Steven Johnson (1)Interview

Author Interview

Steven Johnson is the author of such works as The Ghost Map, Everything Bad is Good for You, and Where Good Ideas Come From. His latest book is Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age, published this month by Riverhead.

In Future Perfect you coin the term "peer progressives"—give us the nutshell version of what you mean by the term, and how you think this worldview has shaped your own thinking and writing.

So much of the political debate today is between the competing visions of big government and the private sector: the state vs. the market. But a growing number of us have begun to think that there's a third way of solving problems that doesn't fit easily into either of those existing categories: the peer network. These are the kinds of collaborative, decentralized organizations that helped build the Internet and the Web and Wikipedia, but are also behind some of the most interesting movements in community-building and health care and many other fields. Future Perfect is my attempt to give a name to this growing movement—the peer progressives, who believe in progress and who believe the best tool we have for continuing the story of progress is building peer networks in as many sectors of society as possible.

To expand on that just a bit, how do "crowd-funding" projects like Kickstarter fit into the peer-progressive model?

Kickstarter is a wonderful example of a peer network at work. Most of us agree that the free market on its own doesn't support enough experimental creative work; that's why we have big institutions like the NEA or the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to support the arts. So in the past, if you were working on a creative project and needed funded for it, you were dependent on two top-heavy monoliths: big government organizations or foundations funded by the super-rich. But Kickstarter approached that problem from a different angle: instead of funding arts through those giant institutions, it took the peer network approach, creating a platform where hundreds of thousands could support interesting projects with small donations. And it works! Just three years old, Kickstarter is on track to distribute more money than the NEA this year. So it's a great model for other peer-progressive initiatives.

In what ways do you see the mass-media environment changing in a world governed by peer-progressive principles?

We're moving from big institutions (mass media, city papers) to smaller, more collaborative, more nimble, and more local clusters of reporting and commentary. This is disruptive for the old institutions, certainly, but in the long run I think we will be better off. In the book I talk about how the amount of information available covering a presidential election or the technology sector has vastly increased over the past fifteen years: more diversity of opinions, more in-depth commentary and coverage, and more immediate access to original speeches or proposals. All of that information is just coming from a much wider range of sources now, rather than three networks and a local paper.

You use one chapter to write about the history of—and potential for—prize-based challenges (like the Longitude Prize, or the X Prize). If you had $100 million that you could award as a prize, what challenge would you set?

I think there's a wonderful opportunity to set ambitious prizes for breakthroughs in drug research and health care, with the caveat that the winners must release their discoveries open-source style so that others can refine and improve on those ideas. That sort of prize structure is a tremendous driver of innovation, with a long history that dates back to the Enlightenment.

As you note, the core ideals of peer-progressive thinking don't really fit comfortably within the current American political spectrum. What are your thoughts on how this relationship will continue to evolve in the coming years?

Interestingly, there are parts of the Obama administration that seem very much aligned with the peer-progressive agenda: in their open-government initiatives, their use of prize-backed challenges, even successful programs like Race to the Top. But they have not yet managed to package those programs as a coherent philosophy—perhaps because it's too difficult to talk political philosophy to voters beyond broad-strokes ideas about collaboration and safety nets.

Besides yourself, of course, who are some other peer-progressive writers and thinkers we should be keeping an eye on?

I've been deeply influenced by everything Larry Lessig has written, and by Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks; and Beth Noveck's book Wiki Government does a wonderful job explaining many of the practical implications of these ideas.

When and where do you do most of your writing?

I have a little study in the guest house where we live now in California, so I have a lovely commute to work: I walk out my front door, down about ten steps, and I'm at the office.

Tell us about your home library: what sorts of books would we find on your shelves?

Until very recently it was dominated by nonfiction: a great deal of books about science, and technology, and history, some of which maps fairly directly onto books that I've written in the past. But for some reason, ever since I turned forty, I have started reading novels again. (I'm currently salivating at this fall's lineup with Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon, and Ian McEwan.)

What books have you read and enjoyed recently?

Right now I'm reading a fascinating collection of essays about communes in Northern California called West of Eden. I'm trying to get in touch with the history of this region and its amazing tradition of mavericks, now that I'm a local. (We moved here from Brooklyn last year.)

Do you have a sense yet of your next project?

I like to have three or four projects in the works at any given time; in my experience it's very productive to have them running in parallel, because they generate all sorts of interesting cross-connections as I research them. But I'm also weirdly secretive about them while I'm in this early stage, so I'll just say: yes.

—interview by Jeremy Dibbell