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Why We Need A Networked Economy
“The technological direction of this revolution is at odds with its social direction,” writes Paul Mason in Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future. “Technologically, we are headed for zero price goods, unmeasurable work, an exponential takeoff in productivity and the extensive automation of physical processes. Socially, we are trapped in a world of monopolies, inefficiency, the ruins of a finance-dominated free market, and a proliferation of ‘bullshit jobs’. Today, the main contradiction in modern capitalism is between the possibility of free, abundant socially produced goods, and a system of monopolies, banks and governments struggling to maintain control over power and information. That is, everything is pervaded by a fight between network and hierarchy.”
Human civilization has largely operated through hierarchies in the roughly 10,000 years since we invented money and the Market Economy. Although the population has served at the behest of kings, queens, emporers, sultans, dictators, presidents, councils, republics, and the ministers who have been given the power of punishment, there has also been a constant yearning to have more freedom from the rule of others and to develop a stronger sense of equality and interdependence through a more democratic network of relationships. And although the founders of the American experiment called out for democracy, only with the technological…
