I am reading a fascinating book. It is called “The Age Of The Unthinkable – why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what to do about it”. Written by Joshua Cooper Ramo.

This book is like the Tipping Point (if you read that) of national security. Ramo discusses the way that in the modern world some of the real solutions to problems are quite counter-intuitive. Well actually that depends on the way that you think… But he cites some very interesting research along the way and uses it to punctuate his points.

Of particular interest is some of the research that he quotes that was done by Richard Naisbett at the University of Michigan into the way that different cultures view things. The bottom line of this research was that Chinese students and American students viewed and recollected images in quite different ways, leading to the conclusion that they processed information in different ways. This is not a race thing by the way. This is a culture thing.

Ramo postulates that these two quite disparate cultures would fight wars differently too. Americans develop strategy along the lines of Clausewitz and the Chinese along the lines of Sun Tzu. Ramo goes on to talk about the way that in the west we try to solve problems head on while in the east they try to understand the ecosystem within which the problem exists… It really is an insightful book….

But what is relevant to this rant is this:

The content industry in “defending itself” against P2P has acted like the west has acted in Afghanistan. You can never win a war against an insurgency. And the content industry has acted like a well oiled military machine. The march in step. They have the best weaponry. They have lots of money. So why are they losing the war?

Because the insurgents (The P2Pers) blend into the countryside, they understand their environment, they are motivated by passion not by money, and above all, they want to be free. And it is not about getting content for free – it is actually about wanting to have freedom of expression. P2Pers are the guerrilla fighters of today. They are also going to be the true anti-heroes of the age. They are also the martyrs of the age and people like Brittney Kruger become the Joan of Arc's and Che's of now.

This revolution that is taking place in our society, and that is what it is, will, I believe, be seen from the vantage point of history, as the way that the next great leap in human society began.

And there are those within the P2P community or the open source community – they are very similar in some respects  – who have that vision: the vision that they are going to change the world one programmed human at a time.

The big idea here is that Darwin captured the concept of evolution and wrote about it, and ultimately was acknowledged for his ideas… But P2P is the Big Bang for humanity. We are in the early days of a huge expansion of consciousness and P2P will be the technology platform that gets us at least part of the way…

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Posted in Main Page by Chris Gilbey No Comments Yet