Throwing The Economy Into The Shredder...

To Make It Better

In a pointed cover article for this month's WIRED Magazine, Chris Anderson posits that the collapse of the credit market and the subsequent global financial meltdown will result in a "new economy," where giant mega-corporations are no longer viable and where smaller, innovative start-ups and mini-corps will become the new drivers of the world market.  It's a solid little article in an issue packed with quality examinations of the current and future economic realities, so check it out.

The old maxim that big, disciplined companies always win appears to have been upended by the increasingly rapid changing of the playing field, where the corporate behemoths struggle under their own weight and find it harder to keep up, whereas smaller start-ups founded by eager, energetic minds will find it much easier to navigate the hyperfast jungle of information exchange that characterizes modern commerce.  I realize that the mega-giants will be able to stick their straws into these small ventures and soak up a lot of their ideas, but that can only work for so long, and it's likely the most they'll be able to do.  Simply gobbling up smaller companies to feed the monster like in the days of Rockefeller and Microsoft (whose days as an all-powerful monolith, in retrospect, have likely already passed) will not work so well, because the same problems of speed-of-change vs. ability-to-change will slow down those old and heavy top-down structures, and reduce profits.  

The idea is fascinating and, to me at least, encouraging, but the reasons for Anderson's predictions only feed my fears about the warp-speed pace of worldwide societal change.  We hit quite a snag this past year when the corporation-dominated business models of old struggled to keep up with an exponentially increasing rate of Information Age 'progress', and the time may well come when NONE of our man-made business models can match the pace, no matter how small they are.  That doesn't even fully account for the more abstract yet deadly serious problematics of Toffler-esque Futureshock crises or Human Information Doubling Theory (we'll save all that for another time.)

Like I said, I like Anderson's idea that the financial shakeup will result in the rise of a smaller, more efficient, more innovative capitalism.  But he seems to assume that the current rate of change will stay the same, fast as it is.  It won't.  Like Anderson, I'm hopeful for the end of mega-giants and I believe it could work out very well....for a while.  But the rate of change is only going to increase, the information is only going to get more overwhelming, and the evolution of human cognition will still only go so fast.  Buckle up.  It's gonna be a bumpy ride.