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Proponents like to say that with bitcoin you trust math instead of governments. A number of startups and venture capitalists are dreaming up ways to use blockchain technology as a general purpose trust mechanism beyond money.
An important aspect of the blockchain is that it is a public commons. No one really owns it because, well, everyone owns it.
The more our society decentralizes, the more important accessing becomes.
For a long time there were two basic ways to organize human work: a firm and a marketplace.
Recently a third way to organize work has emerged: the platform.
A platform is a foundation created by a firm that lets other firms build products and services upon it. It is neither market nor firm, but something new.
At almost every level of a platform, sharing is the default—even if it is just the rules of competition. Your success hinges on the success of others. Maintaining the idea of ownership within a platform becomes problematic,
However, the move from ownership to access has a price. Part of what you own with ownership is the right—and ability—to modify or control the use of your property.
Dematerialization and decentralization and massive communication all lead to more platforms. Platforms are factories for services; services favor access over ownership.
The movies, music, books, and games that you access all live on clouds. A cloud is a colony of millions of computers that are braided together seamlessly to act as a single large computer. The bulk of what you do on the web and phone today is done on cloud computing. Though invisible, clouds run our digital lives.
everything that I work on is actually somewhere else, in a cloud.
If McLuhan is right that tools are extensions of our selves—a wheel an extended leg, a camera an extended eye—then the cloud is our extended soul. Or, if you prefer, our extended self. In one sense, it is not an extended self we own, but one we have access to.
Clouds offer computation with astounding reliability, fast speed, expandable depth, and no burdens of maintenance for users.
Clouds enable organizations to access the benefits of computers without the hassle of possession.
In the coming 30 years the tendency toward the dematerialized, the decentralized, the simultaneous, the platform enabled, and the cloud will continue unabated. As long as the costs of communications and computation drop due to advances in technology, these trends are inevitable.
The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone all the time is quietly giving rise to a revised technological version of socialism.
In other words, sharing and sampling content is the new default.
While old-school political socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.
social action is what websites and net-connected apps generate when they harness input from very large networks of consumers, or participants, or users, or what we once called the audience.
In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements, ranked by the increasing degree of coordination employed.
The online public has an incredible willingness to share.
Sharing is the mildest form of digital socialism, but this verb serves as the foundation for all the higher levels of communal engagement. It is the elemental ingredient of the entire network world.
When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it produces results that emerge at the group level.
The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that in a sense your picture is my picture. Anyone can use an uploaded photo, just as a communard might use the community wheelbarrow.
Community sharing can unleash astonishing power. Sites like Reddit and Twitter, which let users vote up or retweet the most important items (news bits, web links, comments), can steer public conversation as much, and maybe more, than newspapers or TV networks.
That is the whole point of social institutions: The sum outperforms the parts. Traditional socialism ramped up this dynamic via the nation-state. Now digital sharing is decoupled from government and operates at an international scale.
Organized collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of ad hoc cooperation.
collaboration on large, complex projects tends to bring the participants only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the end product.
Instead of money, the peer producers who create these products and services gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience.
The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of sharing technology is this: to maximize both the autonomy of the individual and the power of people working together.
The dream is to scale up this third way beyond local experiments.
So far, the biggest online collaboration efforts are open source projects, and the largest of them, such as Apache, manage several hundred contributors—about the size of a village.
They are “paid” in the value of the communication and relations that emerge from 1.4 billion connected verifiable individuals. They are paid by being allowed to stay on the commune.
The most common motivation for working without pay (according to a survey of 2,784 open source developers) was “to learn and develop new skills.”
The increasingly common habit of sharing what you’re thinking (Twitter), what you’re reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Motley Fool Caps), your everything (Facebook) is becoming a foundation of our culture.
In many cases, a modified market solution worked significantly better. Much of the prosperity in recent decades was gained by unleashing market forces on social problems.
Now we’re trying the same trick with collaborative social technology: applying digital socialism to a growing list of desires—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn’t solve—to see if it works.
We’ve had success in using collaborative technology in bringing health care to the poorest, developing free college textbooks, and...
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The shift from hierarchy to networks, from centralized heads to decentralized webs, where sharing is the default, has been the major cultural story of the last three decades—and
The aim of a collective, on the other hand, is to engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by all participants.
Throughout history, countless small-scale collectivist groups have tried this decentralized operating mode in which the executive function is not held at the top. The results have not been encouraging; very few communes have lasted longer than a few years.
Platforms like the internet, Facebook, or democracy are intended to serve as an arena for producing goods and delivering services. These infrastructural courtyards benefit from being as nonhierarchical as possible,
On the other hand, organizations built to create products rather than platforms often need strong leaders and hierarchies arranged around timescales: Lower-level work focuses on hourly needs; the next level on jobs that need to be done today.
The new collectives are hybrid organizations, but leaning far more to the nonhierarchical side than most traditional enterprises.
It’s taken a while but we’ve learned that while top down is needed, not much of it is needed.
Editorship and expertise are like vitamin...
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Yet if the hive mind is so dumb, why bother with it at all? Because as dumb as it is, it is smart enough for a lot of work.
First, the bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than we imagine.
Second, even though a purely decentralized power won’t take us all the way, it is almost always the best way to start. It’s fast, cheap, and out of control.
While the self-made bestsellers get all the headlines, the real news lies in the other direction. The digital age is the age of non-bestsellers—the underappreciated, the forgotten. Because of sharing technologies, the most obscure interest is no longer obscure; it is one click away.
