The
idea: Rob Paterson has penned
a long and extraordinary article suggesting
that social networking tools, building on a foundation of finding and
connecting and relating tools including weblogs, could be used to cut
out the corporate and government middlemen everywhere, usurp the
existing economy and power
authority, and create peer-to-peer networks that would run everything.
Rob says:
I
believe that ...Social Software tools...will shake our entire society
to the core. I believe that our descendants will look back at its
arrival the same way that we now look back at the advent of the
printing press.
I believe that Social Software is a vector a return to an old culture.
When I say old culture, I mean the culture that fits the essential
nature of humans and that fits nature itself. I imagine a return to the
custom of being personally authentic, to a definition of work that
serves the needs of our community, and to a society where our
institutions serve to enhance all life. I see signs that that we are
going home.
Pretty
heady stuff. I've met Rob, and he is not like me, not an idealist taken
to going off on tangents. He sees social networking as the means to
achieve all three elements of Dyson's
Dream: Free information,
community-based renewable energy self-sufficiency, and peer-to-peer
Ag-Bio innovation. He sees it as the means to achieve a media which
accepts that its job is to make
interesting what is important.
He sees it as the mechanism to unleash the Power
of Ideas. In his future state
scenario he sees virtual communities, formed and connected and
collaborating by means of social networking tools that will:
- allow
consumers to connect and transact directly with front-line farmers and
makers of clothing and other essentials -- on the consumers' terms
- allow learners to
connect and transact directly with front-line teachers, enablers,
demonstrators, and real learning environments -- on the learners' terms
- allow patients to
connect and transact directly with front-line healers, preventative
health providers, self-treatment information sources -- on the
patients' terms
- allow readers and
viewers to connect and transact directly with front-line journalists,
investigative reporters, researchers, analysts, philosophers,
interpreters of events, actors, artists, and entertainers -- on the
readers' and viewers' terms
The sense of urgency to make it happen, Rob says, will come when
we realize how desperate and hopeless and unsustainable and out of our
control our lives have become:
Now
we take it for granted that education is a linear process that leads to
a credential. Now we expect that healthcare is an intervention by
special people who deliver drugs and procedures. We take it for granted
in business that we can have an economy or a healthy biosphere but not
both. We take it for granted that work, family and education are
separate processes that compete for our time. We think that it is
normal to have a job and a manager. We believe that having more things
will make us happy. We accept that we have no real say in the
governance of our work place. Bombarded by millions of messages telling
us what to buy, to eat to wear and to do, we have no confidence in our
own innate judgment about what is good for us.
In Rob's brave new world, what each of us has to offer, and at what
price, and what each of us needs or wants, and at what price, will all
be "out there", in a perfectly connected and disintermediated market,
with no agents skimming most of the money and blocking the way. The
access to information about what's available and what's needed will
allow innovation to flourish, as creative minds rush to fill clearly
unmet needs, and will allow prices to crash to nearly zero, as the enormous supply
of ideas and more-with-less products and infinitely customized,
'virtual' service overwhelms the demand. Commons, community activities
and enterprises, collaboration, and free sharing will explode as horrific
scarcity and outrageous prices for crap give way to astonishing
abundance and affordability. The consequence will not be a rush to buy more
but a rush to work less,
to take time for important things -- a
volunteering epidemic will ensue, and people will learn how to make and
do things for themselves, and in community with others. GDP will crash
and so will stock markets and
housing markets while big corporations will slide into colossal
bankruptcy
and take the banks with them, but everything will get so
much better
for everyone else that no one
will care. Governments will no longer have the revenues to wage war or
accumulate debts, but well-being will have risen with abundance so
there will be no need for either, people will be looking after each
other, voluntarily, free, to the delight of both progressives and
conservatives. The people will have taken back the power, the control
over their
lives, their local resources and their time, and they will know how to
use
them wisely.
Is this possible? Certainly, but only if :
- we can prevent the power elite from using their wealth and
influence to co-opt, critically disrupt or shut down the Internet and
the social networking tools that would underlie this social and
economic revolution (as they have every other institution or group or
movement that has threatened them);
- we are willing and able to work together, collaboratively,
and give stuff away at a time when it still hurts to do so -- for every
person willing to prime this pump, to think ahead and wait unselfishly
for it to pay off, there will be others trying to exploit it, use it to
'competitive advantage'; and
- we are able to drag the 80% of the people on the other side
of the digital divide, across it, before the rich elite successfully
vilifies us in their eyes the way they have always vilified the middle
class in times of class struggle -- which is precisely what this is.
The paradox is that there is nothing we can do to 'lead' the charge to meet these three conditions. This is the ultimate World of Ends that Rob is describing -- there is no centre, no one in charge, and any attempt to impede in any way the free flow of everything from peer to peer will be seen and treated by this World as an undesirable blockage, and the World will work around it, defeating it.
Rob clearly believes that the people, all by themselves, ourselves, can be trusted
to recognize and understand the opportunity, to see it as desirable, as
a better way to live and work, and to cooperate to meet the three
conditions outlined above.
I want to believe. Do you?
Illustration: Network diagram of a TB contagion, from my KM colleague Valdis Krebs' Inflow site, via Mark Newman at UMich, with a little artistic license taken by yours truly.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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