Yawn. All a bit 1998 if you ask me. Look, I found most of it terribly visually impressing in a rock-video type of way.<p>When I can eat or live in a piece of information, then I'll start buying new paradigms with my ears pinned back.<p>All this talk about new economy is a bit old. While I'm impressed about the presentation - that's a very impressive way of showing things - and I agree that command-and-control architecture is done and dusted by sharing and open information models - this whole thing about information being more important than factories is a bit far-fetched.<p>Perhaps for some growth areas of the economy a completely information-based perspective is not only vital, but valid. Maybe more millionaires and billionaires will be minted by clever use of information and digital data. But the majority of the worlds production and income will still be found in digging things around.<p>However, the 'old economy' business of digging things up out of the ground, planting plants and harvesting them, and melting down base minerals to make things from is not going to change. You can layer all types of fancy new diagrams on top of this, but it's not going to change the base.<p>The big indicator should be that the 3 foundations of the current system, as described in the presentation - can all be exchanged for each other. Land for Captial, Capital for Labour, Labour for Land. Try exchanging information for any of these, you won't have much luck, unless we're talking trade secrets or blackmail. Try exchanging open information for a piece of land and see how you get on.<p>Even an iPad has to be made out of stuff dug out of the ground and refined in some way, then shipped across the ocean in an ancient old bit of technology called a ship. That's where the real story in the world economy is, that's where it will remain. Moving information around is just playing with the surplus production given to us by efficient manufacturing and agriculture.<p>If you want the real story on where things are headed, you'd best study things like the baltic dry index, the yield curve and old economy indicators like that. Measuring things in terms of eyeballs, mindshare and information flow is as terminally ridiculous now as it was 10 years ago when this was discredited the first time around.
The "new" economy is actually one we already had, which has simply become more powerful with the advent of the internet, and should have been present in the slides at each step along economic progression. It's a gift economy where capital is based on reputation and ability to share.<p>This is the same economy you use in local situations - with neighbors, friends, co-workers - to exchange favors. It has the power to get you a job, or to make a deal, or to elect a president, or any number of other things that determine how the work is done and how the goods are dealt out. The agricultural through industrial economies downplayed this form of economic activity because property, ownership and employment proved more suitable for creating an efficient market, but sharing has always been present and has always been taught as a moral ideal. If we didn't participate in that economy, we'd be quite a stand-offish, non-collaborative bunch. Nobody would trust each other.<p>What we have now is the ability to make gift economies based on information global in scale. The capital and labor necessary to start your (scarcity economy oriented) startup are potentially sitting right here on HN, if you know what to say and who to say it to. And PG and co. aren't making money off of the site, but I'm sure they've benefited from it. It's this kind of value that is really what's at stake in a successful info-business venture - the ability of companies to monetize on top of the info or info infrastructures ultimately isn't as important to the economy as the benefits accruing to all of society from just having it around and operating smoothly; finding a reasonable doorway from abundance currency to scarcity currency is what has led to the variety of monetization concepts tried over the last decade(ads, freemium, subscription, paywall, patronage...). This problem of monetization is pervasive throughout information products and is at the root of the whole IP debate: If there weren't money in trading information, would the incentives to create still be there?<p>But the question that isn't answered by these slides is the big one: how to balance ownership-based markets with gift-based ones. While the gift economy is endlessly abundant, how will we distribute the work for the older markets as they grow more efficient? Are there enough jobs to go around now, or do we need to rearrange ourselves to sustain heightened unemployment? How do we make everyone materially wealthy enough to be happy, and not destroy the planet in doing so?
Metacurrency? The work is already done and it's called bitcoins.<p>Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency system with a very vibrant community and several enterprises. It's also a system in which nodes trust no one and verify all transaction in the network. <a href="http://bitcoin.org" rel="nofollow">http://bitcoin.org</a><p>Austrian school and other economic models are not obsolete at all. Their tools just need to be shifted to analyze the information realm. In fact, Austro-libertarians in general already reject intellectual property.<p>Indeed, the system paradigram is beginning to replace the old system of nation states and coercion and replace them with anarchistic law system meditated by computers. Computer code will be law.<p>The world is starting to look more like the <i>Diamond Age</i>, everyday.
I think what's really going on is now that there is such an enormous amount of slack in the system we have to find new ways to self-actualize. For instance, because of all the cheap labor in China, manufacturing is now turning into an esoteric geek hobby in the U.S with Maker Faire, etc. I see Unemployed people on food stamps spending thousands of hours of their life in WOW and Farmville pretending they have a job because the real economy doesn't need them.<p>Maybe I'm too cynical.. Any idealists want to cheer me up?
That was good - I bookmarked it to run through again. I really like the part of this not being a recession, but the end of an old economy and the transition to something new where 1/4 of what runs the economy (information) can actually become more valuable as it is shared - not necessarily a scarce resource.
"Something seems to be wrong here, and tells us APP_ERROR. prezi.com/support might help."<p>Or not. Adobe flash player 10 under Fedora 12. Should I try from a Windows box at work in the morning?