Embrace the Swarm
This is the beginnings of part 1 of the Kevin Kelly New Rules of the New Economy review series. I introduced it here.
If you’d like to take a quick read of Kevin Kelly’s Embrace the Swarm chapter, an online version is here.
In that chapter, he has a few interesting headings (these are concept introductions or even statements outright) like "the power of decentralization", "the net is our future", "dumb parts, properly connected into a swarm, yield smart results".
One overwhelming example of his theories would have to be the evolution of Open Source in the last several years. The Net has created the opportunity for otherwise independent and geographically disparate software developers and thought leaders to organize together and create software components that have drastically changed the face of software development. Prior to the net, most software was either completely home-grown or built with purchases components. We now see entire systems comprised of glued-together Open Source components. If you aren’t in the industry, this may be lost to you, but trust me, this is really big.
Companies like Amazon, eBay, and Google who have opened up their platforms with web services which, to some degree, represents an embracing of the swarm. This would not have been done were it not for the Open Source movement and I’m personally curious to see what interesting applications the world of creative developers create.
Blogs and podcasting are now all the rage. While people write independently, it really turns out to be one big intertwined conversation. Someone introduces an idea, another expands upon it or questions it, and the idea gets explored till the next idea takes priority. For those active in the blogosphere, it is not uncommon for their opinions to be shaped by the conversations they are having with bloggers that they’ve never met. This is in stark contrast to years ago, where opinions were probably more influenced by traditional media, friends, and family. Now it is possible to have conversations with anyone in the world. In my opinion, this is as big as the Open Source example and we are just seeing the beginning of it.
Kelly’s book examples draw more on connecting devices and other objects, but my examples have emphasized connecting humans. However, we are seeing trends toward connectedness in many areas, its just that sometimes the connections are invisible or very subtle.
Having said that, I do not think, however, that we’ve quite advanced as Kelly might have believed in making our objects connected. I cannot really say that the gadgets that surround me are as connected as they could be. So on that, I think we’re still waiting.
Next up, Increasing Returns…