Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
People do work together for the common good. But only in certain fields. Some people feel the call to advance human knowledge, and do it because it's what they want, not because they're in it for the money. The same is true for Open Source. The problem is, it's nobody's dream to clean toilets, and there are plenty of such jobs that need to be done in order for society to function.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
but the point is that business in the United States
its right there in the comment.
Now, you know, a lot of the "rest of the world" isn't quite as paranoid about other people wanting to steal their stuff.
A lot of the rest of the world has no need to be paranoid about other people wanting to steal their stuff. Because they can see it happening. Their own governments are doing it.
A lot of us actually believe that the vast majority of the time, most people like to cooperate.
The entire structure of Western Civilisation is built on trust networks, and this is more true in America than it is in Europe. Trust and co-operation do not rule out competition. But socialist governments do.
And there are enough people that like to act ethically that things like wikipedia and open-source can actually work.
Yes. And?
Either the system allows free choice and free distribution of rewards - which is capitalism. Or it doesn't. And capitalism has out-competed every other system humanity has ever devised. Capitalism produces more and better goods cheaper and with less effort. It's capitalism that has produced the immense surplus of wealth that allows us to spend our free time developing software just to give it away.
I can't think of a single other instance in U.S. history where a conglomeration of companies have had the power to stall technological advancement and changing economic structures, but this is precisely what they have done.
This really isn't that unprecedented. There was a big effort by the riverboat lobby to stop the development of railroads back in the 1800s.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
To paraphrase Noam Chomsky; just that communist countries *called* themselves socialist doesn't actually mean they were. Just as some eastern European communist countries called themselves democratic republics, when they obviously were not.
In fact, the first thing that Lenin did after the communist revolution in Russia was to dimantle the workers organizations and centralize power, in conflict with the socialist ideals. Communism (the russian version) was a perversion of socialism, just like the spanish inquisition was a perversion of christianity.
What we call capitalism today isn't true free-market capitalism either, even though everyone seems to say it is. In fact, the current capitalist system is highly protectionist (just look at what goes on at the WTO), and western society as it's currently organized would collapse pretty fast if the state stopped intervening in the economic system.