It sounds a bit mushy and absurd, but in a recent talk, Clay Shirky likens the concept of love as a renewable building material to the Ise Shrine in Japan which is rebuilt — out of love — every 20 years, and Linux which is rebuilt every night “by people whose’ principle goal is that it exist the following morning.”

He suggests that the longest lasting things don’t have an enduring edifice but an enduring process. And that the better predictor of longevity is not a business model, but whether people who like the place/building/system/product take care of it and each other.

In other words, do they run on love?

Love is not a word that’s usually related to technology, but he suggests that:

What is happening in our generation is that we have a set of tools for aggregating things that people care about in ways that increase both the scope and the longevity in ways that were unpredictable more than a year ago. The coordinating tools that we have now– and I’m not talking about anything fancy, I’m talking about mailing lists usenet and wikkis– those tools turn love into a renewable building material.

We’re familiar with it. It’s the creation of open source software, wikkipedia, facebook groups around a cause, and the monitoring of the Nigerian elections by people using SMS and camera phones. And with more web and social networking tools comes an increase in the size and scope of what we can create out of love.

Of course, he argues, this doesn’t mean we’ll wither away into some sort of post capitalist society. “It does mean that the ability to aggregate non-financial motivation, to get people outside of managerial culture and for reasons other than the profit motive, has received a huge comparative advantage.”

Encouraging words, the question is how to do this? Because love on its own is not enough. It needs a system. It’s difficult enough to carve out time in our lives to make dinner, see friends, or make headway on our own projects outside of work. How on earth are we supposed to aggregate social motivation into something tangible for social change? The pattern of aggregating caring into something stable and long lasting is going everywhere, but what will it mean for this group of people? You are the change makers, so show your love. What are your thoughts and ideas on how we can make this happen? Team led projects? Open source models? What do you think can be sustained on love, what is just too much to ask and what kind of system can you imagine could harness the power of you, the many amazing people involved in ADB? Clay gives us a bit of inspiration with these memorable ending lines.

We have always loved one another. We’re human, its something we’re good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has always been quite limited. With love alone, you can get together a birthday party. Add coordinating tools, and you can write an operating system. In the past, we would do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now we can do big things for love.

via CT2