Yochai Benkler Cooperation and Human Systems Design notes

Harvard law scholar Yochai Benkler talked on Monday at a MIT Media Lab colloquium about his new work on cooperation. He focus was Design Levers in human systems of cooperation. For example, building for greatest reciprocity when reciprocity come in a variety of flavors, such as strong, negative and altruistic. Baskin-Robbins’ 31 pales in comparison. It all sounds very scientific, and it is. He calls upon economists, anthropologists and psychologists to support his analysis. Nonetheless, the basic idea here is to augment human uses of human beings—not machinic or scientific. He does an anatomy lesson of cooperation systems toward the goal of better understanding of collective intelligence, commons resources, value systems...the things that make community.

The hypothesis, which sounds impossibly general, came out something like:

In a given situation, some people will cooperate.

He explains that cooperation is contextual and contingent. The big change though, the notion of cooperation as a disruptive technology (my phrase not the level-headed Benkler’s), is that cooperation is increasingly becoming a model for all kinds of interactions in our culture. The Western–technologically-advance-first-world-free-market is already altered in its traditional functions because of accelerated communications systems…and augmented information-sharing technologies. If you extrapolate from Wealth of Networks, Benkler’s highly influential book, and mashed it up with his comments about market values being out of step with moral and civic values, you get some of the direction he is going in with cooperation and its radical butterfly effect.

Benkler bracketed the talk as exploratory, it being still early on in his research. What he laid out were 10 categories of cooperation to be parsed and cross-referenced.

The ten terms


1. Communication

2. Humanization

3. Trust

4. Norms

5. Fairness

6. Punishment and discipline

7. solidarity/group identity

8. Transparency

9. Leadership/asymmetrical contributions

10. Self-selection/entry & exit of system


He points out that the cost of cooperation matters. Fairness matters. Neither money nor punishment is the absolute arbiters of behavior.

Ask him to tell the Herschel’s cookie joke. If you want the literature cited in the talk email me.