The Long March from Crowdsourcing to a Global Meritocracy

I think the closest you can get to this is Mechanical Turk, which works for a large volume of relatively menial tasks and that's about it.<p>The fundamental issue here is that work is increasingly shifting into knowledge work, and knowledge work requires personal relationships and trust. Even assuming you can somehow bridge the trust and fraud gap to create a viable micropayment system for this work—and that's one overwhelmingly huge if—you still have the problem that the newcomer doesn't understand your company culture and the nuances of how you do business.<p>The idea that there are people out there who can magically solve your company's problems is horse shit. The few really talented people who would "get it" and hit the ground running probably are already super busy. Otherwise people need time to learn how to do the job. In a startup this is done with (hopefully) a smarter tight-knit team iterating rapidly. In a huge company this is done by policies and procedures laid out over time to allow people to be more interchangeable. But in either case you need long-term personal relationships for the employee to realize their value to the company.

There are two other significant problems here.<p>1. <i></i>Job security<i></i>. Most people seem to appreciate having a steady source of income. For a company to regularly outsource their jobs to the "smartest person" means that all the other "smart but not smart enough people" are without a job. So long as those other people are still able to find regular employment (i.e., exist within the traditional model), they'll do that, leaving fewer and fewer people available in the crowdsourcing pool.<p>2. <i></i>Quality of job seekers.<i></i> While it's true that in a meritocracy, the best rise to the top, this works best in a fairly small environment. If the entire ecosystem of web developers was required to compete for every single job, and anyone seeking a developer had only the entire ecosystem to look through, finding an "appropriate match" would become far too daunting, and the employers would be forced to reduce the rigor with which they vetted potential employees. This allows weaker candidates to get potentially good jobs. As a result, the more qualified candidates leave, and the meritocracy system is ruined.

During startup school Zuckerberg said something along the lines of 'a company is the most efficient way to align a large group of people to solve a problem' and this is going to be the fundamental obstacle to a true crowdsource model.<p>You need to be able to build up your domain knowledge as a company, not just tap into the knowledge of others temporarily. There is also the 800 lbs gorilla of support which can probably never be effectively solved via a pie-in-the-sky everyone does what they enjoy model. Pursuing your passion is simply not scalable, sure there will be plenty of people that get away with it but it is not feasible to say everyone will be able to. Someone needs to mop the floors, clean the toilets, and answer calls to the help desk.<p>At the end of the day I agree that freelance will probably become more prevalent and the commoditization of software components will certainly reduce the need for in-house expertise. These forces will bring us closer to the authors vision but the demand for support and in-house knowledge will herd us into monolithic organizations for the foreseeable future.

I think he's essentially correct on the macro trends that will move the world more to this kind of model.<p>On the specific point on what's holding back a more distributed/networked model of production, I think one obstacle is that labor is not easily "commoditized" in a way that facilitates trade (see <a href="http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/papers/horton.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/papers/horton.pdf</a> for more on this).

I suggest changing that headline, because it's an obscenity.<p>Mao Zedong committed genocide against China's intelligentsia. The class of people he murdered were part of China's tradition of Confucian meritocracy. The Long March was the military campaign where Mao won power. So that title is about as bad as talking about a Final Solution to the problem of racism.