December 4, 2002

PS 138D – Governance of the E-conomy

Lecture Overview Week XV: Conclusion

• In many ways, it’s impossible to integrate all pieces of the course together in one set of conclusions because it is simply too early. But some preliminary conclusions can be grouped in five areas:

1. Production in a digital era – what is different?
2. Power, transaction costs, and community
3. The nature of debate in an information enabled society – does John Stuart Mill scale?
4. Politics and law as structuring paradigms: the dysfunction of lawyers identifying and trying to solve the problem with law
5. Mechanical and organic solidarity on the Internet

• But first, here are some general thoughts, some "leitmotivs," that have run through the entire course:

• Why did tremendous computing power and ubiquitous network bandwidth come to be seen as a driver toward utopia (i.e. the end of scarcity, the end of poverty, the end of inequality, the end of distance…etc.)?
• How does extremely rapidly changing technology (e.g. Moore’s Law) affect a (slowly changing) world? Institutions are all about persistence and slow, incremental change – what happens to them in light of rapid tech change?
• Do politics and polity scale the same way as networks (e.g. Metcalfe’s Law)? – markets were to become "more perfect"; how about politics?
• How many Degrees of Freedom does the digital revolution provide, and has the power to use them?

• Production in a digital era – what is different? – at least five things:
1. lengthening and looping back of the value chain – the "return channel" from end-use to product-conception might be were the value added is
2. standards that are open and owned (e.g. Wintelism)
3. different character of finance – what cannot be commoditized and is thus most valuable?
4. liquid marketplaces, fueled by increasing returns and positive feedback (i.e. only one or very few e-marketplaces for a given area)
5. from a "division of labor" to "distributed innovation" – taking it one step further, how would a society built around the "end-to-end" principle look like?
• [Power, transaction costs, and community] – skipped

• The nature of debate in an information enabled society – does John Stuart Mill scale?
• When all the information in the world is accessible, how do you know what and whom to believe? – three possibilities:
1. credibility/expert-accounts – risk: "expert-shopping" means you only get information from people whose views you already share, undermining democratic debate
2. John Stuart Mill scales – vision of finding truth though the interaction of as many conflicting ideas as possible (the "truth" will crystallize out)
3. "info-babble" – the end of meaningful information and debate
• [Politics and law as structuring paradigms: the dysfunction of lawyers identifying and trying to solve the problem with law] – skipped
• Mechanical and organic solidarity on the Internet

 



 

We can now increasingly organize a process of production or knowledge creation in any of these four boxes.

It used to be very difficult to move from one box to the other (think of the Russian Revolution, for example, a violent struggle to move from upper-left to upper-right). Now it becomes much easier to move across – what are the implications?