ARTS The night is dark. You are alone. The door bell rings; on the step, a total stranger. “Hello,” you say, “please come in.” You make the strange person supper while he deposits his backpack in your sitting room and makes use of your shower; you then see him tucked up on your sofa or in your spare room before retiring to bed yourself, to sleep untroubled by the idea that he might rob, rape or murder you before morning.
Are you completely crazy? Or are you one of the 850,000 people across the world who make use of couchsurfers.com, a website that runs a system of free accommodation for travellers. The standard of comfort might not be five-star but reports of unhappy incidents are extremely rare. Indeed, couchsurfers is an instance of a new form of e-altruism, or web-based trust network, that is eliciting more and more interest. In the 1970s Richard Titmuss studied blood donorship in his book The Gift Relationship, a phrase he coined to sum up the opposite of the market relationship. His work was the pre-internet proving-ground of altruism: in places where the giving of blood is free and voluntary, Titmuss’s research showed, the supply is better, more plentiful and more reliable than when blood donors are paid. Those who give blood freely do so not because one day they might need some (they’d get it anyway, whether they’d given any or not); more importantly, if they were offered money for their blood they would almost all stop giving it, because that’s not the point. It’s about motive, and sense of self.
Couchsurfers is one of the subjects of a new British documentary, Us Now, which looks at a range of mutually supportive, non-commercial online activities across the political, social and cultural spectrum. The film’s director, Ivo Gormley, wasn’t born when Titmuss was studying his blood donors, but the two would have had a lot to say to each other: Gormley is looking at how the internet has opened up multiple new forms of just that relationship between individuals, and how from them arise new ways of thinking about how society is organised. Ebbsfleet Football Club, which is owned and managed by its online fans, is the come-to-life dream of every boy who ever played Championship Manager on his Playstation – yet the real team got to Wembley. Zofa is an online banking/loan system remarkably like an old-style co-operative, for those outside the net of mainstream banks. And so on.
But Gormley goes further than such practical initiatives, and suggests that the mass collaboration made possible by the internet can actually create new forms of governance. “In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?” the film asks, and takes a shot at answering the question partly by its case studies, and partly in the debates with politicians and thinkers organised around the film’s showings this week in different cities in Canada, next week at the Barbican in London, as part of the London International Documentary Film Festival.
Some years ago I interviewed Sandy Lerner, the American co-creator (with her husband Leonard Bosack) of Cisco Systems, and so one of the very early begetters of the commercial internet. Thirty years on, she is devotedly low-tech, putting her heart and some of her millions into a wonderful library of early books by women in Jane Austen’s village of Chawton, in Hampshire; she told me she never, ever goes online, so horrified is she by the monster she helped to create, a playground for paedophiles and fraudsters, pornographers and terrorists. Lerner, the startled 1970s visionary, could see only that; Gormley, the 21st-century idealist, looks beyond the mountain range of e-dross and sees only a high, clear panorama of human opportunity.
In the intellectual and cultural sphere, certainly, the internet gives huge scope to the gift relationship. We take for granted the idea that we can tap a few words into a search engine and up will spring the poem we couldn’t remember, the name we couldn’t spell, or the entire text of Mark Twain’s Following the Equator. But if we step back a moment and think about that, it is pretty extraordinary. Someone put that there. For me. For free. But why? Just because they wanted me to have it?
Of course, the drawbacks to such intellectual largesse are well known: bloggers are rapidly killing off the paid commentator, piracy (another word for generosity, in some cases) threatens the writer’s chances of earning even a dry crust, intellectual property and copyright may soon seem quaint and distant notions.
But as the cultural world changes, so the internet seems the home of invention aimed at filling the gap. As CD sales plunge, young musicians have only a tiny chance of an old-fashioned recording contract – step forward slicethepie.com, where music-lovers listen to the demos of hopeful musicians, take their pick and pledge a fiver towards the making and marketing of that band’s CD. Fans are media mogul, talent-spotter, investor, critic, all in one: if they get 10p back on their fiver one day, all the better. Whether or not the business model proves durable (the site is only a couple of years old), the psychological model is rock-solid. You too can do this. That’s us now.
‘Us Now’ is at the Barbican, London, on February 25, www.barbican.org.uk/film
Peter Aspden is away
