[whataretheysaying] Mary Madigan: Mob rules

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Posted by Mary Madigan:
Mob rules
http://whataretheysaying.powerblogs.com/posts/1194315832.shtml


   No, not the Paulie Walnuts kind.

   Well, maybe Paulie Walnuts with a blackberry.

   [1]Hyperpeople reports on a web development session by [2]Mark Pesce:

     ..Fishermen form a tight-knit community; while they might be
     secretive about their favorite spots to fish, they all trade
     technique with one another, and â within a very short period of
     time â all the other Kerala fishermen had learned of the power of
     the GSM handset, and each of them brought their own handset to sea,
     made calls to the markets, and sold their catch for a tidy profit.
     Today, the fish markets in Kerala are only rarely oversupplied with
     fish, and are almost never undersupplied. The network of fish
     sellers and fishermen have created their own bourse, a marketplace
     which grows organically out of an emergent web of SMS and voice
     calls which distribute the catch efficiently across the market. The
     customers are happy â thereâs always fish for sale. The fish
     sellers are happy â they always have fish to sell, and at a good
     price. And the fisherman are happy â and earning so much more,
     these days, that a GSM handset pays for itself in two monthsâ time.

     None of this was predicted. None of this was expected. None of this
     was anything but shocking to the legion of economists who are now
     studying this unprecedented phenomenon. To our Western eyes this
     doesnât even make much sense. We think of mobile phones as a bit of
     bling, a technological googaw that makes our lives a bit easier..

     ..Except theyâre not.

     Study after study is confirming something that many were already
     beginning to suspect: the very poorest people on Earth â the five
     billion of us who earn less than a few thousand dollars a year â
     can benefit enormously from pervasive wireless communications. It
     seems counterintuitive â why would a subsistence farmer in Kenya
     need a mobile phone? As it turns out, that farmer â and farmers in
     Nigeria, and Bangladesh and Peru â will phone ahead to the markets,
     and learn where their produce will bring the best price. Left to
     their own devices, human beings with things to trade will create
     their own markets. When mobile communications enter the mix, their
     ability to trade effectively increases enormously.

     Those who serve the poor â microfinance institutions like
     Bangladeshâs Grameen Bank â have real experience of the power of
     mobiles to help the poor. So many of Grameen Bankâs loans went to
     finance mobile handsets that they recently founded their own
     telecoms firm â Grameen Phone â to provide services to the poor.
     None of this is charity work â all of these are profit-making
     enterprises; but it turns out that helping the poor to communicate
     is one of the most effective ways to help them to improve their
     economic effectiveness.

     That, too, wasnât predicted by anyone...

   On why the net may override our existing hierarchies:

     the network, in every form, is anathema to hierarchy. The network
     represents the other form of organization, not a contradiction of
     hierarchy, but, rather, a counterpoint to it. Iâve rewritten
     Gilmoreâs Law to reflect this:

     âThe net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it.â

     For the fifty-five hundred years of human civilization, hierarchy
     has always had the upper hand. Now the network, amplified by all
     those wires and routers, is stronger than hierarchy, and battle has
     been joined. But this isnât going to be some full-on Armageddon, a
     battle between the Empire and the Alliance; this is the Death of a
     Thousand Cuts. The network is simply kicking the legs out from
     under hierarchies, everywhere they exist, for as long as they
     exist, until they find themselves unable to rise again. What it
     really come down to is this: we are assuming management of our own
     affairs, because we are now empowered to do so. It doesnât matter
     if youâre a maize farmer in Kenya or a video producer in
     Queensland; these mob rules apply to us mob...

     ...In a future which looks increasingly like the present, there is
     no center anywhere, no locus of authority, no controlling power
     ordering our daily lives. There are no governments, no
     institutions, no businesses that look anything like the limited
     liability enterprises born in the Netherlands five hundred years
     ago. Instead, there are groupings, networks within the network,
     that come together around a project or ideology, a shared sense of
     salience â meaning â for that group. The product of that network
     could be Wikipedia â or it could be al Qaeda. Buy the ticket, take
     the ride.

   As a web designer working in Silicon Valley, I sort of took this stuff
   for granted. Government and major media sources were becoming
   increasingly irrelevant. Code was infiltrating most aspects of modern
   life. Code was also becoming more portable, in cell phones and Palm
   Pilots. It was easy to imagine that, in a few decades, code would be
   more essential than steel or oil. Whoever controlled the code would
   control everything.

   Since it was portable, and since cell phones were everywhere, that
   power would belong to the mobs, the masses, the people.

   Or the hackers. In a code-based world, hackers with the proper kung-fu
   could bring governments and media outlets to their knees armed solely
   with hot pockets and a few lines of C ++. The net was power.

   But 9/11 destroyed that illusion. Even the best coding kung-fu
   couldn't reach the hairy-assed 'masterminds' of the attack in their
   Afghan caves. In those dark days, we needed the old hierarchy, with
   its organization, it's defense capabilities, their immediate news, the
   kind that only CNN, Aaron Brown and their ilk could give. The old
   hierarchy was back in style.

   But then the old hierarchy gave us their old solutions - more biased
   news, more "peace" plans, a realpolitik war, more pointless partisan
   fights. More of the same - the only difference was, the new mob was
   aware of it. We learned that the old hierarchy was not as effective as
   we hoped they'd be.

   The mobs are getting restless again....

   * Link thanks to [3]Alan Sullivan

References

   1. http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/
   2. http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=39
   3. http://www.seablogger.com/?p=9209