I’m collecting links to thinking that tries to identify the essence of the new economy. In a stream-of-consciousness flow about just this, Brian Frank argues that we’re moving from an industrial to a venture-capital economy where supposed scientific precision gives way to the imperfection that is inherent in innovation:
[Paul] Graham compares this to the Industrial Revolution, which is a fair comparison in terms of scale, but I think we should recognize that these current changes are a kind of reversal, or inversion, or undoing of the Industrial Revolution.
Through the Industrial Revolution the economy itself gradually became like one big machine — or at least that’s how most economists tended to see it. Everything could supposedly be quantified, reduced, and rigorously predicted.
Silicon Valley represents something else entirely. . . .
Rather than expanding control and diminishing variations, the emerging attitude will be about expanding variety and accommodating the unknown. It inverts all of our intuitions and assumptions about doing business and managing the economy… Know your ecology and complexity science.
(My favourite books on this are The New Pioneers by Tom Petzinger, Surfing on the Edge of Chaos by Richard Pascale et al, and Bob Sutton’s Weird Ideas That Work… I haven’t read Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do? yet — I have it on-reserve — but I think it might make my list too. Orbiting the Giant Hairball has been on my reading list for a long time as well.)
So far Silicon Valley is the best model we have for going forward. It addresses the two big defects of industrialism: the one pointed out by Roger Martin, that employees and customers are turned off by rigorous efficiency, and the one pointed out by Nassim Taleb, that the unexpected is inevitable.
