Here are my notes on Howard Rheingold’s opening keynote at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference, “Technology Innovation and Collective Action.”
We lived in small groups, hunting rabbits and digging up carrots for a long
time, and at some point, we worked out how to team up in groups larger than
families to hunt big game and to engage in agriculture, the birth of collective
action.The history of Unix is the history of people working collectively to create a common good that was useful to all of them. This was enabled by the architecture of Unix. The end-to-end principle guaranteed that people would invent their own services, unenvisioned by the creators of the Net.
The Web is the ne plus ultra: if you had asked five big corps or the govt to
create the web, they’d still be working on it in our g’childrens’ day. But
giving a million geeks the power to post pages about their dogs was the
affordance for collective action that gave rise to the Web.