Here Comes Everybody

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations was Clay Shirky's 2008 examination of how digital technologies had dissolved the transaction costs that had historically required formal organizations for any sustained collective action. The central observation was that the costs of finding people who shared your interests, communicating with them, and coordinating their efforts had dropped so dramatically that groups could form, act, and dissolve without the overhead of formal hierarchy. A protest could be organized through social media without a protest committee; a collaborative project could be coordinated through a wiki without a project manager; a crisis response could be mobilized through mailing lists without a crisis management bureaucracy. The book documented this shift through case studies ranging from the flash mob to the Catholic Church abuse scandal to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami response, drawing a consistent conclusion: the internet had made possible forms of collective action that had previously required institutional infrastructure, and the institutions built to