10
The Live Web
Urge and urge and urge …
Always the procreant urge of the world …
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance …
Always substance and increase …
Always a knit of identity …
Always distinction …
Always a breed of life.
—Walt Whitman1
The network is the urban site before us, an invitation to design and construct the City of Bits (capital of the twenty-first century), just as, so long ago, a narrow peninsula beside the Meander became the place for Miletos.
—William J. Mitchell2
In 2003, my son Allen and I were talking about the future evolution of the Internet and the Web in particular. As he saw it then, the Web we knew was mostly static. Sites changed constantly, but not so fast that Google and other search engines couldn’t index everything on the whole Web every few days. But search engines didn’t show what was happening right now, in real time. That’s because nearly every Web site in those days was more of a construction project than a venue for live events. Allen didn’t see this as a problem so much as an early limitation that would be overcome when anybody and anything could engage each other in real time. He called that future environment “the Live Web.”
Blogs were the earliest, widespread Live Web life form. What makes a blog live is syndication. When a blog post (or a news story) goes up, it notifies the world of that fact through an RSS feed. This fact came in handy when David Sifry and I were working together on a story about blogging for Linux Journal in November 2002. To help us do the research required, David invented Technorati, which went on to become what he called a “Live Web” search engine, borrowing Allen’s term.
Both Allen and David turned out to be ahead of their time, which began to arrive in a big way when Twitter and Facebook made the live nature of the Web obvious to everybody.
For me, the most dramatic example of the Live Web at work came when my daughter called me in Boston one afternoon from her home in Baltimore. “We just had an earthquake!” she said. “It feels just like it did back in California. Everybody rushed outside and started yelling, ‘Are you okay?’ to each other. Have you heard anything?” I looked for #earthquake on Twitter. The first results were from Virginia, D.C., Maryland, then Philadelphia, then New York. “It must be coming from somewhere south of you,” I said. Then our house began to rock. “Wow! I’m feeling it here now,” I said, and watched fresh tweets from others in Boston.
But here’s the important thing: Twitter and Facebook are just early versions of far more evolved species. They are as prototypical of the future Live Web as AOL and Compuserve were for the Static Web. They are also companies and therefore single points of failure. They will die. That means we can’t depend on them or any other company alone to give us the Live Web. To imagine our way to the Live Web, we need to look past Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the natural environment we see outside of humanity: the forests, jungles, and oceans of the world. Instead, we need to look at cities.
How We Live
The human population of Earth passed seven billion while I was writing this book. Already by 2006, over half our population lived in cities. (In the United States, we’ve now passed 82 percent.) From now until 2050, over a million people per week will be added to cities. While these are interesting facts that can lead in many directions, the most pertinent one for us here is mortality in business. That’s because cities live while businesses die off—as do people and other living things. What do cities do that companies and other living systems don’t?
Geoffrey West has an answer. West is a theoretical physicist who enjoyed a long and distinguished career in his field before he and some colleagues began seeking a scientific model of cities. In the course of that work, they also studied companies. What they found was that cities continue to grow in size and vitality while plants, animals, and companies grow only to the point when they can’t any more. “It’s very hard to kill a city,” West says. “You can drop an atomic bomb on a city and thirty years later, it’s surviving. Very few cities fail. All companies die.”3
That’s because cities scale in a superlinear way, while plants, animals, and companies scale in a sublinear way. In mathematical terms, the leverage of growth is greater than one for cities and less than one for plants, animals, and companies. So, as a city grows, it needs less energy to keep growing, while a company needs more. Hence, a city has no inherent burdens of size, while an organism does. As my wife likes to say, “Trees don’t grow to the sky.” Sublinear scaling is the reason. The typical path of sublinear growth is sigmoidal: after it hockey-sticks up a steep growth slope, it bends right toward the horizontal. West and his colleagues studied twenty-three thousand companies and found that “they all start by looking like hockey sticks, they all bend over, and they all die like you and me.”4
Yes, companies can renew themselves. They can invent new products and services that hockey-stick toward the sky at the speed of a start-up. Yet each success makes the company bigger again, and bigness has costs that can only be offset by constant innovation and even greater growth. This simply doesn’t happen beyond a certain level of hugeness, unless the company breaks into smaller pieces that all grow independently. But then it’s not one company anymore. By dividing into separate pieces, the original company dies.
Cities, on the other hand, are by nature arrangements of many living things. All those things die individually, while the city lives on as a collective system with benefits that transcend the mortalities of everything that comprises it. West says this works because cities are networks.
Worldwide City
“All of life is controlled by networks,” West says. But when you contain that network inside a single entity, it is mortal. When you combine those living networks with others of the same and related kinds, the economies of scale bring increasing returns. “The bigger you are, the more you have, per capita.” For example, “higher wages, more super-creative people, more patents …”5 You also get more crime, disease, and other downsides as well. But cities also increase hope for solving those things, because the sources of solutions are networked.
What the Internet does is give all of connected civilization the benefits—at least online—of living in a city. By connecting each of us to all of us, the Internet is the biggest city of all.