OPEN

I’m back on the revolutionary path and unashamedly stirring up my own thoughts and feelings with stuff like this from Yochai Benkler, Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School:

Posted just this month, but recorded in 2005, it is one of those 20 minute TED conference head-spinner videos, this time talking about how and why the web is changing the fundamentals of economics (following quotes are paraphrased slightly, but the meaning’s not been changed):
“One of the problems with the internet is telling the difference between fashion and deep change.”
Anyhow…
“The information economy is often used as the term for what followed the industrial age. But in fact we have been living in an information economy for 150 years, it’s just been an industrial information age.”
A key moment reminds me that I’ve drawn a great deal from Benkler over the past few years.

For the first time since the industrial revolution the most important means, the most important components of the core economic activities of the most advanced economies… are in the hands of the population at large. This is completely different to anything that has happened before…

Feeling that maybe a re-read of his (free to download) Wealth of Networks could well be in order.