It's ten years since Dutch designer Mieke Gerritzen and others produced the manifesto Everyone is a designer. This year the book is reprised with an updated edition, Everyone is a designer in the age of social media, which features new contributions from Matthew Fuller, Alexander Galloway, Peter Lunenfeld, Ellen Lupton, Lev Manovich, Koert van Mensvoort, Metahaven, Rick Poynor, Ned Rossiter, Bruce Sterling, McKenzie Wark and the most articulate of all social media evangelists, Clay Shirkey.

The idea that everyone is a designer is intoxicating. Clay Shirkey's book Here Come Everybody famously predicts that as Web 2.0, (to use a curiously antiquated label), grows, institutions will lose their power to individuals. Who needs expertise when we all now have - in theory at least - access to all the resources the internet offers. It's an ideology that you can see filtering down even to David Cameron's Big Society; why do we need social institutions when we should all be doing this stuff ourselves? It's at this point you remember that the culture of the internet was largely produced by a group of Northern Californian geeks and entrepreneurs who shared a radical ideology which was 50% hippie idealism and 50% aggressive free market passion. It's a kind of pure economic man scenario in which the internet levels us all so we are all equally free to sell our skills.

But what if our skills aren't equal. Everybody is a designer? Yes, it's great that everybody has the tools. But not everybody is a designer. I'm not, for one. It takes years to become a good designer. Even contributor Bruce Sterling sounds slightly nervous about the magnitude of the claim. In Beyond The Beyond he writes, "I’m in this book, though I’m pretty sure I didn’t declare that everyone is a designer."

Illustration: Cover from Emerge magazine by Mieke Gerritzen, 2001