The Australian political blog scene is currently discussing the Sydney Morning Herald's publishing of the top one hundred public intellectuals. Not surprising since many in the Australian political blog scene are heavily involved with the industrial era institutions of intellectualism such as university and think-tanks.
Abundance theory teaches us the importance of fluidity. This is the uninhibited flow of interaction. Whether memes, consumers, commentators, customers, voters, whatever the interface is for information exchange and value determination. Abundance shows us that flash-mobs are the vectors by which we progress. Agronomists have come to understand the power of edge effects, flash-mobs are the same phenomena translated to human knowledge. Flash-mobs are the new public intellectuals.
The One Hundred
Anything static is orthogonally opposed to fluidity. This includes industrial era structures that promote monopolies, tenure, encumbancy and exclusion. Many of our institutions are rife with those aspects. Our economic structure ensures monopolies form and extract rents from the market. Our academic structure enables tenure and peer review within an exclusionary and contained group of specialists. Our representative government coagulates power around itself and strives to perpetuate its own glory through incumbency while drawing a rent in ever increasing legislation, tax and coercion from the very people it draws its legitimacy from. Our mass media operates on the principle of information scarcity and exclusion.
When looking at those who were
asked to vote
, and those they voted for, it is not surprising to see that nearly all of them occupy the industrial structures. Dead-tree publishing, academia and politics. It also interesting to note how few are business leaders. The entrepreneurs do not have the same power and access to public opinion as they do in the United States.
Another point of interest is how incestuous the list was. Those who voted, did so nearly uniformly inside the media and academia. Many of those in the list were more defined by their access to the bull horns of the mass media and academia than their output or contribution to Australian intellectual endeavor.
The closed nature of the list has meant that many who are forging new paths in the abundance era were over-looked. One of Australia's great abundance era practitioners and intellectuals is
Andrew Tridgell
. Software is the first of the abundance era technologies to go mainstream. Those managing opensource software projects on a worldwide scale are at the forefront of intellectual and technological achievement. They are defining many of the practices that will become common in our future.
Software
Henry Ford commoditized labour with the factory line. But the commoditization and reduction of the human element began with the industrial revolution when manufacture ceased to be the sole domain of craftsman. Management principles such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six-Sigma seek to further commoditize the human input, especially middle management. It has meant we now have qualitative principles to define quality, but one industry has defied the ability to commoditize the human or the labor. This is the software process.
Software has tried many of the industrial era management technologies. Processes such as waterfall design, architectural analogies, construction analogies, etc. They are all inefficient when applied to software, they add cost, time and create barriers to project completion. These processes are intended to commoditize the individual in the process, but in reality only set the project up for a greater likelihood of failure.
One of my favourite
agile software
thinkers is
Alistair Cockburn
. He went through a wonderful series of projects where his input on establishing process was ignored, yet the software developers still produced working code. He came to the conclusion that the developers were the primary force that determined success or failure of the project. Consequently he came to the conclusion that the simplest processes in software are the most successful.
Flash-mobs and Opensource
It is necessary to have some process in order to meet the bare minimum of quality. A central source repository and continuous integration are two of the bare minimums. But the volatile nature of software requirements and the continuous adaptation of design mean that software is somewhat unique. The compilation process (construction) is so cheap that design consumes 99% of a software project. The delivered source code becomes the end design document.
Since software is a human driven process, it is not surprising that it derives direct benefits from flash-mob processes. Opensource software is a good example of this. Flash-mobs are emergent behaviour. The biggest opensource software projects have grown simply because flash-mobs found them, put them to use, added to their growth, contributed to their development and their ongoing emergent value.
It is no coincidence that opensource software mimics flash-mob intellectualism. Software, as a rule, simply works better when developed in a flash-mob environment. Andrew Tridgell is one of many prominent Australians at the coal-face of this new manner of inter-connected benefit.
Flash-mob Intellectualism
The One Hundred in the Sydney Morning Herald contains those in the existing industrial power structures. As the world moves more and more to abundance structures this will be defrayed and eventually deplaced by amorphous and fluid flash-mob structures. We already have some flash-mob structures in our present day society. The sortition process of establishing a Jury is an example of a flash-mob.
Flash-mobs create new institutions of knowledge. They give unfettered access to information that allows the flocking around that body of knowledge along with the unfettered and unencumbered dissemination of it. Flash-mobs are not harmonious, nor discordant. They are for evaluating that meme for its intrinsic properties. No ivory tower, no gates, no barriers, just pure dissemination.
The flash mob creates a new body of knowledge around that meme - does it survive? does it propagate? does it morph? does it fail under that scrutiny? It is not so different from the process that Scientific specialists use to evaluate their work, though the flash-mob intellectualism has wider applications than the scientific method.
With flash-mobs we have a flocking around knowledge and memes until a new institution of knowledge is established and gained wider support. A new theory is developed in a short period by the flash-mobs that contains both support and skepticism. The flash-mobs are the vector by which new human knowledge is created, established, destroyed and disseminated.
Consequently this process is of greater value to human knowledge than a single intellectual in an industrial institution, who, through the vehicle of tenure, publishes their papers to other tenured specialists. The holistic nature of flash-mobs leverages the knowledge and wisdom of the people, not just the cloistered world view of the tenured specialist.
Flash-mob Government
In the abundance era world, knowledge is the coin by which people live. Information is already abundant, with the development of nano-technology, manufacture will also move to abundance and be commoditized in short order. Like the software compiler was in the 1990s. The construction process will only be limited by the programming powers of humanity.
The flash-mob also commoditizes the knowledge of the people. Rather than enforced scarcity, and subsequent perceived authority, through tenure or encumbancy, a flash-mob maximises the ability of the wisdom of the people to be brought to bear on any issue. Specialists will obviously not be in favour of it, preferring to believe that their acces to existing power structures gives them more legitimacy to make decisions for, and over, other individuals.
Yet we teach our six year olds Cartesian Algebra that only a few hundred years ago was the sole domain of the brightest scientists on the planet. With decentralised data networks, the complete library of human knowledge has never been so close to our fingertips. Our ability to absorb knowledge will only increase as we place more and more demands on ourselves.
The industrial structures are built around scarcity of information and expert depleted environments. They do not scale, nor are they relevant to, a society founded on knowledge and equity. The structures of monopoly, tenure and encumbancy need to be devolved into more fluid structures that draw from the statistical weight and knowledge of the people. For this reason I believe the injection of a
sortition or ratification process into the parliamentary system
is a necessary step toward a completely abundant democracy.
Flash-mobs In The Blogosphere
Abundance theory teaches us that human knowledge is universal. The sum of human knowledge is knowable by all and the decentralised data-networks put the sum of human knowledge potentially at our fingertips. No longer is human knowledge the exclusive domain of specialists. With discovery and deliberation, the same specialist knowledge can permeate through the people as they need.
While some straddle both scarcity and abundance institutions, Andrew Bartlett, John Quiggin and Ken Parish being good examples, many are penalizing themselves by restricting their publishing to the archaic and exclusionary structures of the industrial era.
Mark McKenna is an example of this. I love his work but he publishes into the industrial institutions. He has written a PhD thesis, published books, and written op-eds for newspapers. His industrial era credentials give him access to these structures. But as it stands now, no flash-mob can congregate around him, his writings, his memes or his thoughts.
He is out-sourcing that possibility to the present day flash-mob intellectuals such as
John Quiggin
and
myself
. My suggestion to Mark is, grab an account at South Sea Republic and start writing diaries/articles on Republicanism!
Embrace the abundant. If Mark does not, then his writings will be lost, or become the domain of other specialists who deal in scarce information. Other great Australian writers suffer similar scarcity and exclusion of their works. I cannot read Dan Deniehy from a google search, nor Frederick Vosper, Louisa Lawson, or William Lane. I have to go into a library and read their writings.
Anyone who publishes solely into the industrial mediums will suffer the same fate as those great Australian public intellectuals. If a meme is not instantly accessible, it becomes inconvenient. It will fail to gain wider currency; It will absolutely fail to generate ongoing reflection; It will become scarce.
Without instant access to the archives we lose the external memory that humanity is so proficient at creating. With barriers to that external memory of human knowledge we perpetuate the exclusionary industrial structures of monopoly, tenure, encumbancy and entrenchment.
Conclusion
The Abundance era reverts us to hunter-gatherers again. No longer are we slaves or serfs suffering under the inequitable structures of industrialism, specialism and exclusion. The industrial structures are a drain on society, they extract a rent from us, they promote complexity as a subsidy for the specialists and their exclusionist professions. They inhibit the vigour and innovation of the people.
As more and more of our lives move to abundance the industrial structures will come down. It will be a battle against the entrenched interests of those that occupy the powerful positions of the industrial structures. They will not give up their entrenched and exclusionist interests without a major battle.
Flash-mobs will become the defining vector by which human knowledge aggregates. As the digital archives become a synergistic and concurrent form of external memory - the sum of human knowledge and experience - flash-mobs will become the aggregators and disseminators of humanity. The industrial structures stand no chance, already they are being routed around when they have become inconvenient. Like all entrenched "horse and buggy" systems with access to coercive power, they will go kicking and screaming, scorching all they come in contact with as they fall. It is inevitable however - they would do best to embrace the abundant.
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