radical decentralization

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The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

In his work, the Internet fits into this trend, enabling better coordination and cooperation in these sorts of loosely affiliated networks. My own emphasis is on the specific relative roles of market and nonmarket sectors, and how that change anchors the radical decentralization that he too observes, as a matter of sociological observation. I place at the core of the shift the technical and economic characteristics of computer networks and information. These provide the pivot for the shift toward radical decentralization of production. They underlie the shift from an information environment dominated by proprietary, market-oriented action, to a world in which nonproprietary, nonmarket transactional frameworks play a large role alongside market production.

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It is this second shift that allows for an increasing role for nonmarket production in the information and cultural production sector, organized in a radically more decentralized pattern than was true of this sector in the twentieth century. The first shift means that these new patterns of production--nonmarket and radically decentralized--will emerge, if permitted, at the core, rather than the periphery of the most advanced economies. It promises to enable social production and exchange to play a much larger role, alongside property- and marketbased production, than they ever have in modern democracies. 16 The first part of this book is dedicated to establishing a number of basic economic observations.

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These economic and social forces are pushing at each other in opposite directions, and each is trying to mold the legal environment to better accommodate its requirements. We still stand at a point where information production could be regulated so that, for most users, it will be forced back into the industrial model, squelching the emerging model of individual, radically decentralized, and nonmarket production and its attendant improvements in freedom and justice. 64 Social and economic organization is not infinitely malleable. Neither is it always equally open to affirmative design. The actual practices of human interaction with information, knowledge, and culture and with production and consumption are the consequence of a feedback effect between social practices, economic organization, technological affordances, and formal constraints on behavior through law and similar institutional forms.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

There is an urgent and critical need to build AI platforms that are co-owned and governed by the people who will use them for more and more purposes. These crucial efforts will help alternative AI software mature and develop toward an intelligence that truly represents us, not just the wealthy few who funded the earliest research and development expenditures. Cooperative online platforms need a free, open, and radically decentralized answer to the cloud. The cloud is expensive and decentralized platforms are only now emerging. Platform owners claim that the Internet is free, but the conflation of free-as-in-libre and free-as-in-gratis causes confusion. The corporate cloud, really, is just someone else’s computer; it is at odds with platform co-op ethics, especially when we realize we’re just renting access and computation.

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The corporate cloud, really, is just someone else’s computer; it is at odds with platform co-op ethics, especially when we realize we’re just renting access and computation. However, to deliver the AI-powered features that near-future users will demand, applications will need to draw upon sophisticated industrial-strength AI software services and harness powerful clusters of data-mining server farms. This stuff doesn’t come cheap. Free, open, and radically decentralized AI isn’t a thing yet, but blockchain-based platforms like Ethereum and Backfeed could offer decentralized alternatives to the corporate cloud. More libre but not gratis, as you’ll pay for decentralization with cryptocurrency. In its infancy, Ethereum is far more expensive than the Amazon cloud but with laughable performance and capability by comparison.

Bitcoin for the Befuddled by Conrad Barski

Airbnb, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Isaac Newton, MITM: man-in-the-middle, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, node package manager, p-value, peer-to-peer, price discovery process, QR code, radical decentralization, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, software as a service, the payments system, Yogi Berra

This economic philosophy argues, among other ideas, that the price of a unit of currency has the ability to adjust appropriately on its own, guaranteeing that purchases and savings in an economy will remain at desirable levels, no matter how many units of currency exist at any point in time in the economy. Bitcoin and Government Stability Some contend that a successful Bitcoin system would be harmful because it could destabilize governments. It has been debated that Bitcoin is part of a larger movement, recently termed radical decentralization, which maintains that all decentralization (including the functions of the government) is desirable and possible. This idea is a direct extension of the philosophies of Friedrich Hayek, who reasoned that local control is usually preferable to central control, because local people have more knowledge about local conditions and can therefore behave more efficiently in most situations.

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See also security protocol, for Bitcoin, 112 public information, transactions as, 11 public key, 150 encryption, 91 master, 188 parable of, 141–145 reversing function of, 136 sharing, 156 public key cryptography, 133–135 public/private key pair, creating with ECDSA, 154 pushing, Bitcoin programming, 223 Python, 226 Q quick response (QR) codes, for Bitcoin address, 10 R Race Integrity Primitives Evaluation Message Digest (RIPEMD), 139–141, 188 radical decentralization, 126 random key generation, 187–190 randomness, for generating Bitcoin address, 39 relay node, 170 RelayRides, 67 remote servers, Electrum connection to, 15 retailers, acceptance of Bitcoin, 116 reversible transactions, 55–56 rewards, 170 from Bitcoin-mining lottery, 22 for transaction processing, 26 RIPEMD (Race Integrity Primitives Evaluation Message Digest), 139–141, 188 risks, to Bitcoin, 117–121 Rivest, Ron, 133–134 rounding errors, 235 and cryptography, 151 RSA encryption, 133–134, 137 Ruby, 226 S safety, of storage, 35 satoshi (bitcoin unit), 9 SatoshiLabs, 43 Satoshi Square, 71 savings, Bitcoin for, 121–122 scarcity, of currency, 118 Sean’s Outpost, 18 Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), 139–141, 188 ASIC optimization to calculate, 174 security, 14, 118–119 of Bitcoin exchanges, 63 confidence in, 216–217 double hash scheme and, 156 SPV wallets vs. full wallets, 193–194 of storage, 35 seed, in Electrum, 14, 15 sending money from Bitcoin address, 236–239 code for, 238 SendRequest object, 238 settlement period, 55, 56 SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm), 139–141, 188 ASIC optimization to calculate, 174 Shamir, Adi, 133–134 Shamir’s Secret Sharing method, 42 shares, of mining reward, 176 side chains, 121 Silk Road website, 124 simplified payment verification (SPV), 191, 233 vs. full wallets, 193–195 single key generation wallet programs, 188 smartphones private keys on, 44 wallets on, 192 software as a service, 34 speed of payments, SPV wallets vs. full wallets, 193 spending bitcoins, 17–19 SPV (simplified payment verification), 191, 233 vs. full wallets, 193–195 SPVBlockStore object, 232, 233 stateless currencies, 2 storage, Bitcoin, 31–47 choosing method, 46–47 hot vs. cold, 33–34 of large amounts of bitcoins, 38–42 private key, 33 safety, security, and convenience, 35 of small amounts of bitcoins, 35–38 SPV wallets vs. full wallets, 194 Trezor, 43–45 summation, pseudocode for, elliptic curve cryptography, 158–159 symmetric key cryptography, 133 synchronization, SPV wallets vs. full wallets, 193 T Takhteyev, Yuri, 112n tangent to curve, elliptic curve cryptography, 150 thick wallets, 191 thin wallets, 192 third-party service provider, as bank, 33 timestamp, for block, 172 Tor, 127 trade volume, of exchange, 63 transaction confirmation, 25 transaction fees.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

In fact the Tea Party has taken as its organizational manifesto a book called The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. The idea behind the book is that if you have a leader, then the organization is only as good as that leader’s decision-making, whereas if you decentralize power, you are no longer pegged to the flaws of a small elite. It’s a way to rewrite Michels’s Iron Law. “In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on so large a scale,” wrote National Journal’s Jonathan Rauch. “Tea Party activists believe that their hive-like, ‘organized but not organized’ (as one calls it) structure is their signal innovation and secret weapon, the key to outlasting and outmaneuvering traditional political organizations and interest groups.… No foolish or self-serving boss can wreck it, because it has no boss.

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Norton and Dan Ariely, “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” Perspectives on Political Science 6, no. 1 (2011): 9, http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely.pdf, accessed January 26, 2012. 22 “placing a surtax on federal income taxes for people earning over one million dollars a year”: NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey, February 2011, p. 16, http://issuu.com/wsj.com/docs/wsj-nbcpoll03022011.pdf, accessed January 26, 2012. 23 A 2005 Pew study of more than eleven thousand Howard Dean volunteers and donors found that 80 percent had four-year college degrees: See “The Dean Activists: Their Profile and Prospects,” Pew Research Center for People & The Press, April 6, 2005, http://www.people-press.org/2005/04/06/the-dean-activists-their-profile-and-prospects/, accessed January 26, 2012. 24 The audience of Daily Kos and the more radical website Firedoglake are roughly similar: See demographic statistics at http://www.quantcast.com/firedoglake.com, and http://www.quantcast.com/dailykos.com, accessed February 22, 2012. 25 “You have a lot of kids graduating college, can’t find jobs”: See Kate Taylor, “Bloomberg, on Radio, Raises Specter of Riots by Jobless,” New York Times, September 16, 2011. 26 “POLL FINDS TEA PARTY BACKERS WEALTHIER AND MORE EDUCATED”: Kate Zernike and Megan Thee-Brenan, “Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated,” New York Times, April 14, 2010. 27 “sheer unadulterated disgust for the wealthy”: The clip is available at http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201106300012, accessed January 26, 2012. 28 “Ultimately I figured out that the real enemy of the people”: Author interview. 29 boasted a membership at its peak of more than 2 million: See Edwin Amenta, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 1. 30 “In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on so large a scale”: Jonathan Rauch, “Group Think: Inside the Tea Party’s Collective Brain,” National Journal, September 11, 2010. 31 “You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature”: See “You’re Creating the Sort of Society You Want to Have in Miniature,” Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog, Washington Post, October 3, 2011.

Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism by David Friedman

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Fractional reserve banking, hiring and firing, jitney, laissez-faire capitalism, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, means of production, Money creation, radical decentralization, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Universities would have to offer substantial incentives to keep their better teachers from being drawn off into freelancing. Such incentives might take the form of effective market structures within the university, rewarding departments and professors for attracting students. Large universities would become radically decentralized, approximating free-market universities. Many courses would be taught by free-lancers, and the departments would develop independence verging on autarchy. Under such institutions the students, although they might have the help of advisory services, would have to take the primary responsibility for the structure of their own education.

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Long live socialism. IF YOU WANT IT, BUY IT As the previous chapter suggests, there could exist a society which some socialists would call socialist but which I would regard as both capitalist and free. Such a society would be produced by combining the 'socialist' principle of worker control with radical decentralization and the market structure that such decentralization necessitates. There would be no central authority able to impose its will on the individual economic units. Coordination would be by exchange, trade, by a market. Instead of firms, the normal form of organization would be workers' cooperatives controlled by their workers.

Peer-to-Peer by Andy Oram

AltaVista, big-box store, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, dark matter, Dennis Ritchie, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, independent contractor, information retrieval, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, moral hazard, Network effects, P = NP, P vs NP, p-value, packet switching, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, power law, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, semantic web, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vernor Vinge, web application, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

Nonetheless, Napster (http://www.napster.com), as the application whose rapid uptake and enormous impact on the music industry sparked the furor over peer-to-peer, deserves some significant discussion. One of the most interesting things about Napster is that it’s not a pure peer-to-peer system in the same way that radically decentralized systems like Gnutella and Freenet are. While the Napster data is distributed across millions of hard disks, finding that data depends on a central server. In some ways, the difference between MP3.com and Napster is smaller than it appears: one centralizes the files, while the other centralizes the addresses of the files.

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Experience is already showing that a hierarchy is starting to emerge. Some users turn off file sharing. Even among those who don’t, some have more files, and some have better bandwidth. As in Orwell’s Animal Farm, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. While this idea is anathema to those wedded to the theory of radical decentralization, in practice, it is this very feature that gives rise to many of the business opportunities in the peer-to-peer space. It should give great relief to those who fear that peer-to-peer will lead to the leveling of all hierarchy and the end of industries that depend on it. The most effective way for the music industry to fight what they fear from Napster is to join the trend, and provide sites that become the best source for high-quality music downloads.

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What’s more, it is also the key to many peer-to-peer business models. Controlling namespaces and resource discovery has turned out to be one of the key battlegrounds of the Web. From Network Solutions (which largely controls DNS registration) to Yahoo! and search engines, identifying and capitalizing on the ways that centralization impacts even radically decentralized systems has turned out to be one key to financial success. Instant messaging turns out to tell a similar story. The namespace of an instant messaging system, and the mapping of identity onto user addresses, is the key to those systems. You have only to witness the efforts of AOL to keep other instant messaging vendors from reaching its customers to understand just how important this is.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Some new power communities don’t have any person or entity that meets this definition of owner. Instead, those communities have what we call platform stewards, who play recognizable but sometimes informal leadership roles that allow them to channel the energy of the broader community, create rules or norms, and define the structure of a platform. Even the most radically decentralized models, like the virtual currency Bitcoin, have seen such figures emerge. Though anyone is free to take Bitcoin’s code, adapt it, and create a new protocol for others to follow, only a handful of people have the power to “commit” code to the Bitcoin code base. These few have played a stewardship role in directing the technology.

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“I think it’s genuinely harder to write such a book today than it was ten years ago.” To explain why, he describes a class he teaches every few years on the music industry and intellectual property. “What’s interesting is that if you teach the case of the music industry in the late 2000s, what you see is radical decentralization and breakup. When you teach it five years ago, it’s the beginning of the emergence of mid-level structures to allow artists to make a living. Voluntary donations, SoundCloud…Then you’re teaching it in 2016 and it’s basically all Spotify. It’s completely recentralized.” (You can imagine Carr rubbing his hands together in self-righteous glee.)

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

In addition, small-scale, versatile, highly productive machinery can collapse globe-spanning industrial supply chains to just a few links, from raw materials to refined feedstock materials, from feedstocks to standardized microblocks, and then from microblocks to products that play roles as different as solar cells, spacecraft, car engines, concrete, computers, and medical instruments. Short supply chains and flexible production can enable radical decentralization. The second, atomic precision starts with small-molecule feedstocks, atomically precise by nature and often available at a low cost per kilogram. A sequence of atomically precise processing steps then enables precise control of the structure of materials and components, yielding products with performance improved by factors that can range from ten to over one million.

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As we’ve seen, the Information Revolution provides an alternative model. Producing patterns of atoms using APM-based technologies once again resembles producing patterns of bits using information technologies. Rapid production based on multipurpose, scalable platforms; independence from long, specialized supply chains; the potential for radical decentralization; the pivotal role of software and online data; new products without costly new physical capital; low marginal costs of production and distribution; the potential for rapid, global deployment of new products—all these characteristics are shared by both APM and information technologies, yet all contrast sharply with the characteristics of modern industry.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

See the Sea The globally emerging Blue Revolution became conscious of itself when Google engineer Patri Friedman realized that the economic theories elucidated by his grandfather, Milton Friedman, and developed by his father, David Friedman, would soon be put to the test by a rapidly approaching technology. Milton and David each asserted that political conflict was caused by political power, and that the solution to political conflict lay not in further consolidating power in the most virtuous government officials, but by the radical decentralization of power among millions of individuals with freedom and choice. How could such an organic bottom-up system work? In 1973 David published The Machinery of Freedom, describing the practical details, and Milton and his wife, Rose, later wrote Free to Choose, explaining the moral principles.

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Imagine a thousand floating Venices with waterways for roads, except the components are modular. When individuals possessed the technology to settle the seas, they’d discover an aquatic world more than twice the size of Planet Earth, where citizens would engage in such fluidity of movement that tyrants would have a very hard time getting a foothold, and political power would be radically decentralized and shared. Floating cities that best pleased their inhabitants would expand, while others which failed to do so would decline and disappear. Democracy, a system by which majorities outvote minorities, would be upgraded to a system whereby the smallest minorities, including the individual, could vote with their houses.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

What kinds of documents, records, or transactions would you put in it? What partners—customers, suppliers, third parties, government entities, and so on—would you have join you? How much time and money do you think such a ledger could save you? 2. In order for it to be valuable to you, would this ledger also need to be radically decentralized, or could it be owned and controlled by one or more organizations? 3. How important might Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies be to you? Are you planning to accept them as payment? 4. What would be the first “smart contracts” (contracts that execute 100% automatically) you would attempt to write?

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— attributed to Winston Churchill (1874–1965) IN THIS ERA OF POWERFUL NEW TECHNOLOGIES, DO WE STILL need companies? Many observers assert that real alternatives to companies are now available. These alternatives make use of many of the digital innovations described in this book, especially the radically decentralized, crowd-based technologies of cryptocurrencies, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts that we described in the previous chapter. Companies are squarely at the core of modern capitalism, but as we’ve shown repeatedly throughout this section of the book, the core can often be beaten by a technology-enabled crowd.

Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, altcoin, anti-fragile, bank run, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, driverless car, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, informal economy, invisible hand, Kickstarter, litecoin, Lyft, Money creation, obamacare, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, public intellectual, QR code, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, the payments system, uber lyft

And so it is with every driver in the sharing economy, every renter in the overnight-stay market, every buyer and holder of bitcoin, every lender on LendingTree. Welcome to the real world. It’s a wonderful place to live. How precisely the risk associated with investment is to be allocated in society cannot be foreseen by any planner or pundit. Risk allocation is for the market to discover. With P2P services, which are radically decentralizing the capitalist ethos, we are finding that workers actually want to bear more risk—in the hope of greater gain than wages alone could provide. Therefore, Asher-Schapiro is more or less correct in his conclusion: “there’s nothing innovative or new about this business model. Uber is just capitalism, in its most naked form.”

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, different worldview, driverless car, Easter island, failed state, fulfillment center, future of work, hiring and firing, holacracy, index card, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, radical decentralization, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the market place, the scientific method, Tony Hsieh, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

Under Sant’s leadership as CEO until 1994, and then with Bakke at the helm, it grew from a two-person firm into a global energy producer employing 40,000 people in plants located in more than 30 countries around the world. AES became a Wall Street darling after it was publicly listed in 1991. For years, while the company was going from success to success, the board members were supportive of AES’s radically decentralized and trust-based decision-making. And yet as Bakke suspected, “Most board members loved the AES approach primarily because they believed it pushed the stock price up, not because it was the ‘right’ way to operate an organization.”131 In 1992, an unexpected problem confirmed Bakke’s suspicion that most board members were still firmly rooted in a command-and-control perspective.

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A host of lawyers descended on the plant to “protect the assets.” … Several of our most senior people and board members raised the possibility that our approach to operations was a major part of the problems. It was as if the entire company were on the verge of ruin. They jumped to the conclusions that our radical decentralizations, lack of organizational layers, and unorthodox operating style had caused “economic” collapse. There was, of course, no real economic collapse. Only the stock price had declined. In addition, one of our senior vice presidents did a presentation to the board suggesting that “Protecting our Assets” rather than “Serving Electrical Needs” should be the top goal of the company.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Wherever people grapple with tricky management problems, from big organizations to small ones, from the public sector to the private, and increasingly in the voluntary sector, you can find Drucker’s fingerprints. The range of his influence was extraordinary. He changed the course of thousands of businesses, including America’s most revered conglomerate, General Electric, where he spawned not one but two revolutions, first in the 1950s when GE followed his concept of radical decentralization, and second in the 1980s when Jack Welch rebuilt the company around Drucker’s belief that it should be first or second in a line of business or get out. George W. Bush, America’s first president with an MBA, was a devotee of Drucker’s idea of “management by objectives.” (“I had read Peter Drucker,” Karl Rove once told the Atlantic Monthly, “but I’d never seen Drucker until I saw Bush in action.”)

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Drucker showed how GM’s decentralized structure enabled it to respond to the difficult challenges that faced it, such as the transition from war to peace.8 And other organizations such as Ford and General Electric rushed to copy it, blithely ignoring Drucker’s warning that he had doubts about the general applicability of the idea. By the 1980s, Drucker was credited with “moving 75–80 percent of the Fortune 500 to radical decentralization.”9 Drucker’s People As well as being a somewhat academic treatise on decentralization, The Concept of the Corporation was an unashamedly passionate plea for GM to treat labor as a resource rather than just as a cost. Drucker insisted that industrial relations ought to be based on people’s desire to be engaged in their job and proud of their product.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

The creation of ARPANET and TCP/IP were milestones on many levels. They now rightly occupy a prominent place in the history of computing, communications, and globalization. But in a strange way, they should also be seen as milestones in the history of political philosophy. The ARPANET was a radically decentralized system that had somehow emerged out of a top-down government agency. The Baran Web showed that states did not have to create Legrand Stars, with their geometric lines and heavy centers. They could also create more fluid, dynamic structures that lacked hierarchies and centralized control. The ARPANET was like Hayek’s marketplace, with “dispersed bits of information” and no central authority, but somehow, against all odds, it wasn’t an actual marketplace.

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, capital controls, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, export processing zone, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, microcredit, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, the new new thing, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

Jaycox called an ex-colleague in a despondent mood: Wolfensohn understood nothing about Africa and didn’t want to learn from him.60 The boss understood more than the barons were admitting. His visit to Mali had taught him that the Bank could be popular when it put good people in the field; and he soon embarked on a radical decentralization. His stop in Côte d’Ivoire had sealed his determination to tackle debt, and over the next year he hammered on this issue, ultimately bringing the IMF and reluctant rich-country shareholders around to his position. His time in Uganda had confirmed his suspicion that the Bank’s NGO critics could sometimes be correct, and that the Bank’s own staff could be too arrogant to admit it.

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Moreover, the idea that authority was decentralized to locally based Bank managers was not really true in practice; the Bank’s vice president for Latin America was closely involved in the Bolivia program, so decisions tended to flow up to his office in Washington.17 The vision of a streamlined Bank that got behind a politically legitimate, nationally owned development plan had been inspiring. But the wariness of the board and the naïve ebullience of the visionaries had combined to undermine a good idea. A little while later there was a fitting epilogue to the Bolivia story. Dennis Bakke vacated the executive suite with the statue of Jesus and St. Peter. His faith in radical decentralization had helped to land his firm in trouble, and his shareholders decided that head-office oversight is not so evil after all. The Bolivia fight almost buried Wolfensohn’s Comprehensive Development Framework, but Wolfensohn fought on. He flew off to Berlin the week after the disastrous board meeting and sold his idea directly to Europe’s development ministers.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

“The managers of these retail outlets and public houses had a high degree of information about their customers,” explains the economist Antoin Murphy. “One does not after all serve drink to someone for years without discovering something of his liquid resources.”8 In no time, people forged a radically decentralized monetary system with the country’s 11,000 pubs as its key nodes and basic trust as its underlying mechanism. By the time the banks finally reopened in November, the Irish had printed an incredible £5 billion in homemade currency. Some checks had been issued by companies, others were scribbled on the backs of cigar boxes, or even on toilet paper.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

It was inevitable that as bitcoin grew, people without the same agenda as the libertarian types in the Valley would find useful apps for blockchain’s ledger technology, and that’s what was happening. “Blockchain, not bitcoin” meant you were part of the group that wanted to use the technology bitcoin had pioneered without the radical decentralized system that let anyone in the world be part of it—a members-only system that produced a tamper-proof common ledger similar to the bitcoin one. For banks and big companies, “blockchain, not bitcoin” promised all of the innovative parts of Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation minus the controversy, amateurish oversight, and sketchy figures.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

But there is still another reason that Spotify chose the squadification approach. Once we push aside the communitarian language and the seeming affinity for small, adaptive, loosely organized groups, we see that the company is injecting a piece of market DNA into its structure. After all, decentralized decision-making is the hallmark of the market. Introducing such radical decentralization into a firm invites bits of the market inside. Spotify is an intriguing example of a firm intent on avoiding turning into a traditional firm by opting to be an organizational hybrid: part firm, part market. Introducing the market into the firm isn’t a radically new idea. There are many variations, but what unites them all is the delegation of some managerial decision-making to fundamentally decentralized, more market-like mechanisms.

The Knowledge Economy by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, balance sheet recession, business cycle, collective bargaining, commoditize, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, global value chain, information asymmetry, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, means of production, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, post-Fordism, radical decentralization, savings glut, secular stagnation, side project, tacit knowledge, total factor productivity, transaction costs, union organizing, wealth creators

The second set of reforms has to do with the demotion of the patent and copyright laws in their present form to one of several ways of compensating innovators and organizing the use of their discoveries and inventions. Data should belong to the individuals who generate them, as part of the expression of personality in society. Those who use data for economic gain should win consent for their use and pay for them. The radical decentralization of property in data—a vital input of much of the knowledge economy—would encourage a wide range of varieties of compensation other than the payment of a rent by the data user to the data generator. Such alternative variants of remuneration would include fractional equity stakes. The stakes can in turn be pooled in a secondary market that would monetize and trade them.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

This is how Linux, Wikipedia, and a growing number of extraordinary products have been developed. Belief in the viability of an alternative production model is growing among the technorati, as Benkler argues: “The networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production: radically decentralized, collaborative and nonproprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, locally connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial comments.” If I am right that knowledge is the scarce resource in the transition to sustainability, then it’s a limiting factor in the growth of the clean sector.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

m ay correctly be depicted as embodying everything that is wrong about hierarchical forms of gov­ ernance, the alternative imaginary of thousands upon thousands of autonomous municipalities fiercely defending their autonomy and their 84 R E B E L C I T I ES turf while endlessly (and undoubtedly acrim oniously) negotiating their position within Europe-wide divisions of labor is hardly alluring. How can radical decentralization-surely a worthwhile objective­ work without constituting some higher-order hierarchical authority? It is simply naive to believe that polycentrism or any other form of decen­ tralization can work without strong hierarchical constraints and active enforcement. Much of the radical left-particularly of an anarchist and autonomist persuasion-has no answer to th is problem.

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World by Paul Collier

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, charter city, classic study, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, first-past-the-post, full employment, game design, George Akerlof, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, language acquisition, mass immigration, mirror neurons, moral hazard, open borders, radical decentralization, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, white flight, zero-sum game

Pressed on where he felt most at home, he chose a village in France. I cannot imagine a French ambassador volunteering an equivalent sentiment. Both Canada and Belgium manage to sustain high incomes despite their weak national identities, but their solution has been complete spatial segregation between the different language groups, combined with radical decentralization of political authority to these subnational territories. For practical purposes of public service delivery, Canada and Belgium are four states with cohesive identity, not two states without it. In Britain the acceptability of national identity is confused because of the relatively recent multinational composition of Britain from its component parts: nobody in Britain, except for some immigrants, thinks of themselves as primarily British.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

As a result, we predict the lightweight OKR approach will gradually replace traditional top-down managerial oversight. Furthermore, many Exponential Organizations are organizing internally—though not in traditional departments with layers of middle management, but rather by self-organized, interdisciplinary teams and with radically decentralized authority. The Millennial generation, armed with Internet and gaming skills, which cultivate a self-starter and entrepreneurial mindset, is increasingly at odds with classic hierarchical structures that are optimized for efficiency over adaptability. Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Pixar Animation and Walt Disney Animation, expands on this idea in his New York Times bestselling book, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration: “We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute.

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

But most important, do not bring proposals before a larger group unless there is a compelling reason. This is absolutely essential. In fact it’s so important I will give it an entire section of its own. DO NOT SUBMIT A PROPOSAL FOR CONSENSUS UNLESS THERE IS A COMPELLING REASON TO DO SO Consensus process only works if it is combined with a principle of radical decentralization. I really can’t stress this enough. If there is any silver lining to the cumbersome nature of formal consensus process, it’s precisely this: that it discourages people bringing proposals before a General Assembly or Spokescouncil or other large group unless they really have to. It’s always better, if possible, to make decisions in smaller groups: working groups, affinity groups, collectives.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

One suggestive idea is that all significant technologies, including new algorithms, should be subjected to FDA-style trials like those applied to new drugs.16 Work such as that carried out by WEF is helpful, of course, but even their longish list of disruptive technologies is only scratching the surface. It misses a wide range of other technologies that are bubbling under, or actively brimming over into today’s world. With the development of many of these technologies now radically decentralized, and with biohackers working in garages with little or no government supervision, something more is needed to ensure that Gray and Black Swan risks are minimized and Green Swan opportunities optimized. Good intent will not be enough to ward off the inevitable dangers and crises. Indeed, it is worth remembering that each of the Black Swans covered in Chapter 3 began as some form of Green Swan, a technology that at the time was seen to offer significant advantages over what had gone before.

The politics of London: governing an ungovernable city by Tony Travers

active transport: walking or cycling, bread and circuses, congestion charging, Crossrail, first-past-the-post, full employment, job satisfaction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, post-Fordism, radical decentralization, urban sprawl, vertical integration

In Tower Hamlets, the relationship with the LDDC was conditioned in part by the way the borough was administered and also by its political control. In the early days, the relationship was adversarial; there was significant friction between the Corporation and the Labour group that ran the council. 40 The Politics of London In 1986 the Liberal Democrats took control, and brought in radical decentralization, with power being devolved to neighbourhoods. There were two Docklands neighbourhood committees, the Isle of Dogs and Wapping, both of which were Labour-controlled. While there were tensions between the neighbourhoods and the centre, the relationship between the neighbourhoods and the LDDC steadily improved.

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

“If the workers of the industrial factory found themselves laboring in an iron cage, the workers of many of today’s post-industrial information firms often find themselves inhabiting a velvet goldmine: a workplace in which the pursuit of selffulfillment, reputation, and community identity, of interpersonal relationships and intellectual pleasure, help to drive the production of new media goods,” Turner writes.50 Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have been regular Burning Man attendees since the 1990s. At the festival, Page and Brin would have encountered a radically decentralized social structure, one that facilitates creativity, collaboration, and experimentation with little or no “command and control.” Burning Man, Turner concludes, is a distillation of the “cultural infrastructure” that nurtures Google, a spiritual manifestation of what Yochai Benkler calls “commons-based peer production.”51 As the sociologist Dalton Conley has described, many of the most highly rewarded workers—those on the creative side of the technology industries—are either trapped in something like a velvet goldmine or struggling to get into one.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Indeed, as we will argue below, the government’s role would be more limited than it is today because there would be no need for discretionary interventions, like eminent domain or public ownership of property in the conventional sense, to solve holdout and other monopoly-related problems. There would also be much less need for distortionary and discretionary government taxes to raise revenue for the state. Furthermore, control of everything would be radically decentralized; a COST thus combines extreme decentralization of power with partial socialization of ownership, showing that they are, perhaps surprisingly, two sides of the same coin. Far from creating a form of centralized planning, the COST creates a new kind of market—a flexible market in uses, to replace the old market based on permanent ownership.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

Wales is optimistic about the Internet, too. “There’s a certain kind of dire anti-market person,” he says, “who assumes that no matter what happens, it’s all driving toward one monopoly—the ominous view that all of these companies are going to consolidate into the Matrix.” His own view is that radical decentralization will win out, to good effect: “If everybody has a gigabit [broadband Internet connection] to their home as their basic $40-a-month connection, anybody can write Wikipedia.” Wales’s optimism isn’t without perspective. After reading Tom Standage’s book about the impact of the telegraph, The Victorian Internet, he was “struck by how much of the semi-utopian rhetoric that comes out of people like me sounds just like what people like them said back then.”

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

In his book The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the problem of production had been solved; now the question was how to distribute its benefits. Economist Robert Theobold argued for putting the benefits of rising productivity into a reduced workweek so that citizens could have more leisure time to cultivate their lives outside the market. British economist E. F. Schumacher made the case for radically decentralizing economic power and production. In 1964, a group of liberal academics and activists signed a memorandum to President Johnson outlining an economic vision called the Triple Revolution. They argued that with automation and computerization, society would need fewer and fewer workers. Rather than allowing the market to translate that process into joblessness and the pressure to lower wages, society should take it as an opportunity to end poverty, spread wealth more evenly, and increase public spending on health, education, and culture.

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

Apple II, back-to-the-land, Future Shock, game design, ghettoisation, Hacker Conference 1984, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, machine readable, Mitch Kapor, pirate software, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

Netsys was not a stand-alone machine, but part of the globe-spanning "UUCP" cooperative network. The UUCP network uses a set of Unix software programs called "Unix-to-Unix Copy," which allows Unix systems to throw data to one another at high speed through the public telephone network. UUCP is a radically decentralized, not-for-profit network of UNIX computers. There are tens of thousands of these UNIX machines. Some are small, but many are powerful and also link to other networks. UUCP has certain arcane links to major networks such as JANET, EasyNet, BITNET, JUNET, VNET, DASnet, PeaceNet and FidoNet, as well as the gigantic Internet.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

The online nature of the interactions allows people to rapidly shift their attention from one topic to another, and it allows people from a huge group to form an ever-shifting constellation of many parallel small groups, each of which works temporarily on a specific article or other topic. And that, in turn, makes the radically decentralized consensus process work in a way it almost certainly couldn’t in a large face-to-face group. Communities of Practice Community of practice is a term for a community of people who do the same kind of work and learn how to do it better from interacting with one another.4 A classic example of this was described by anthropologist Julian Orr, a former colleague of mine when I worked at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Maintain this system for too long without decentralizing authority, and whatever morale gains were made will be reversed as people become frustrated with their inability to act on their new insights. Just as empowerment without sharing fails, so does sharing without empowerment. Shared consciousness is a carefully maintained set of centralized forums for bringing people together. Empowered execution is a radically decentralized system for pushing authority out to the edges of the organization. Together, with these as the beating heart of our transformation, we became a single, cohesive unit far more agile than its size would suggest. Unlike the items in a MECE checklist, neither of these can be instituted alone; only when fused can they power an organization.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Policymakers, faced with the opportunity to create an innovation commons for the wireless Internet, want to sell the right to innovate to the highest bidder.We’re at a critical point where we’re choosing which path to go down, and the problem is that most people in wireless policymaking are control freaks. They’re the Soviets of our time. They think the only way to run an economy is if the government decides who uses spectrum for what purposes. I fear that the Soviet mentality will destroy innovation here. Instead of top-down control, we need radical decentralized opportunity to innovate and create using this medium. —Lawrence Lessig Unwiring the World, One Neighborhood at a Time I had heard übergeek friends rhapsodize about “wireless freenets” and something called “eight oh two dot eleven bee,” but I never watched anyone pull an Internet connection out of the air until Lars Aronsson, instigator of Elektrosmog, flipped open his laptop and surfed the Web from a café near Stockholm’s Sergel Square.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

But while the flaws of most parties are often unquestionable, their demise implies the disappearance of important reservoirs of highly specific knowledge that are not easy to replicate by the alluring newcomers—many of which tend to be what Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt called “terrible simplifiers,” the demagogues who seek power by exploiting the ire and frustration of the population and making appealing but “terribly simplified” and, ultimately, deceitful promises.9 The same holds for the experience of large firms as employers and investors. Micro-enterprises, pop-up stores, venture funds, social networks, and the like have a hard time replicating a large firm’s accumulated intellectual capital. The radical decentralization of knowledge—from Wikipedia to open-source software development to MIT course material available free online—is one of the most exciting trends in the dispersion of power. But the ability of these new sources of knowledge to match internal R&D or preserve institutional memory is inconsistent at best.

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences by Steven G. Mandis

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Litterman, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business process, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, eat what you kill, Emanuel Derman, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, housing crisis, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, performance metric, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, value at risk

Stark notes that when faced with uncertainty, “instead of concentrating their resources for strategic planning among a narrow set of senior executives or delegating that function to a specialized department, heterarchical firms [flat organizations or those with a limited hierarchy] embark on radical decentralization in which every unit becomes engaged in innovation.”44 Therefore, hierarchical firms—those with a long chain of command—are less supportive of innovation and entrepreneurship. Dissonance—supported by the flat organizational structure that facilitated interaction and information transfer, and the financial interdependence of partnership that fostered trust and aligned interests—gave Goldman a significant competitive advantage.

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

Their intellectual genealogy can be traced directly to a particular text, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which appeared in 1776 at the outbreak of the American Revolution—a sign not to be lightly dismissed as a mere coincidence. It was written to oppose “mercantilist theories” that assigned to the state an active role in regulating and promoting economic activity. Smith offered a sharply opposed vision of the economy as radically decentralized, largely unregulated, consisting of small-scale producers—in short, virtually autonomous (laissez-faire). In place of an explanation (the economy was supervised by the state for the common good), Smith offered a miracle. The decisions of countless individual actors, each acting for his own self-interest, would nonetheless produce the well-being of the society, a state of affairs that the actors had not intended.

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

In a hugely cited book, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, written originally in 1974, Harry Braverman argued that the computer would lead to mass deskilling and, in effect, the centralization of economic power (Braverman 1998). But in fact transformation has gone in a radically decentralized direction, as the individual console has put greater and greater computer power in the hands of the individual. Our approach is not technologically deterministic: it could be plausibly answered that Braverman could have been right had the development of computing remained under central control, either by governments (as it might have been in the Soviet Union) or by great corporations with monopoly control over product and labor markets.

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

For example, Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain generalized from his reading of the Internet’s architectural history to propose a “procrastination principle” built on the assumption that “most problems confronting a network can be solved later or by others.” This principle, Zittrain argued, “suggests waiting for problems to arise before solving them.”5 Two important points emerge from this new conventional wisdom that casts the Internet as a radically decentralized open system, capable of facilitating a new style of “organizing without organizations.” First, it indicates that Internet advocates, popular writers, and the general public have a poor understanding of the Internet’s history. The Internet, like many technological novelties that preceded it, provokes fantasies that its history does not support.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

“Massive intelligence on a decentralized global computational substrate, an underlying layer, should change the architecture of the firm from a large collection of specialized departments run by humans to software agents that can cooperate and compete in free markets.” Some agents will organize for longer periods of time to serve ongoing customer needs, such as utility and maintenance. Others will swarm around a short-term problem, solve it, and dissolve just as quickly, having served their purpose. Is there a risk that radical decentralization and automation removes human agency in decision making (e.g., the risk of rogue algorithms)? “I am not concerned about machine intelligence. We will evolve with it and for a long time it will be in the service of, or an aspect of, Homo sapiens cybernetica. It may evolve beyond us but that is fine,” Lubin said.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

While all else was being consolidated, the 1990s would also see the so-called Internet revolution, though amid its explosive growth no one could see where the wildly open new medium would lead. Would the Internet usher in a reign of industrial openness without end, abolishing the Cycle? Or would it, despite its radically decentralized design, become in time simply the next logical target for the insuperable forces of information empire, the object of the most consequential centralization yet? Part V will lead us to that ultimate question, the answer to which is as yet a matter of conjecture, for which, I argue, our best basis is history.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Many of my supporters first heard about my campaign via YouTube or other online videos of my speeches and campaign events. These converts quickly began sharing information with others. They also used the Internet to coordinate activities and events organically, without any centralized coordination with my official campaign. This radical, decentralized, organic support for my campaigns—with the Internet serving as the primary organizing tool—was an incredible demonstration of true “grassroots” organizing. This army of mostly young, Internet savvy activists is what enabled my campaigns to overcome the deeply biased mainstream media’s virtual blackout, allowing my campaign to outperform several better-funded candidates.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

But after a decade of travails, in 1990 the PSA was wound up and split into two, with the state maintaining the property management arm (renamed Property Holdings) while the construction arm became a commercial entity. And then, in 1996, all responsibility for land-and-property holdings was devolved to individual departments. Later described in one report as creating a ‘departmental silo’ system, and in another as creating an ‘autonomous string of castles’, this radically decentralized new scheme of things would explicitly militate against any subsequent attempt to set and execute overall estate strategy centrally.1 So when, in the 2000s, Whitehall decided to begin to set targets for space reduction, and thus surplus creation – and also, as we shall see, for surplus disposal – it decided to do something about this silo system.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

But how do we even begin to conceive of the sense that allows bees to register (through the hairs on their legs) the electromagnetic fields that plants produce? (A weak charge indicates another bee has recently visited the flower; depleted of nectar, it’s probably not worth a stop.) Then there is the world according to an octopus! Imagine how differently reality presents itself to a brain that has been so radically decentralized, its intelligence distributed across eight arms so that each of them can taste, touch, and even make its own “decisions” without consulting headquarters. * * * • • • WHAT HAPPENS WHEN, under the influence of psychedelics, the usually firm handshake between brain and world breaks down?

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Yochai Benkler has examined the opportunities for the democratization of cultural participation offered by the Internet through the lens of liberal political theory: The networked information economy makes it possible to reshape both the “who” and the “how” of cultural production relative to cultural production in the twentieth century. It adds to the centralized, market-oriented production system a new framework of radically decentralized individual and cooperative nonmarket production. It thereby affects the ability of individuals and groups to participate in the production of the cultural tools and frameworks of human understanding and discourse. It affects the way we, as individuals and members of social and political clusters, interact with culture, and through it with each other.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Secretary of State for Environment, quoted in “Carbon emissions: Now it’s getting personal,” New York Times (June 20, 2007). 16. Richard MacManus, “IBM and the Internet of Things,” ReadWriteWeb (July 22, 2009). 17. “World electricity: The smart grid era,” Economist (June 5, 2009). 18. “SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age,” The Climate Group (2008). 19. The argument in favor of radically decentralizing energy production is also subject to the specifics of geography. The southwestern United States, for example, has both sun and land in abundance, which makes desolate areas like the Mojave Desert ideal for large-scale solar power generation. In more northerly latitudes, where land and sun are more sparing, the economics are different.

In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

When text is confined to concrete objects, such as books or pieces of paper, it generates pressures for centralization (you must go to the text if you 180 KNOWLEDGE AND COMPUTER-MEDIATED WORK want to read it) or for possession (you can own the book or maintain your own files). The electronic text is the result of an even more radical centralization: a wide range of information can be gathered and codi- fied in a single computer system. However, this radical centralization enables an equally radical decentralization: in principle, the text can be constituted at any time from any place. The contents of the elec- tronic text can infuse an entire organization, instead of being bundled in discrete objects, like books or pieces of paper. Finally, the electronic text does not have an author in the conven- tional sense.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

Piracy conflicts demanded some specification of the roles of home and state in creativity and commerce. They also required some account of how to police domestic activities in a liberal democracy. But home copying terrified the culture industries in their formative years of the midtwentieth century more than prior piracies because it implied a radical decentralization of cultural production. What made this possibility plausible was the reception accorded to one of the technologies appropriated by America from the ruins of Nazi Germany: magnetic tape. Reeltoreel tape machines became a presence in many U.S. households by the late 1940s. Although cumbersome by the standards of later incarnations, they made recording and copying far easier than they had ever been before.

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

But who would I leave it to? I'm so tired."21 Gorbachev took Chernyaev with him on the holiday to Foros in the Crimea. After lunch on Sunday, August 18, Gorbachev went to work on his speech about the new union treaty. He planned to fly back to Moscow on Monday for the ceremony on Tuesday. The treaty would radically decentralize the Soviet Union by giving the republics broad new powers, including control over their own resources. On Sunday, the hardliners swung into action.22 On the grounds of Gorbachev's resort compound, code-named Zarya, or Dawn, duty officers stood by with a suitcase for command of the Soviet nuclear forces.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Likewise, Sean Parker had been in trouble with the law, not to mention with power brokers such as Moritz; Thiel nonetheless embraced him. To banish consensual thinking, Founders Fund broke with the industry practice of Monday partnership meetings, replacing the Sand Hill Road tradition of collective responsibility with radical decentralization. Founders Fund investors sourced deals independently, even writing some small checks without consulting one another. Bigger bets required consultation—the bigger the check, the more partners had to assent—but even the biggest investments did not require a majority to vote in favor. “It usually takes one person with a lot of conviction banging their fist and saying, ‘This needs to be done,’” one partner explained, by way of summary.[52] Like Soros’s, Thiel’s philosophical interests convinced him of the case for unusually aggressive risk-taking.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

He was not primarily an anarchist thinker, but like Colin Ward in Britain was keen to show in concrete ways the practical applicability of anarchist ideas. He helped develop and gave expression to the wave of libertarianism and pacifism in the fifties and sixties which formed part of the New Left in America. His advocacy of anti-militarism, radical decentralization, participatory democracy, and organic community also deeply influenced the counter-culture at the time. Goodman first proposed his alternative to the size, sprawl and bureaucracy of contemporary America in Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (1947), a work he wrote with his architect brother Percival.