Globalization - Rise of Networks

[Music] people have been exchanging goods and ideas on a global scale for millennia but in the past few decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall the opening up of capital markets the rise of information technology and the reduction in trade tariffs the pace of global connectivity has greatly increased as many countries and people have entered into a single global economy of exchange [Music] although the initial phases of economic globalization may be behind us today soaring flows of cross-border data channeled through the internet are taking globalization to new levels today 1 billion people are coming online every five years as digital platforms are coordinating evermore spheres of economy and society the level of globalization fostered by the information revolution is altogether unprecedented in human history as the speed with which information transactions and capital can travel virtually anywhere on the planet enables the sustained coordination of human activity at a new scale and level of complexity this series of short films documents this fast changing landscape at the intersection of globalization and the ongoing expansion of information networks [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] global interconnectivity has expanded and contracted many times throughout history with the rise and fall of Empires and their extended trading routes [Applause] [Music] before the advent of industrial technologies the capacity to maintain some form of global relation was highly costly and thus the privilege of a tiny minority of any society the aristocratic women of the Roman Empire could wear fine silk garments imported from China but the vast majority of people lived out their lives interacting only with their local social cultural and physical environment tribes clans Lordships and other forms of traditional society were organized around a cosmos of local level interactions and relations that defined the limits to economic and political organization for most of human history [Applause] [Music] with the advent of industrial technologies such as the steam engine and later the telephone and radio the mass of society could communicate with people and travel to places far from their indigenous locality tapping into the new energy sources of fossil fuels enabled the sustained expansion in physical connectivity beyond the local the railroad was one of the truly revolutionary elements of the industrial revolution for not only did it create a new economic dimension but also it rapidly expanded the geographic mentality of people for the first time in history human beings had true mobility over a large geographical area beyond their local community for the first time the horizons of ordinary people expanded beyond the local and it expanded out into a national system of organization that formed over the coming centuries economic industrialization went hand in hand with the rise of the modern nation-state as transportation technologies enabled people to experience a wider geographic area as if it was one national culture was fostered and sustained through the newspaper radio and later the television which allowed a geographically dispersed population to share their collective set of ideas and experiences today the modern nation-state is the primary macroscale system of organization in the world sovereign states are designed to have supreme and independent authority over a geographic area all organizations on the regional and the international level operate through or are regulated by the legal machinery of the nation-state the nation-state has come to represent a whole world of cultural social economic and technological relations on a particular geographical scale having proved to be the fundamental institutional framework of an industrial society but whereas the industrial technologies of the railway automobile radio and newspaper enabled the modern state the advanced technologies of information communications and global transportation are interconnecting people and places in ways that go beyond the paradigm of the nation date [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the global connections that these technologies enable whether they are airline routes the flow of financial capital or supply chains they all start local and travel globally with limited reference to the national level [Music] in parallel with this rise of information technology was a changing economic paradigm starting in the late 80s a new economic and political ideology arose promoting the idea of the free market both internal to the nation-state through privatization and external through the reduction in trade barriers tariffs and other policies that were designed to reduce the differences between national jurisdictions and enable a global free market the net result of this coupled with new technologies has been a mass increase in global economic exchange and with this increase in connectivity an increase in global interdependence [Music] networks of infrastructure of telecommunication of data exchange of migration of tourism of financial flows are expanding out into a new global sphere but the management of our world has remained by and large structured around the nation's state the result is a growing chasm forming and ever-growing sphere of activity within and between societies that is unregulated a void that becomes determined by powerful market actors [Music] [Applause] as a consequence at the heart of this evolution in human organization is the question of how can we manage the global economy how can we manage these global networks in an effective fashion today the case can be easily made that we have not and are not capable of doing this from financial crisis and offshore tax havens to an incapacity to deal with migration and refugees further environmental challenges such as global warming cross boundary water and air pollution and overfishing of the ocean are directly linked with lack of global governance [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] to date neither markets nor public institutions have proven effective at delivering sustainable solutions to the management of the global economy on its different levels the Industrial Age macroscale management structure of the nation-state has not transformed to meet the demands of an emerging set of global networks that require a new form of management structure that is today significantly lacking and this has many systemic detrimental effects [Applause] [Music] global institutions built on the framework of the nation-state like the World Bank WTO IMF and United Nations although effective in some ways are ultimately an incomplete solution to global governance as they are piecemeal undemocratic often ineffective and have not created the desired results today few people desire the formation of a centralized global government that might be able to manage the global Commons in the same way that the nation-state did for national economies while private actors and markets have evolved into a global structure such a system of organization without regulation has proved to create huge social and environmental negative externalities that are unsustainable in many ways the form of globalization that we have developed has turned out to be very unsustainable while this global interconnectivity is working to disintegrate the social welfare state in many ways it has not yet replaced it with a viable model on the global level [Music] while large sections of the global economy are still in an industrial mode of organization at the leading edge networks are emerging as a new model for organizing human activity without dependence upon geographic boundaries until very recently the only way to achieve large-scale coordination was through centralized closed organizations but with information technology and online platforms we now have the actual means to create global scale organizations capable of coordinating resources and people at an unprecedented scale this changes the rules of the game and the conditions for success have changed as power is fast moving from people within hierarchical positions to the design of information networks every horizontal connection made across the borders of vertical organizations reduces the resources flowing through those structures we are going through a massive wave of cross boundary connectivity that is redirecting the flow of resources both within societies and between them the resources flowing within vertical organizational structures is diminishing at the same time the challenge and complexity of the environment they operate within is increasing as more and more resources are flowing through information based networked organizations [Music] this transfer of power from closed organizations to global networks that is taking place as we move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age is comparable only to the transfer of power that occurred at the beginning of the modern era from the church and landed nobility to the capitalist classes nation-state and bureaucratic organizations in general a myriad of overlapping and intersecting global networks are becoming a new organizational structure for Humanity in the age of globalization networks of trade of finance of air transport of information of media are now starting to link and coordinate human affairs in new ways but this transition is far from over and the outcomes remain hugely undecided [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] at the heart of the process of globalization is the rise of a new organizational paradigm in the form of the market system a new logic of commercial exchange has expanded to evermore spheres of human activity after millennia of societies and economies being governed primarily by people making choices within a political context today economies around the world are less governed by the choices of their political institutions and more by the rules of economics markets and flows of financial capital this truly radical transfer of power and decision-making has taken place within a few short decades with far-reaching implications more and more societies around the world and more aspects of those societies become opened up to being organized through the logic of the market system centuries-old established local ways of doing things are becoming increasingly organized via global networks of economic exchange [Music] since the origins of society people have formed political institutions to make collective decisions for their community tribes chieftains states and empires have been governed predominantly by a small elite of people making collective decisions about the ordering of their societies and economies with these political systems forming hierarchical centralized structures based around a common culture and confined within a specific geographic boundary the modern era saw the expansion of another major modality for the coordination and management of resources within society the market system markets have always been there but have traditionally operated within the confines and constraints of the cultural social and political institutions of their society typically in pre-modern societies most of the resources produced are for direct family consumption excess resources are typically aggregated and controlled by the ruling political authorities within these societies markets play a relatively limited role in terms of decision making [Music] one of the primary characteristics of the modern era has been the rise of capitalism and the market system particularly since the Industrial Revolution with urbanization mass production and the specialization of Labor the mass of people became dependent on the capitalist market system for their everyday livelihood in a modern society the market system comes to take on a new role instead of being a means to an end that is controlled by the political social and cultural elite it becomes an end in itself and increasingly liberated from socio-political constraints as an ever more important means for decision-making in relation to the allocation of resources the economy becomes the glue that binds people together through their interdependence on each other through the process of industrialization it becomes a major independent organizational structure during this process of industrialization it became accepted that the market system needs independence from socio cultural and political control although this idea was challenged during the 20th century by centrally planned economies like the USSR it eventually came to dominate you [Music] until the middle half of the 20th century hierarchies were almost unanimously seen as the only effective method for organizing production within large mass societies it was at this time that a new ideology of the free market as a distributed coordination mechanism in its own right arose one can see the early conceptual stages of this process with the work of Friedrich Hayek Hayek recognized that prices produced by supply and demand alone could be an accurate and sufficient signal of information to allow decentralized coordination to achieve the optimal allocation of resources within society although the state was still seen to be needed for providing basic support Hayek saw the market as an optimal self-sustaining system and enabling it required converting as much as possible into private property and contracts that would allow for those signals to order economy spontaneously the latter half of the 20th century saw the realization of Hayek's ideas here in the United States and in other developed economies with the acceleration of a process of transferring socio-economic organization from hierarchical social organization to market structures as promoted by a new ideology of neoliberalism in the 1970s 80s and 90s public provisions started to retreat and private production via the market started to expand into almost all areas the neoliberal paradigm is the logic of the market system although originally it may have been an economic theory neoliberalism came to be much more than this as it came to encompass a set of ideas or paradigm about human nature economic and social organization neoliberalism is the free-market ideology based on individual liberty and limited government the connected human freedom to the actions of the rational self-interested actor in the competitive marketplace neoliberalism formed the conceptual rationale for shifting economic organization from people and hierarchies toward an impersonal logic of the market in order for it to achieve this it had to remove power and capabilities from the nation-state a battle was fought during the latter half of the 20th century for control over the state and it was largely won by the proponents of this new market based model neoliberalism had a clear agenda to shift power from democratic systems of governance and move it into the market this was done through two primary vehicles one was privatization and deregulation of national economies the other method was the shifting of power out of national democracies and their Parliament's and into the executive in international bodies that were not controlled via democratic procedures such as the IMF or WTO as people became increasingly aware that the political power to affect the things that mattered in their lives was fast slipping out of their hands civil society started to react clashing with the architects of this new global economy the epicenter of which was here in Seattle on November 30th 1999 where massive street protests turned mounting tensions into violent outbursts however the battle was already over the days of the National Democratic system exercising independent power were coming to a close as all were becoming interdependent in a new market system that was starting to extend around the world [Music] the ideological and regulatory playing field was now set for an unprecedented expansion in global economic activity an era starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall that is now called hyper globalization countries around the world began in earnest to industrialize their economies bringing in country workers into urban centres to work in the low-skilled manufacturing of goods that could now be exported to global supply chains global trade agreements removed the limitations of the national economy as the world economy could absorb a much greater amount of production this process of industrialization in China and other emerging markets drove huge growth in the global economy over this time the expansion of telecommunication networks and the introduction of computerized coordination into the corporation enabled it to geographically disaggregate certain key aspects of production outsourcing expanded creating greater exchange along the emerging global supply chains more products and information we're starting to move between more nodes faster and a greater volume [Music] the deregulation of financial institutions in the late 80s enabled the formation of a global financial architecture to move investment around the world foreign direct investment started to flow to emerging economies as money became relatively freely available within capital markets this was the pinnacle of neoliberal economic globalization that took place during the 1990s and early 2000s with the development of global supply chains and hyper growth in China driving the commodity supercycle this period of globalization drove dramatic changes around the world in places like Dubai Shenzhen or here in Shanghai as a city grew at 10% a year for 20 years with its iconic skyscrapers appearing almost overnight Shanghai will forever personify this period of globalization as the balance of power in the global economy changed substantially this era marked the culmination of a centuries long process in the shift of power and decision-making from political organisations to the markets and private enterprise [Music] this period of extraordinary growth in the global economy all started unraveling over the course of a few months with the emergence of a global financial crisis the well accepted truths of economic development were shattered overnight everything became open to requesting and an era of uncertainty began the cold hard realities of national divides and geopolitics came to once again prevail [Music] an era in the history of globalization was over and a period of searching began when a new model for globalization was to emerge almost a decade later it would take a very different form the net result of this period of hyper globalization is an economy that has evolved into a global form that is too complex for any nation state or centralized organization to manage in the space of just two decades something profound had happened some kind of global system had emerged that was greater than any of its parts after thousands of years of people being guided by ruling elite according to a multiplicity of local cultures and their different value systems humanity is now embarked on an extraordinary process the formation of a single global value system a single logic for value exchange that is extending ever farther and ever deeper to replace the age-old structures that have organized societies for centuries [Music] [Applause] [Music] the form of hyperglobalisation that expanded around the turn of the millennium was based on neoliberal economic theory it was marked by a reduction in trade barriers the development of outsourcing and global supply chains the privatization of state assets and the shift of power from national legislation to multinational institutions the massive expansion of the global financial market and the formation of the global cities network but the financial crisis was to bring this massive expansion in economic exchange to a shattering end you [Music] the global flow of goods finance and services flattened the well accepted truths of the free market became reopened for questioning as multinational organizations like the IMF and World Bank have come to have less influence through the financial crisis the political establishment in developed economies became increasingly de legitimatize as nationalism began to once again expand while many speculated about the end of globalization underneath the ashes the seeds for the next era of globalization had already been sown as a revolution in information technology was continuing unabated the model for globalization was transforming the globalization of today is no longer driven by increasing exchange of goods but instead information and services while political organization remains divided soaring flows of cross-border data are taking global integration to new levels as we approach four billion people connected to the Internet these huge flows of data and the platforms that orchestrate them have become the new architecture to globalization [Music] the story of globalization as it has unfolded over the past decades has been one of a new set of information technologies enabling the development of a global economic and financial system that brings humanity into a commonly shared value system mediated by markets in the past the linkage between the underlying information technology and the institutional structures that resided on them was not apparent globalization was seen to be driven by the institutional structure of the multinational corporation of trade free agreements of financial markets and the physical connectivity of the global city and global air and shipping networks but after the financial crisis this started to change as the underlying information technology began to mature there was an inflection point everything was starting to shift into the realm of technology and information with the development of the second generation of web technologies mobile and cloud computing and the rise of online platforms the world was about to become connected in unimaginable new ways as the underlying technology and software platforms matured networks were starting to take over the coordination of critical aspects of human organization the internet was now moving from being a decoration on industrial societies to becoming the core infrastructure mediating global economic exchange information technology and economic markets were about to converge in a new model of the platform economic and social organization were starting to be channeled directly through this global information network giving rise to what is called the platform economy for thousands of years markets and hierarchies were the only alternatives when it came to aggregating human effort but through the financial crisis both the markets and social institutions of the Industrial Age had shown their limitations now technology was starting to show the third option real-time distributed information based networks the critical economic aspect that started to change with the rise of information technology was the placing of the means of production into the hands of many and the interconnectivity between them through which they could connect collaborate and exchange value outside of the traditional centralized structures for the first time since the Industrial Revolution the most important inputs into the core economic activities of the most advanced economies came to be widely distributed in the population it began with computation storage and communication but is increasingly expanding to all areas including material production at the same time network communications dropped transaction costs to a very low level making it much easier for people to set up their own networks for collaboration value creation and exchange without traditional formal organization this meant that the production of information and knowledge could happen without large investments of capital and overhead costs of management and transaction fees this in turn allowed for production to move outside of the domain of the market and more into the domain of peer production within social networks based upon a more complex set of motives and values than those of the pure market logic we saw this first with open source software core aspects of what used to be an industrial information and cultural economy turned into a social production economy that began to seriously compete with the major economic actors and destabilize power disrupting traditional market logic in new ways that were previously almost unthought-of these new online organizations leveraged a critical new advantage that was made possible by the information networked economy loosely coupled distributed collaboration around a common resource to deliver overall if sees something that was significantly absent in the neoliberal efficient market model constructed around closed organizations competing as the first generation of web technologies were all about the exchange of ideas media and information it had little direct impact on the global economy however this began to change with the development of a new set of server-side technologies that led to web 2.0 where people can both read from the internet and write to it this new technology made it possible for people to interact through collaborative platforms both producing and consuming content creating new forms of user-generated systems as a means of production and exchange of value not just of information and ideas but increasingly of physical assets the critical economic aspect that changed with the second-generation web around 2013 and 2014 is that the set of resources that people were sharing moved primarily from being information knowledge and culture shared primarily in social networks of informal free social exchange to models where people were making money via the provision of services like driving someone on uber or online staffing platforms connecting enterprises and workers on demand companies like Airbnb rapidly built multibillion-dollar global businesses reaching vast borderless communities via internet platforms [Music] in this respect the platform economy can be seen as the merging of the social networks and collaborative platforms of early web 2.0 with the market as it caught up with the new technology and worked to commercialize the new possibilities for economic activity mediated through information networks the result was that the early social free and sharing model got somewhat displaced by the market model but also merged in new ways these organizations absorbed the networked user generated model for production and exchange of services into a new platform market model while greatly reducing the centralized organization that managed them [Music] [Music] [Music] within just a few short years platforms rapidly scaled to become major actors in the global economy whose scale and profits few could ignore the internet was starting to come of age as a system of economic organization in September 2014 the Chinese online commerce company Alibaba Group conducted its initial public offering the largest ever in history this event attracted considerable media attention some of it naturally commenting on the changing balance of the global economy and the growing impact of platforms within just a decade of their origins platforms came to dominate the list of largest corporations by market capitalization as people started to take seriously this emerging internet based economy these platforms managed to tap into the new possibilities created by widespread mobile connectivity and the coordinating power of advanced technologies to create scale and serve untapped markets more rapidly than ever seen before they match suppliers and producers within two-sided markets and harness the untapped resources of the end-user to meet basic human needs and desires in ways that would be beyond the imagination and capacities of the traditional closed enterprise they activate communities of individuals and resources in new ways accelerating innovation and challenging major incumbents [Music] this new model to globalization is changing who is participating how business is done internationally where the economic benefits are flowing and how fast the competitive landscape changes even though advanced economies in general continue to be the leaders in most flows the door has opened to more countries to small companies and startups and even to billions of individuals whereas previously corporations would have to build their own IT infrastructure at great cost in time this is now instantly available for anyone with an internet connection and the know-how as such success in the global economy becomes much more linked to technical know-how innovation and entrepreneurial Drive rather than finance and capital assets this new digital model of globalization is much less capital intensive rather than establishing a large physical presence in many countries some companies focus local offices on sales and marketing only those that deliver digital goods and services can enter new international markets without establishing a physical presence at all globalization is no longer a hunt for the cheapest labor with automation and the shift into an information services economy production can be restored to be close to end demand and sources of high skilled workers added to this 3d printing and other distributed technology will in the not-too-distant future have an impact on supply networks and the cross-border trade landscape [Music] the potential for a new distributed form of globalization is now forming based on information networks that link people directly into a common global platform economy the global networks that proliferated with the previous round of globalization are transforming to become richer and deeper and more distributed through the proliferation of information technology this has the potential to bypass the centralized hubs that previously dominated the global economy as people and places that were previously on the fringes can become more directly connected into this newly forming global system of economic organization [Music] in the past decades this process of economic transformation was driven by corporate structures and the financial system who will of course continue to play a major role but after the platform revolution going forward the center of this process of change will be happening on the Internet as technology and economic development are starting to become one the platform economy took us one step closer to merging our newly created web-based networks with the management of our global economy it gave us a greater glimpse into the emerging networked economy and for the scale of change underway as the term disruption became the new buzzword however it is safe to say that the largest deepest and most disruptive structural changes are still ahead of us as the information revolution continues at full pace with a new technology paradigm emerging that will have profound economic consequences consequences that go far beyond what we have seen to date and may well happen at an even faster pace [Music] the decades around the turn of the millennium saw huge changes taking place as global connectivity expanded along almost all dimensions now the repercussions of these changes were starting to feed back and be felt by all as the world started to move into an ever more dynamic state [Music] critical aspects of an industrial age set of institutions started to grind to a halt in the face of an ever more dynamic and complex environment that was presenting an ever more complex set of issues as societies were starting to become aware of the realities of living in a globally interconnected context [Music] the expansion of supply chains and the rise of emerging markets particularly China was disrupting the global political and economic establishment that had been a source of stability and order for over half a century the liberal economic order and democratic systems were stalling as they had failed to keep pace with the rapidly expanding social networks that now occupied people's time and attention [Music] the level of inequality brought about by globalization and financialization was becoming almost unbearable for many societies the impacts of a changing climate and multiple forms of environmental degradation were starting to become a reality centuries-old social economic and environmental structures had been irreversibly altered and humanity was starting to find itself in uncharted territory stability was becoming the exception no longer the norm as massive upheavals have left the global economy society and environment unstable along many dimensions alongside all these developments the information revolution was starting to enter into an even deeper and more radical phase in its development globalization is a complex multi-dimensional phenomenon but at the heart of it is the formation of some kind of global organization the level of globalization that we have achieved by now only happens through advanced forms of information and telecommunication technology without it the formation of global supply chains and outsourcing would not have happened without it the massive growth of multinational corporations would not have been possible without it the financial system would be a mere shadow of what it is today although it was long apparent technology and market structures were the driving force at the heart of globalization that would profoundly change societies what exactly the outcome to that change process would look like had not been apparent now a new set of information technologies were about to give us a glimpse into a future that looked very different from the past societies had lasted many decades at this stage with a growing mismatch between their ever expanding underlying technological means and the legacy institutional structures that sat on top of them the platform revolution had shown us a new form of information based organization but the next stage in the internet's evolution was about to take this to new levels as economic organization and information networks were about to truly become one the decades-long struggle between hierarchies and networks is now entering a new stage as a new vision for the third generation web is starting to take shape and the endgame for globalization is coming into focus [Music] with the rise of platforms the internet had become a core structure supporting a new process of digital globalization with a billion people around the world coming online every five years the internet had scaled rapidly but as a consequence this core infrastructure of the information revolution is now starting to creak under its own weight we scale the internet by simply building out more cables and more computers within the same architecture we went from servers to server farms to data centers to the hyper scale data centers that run the Internet platforms of today in the process the Internet had gone from a public utility to being operated by a small number of large platforms owned by private for-profit companies the internet had become something of a walled garden built around huge privately owned data centers there are now some 400 hyperscale data centers in the world that each contain tens of thousands of servers almost half of these reside in the United States these computers do the heavy lifting for the Internet but this centralization of the Internet has resulted in a huge concentration of power in the hands of technology companies the algorithms that run in these data centers operate these emerging networks that are used by billions daily but they are understood and controlled by only a small handful of people it was cloud computing that made the platforms of the second generation Internet but what would happen if that computing architecture changed today in labs and startups a new kind of Internet is being pieced together that may once again rewrite the rules for globalization [Music] this next stage in the process of convergence and transformation of the global economy is enabled by a new set of information technologies as we are currently in the process of remaking the underlying software supporting the internet building what is called the decentralized web this next stage of economic development works to decentralize economic activity and shifts operations to global information based networks like never before with truly profound consequences the centralized cloud computers of today are changing as a new innovation in computing is making it possible to turn them into distributed computing networks we can now simply design protocols that enable a collection of computers to work together as a single cloud computer in a distributed fashion we can store data securely and run the same forms of complex algorithmic coordination on this computer all without the need for the centralized platform these protocols enable people to connect to each other within peer-to-peer networks to conduct transactions directly and securely without the centralized platform all share one common database that all can trust because of its transparent nature and the need for consensus among peers the decentralized web removes the Internet's dependency upon centralized systems to enable trust security value exchange and computing resources it creates networks for people to interact create or exchange value directly peer-to-peer bypassing traditional market systems and existing institutional structures in radical ways on top of these secure peer networks can be built new forms of economies these decentralized economies work through a token system where each network creates a token that represents the underlying value that is being created and exchanged within that economy people can then invest in that micro economy by purchasing the tokens and likewise use them in that ecosystem through this token system block chains work to create a whole new economy and value system outside of the traditional utility based market the outcome of the information revolution Big Data Internet of Things and advanced analytics is that we will be able to sense and quantify our world like never before this will give us the capacity to quantify and begin to account for all forms of value this is something that was previously not possible as we simply did not have the information as the data starts to flow in as our capacity to process the information in real time matures through advanced analytics we will increasingly have the capacity to quantify what people value in a more comprehensive way and begin to manage this through peer token markets instead of centralized organizations token market economies can now be built for any resource that needs managing what we see emerging is a global information network for mediating economic activity directly through distributed internet protocols and algorithms bypassing traditional institutions that appear to be stalling in the face of the complexity that has emerged [Music] you at the heart of globalization has always been the potential for huge benefit to all through global collaboration this global collaboration can potentially enable very rapid economic development for any society by having a shared and trusted global computing network through which data can be shared and services delivered anywhere this enables the potential for global collaboration like never before in the past we lived in a world of many different nations developing different solutions within their own countries individually thus having each nation reinventing the wheel with the result being slow progress and a massive amount of redundancy when taken as a whole with the global information system of the internet it is now possible to collaborate on the same generic solution on the global level which is then duplicated and customized for the different geographies the potential for this model of creating once and duplicating many times is vastly increased as we move into a global information and services economy particularly when we add distributed technologies with information technology the capacity to duplicate information and ideas is radically increased likewise is the capacity to move them to any place on the planet at the click of a button when this is combined with a new set of distributed technologies such as solar cells wind turbines the blockchain drones 3d printing a whole new model to economic development starts to emerge one that has the potential to be radically more efficient more distributed and inclusive a model where global information networks allow for mass collaboration in the development of solutions online like Wikipedia or the Linux operating system and then the rapid duplication and deployment of these solutions virtually anywhere thus holding out the possibility for a bottom-up era of global economic development you this potential has been there since the advent of the internet that is now greatly more viable due to this emerging secure and shared computing infrastructure because of the secure nature of these information systems we can create economies and financial system natively on top of them that delivers the same quality of service anywhere on the planet what is different this time is the autonomy of these systems our capacity to create systems of organization on the Internet and to coordinate human interaction directly through those to secure those networks and increasingly connect them up to real world physical assets and technology means that these networks are increasingly starting to gain their independence secure value exchange can be built into the network removing their prior dependence upon the traditional financial system and national regulatory framework this works to greatly increase the autonomy of these new forms of networked institutions just as the multinational corporations and financial institutions carved out their own territory at the center of our global cities so to these networks will create their own spaces out on the edge of the system in places like Haiti in the wake of disasters in small jurisdictions but also in cities as urbanization changes the structure of power and governance and cities come to gain more autonomy and governance functions everything and everyone is starting to become connected and to find themselves embedded within a networked fabric of information that is wrapping around the world disrupting the centuries-old structures that carved up the planet into separate jurisdictions and societies while the logic of hierarchical management within the National framework has retreated and the market has proven unsustainable information networks are emerging as the new form of globally distributed coordination token markets can potentially enable the management of self-sustaining economies in a distributed fashion without dependence on the centralized institution of the nation or corporation the responsibility is shifted to the hands of every person the question is one of values what values do we build into this set of emerging information based networks that is being pieced together with every new connection made you the world of yesterday was ruled by the states and armies the world of today by markets and finance the world of tomorrow will be an empire of networks but who will rule that Empire could it be us [Music] Oh

Channel: Systems Innovation

Views: 101,260

Rating: 4.655797 out of 5

Keywords: globalization, global economy, network society, global networks, platform economy, information revolution, distributed systems, systems thinking

Id: x1wLbJoSmR0

Length: 62min 18sec (3738 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 03 2019