Bottom-up social media, where the content/passion starts at the edge and ripples upward/inward, creating order and power as it goes.

Very cool. I am going to have to watch these phenomena very closely.

A snippet taken from Stowe Boyd's article Hugster, MeetUp and Activism at the Edge on his Get Real blog on Corante.

I also noticed a similar statement in a quote from Daniel Henninger (below) on Glenn Reynold's Instapundit blog today, as well as further down his page some speculation that Time's Person (Man) of the Year could be the Blogger logo, or a photo of an eye with the caption Citizen Journalist underneath it.

Communications technologies, most of them developed in American laboratories (often by engineers who voted for John Kerry), have finally begun to effect an historic shift in the relationship between governments and the governed. The governed are starting to win.

Is a Power Shift underway ? Looks like it. Emergence, emergent democracy, the power of distributed networks, call it what you will ... I believe one of two things can happen over the next decade or so, as this set of conditions matures somewhat, and the technology just gets more integrated and easier to use. Either the transparency will grow, and there will be requisite (but probably painful) changes to structures and adaptive responses that will render hierarchy, generally, more accountable (early examples abound, but suffice to say that I consider Sarbanes-Oxley a good thing to keep an eye on), or the dark side will grow, with which there will be greater corporate and governmental control (some visible, some not) of digital rights, digital identities, and yes, even the content that will be published and exchanged on the Internet.

Which of thos two directions will you or do you support ?

It's commonplace today to use, or hear, the phrase "The Age of Transparency". And of course as I have been thinking about what I call "wirearchy" for a long time, I am heartened to see the ongoing changes taking place.

But, what does transparency mean for most of us ? More choices, or more confusion when we find out that our local government, or our employer, or a friend or a neighbour, is different or has behaved differently than we expected or were previously advised ? How much transparency can we handle ?

I don't mean this to sound trite. I'm reminded that a widely-recognized guru of leadership, Warren Bennis, said not too long ago that "hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust". I think we're seeing the ramifications of that in many places and ways these days. Knowing more and seeing more, having and living in transparency ... implies engagement, and it implies growing one's capabilities to handle, or at least work with, more sources of information and opinion than that to which we are habituated. If you don't trust your boss, or that Roman Catholic bishop in your region who smiles at everyone, including the altar boys, or the politicians who have lied and manipulated repeatedly, or your brokers ... who do you trust, and why do you trust them ?

Think about it for a minute. Until relatively recently (ten or fifteen years ago) the only sources of information for most people were television, newspapers and radio ... and in that mix, there was a much greater tendency or willingness to rely on those sources as authoritative. And when it came to life in the real-time world, at work or in interaction with institutions, the dominant force was the authority, status, and expertise of the top strata of organizations and institutions. Fifteen years ago, there were no easily-clickable sources of information, no blogs, no interlinking, no citizen journalism.

What will it be like when we have had blogs and RSS feeds for 15 years, when it's commonplace to link to several sources in one paragraph (sources that may even be conflicting), and when the examinations and analyses stay up on a blog or web site for years, and can be linked together with other expert sources of investigation, examination and analysis ?

Will this promote greater truthfulness, and more listening to a wider range of voices in various forms of dissent, agreement, clarification and criticism ? Or will this promote a very real surround-senses atmosphere in which people clamp onto channels ... of thinking, of expression, and of influence ... which may result in a much narrower and probably homogenous center ... actually, many many centers ... with divergent and exploratory thinking remaining out at the edge ?

Watts Wacker and Ryan Mathews wrote a book about two or three years ago titled "The Deviant's Advantage", in which they set out a well-worn path for new ideas and innovations, both large and small in their overall impact. The path was from the Fringe, to the Edge, to the Realm of the Cool, to the Next Big Thing and finally to the Mainstream ... and they used as an example the now-widespread popularity of tattooing. Blogging would also serve well as an example. Is a marginal activity like blogging, still on the Edge as far as most people are concerned, likely to become mainstream, perhaps in some derivative form ? Will it, for example, be the way people communicate and learn in the workplace in ten years ? Will it be excluded from the workplace, because organizational cultures are not able to get past criticisms and challenges, and continue to insist that everyone speak in the sotto voce ersatz non-controversial politeness that has characterized the most recent wave of new language in the coporate workplace ?

My question is ... will all this bottoms-upness, the World of Ends, the mass customization of work and life, the transparency afforded by an interconnected, interlinked and linkerate critical mass of people ... will this means of communications, and the actions that flow from it, become mainstream over the next decade, and if so, will there actually come to be a major change in the ways power and control are 1) viewed, 2) enabled and enacted, and 3) used ?

What do you think ?

I'm going to answer "Yes" to my question, and here's why.

A lot of the news about blogs is about two key features of blogging .... two-wayness and voice ... that are the outcomes of sociology meeting technology head on.

Both attributes are the results of communication and sharing attempts at making meaning using a medium that didn't really exist for most people only 15 years ago.

Information architecture, basic web site technology and the infrastructure of the Internet have all sufficiently advanced such that blogging is becoming able to combine all three to let individuals connect and exchange via personal publishing ... of text, images, voice and video.

I've consistently noticed over the past three years how and what I felt when reading other peoples' blog, when considering the ebbs, flows, insights, resolutions and other arcana of my relationship with blogging, and when engaged in dialogue with others via the Comments section of their blogs and on my blog.

When listening to other peoples' voices ... I look at sentence structures, I notice style, I read woop-ass phrases with delight, I marvel, shake my head and sigh when i go through some of the truly brilliant material I have seen (there are some real genius people out there ... amazing). I make the conscious decision, from time to time, to give a full 30 minutes or hour (or two) to go through other peoples' material ... and this involves feeling whether i am ready to shift my body position, slow down and concentrate ... attend.

Some people blog light and positive, some people literally hurl invective ... others satirize, in different styles ... you learn to look for the smirk, or the knowing wink, or the shared nod of understanding and reflection. Colours matter, and the cleanliness or delicacy or whimsy or banality of the font, the spacing ... the blogger who writes deliciously and with long sentences, having fun ... or the inspired, organic use of photos.

Two-wayness ... this is a type of interaction that is truly different, I think, than talking with someone else on the phone, or speaking to them face to face. In both those cases, the evidence of what was communicated and exchanged evapoartes, if you will, unless recorded. The two-way exchange via a blog post and comments, or the more general two-wayness of links, has persistence (as many have noted before), and the process of creating, sending and receiving the information is also quite different. Organizing thoughts and speaking, either formally or informally, is very different from typing and posting words and images to ocnvey one's message and meaning. And this persistent, always accessible two-wayness creates meaning in and of itself - the medium becomes part of the meaning created

Comments ... some make you angry, or resigned to the stupidity and viciousness of trolls ... some take your breath away, and lift you up, either through empathy and a felt senes of understanding and respect .. or equally, through a robust challenge to one or another assertion you may have made. The way a host responds to a range of comments, questions, challenges, and attacks can be very revealing, and I swear one can feel the calmness, or the brusque charm of an opinionated expert, or the anger or sadness in another person's expression of their care and concern.

You get physically involved, sometimes ... often ? ... with the process of blogging, typing faster when your're clear and excited, slowly and more deliberately or more vaguely, when you're thinking or just scratching your ass and looking out the window.

Working with and in blogs makes you sometimes want to get together with other people who share this somewhat unusual but "you-know-it's-so-natural-too" hobby of blogging. And so of course you notice outbreaks, sometimes, of people who live in a certain regional area getting together for drinks, or the phenomenon of Bloggercons and Foo Camps and Poptechs and Supernovas and SXSWs that have popped up in the past fiuve years - the sociality that is more and more accompanying the use of interconnected social technologies in this era. And of course there was a great deal of empassioned, high-engagement blogging work involved in the last three years of political campaigning that we've all ived through.

Doing this makes me feel social, and some of my readers may know that I've actually gone about meeting quite a few bloggers over the past three years - in the USA, the UK, France, Holland, and Germany, and across Canada. I enjoy meeting these new people who feel like friends already, because they have been writing and posting what it is that makes them who they are, and so I feel like I know them somewhat already ... a basic threshold of trust has been established.

Update 6 years on:  Several people referred to above have become very robust, no doubt lifelong, friends.  Others ... well, wrinkles here and there, lapses into detached and perfunctory politeness, loss of interest on one or the other's part, etc.

Other bloggers' writing style and tone, syntax, degree of focus, diversity and other factors all combine to often give me a feeling of being able to feel the other persons' presence coming through that which I see, read, observe and ponder.

So I think you can feel other peoples' blogs, yes.

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It's easy to begin thinking things may be changing in massive ways. Heck, it's not only me ... Bruce Mau is famous, even ... and he just named his most recent travelling exposition Massive Change - The Future of Global Design. Here's what his home page boldly states:

Design has emerged as one of the world's most powerful forces.

It has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility...

... and in places where the exposition opens, I believe there's often a keynote speech at the opening by Alvin Toffler, author of a number of well-know books, including Power Shift

If Mau's statement is correct (and who am I to argue, huh ?) then surely the new types of persistent visually-aided communications we have experienced since the advent of the Web, the browser, ubiquitous email, blogs, and blawg, blawg, blawg ... might also be heralded as a "new, unprecedented period of human possibility".

In musing on how interconnected interlinkage might have impact on social structures and the dynamics within and without those structures, I have no doubt been guilty of naive utopianism. Many thinkers, writers, bloggers, pundits and punters ( added this group since I needed to belong somewhere in this) have opined on the democratizing forces of exchanging information and views (and probably evidence, too ;-) via the Web.

Some recent exchanges involving the term "wirearchy" and my definition and other mutterings, have prompted some curiosity (hey, when I google "wirearchy" the references are at about 20,000, up from 7,000 or so a month and a half ago).

I've been roundly dismissed and criticized ... often ... by many bright and aware people, who have virtually all said some form or other of "hierarchy is natural", and gone on to offer their opinion as to how naive and overly optimistic I am or have been.

Generally, I agree with them ... but only up to a point.

I do think hierarchy is endemic in our daily lives, all around the planet. It's in our institutions, it's in our groups, it's often even in our friendships and it's in our private lives. And as an organizing principle it's been around for a long time - pretty much ever since humans began trying to explain things to themselves.

You know ... the arrangement between God and the archangels, and then God's representatives on earth (Kings, Queens, Cardinals and Bishops), and then various other social arrangements that have flowed from set-ups favouring aristocrats and owners. Some wag once suggested that in today's context, wherein corporations have a lot of power, CEO's and senior management are what royalty and the top layer of clergy were in the Middle Ages.

And certainly, these types of social arrangements predominate to this day. Hierarchy informs our daily lives from birth through to our ingress to the modern workplace, and most of us understand it more-or-less unconsciously. There are ways to escape from it ... either by going off on a personal, iconoclstic route, or by coming up with a lot of money, so that no one else really can tell you what to do and why. There's a reason it's called "Fuck you money".

For many years, my work consisted of helping corporations design and implement organization charts, with the attendant salary grades or classifications, perfromance management schemes, rules of engagement (otherwise known as competency models) and other sundry people management arrangements.

There are rules (believe me, rules with a capital "R") for designing and implementing these processes.

The rules are manifest in a boring, dry and exceedingly widespread domain known as job evaluation. The core methodology for this domain was invented in the early 1950's and reflected efforts on the part of some large-ish corporations at that time to bring greater structure and clarity to the work currently being carried out in those organizations.

The invention of this method was simple ... it consisted of rank-ordering the jobs that were extant in a corporation at that time, and then seeking a consensus amongst the group of people examining the jobs what it was .. which factors... that differentiated amongst the jobs. This was supplemented with an "Input - Problem-Solving - Output" model which suggested that all work could be defined as the product of it's inputs, problem-solving efforts and activities, and its outputs.

Factors were teased out, and codified into a set of language-based definitions. Three or four main methods quickly became prevalent in the marketplace for designing and structuring work - the Hay Guide-Chart method, the Aiken Plan, the Wyatt WJQ Method. Each of these methods are essentially the same ... carbon-copies of each other ... and have very similar factors and language. There have been various spin-offs since the early '50's but they still rely on the basic assumptions about the nature of work in an organization that were uncovered in that early, experimental work (with the possible exception of Elliott Jacques' Time-Band Decision-Making methodology - but it relies even more on hierarchy, in some ways).

From the invention of these methodologies till today, job evaluation has been used at almost any organization or corporation that has more than a handful of people, and has come to define work almost universally.

What interests me ... a lot ... is that these methodologies, and the beliefs about work that they have embedded in its design and the dynamics of the workplace, have their roots in the time-and-motion studies of Taylorism and the fundamental view of work as a linear mass-production process, a sequential series of supervisable tasks.

This methodology has missed - completely - the impact of information technology and more importantly - the fact that work now takes place in an interconnected and interlinked environment. It's interesting to note that any sense of computers aiding in the work, or even defining the processes of work, were completely absent in the founding assumptions of work design as it is still practiced widely today. It doesn't consider the every-which-way linkages, and the persistence of those links, that point to useful information, other ways of think about some issue or problem (thinking out-of-the-box, anyone ?) or the relevant, useful and catalytic conversations people can and do get into with the help of software, linking and the Web.

The experts in this field today will tell you - quickly and adamantly - that the methodologies have incorporated the language describing work environments and challenges in an environments built on information systems. And I'd agree ... and yet in a very important way that's the core of the problem.

The fundamental issue of what is creative and constructive knowledge work, and how it must necessarily be human-centered and rooted in collaboration, has not been as widely agreed upon.

It has been studied endlessly, and there have been many interpretations of new and emerging organizational designs. And there have been important experiments with people-centered work design methodologies (the one that makes the most sense to me is Emery and Trist's work on Participative Work Design). But nothing definitive in terms of how to design working in distributed networks has taken the place of the 1950's Industrial Age ways of looking at work, production and service. Yes, people have identified trust as critical to succeess, and much work has gone into the development of effective communications skills.

Today, work IS communication. How work takes shape in a human-centered design process will be an interesting field to watch evolve as we all move deeper into an interconnected and interactive future.

About five years ago (the fall of 1999) I read an article in The Atlantic Monthly by Peter Drucker, titled "Beyond The Information Revolution". That was the brief era when the dot.com boom was in full eruption ... stock options were being used to attract smart people and talent to all sorts of blossoming startups, and all sorts of articles had begun to appear describing various views on the new, less hierarchic workplace cultures that seemed to be springing up everywhere.

Here's one excerpt of Drucker's thinking and writing in that article, found on the unreasonableman's blog:

Peter Drucker draws social lessons from the impact of the Printing Press (c. 1455) and the Railways (c. 1855).

What we call the Information Revolution is actually a Knowledge Revolution. What has made it possible to routinize processes is not machinery; the computer is only the trigger.

Software is the reorganization of traditional work, based on centuries of experience, through the application of knowledge and especially of systematic, logical analysis. The key is not electronics; it is cognitive science. This means that the key to maintaining leadership in the economy and the technology that are about to emerge is likely to be the social position of knowledge professionals and social acceptance of their values.

Drucker went on in this article to speculate a bit more deeply about his sense that "knowledge workers own the means of production now", and the long-term implications this held for organizational design and dynamics.

Here's a bit more, from the blog of Rick Klau ... he's taken Drucker's insights and added what I think he suggests is the "missing link". I've added bold font as emphasis.

In October, 1999 Peter Drucker wrote an article for The Atlantic that put the "information revolution" into historical context. His last paragraph is a prediction for where he expects the modern corporation to be within 10 years:

...[P]robably within ten years or so, running a business with (short-term) "shareholder value" as its first -- if not its only -- goal and justification will have become counterproductive. Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold and motivate knowledge workers.

Drucker, who's been providing these predictions since the mid-1940s, sets the stage properly, but misses a final element. I'm most interested in professional services firms - where the concept of a knowledge worker is quite old. Yet the compensation model - not to mention the organizational structure - is firmly tied to a system that doesn't encourage the sharing of this knowledge.

The technology to promote such sharing exists today (CRM, portals, etc.), yet too few firms have "leaders" who are capable of evangelizing the benefits of sharing their knowledge. Where Drucker fails to close the loop (and who knows, he may have done it since this 10/99 piece) is to point out that the modern organization must not only "attract, hold and motivate" knowledge workers - it must also provide an infrastructure for them that will enable and reward the active dissemination of that knowledge

Back to the check-in with reality.

As far as I know, almost all organizations are still using the basic methodologies I described above to design their organizations, create job descriptions, manage the people in their workplace ... Competency models have rivalled job descriptions and used with team matrices are the current unit of work design. Great care has been taken to maintain the fundamental hierarchic structures, so of course the competency definitions are rolled out by organizational level. At the same time throughout this structure, employees are linking to each other, even if only by email, linking and talking with customers via electronic links, interacting with large information systems that integrate and reconstruct information, and of course being watched by these same systems.

There's a reason for this continuance, and for the general lack of appetite many organizations have for innovation, or for structuring work so that it leads to better, more genuine and human outcomes on a consistent basis. Control and predictability are much prized attributes in the current economic structures and markets around the world. In addition, those who happen to find themselves in the top layers of hierarchies have little, if any, incentive to let go of the power, control and privilege that they find there. Why would they even consider it, other than on some basic level of values that they may hold personally ? It's much harder to manage, and execute when authority is challenged, or open to a proces of building consensus before acting.

Mitigating against that these days is, of course, the difficult challenge posed by millions of smart, aware, adept people who can find out much about almost any given subject with the right information search tools and a couple of well-placed questions.

The challenges to established structures and ways of doing things have, indeed, seen the first successful instances of fundamentally redefining and redesigning work and organizations (the ubiquitous examples are Amazon, eBay, Dell, and the ongoing reconfiguration of the entertainment and communications industries).

Will such challenges continue as people who learned to think, write and work before personal computers appeared continue to retire at an accelerating pace ? Will the rapidly-growing presence of the Digital Generations (homo zappiens, as Wim Veen likes to call them) in the workplace add to the pressures for re-designing organizations and work ? Will traditional hierarchy persist in these conditions, as the conditions widen and mature ?

Here's Drucker's concluding paragraph in "Beyond The Information Revolution" (my emphasis added in bold):

Bribing the knowledge workers on whom these industries depend will therefore simply not work. The key knowledge workers in these businesses will surely continue to expect to share financially in the fruits of their labor. But the financial fruits are likely to take much longer to ripen, if they ripen at all. And then, probably within ten years, running a business with (short-term) shareholder value as its first - if not its only - goal and justification will have become counterproductive.

Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institutions so as to attract, hold and motivate knowledge workers.

When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers' greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners.

I wonder what Bruce Mau has to say about the impact of design principles on the structure and dynamics of social institutions in the first decade of the 21st century. No, I mean it, really ... I'm curious.

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I have read and re-read Dave Roger's post on Hierarchy. It's a well thought out piece ... and I think he's largely correct.

I don't want to rebut Dave Rogers, per se. Notice the "And" rather than "Versus" in this post's title (though I have posted "versus" types of blog posts on this issue before).

I want to learn from Dave, and I want to explore the thinking he sets out.

I found it interesting that he started out his post with definitions of hierarchy ... which is one of the first places I started when I first began thinking about "wirearchy". From there I went, of course, to the truism "knowledge is power", which I think is often used to trace the arc from the time when "knowledge" began to be more widely distributed due to the printing press and the re-invention, if you will, of books .. and all of the social change that has been ascribed to that point in history.

From there he goes on to say that really nothing much has changed - humans have always existed in and worked in hierarchies, and hierarchy is to be found throughout our biological and existential worlds. I couldn't agree more.

Dave Rogers says

The advent of a networked world has created an enormous new medium in which people can compete for authority, and therefore, rank within the hierarchy. We all want to be higher in the hierarchy, even if it's only for the brand of beer we drink, or the manufacturer or our automobile or pickup truck; or, for that matter, our operating system. Some unique thing sets me above others, and therefore you should pay attention to me and listen to my authority. It's all about being able to pass along my genes. Of course, that's by no means what it's really all about, but that's what we spend 99.44% of our time doing and worrying about.

Authorities, where they don't compete directly with one another, will ally with one another to compete with other authorities. This is what one observes when one sees so many webloggers commenting on the deficiencies of "broadcast media," and promoting the supposed virtues of the new distributed media. The main point of their effort is to establish their place within the hierarchy of authority, why you should "trust" them, and so one should always be willing to "cut the cards," so to speak. Take everything they say with a, rather large, grain of salt.

There is nothing truly new here. It's all about monkeys climbing in trees. We've got a new forest now, and everyone believes "that changes everything." It's not true, and anyone who tells you that is just promoting themselves, not the truth.

Indeed, all of the above is true, I think. I find myself wondering a little bit about the last sentence. I'll admit - right here - that when I started thinking and writing about "wirearchy", an element of doing so was to try to promote some of my thinking and experience and capability in organizational consulting. That's not really the case, any longer ... too many arrows in my back now ... sadder and wiser ;-)

For years I worked as a management consultant helping to design hierarchies ... and I have a solid working knowledge of the methodologies, rules and processes whereby organizational designs are created and implemented. And I got really, really fed up with what I saw, the simplistic logic behind the methodologies, and the ineffectiveness and rigidity that these methodologies helped create ... and sustain.

Around about 1991 - 1993, information systems began to penetrate and infiltrate more and more of the planning and reporting that accompanied business and organizational management processes, and business process re-engineering became all the rage - ostensibly in search of efficiencies and yes, flexibility whilst retaining all the control that hierarchies are used to, want and believe they need.

I was quite interested in what I perceived as the impacts of information technology on the nature of work, and on organizational design and dynamics ... this was, roughly speaking, when organizations began flattening their structures, cutting out middle management levels, and using information technology for a wider range of purposes within the business processes and for reporting and monitoring work activity and results.

Following that period, from let's say 1993 on, we were introduced to the Web, and slowly but surely, hyperlinks. The Cluetrain authors said, famously ... "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy". Well, yes ... if you truly believe that knowledge is power.

Five years on ... is this having any effect ? I suppose you could say "yes", in terms of all the reporting on transparency, relationship capital, the need for trust, the effect of blogging on the established expertise and authority of mainstream journalism, the use of the web to give consumers more and more power which some say has led to the need for new business logics and new business models (are Amazon, Dell, and eBay examples of this, as is often suggested ?).

Many more intelligent and more aware people than me have suggested that there's something up wirth the impacts and dynamics of distribtuted networks ( some that come to mind are Joi Ito, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelley, the Cluetrain authors ... let's see, who am I leaving out - oh, several thousand, no doubt).

One of the influential thinkers that kept me interested in the notion of "wirearchy" was Stan Davis, whom I was re-reading in 1998 or 1999. Stan Davis is an influential business thinker who wrote books such as Future Perfect, 20/20 Vision, Future Wealth, Blur, and most recently It's Alive - The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology and Business. Stan was (I think) the business thinker who coined the term "mass customization", and speculated very early on about the impacts of information technology on time, space and matter as it pertained to the process of turning matter into products and time combined with knowedge into valuable services.

I was particularly impacted by several paragraphs at the end of Chapter 3 of his book Future Perfect, wherein he speculated that distributed networks of information and people would (eventually, but over quite a long period of time) lead to new forms of organizational structure and new organizational dynamics.

I specifically focused on the implications of these two paragraphs.

"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization (here, we can read organization in the large sense, as a nation or society as well IMO) to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn't otherwise permit it. What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company (see expanded definition above)as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.

Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both. We are still a long way from figuring out the appropriate and encompassing organization models for the economy we are now in. At the very least, it is clear that we will have to reconceptualize space, transforming it by technology from an impediment to an asset.

The phrase emphasized above is what I hold in my mind as the guiding question regarding "wirearchy", and the references to the (perhaps) emergence of a new organizing principle, which Mr. Rogers deconstructs and derides.

For the record (again, as it's not the first time) I am not suggesting wirearchy will replace, or should replace hierarchy. I do think that the widespread access to and distriubution of information will have impacts upon hierarchy as we know it today. And I think that linkage back and forth will mean something very different ten or twenty years from now than what we understand it to be and mean today.

What seems clear to me is that we all ARE involved in and engaged with (to greater and lesser degrees) a set of conditions that humans have never before encountered or experienced ... our minds, imaginations, and expressing potentially linked to whomever else out there wants to take the time to examine and consider. And ... there's a Save button ! Conversations, ideas and evidence don't disappear as easily as they might previously have done.

And much of the impact is yet to come, I think. Much has already been thought and written about the digital generations that are coming along, containing all those young people who persist in calling me (and probably Mr. Rogers) "Mr.". It has been noted that they have much smarter thumbs than do we old people ... and I think kids today are learning what search engines and Google mean before they even get to school. The impact on language and how we structure thought, thinking and decisionmaking is inevitable, and seems to portend immense structural changes in language and the process of human communication - what things mean and how thtat meaning is conveyed and exchanged.

Will some fundamentals of human interaction persist ? I am certain they will, and I do think that animals ( yes, in spite of computers and regardless of what Ray Kurzweil has said in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, we humans are still animals ) use social hierarchy as a primary organizing principle.

Will interconnected distributed networks of information and people have more impact than is apparent today, on what we understand as traditional hierarchy today ? Again, in my opinion, it seems certain.

Will "wirearchy" replace hierarchy ? I don't think so. Will hierarchy in an era of interconnected, intelinked humans and information be substantively altered, in terms of how it functions in the setting of organized purposeful social systems we call organizations. In my opinion, yes. How ? I don't know, though I think we can observe some of the patterns that have been forming. Do they lead to new business and organizational logics, and new organizational forms and dynamics. I think the answer is a qualified "yes".

And ... I want to come back to the examination Mr. Rogers has offered us, specifically with respect to self-promotion and the effects that working and living in hierarchies have on many humans. I too believe that it is useful to reflect on the degree to which striving for and using status has deleterious effects on being an effective human being who must live in society with other human beings. We see lots of crap being done to others, sometimes we do it to others, and there is that famous expression "shit flows downhill".

I don't want to crap on anyone, and I don't want anyone to crap on me. I do want to try to find ways to do interesting things that will help us all live together better, and so far I think that the Web and interconnectedness has helped us do more of that, and challenge unhealthy, power-blinded hierarchy. So far, so good, in my opinion.

Here's Mr. Rogers' conclusion. I feel like I could say much the same thing. Thanks, Dave.

As for me, I maintain you shouldn't listen to me. You should think for yourself. I am an authority on nothing, this is all just my opinion. I make it all up. I don't want to play in the hierarchy game, but I don't want to see people abused when others play it either. I don't have a blogroll, and I don't usually link a lot, because that supports the hierarchy competitors. I don't post advertising and I don't affiliate with Amazon and I don't have a "tip jar." I'm not trying to convert my lack of authority into wealth, the liquid form of authority. I'm just here to try to say what I think, and I hope I approach whatever "the truth" is. Maybe it'll give someone else something to think about too. And if it doesn't, that's okay by me too. I'm not trying to "change everything." I'm just trying to change myself.

At the end of the day, I think that's what it's all about.

I have read many exhortations, in many forms and guises over the past three years, to "speak truth to power".

I guess something's up.

I was deeply struck today, when casually reading a recent entry on Doc Searls' blog, in a way that helped me piece together a bevy of floating semi-connected thoughts I've held for quite a while, in a loose-ish frame.

Doc was making some sort-of wrap up after the election comments on his blog, when he came across an essay written by an elderly North Carolinian columnist. Here's the part that struck me:

Early one Saturday evening, after my aunt's funeral, I drove south from Rochester, N.Y., into the Allegheny foothills. In late September twilight I drove 90 miles, almost to Pennsylvania, before I found a motel or any substantial sign of life. The dozen towns I drove through were ghost towns, with empty streets, empty storefronts and scarcely 20 functioning businesses that I could count -- and 15 of those sold pizza. It was like a medieval countryside emptied by the plague. Do ghosts eat pizza?

Every 40 miles or so a Wal-Mart sits like a fortress in the same medieval landscape, the Wal-Mart that murdered these once-charming villages, that created five mega-billionaires on the latest list of the super-rich, that controls all the retail business and most of the jobs that remain in wasted rust-belt regions like Western New York. And I know from the experience of living there, as well as the flags and ribbons, that most of these people support the war and support this president. Out here even the ghosts vote Republican.

It's here in the empty country that the great Republican gullibility holds sway. People surrender their soldier-children, their votes, their meager taxes without a murmur, then call in to rightwing radio hosts to rage about abortionists and same-sex marriage. Where hope is hard to find, people turn to more accessible emotions, like anger and fear. They need enemies to give them purpose in the world, and if Osama bin Laden is out of range they're happy to substitute you and me -- the too-tolerant, too-skeptical "secular humanists" for whom, ironically, the post-Enlightenment American democracy was expressly designed.

The Republicans are wondrous manipulators of these lost souls, these disenfranchised Middle Americans. But Kansas isn't our enemy. It's our responsibility, as a few serious politicians understand. Sander Levin, Democratic congressman from Michigan, is an intelligent, compassionate, somewhat sorrowful-looking old man who looks like the Hollywood stereotype of the wise old liberal legislator. On his wedding anniversary, he drove out to a Kerry fundraiser in upscale Chevy Chase, Md., to rally the troops, who had been reading discouraging polls.



I have lived in a variety of places in the USA, in Canada, and Europe, travelled reasonably widely, and have also borne witness to the incredible scope and pace of change that has invaded our individual consciousness since the mass adoption and embedding of the computer in our lives. I have done menial blue-collar work for long enough to have had callouses that lasted a year or more. Several years later I had migrated to being a financial analyst and learning how to build spreadsheets and construct logical macros. Eventually, wiith the years I also became polished enough as an intellectual courtesan to have also worked in some of the boardrooms of some of the largest corporations on Earth. I have been lucky enough, and I suppose smart enough, to adapt effectively a number of times to very different circumstances.

In fact, for a good decade or so, I was a senior consultant in areas such as compensation, organizational design and development, leadership and organizational change - areas that (I believe) have given me some insights into human motivation, psychology, learning, adaptability, and the polar opposites ... inertia, unconsciousness, refusal to admit new facts and learn, lack of flexibility and so on.

Several things struck me in the piece above. First, I spent the years from 7 to 13 in deep rural New Jersey, living in a house surrounded by farms. My parents were middle-class (or higher, there, I guess) professionals, and they decided that when it was time for me to go to high school that I would not go to school there, as the general level of education was, let's say, less than first-rate (and I thank them for that decision). I am reminded, in the context I've offered, that there are many people who have grown up in and remained in such places, even though many would now be suburbs or near-suburbs.

And, before I go any further, I am categorically NOT suggesting that the people generally who live in such rural areas are dumb (some are, some aren't). All I'm saying is that many have access to a different set of circumstances than others of us ... and maybe that a certain proposrtion of people don't move far from where they grew up.

But in the process off growing up in North America, many of us have been inculcated with the same messages about the America that at least half the USA feels has now disappeared, or is sinking out of sight very rapidly ... the America of the pledge of allegiance, of In God We Trust, where corporations are powerful, authority figures (especially strong ones) are to be obeyed, play the American game and you'll be alright, foreigners, especially brown ones, look, smell, talk and act funny, boys aren't supposed to love boys and girls aren't supposed to love girls (all the daily playground and hangin'-with-friends messages you'll remember from grade school and high school).

Someone who is 45 today and lives in rural or semi-rural America was 20 years old in 1985, and 10 years old in 1975, just as the Vietnam War was wrapping itself up, and just as Watergate was playing out. In what proportion of such folks, and to what degree, will they have experienced, assimilated, understood, and adapted to the new wrold we are beginning to experience ... the one that is in the tall office buildings in New York City, in the slums of Philadelphia, in the lay-off scarred neighbourhoods of Chicago, in the urban cool of San Francisco ?

Since that time (in 1975 I was 20 and just graduating from university, and had only a vague notion there were things called computers), we have been launched into the Information Age, if not the Knowledge Age ... business as a movement, with its business and revenue moidels, cost accountants, financial derivatives and business process reengineering has come and gone, and is now being fine tuned with the help of RFID chips and increasingly intelligent code-based algorithms, and on and on.

Paradigm shifts were talked about all the time 15 years ago .... everyone nodded understandingly, and went about doing what they did the day before, and what they would do the same way the next day ... especially in rural, non-urban areas. But I don't think many people really understood what they might mean then, and how the paradigm has and hasn't shifted.

Those Wal-Marts cited up above ... they're wired, man. The process engineers they use are the best ones on the planet. I'll bet they use all sorts of exotic forward contracts to hedge any losses they might contemplate with any of the billions of loose cash likely to be found in their transfer accounts. The Information Age has blown through all the ghost towns where Wal-Mart has called, and not much is left standing ... as the author vividly describes.

Now, for the people part of all this. Evidently, the election just past was won on "moral values". I believe that an awful lot of the people who voted for George Bush were actually voting based on vague feelings of a vestigial 1960's security and grace. They long for the America of the American Dream, using an irrational and religion-abetted denial that what has happened all around them, and increasingly around the world, is real. And GWB, Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al are dishonest enough and cynical enough, and yes Machiavellian enough to use that dumbstruck fear and denial to their advantage, to create a machine that at times looks invincible. And, to make matters worse, they are probably close to the stage where they are getting drunk on their power.

I maintain ... steadfastly ... that the best movie I've yet seen about the (eventual) effects of interconnectedness and the Web is a small, and in my opinion underappreciated classic film titled Pleasantville. I think it represents a paradigm shift, and a celebration of the magic in each individual human which can only flourish in community with others, in appreciation.

There's a scene in the movie in which the father of the two protagonists, aided by the Mayor, the Police Chief, the School Principal, and the Town Businessman, put on trial the young people they believe are the perps behind all the strange changes going on in Pleasantville. It doesn't work ... the changes are too human, too real, too principles-based ... the people of the town push back and begin speaking truth to power.

I believe that many many people in the USA are isolated from the rest of the world, their psyches fed by television, new cars, and the ever-present fear of losing their jobs, even if those jobs are at best meaningless and at worst demeaning. I believe some wag has termed this state of affairs Wealth Bondage.

They haven't been helped to understand that these changes are happening all over the world, and that while some of the changes require new job skills training, others require skills such as open minds, curiosity, literacy, tolerance, civility, responsibility to a community and so on. I say that in the full knowledge that there have been reams of articles, and scores of books all aimed at explaining the massive changes that have occurred and continue to arrive on our doorsteps ... all well-intentioned, by smart people, with some degree or other of an effective picture of the changes and some partially-effective remedies or recipes for adaptability.

There's something missing, or "croche" (crooked, bent) as the Quebeckers would say. I believe it lies in the messages I learn at Wealth Bondage, or over at How To Save the World (my friend Dave Pollard).

We have been seduced, by marketing, by the belief that we have an entitled right to a way of life that has been built artificially. We are coerced, by the need for money and thus a job, into collusion with a machine designed for controlling us (having us swallow TV and crap cash) and keeping 95% of the people labouring away to the benefit of the other 5% who managed to get into the club, and have no hearts, care not for their fellow human (protestations to the contrary notwithstanding).

At this stage of my life, for me, one little speck of humanity in the long arc of time, I can do nothing better with my time and energy than speak truth to power.

I hope others feel the same way, not because I want to be right, but because I don't want to feel so lonely.

Update

John Perry Barlow covers the same ground, basically, but about a thousand times better ... wish I could write like he does.

And what he has written brings to mind a quote from Barbara Marx Hubbard I have never forgotten ...

... "It's too late for pessimism"