How intelligent swarms change the world
An article in the FAZ (german) talks about Howard Rheingold and how he sees the world changing through technology. How open source and peer to peer changes the politics of big corporation. He refers to the phenomena as SmartMobs or intelligent swarms. He talks about what all people connected for some time know - groups of people constantly organize reorganize make voices heard and all that completely without a top down control without a clear simple universal structure.
There is one quote that kind a struck me as this is the essence of what I believe in so I try to translate:
"Through the success of the peer to peer production of said swarms we see a fundamental change in business politics and therefore in the structure of capitalism."
„Wir erleben hier durch den Erfolg der peer-to-peer-production solcher Schwärme einen fundamentalen Wechsel in der Geschäftspolitik und damit in der Struktur des Kapitalismus.”
Rheingold goes on to say that of course big corporation try to hijack the new media forms but that this is seen by the communities and mostly dies of as quickly as it came. That is a point that I find debatable. I have seen big corporation taking over whole communities and outright killed them. Also there are multiple instances of corporate influence in existing big communities (I bet there are lot of links in wikipedia for example that are put there by hired personal). I think this is a real threat to the overall infoculture and can not be brushed off so easily.
As a futurist Mr Rheingold also looks into the future and has another thought he share that I agree with and hope for: China. A country with a communist government trying to give their people capitalistic standards. A country with 400 Million Mobile phones - popping up in the last 5 years. A country 1.5 billion people. Where does this country go? A democratic route? a pure capitilistic route? Mr. Rheingold thinks - like me - that this is the country where a new form for society could be born - and the world is rife for that and it could act as a role model. I surely hope that the peoples power will make this into something beautiful something that is not based on greed and hate.