Many have realized that Twitter, Facebook or any other widely used system of Status Updates could be useful for tracking possible infections and other trends, as well as having application in many other forms of group action and communication.
(Sure enough, within an hour of posting, a friend over at the Brennan Center sent this link: http://www.google.org/flutrends/
And I recently saw a clever suggestion for keeping realtime track of buses in NYC! Apparently the city wants to implement a computerized system to keep track of where all their buses are but they can’t afford it.
Someone came up with a simple idea! Just ask regular people to text or tweet the positions when they see a bus or its late or whatever! And some person or group will come up with an open source method to put the data together and get the job done.
It’s another example of how technology is changing economics and power relationships in fundamental ways. Like the issues with newspapers, intellectual content, etc.
From Vernor Vinge* who’s a hot topic these days:
“The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of true technological unemployment finally come true.“
*The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era
Yet in many cases, and as a result of the Internet’s unique nature, the value is actually produced from a distributed network which extends beyond the boundaries of the entity which focuses that value into marketable form and derives the market’s benefits.
The Internet is a landscape not a business. But as a landscape its qualities are unlike normal geographies since proximity is fundamentally redefined (farther in space and longer in time become closer and shorter respectively). This results in both greater productivity but also reduced opportunities to extract surplus value from the points along that chain from product to consumer since that chain no longer exists.
Further the Internet disperses content… or more accurately disperses it and then reconcentrates it in a myriad different configurations ever more individually determined.
Thus, the nature and reality of Vinge’s singularity are debateable but the ramifications of technological unemployment are here right now!
It’s possible that some form of exchange could be envisioned rewarding different kinds of personal or group production distinguished from the production of consumer goods or services through traditional entities.
Further, the availability of information and communication technology COMBINED with the implications of the Ultimatum Game in a shrinking and interdependent world make vast imbalances in wealth and power much LESS viable than they once were. Which suggests that a minimal drawing right against the commons for basic necessities may now be a practical necessity… in addition to the moral imperative it’s always been.
(this is reposted from my blog at Chagora & Civilization Systems )
Chagora Overview: http://www.netsquared.org/projects/chagora
Prototype & FAQ http://www.Chagora.com/faq.aspx
