Actocratie in a flat world

maandag 27 september 2010

You might feel the internet revolution is over. The big changes due to the connection of the world have happened. A half billion people are connected via Facebook. We can buy everything via Amazon and sell it via E-bay. We have a open encyclopedia and a open operating system named Linux. Everything that can be done has been done via the internet we can wait for the next revolution. I think you might be up for a big surprise. It took us several decades before the profound changes of the age of electricity where realised. The infrastructure needed to be adopted from big factory halls into the a more electricity based environment. The 2000’s where the beginning and the real revolutions are yet to come.

What do I think will happen to the internet. We have had a decade of description behind us. We have talked about a lot of stuff via web services like MSN and sites like Facebook. We have talked about what we liked shared our experiences via blogs. Now the time for acting has come. Collective and group action on a national and even global scale have just arrived. Projects like “Let’s do it” have shown us that a group of twenty can move hundreds thousand of people to clean up a country. But how to organise? Who will do it?

At Ars Electronica a festival for electronic art in Linz Austria I found a answer. The guys of the hackerspace Austrian hackerspace had noticed that the old internet is about talking and discussion. When they wanted to paint a wall they put it on a mailing list and a half year of discussion begun about colour and the type of paint. Nothing got done. This is when they introduced a actocratie. First a call goes out to people who actually want to do stuff. Then they decide what has to be done. Why does this work? The people who want to do stuff want it done. The people who want to talk just talk.

I think our world is a actocratie where the cost of failing have gone down so fast. This means that anybody can act at such a low cost that the one who acts will win. In case you do not win you giant more experience than that it cost you.

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