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17 CHAPTER TWO Here Comes Everybody Problematizing the Right to the City Mass amateurization is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities. Clay Shirky I. HCE and RTTC It’s in James Joyce’s dazzlingly inventive masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, published on the brink of World War II, where the acronym “hce” first enters the scene, coined after the book’s antihero, a certain Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker , barkeep and man of the world. Throughout Finnegans Wake, Joyce puns and plays with H. C. Earwicker, whose dreaming mind becomes the psychological space in which the Wake’s drama unfolds. If Ulysses’s Leopold Bloom is an Every(day)man, then old Earwicker, old hce, is an Every(night)man, a universal dreaming figure. Thus the other epithet Joyce gives Humphrey, the other use of the acronym hce: Here Comes Everybody, the “normative letters,” Joyce says, of a “manyfeast munificent,” a sort of Jungian archetypal image of our collective, desiring unconscious, reliving in a single night’s sleep the whole of human history.1 The dreamer is “more mob than man,” jokes Joyce,2 “an imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalization.”3 For a while I dreamed of calling this book Here Comes Everybody, this urban book, because today those normative letters, this hce, seem to capture what life on planet Earth actually is: urban life, planet urban. A few years back, however, Clay Shirky, a freelance writer and sometime communications professor at New York University, beat me to it. He penned a book bearing those exact same normative letters—Here Comes Everybody—bearing an intriguing subtitle, The Power of Organizing without Organizations.4 I’d gravitated toward this book, jealously, with eager expectations of high-spirited Joycean inflections , of Joycean influences, of Joycean puns and artistry, and of Joycean desire. In fact, there’s none to be had: it’s as if Earwicker never existed, had never had 18 • chapter two his great fall. Instead, Here Comes Everybody is an artless book, a superficial book in many ways, un-Joycean in its lack of existential depth about human life; and yet, ironically, or maybe not so ironically, in its very superficiality it makes a pretty convincing case for the new forms of sociability our digital age begets. Perhaps the lack of content is Shirky’s major point, his major strength: that what we have now is a banal world of virtual flows and forms without any content, a deterritorialized world where territoriality doesn’t matter anymore, where everybody really is getting together on Facebook and Twitter; and it’s there, through new digital media, where our collective instinctual behavior is now getting expressed, where our real future becoming resides. Shirky’s book quickly became a bestselling user guide for the new social media movement; and its thesis applies as much to the corporate sector as the revolutionary sector, to business organization as well as grassroots organization. In this latter respect, we’re not too far removed from John Holloway’s autonomous Marxist chant from 2002: to change the world without taking power, to organize without organizations. Shirky’s great appeal, and doubtless part of the book’s success, is his optimism, his inclusive everybody, his popularism and pluralism. Social media, he reckons, have the potential to empower everybody; they can deprofessionalize certain select sectors of the creative professions (like journalism and photojournalism); engender creative, collaborative work for lots of “ordinary,” nonspecialist people; and they can coordinate unprecedented mass activism and mobilization. As Shirky writes, now “we have groups that operate with a birthday party’s informality and a multinational’s scope” (48). Shirky’s ideas are hip and contagious, especially when framed around such suggestive and provocative rubrics as: “Cooperation as Infrastructure”; “Ordinary Tools, Extraordinary Effects”; “The Global Talent Pool”; “Rapid and Simple Group Formation”; “A Possible Future for Collective Action”; “Revolution and Coevolution.” Shirky’s optimism spills over into the world of social protest: “Why is so much collective action focused on protest,” he asks, “with its emphasis on relatively short-term and negative goals? One possible explanation is that it is simply easier to destroy than to create; getting things started in a group takes a lot more energy than trying to stop them. That explanation is hard to support, though, given the fecundity of other kinds of social media. Once you know what to look for, evidence of group...

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