Ross Mayfield gives a nice perspective on Tim O’Reilly’s Hacks meme. He posits that we are at the beginning of the wave in the information revolution and have only begun to develop tools for it.
Relative to agricultural revolution, we just figured out crop-rotation and are in the process of entering the bronze age of tool development.
Sure, today its about hard core geeks messing with code. But the number of users as developers is increasing — as consumers become participants in networks and collectively demand the right to self-organize when the market fails them. From the bottom-up, we are attempting to overcome the complexity we have created…
What may be different from the industrial era archetype of mechanistic division of labor is the social practice of co-creation and pace of practice development we see in the open source, blogging, participatory democracy and other movements of the day.
