Standing on the Sun. Christopher Meyer

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СКАЧАТЬ in Phoenix for an afternoon with rocker Alice Cooper.

      Here's the point: if you're a blogger, for whom the open source development of Linux or other software, the free provision of Web-based apps in exchange for a little attention to ads, and the media culture in which an item gets picked up and amplified by the media the way a planetary probe gets slingshotted around Jupiter to get to Saturn are all just part of life, why not try to trade a paper clip for a house? There are implications here for capitalism on a larger scale. It shows how social capital can be fungible with financial capital. That the marginal cost of trading is so low that Ronald Coase's assertion of the fundamental reason for the existence of the firm needs a new look. That the “gift economy” concept spawned by free value available on the Net may be a real economic phenomenon that changes our ideas of trade. In sum, digital natives will see possibilities for reorganizing economic activity that wouldn't occur to the previous generations.

      Again, the youth story turns out to be tightly bound up with the emerging-economies story, because the populations of the fastest-growing economies are on average younger that those of the industrialized world. If it's significant that capitalism will increasingly reside in the hands of digital natives, then it's significant which nations are richest in that resource. Let's think about the part of the global population that is less than fifteen years old. Going back to Alan Kay, by the time this cohort was born, the first graphical Web browser had been released for a couple of years, so the Web doesn't count as technology for them.¹⁰ That group, in India, made up 31 percent of the population in 2007. In the euro area, it represented only 15 percent. The United States and China are both at 20 percent. The average age of the population of the G7 countries was forty-two years in 2009; of the emerging economies, only twenty-eight. And although we're not ready to write the book about the not-yet-emerging economies, it's worth noting that if we rank all nations according to this metric of youth, thirteen of the top fifteen are in Africa.¹¹ And now let's think about the population over sixty, for whom stereophonic LPs count as technology. That group represents 7 percent of India and 12 percent of China, but 18 percent of the United States and 24 percent of the European Union. (Japan? Ichiban, at 30 percent.)

      It's predictable, then, where nations will first become dominated by their digital natives. So what happens when some parts of the world have digital native societies?

      Built on New Machinery

      On May 6, 2010, Jack Ablin, a Chicago-based investor, sat stunned as he watched the price of his Procter & Gamble holdings drop more than 40 percent within half an hour, from the mid-$60s to $39.97. It was part of a larger event that came to be known as the flash crash; in those same few minutes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged almost 1,000 points, losing nearly one-tenth of its value. Ablin told a reporter he quite literally fell out of his chair; it was not only the biggest drop he'd ever seen during a trading day, but it was also the biggest one (in absolute terms) the Dow had ever experienced. Even more amazing, no one seemed able to determine exactly why it had happened. Early theories centered on the possibility that a trader who meant to sell $16 million worth of futures made a typographical error and placed the order at $16 billion. In any event, something kicked the sell-off into motion, and, as automated orders were activated, it quickly snowballed.

      For us it was a dramatic reminder of another way that capitalism's environment has changed. It is now situated in an electronic world of ubiquitous, fast-moving information, increasing transparency, and strong feedback effects.¹² Technology is always advancing, of course, and that doesn't usually spell fundamental changes for capitalism. But sometimes, it does. Futurists like to say that when an important technology arrives, “we expect too much in the short run, and too little in the long run.” We've been through the former. The dot-com bubble was an expression of faith that “The Internet changes everything”—a belief that proved premature. It was succeeded by a Dark Age. Following the 2000 dot-com bust, there was a certain amount of relief on the part of those who chose to believe that the Internet was much ado about nothing—until Google's phenomenal stock performance, starting in 2004, turned geeky talk about “Web 2.0” into an “eyeball bubble,” driven by social networks, with investors eager to buy in to the new world of advertising-supported business models.¹³

      Now the long run is arriving. It's not about better targeting of marketing. Rather, it's about the democratization that was promised at the dawn of the Web, because, as promised, information technology is empowering smaller economic entities—including individuals.

      Three current developments really do have that power. Cloud computing is one, because it changes not only the economics of data storage but also the risk profiles and capital requirements for new businesses. The mobile Internet device is another, because it allows rich information not only to be received but also to be created and transmitted by anyone, anywhere. And what has been referred to as “the Internet of things” is a third, because it allows remote and dispersed phenomena to be sensed and reported and because it automates another class of labor. Each of these trends can be and has been explored at book length, and there's no need to do full justice to them here. We're interested only in the ways they change capitalism.

      Cloud Computing

      Cloud computing gets its name from the fact that the computing power that firms rely on to operate needn't be on the ground at their own facilities. It can be “out there” somewhere, accessed via the Internet and purchased on demand from vendors like HP and Amazon.

      If this were just outsourcing to take advantage of scale and specialization it would hardly be a new story for capitalism. Two benefits of cloud computing are more subtle. First, it lowers the barriers to innovation. If you have a new, information-based business model, to have to set up an IT infrastructure to prepare for customer number one is a big burden. To be able to buy computing power economically “by the sip” removes it. Before electric utilities, every company needed its own source of power. After they arrived, companies could use electric equipment without that investment. In 1982, when Xerox invented Ethernet, it had print ads showing a jack in the wall labeled “Information Outlet,” illustrating that someday you'd plug in (how quaint!) to a network and get all the information power you needed. Now it's happening.

      The second benefit cloud computing brings is illustrated by Salesforce.com, one of the first apps to run in the cloud. Its experience shows how the cloud can bring true Web 2.0 value to apps; the many companies who use its sales management tools not only pay for the privilege, their usage helps to extend and improve the software's capabilities. Salesforce.com learns from everyone and makes that learning available to all. In general, shared information systems not only cost less than a population of proprietary systems, they encode more knowledge, and learn faster. This continuous, cloud-based learning takes us a long way from the architectures installed in the 1990s by big systems integrators, whose strategic mantra was “design, build, operate.” When the firms for which they used to deliver their walled-garden solutions opt for the cloud instead, few are able to gain a proprietary advantage through IT, but all benefit from a more rapid diffusion of innovation.

      We'll return to this theme—the creation of platforms for continuous learning—in chapter 8, when we look at firm-level implications of capitalism's evolution. For now, let's move on to another technology with transformative power.

      Mobile Internet Devices

      Mobile Internet devices are important because they represent a tipping point in the world's access to shared information—and they produce a lot of it as well. The idea of providing everyone on Earth with a laptop has been superseded by the explosive growth of smartphones; Gartner reported that third-quarter 2010 sales of the devices were 96 percent higher than in 2009. Internet-connected phones have СКАЧАТЬ