The Next Social Revolution?

Cryofan writes "In a recent interview, Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs) discussed the possibility of a 'new economic system' born of 'unconscious cooperation' embodied by such technologies as Google links and Amazon lists, Wikipedia, wireless devices using unlicensed spectrum, Web logs, and open-source software. Rheingold speculates that 'the technology of the Internet, reputation systems, online communities, mobile devices...may make some new economic system possible....We had markets, then we had capitalism, and socialism was a reaction to industrial-era capitalism. There's been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.' However, Rheingold is worried that established companies with business models that are threatened by these new technologies could 'quash such nascent innovations as file-sharing -- and potentially put the U.S. at risk of falling behind the rest of the world.'"

Comments

Re:Major problem: Human Greed

[maxpublic]

Nature's encouragement of greed/self-interest is now something that humanity, if it wants to survive, must overcome.

And we replace it with what? The 'greater good', which is invariably defined by the person who yammers on about it? Which would make the definition one created out of self-interest, would it not?

Cut the socialist clap-trap about how 'self-interest' is evil and counter-survival. It's not only pure, unadulterated crap, it's pathetically juvenile.

Max

Re:A New Economics System?

[SpaceCadetTrav]

Don't worry, with his kind of thinking, he'll never get off of welfare.

The utopian information revolution. Again.

[Hognoxious]

It seems that some knowledge workers seem to lack certain bits of knowledge - namely that you can't eat information, live in it or use it to travel from A to B. The real economy is not dead, and is likely to survive at least until they invent replicators.