larger-scale social organization. The first empires began to construct cities out of mud and stone. The first forms of writing appeared as in the form of marks on clay as a means of accounting for the exchange of commodities such as wine, wheat, or sheep — and the taxing of that wealth by the empire. The master practitioners of this new medium were the accountants for the emperors and their priest-administrators.

Alphabetic writing was the exclusive tool of the administrators of empires for thousands of years. An elite of priests and civil administrators were taught the secret of encoding and decoding knowledge and transmitting it across time and space. Then within decades of its invention, the printing press enabled populations of millions to amplify their thinking by becoming literate. Again, new forms of collective action emerged from newly literate populations – Protestant reformations, constitutional democracies, Scientific revolutions. And again, new wealth was created: Markets are as old as the crossroads, but capitalism is only around five hundred years old, enabled by stock companies to share risk and profit, double-entry bookkeeping, shared liability insurance companies, printing.

The global Internet brought the advent of many-to-many capability: every desktop or mobile device linked to the network is now a worldwide multimedia printing press, broadcasting station, place of assembly, marketplace. That power is untethering, leaping off desktops into our hands. The mobile telephone is in the process of morphing into a wirelessly networked supercomputer in a billion pockets. As I noted in 2001, the most important new technologies will not be hardware or software but social practices. Understanding these practices early in the history of the new medium could be crucial.

In the past, invention raced so much faster than understanding of their effects that new media made social changes possible decades or centuries before anyone tried to make sense of the changes. If we are at the threshold of societal changes as disruptive as those enabled by the alphabet and the printing press, can we gain understanding of the new media early enough to influence these changes?

When I started asking these questions, I understood that the task required more than writing books or growing online social networks ‚Äö√Ñ√¨ instruments I have used before. Catalyzing an interdisciplinary discourse, developing methods of seeing and teaching the new knowledge, mapping the domains to be explored, drawing connections, finding patterns, are activities that require an institution for collective action. That’s where I teamed up with Institute for the Future for the Cooperation Project, and why we’ve teamed up with the Stanford Humanities Lab to present this course.