In this TED talk, Renaissance man Howard Rheingold manages to synthesize a lot of things that I’ve discussed before on L&UL through a lens that’s pretty new: collaboration.
The beginning of Rheingold’s talk focuses on one of the products of collaboration: wealth. This is a key feature of gift economies as well. There is some worth that resides exclusively in the group and is not divisible among or attributable to any its individual members. As tribes of humans farmed and hunted in larger groups, the result was more food than individuals could eat and greater wealth than they could produce on their own. With this new wealth comes specialization, trade, and, ultimately, counting and language. When the printing press emerged, it made language easier to produce and the goal of widespread literacy more possible to obtain. With more people reading, writing, and circulating their ideas, major shifts in thought occurred: the scientific revolution, the Protestant Reformation, and constitutional democracy to name just a few. Rheingold’s point is that new wealth always results from new forms of collaboration, and new ways of managing that wealth are then necessarily devised. In this case, simple commerce morphs into Capitalism, a brand of commerce with its own, more institutionally collaborative instruments like insurance and incorporation.
