I wonder if Mick Jagger ever thinks about it: 1969, Altamont Pass, California. The crowd assembled to listened to him are in a state of excitement. In the Dionysian excitement, his praetorian guard of Hell's Angels knife the young Merideth Hunter to death, while Mick lamely asks everyone to "stay cool". Does Mick, I wonder, ever think that the state of mind he created in his audience might have been the cause of Merideth's death? And might he feel the causal link is enough to create a moral link?
I was reminded of Mick's moment with the responsibility for crowds in a somewhat less dramatic context of Digg founder Kevin Rose's moving climbdown in the face of his excited audience. Digg allows users to vote on technology news stories and makes the front-page position of a story depend on the number of votes it gathers.
Yesterday, Digg users - a techno-libertarian bunch - posted and voted into prominence a piece of code which will allow us all to by-pass the copy-protection methods of the next generation of DVDs. Like a particularly energetic Jumpin' Jack Flash to the Altamont audience in 1969, this is the
kind of news that gets the geek blood boiling. But the industry association lawyers were not so happy with Digg's role as a distributor of the theft-enabling information, and sent Kevin Rose a "cease and desist" letter.
When he complied and took the story down, his audience got angry. They flooded the site with links to the offending code and voted for them so enthusiastically that the entire front page was devoted to the story. And then came Kevin's heroic and sad capitulation to the angry crowd:
"now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments,
you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down
to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete
stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the
consequences might be."
Kevin and Digg had lost control to the crowd, just as Mick had. The point is this: if you live by the repeated excitement of a group, you eventually give it an identity; and once it has that, it has the beginnings of power. Digg's whole ethos is populist, and what Kevin saw yesterday is that the tables can be turned very fast: from a group that you nurture and service, to one that is quite willing, collectively, to lead you to its own destruction. It is consumed by its identity.
Mick kept going, still exciting the crowds year after year. Even if the lawyers take Digg down in the face of the defiance of the crowd, web populism will keep going too. At Altamont it led to a death; yesterday, maybe, it will have caused the closure of a website. In both cases, I can only regret that it was not possible for each individual in the crowd to behave just slightly responsibly, with an eye on what we all together create through our actions.
