“Television, computers, all of these things are de-socializing us… expensive technologies take energy and resources and complicated sometimes toxic materials and processes to manufacture….”

*Well, the net and cellphones definitely are de-socializing us – in the sense that former social structures are visibly dissolving. Last night we had dinner for guests and we brought out some fine silverware from the 1930s. It was amazing how archaic it looked and felt compared to our mismatched plates, re-used jelly-glasses, constantly bleeping cellphones, a digital flatscreen at our elbows, and the other globalized bric-a-brac of our multinational existence.

*It’s beautiful social technology, silverware. Henry Petroski wrote some very nice design-studies things about silverware. Silverware is pretty. To eat with tools almost as heavy as lead makes you very conscious of proper table-manners. We have almost none. Except that we are kind to our friends. Everyone was comfortable; we are how we are. The silverware didn’t feel much like sociality any more; it was a party trick, conversation pieces.

*Being de-socialized doesn’t mean falling into an asocial abyss. The 1930s were horrible times. If you try to return to the sociality of the 1930s you are heading straight for what they used to call “the Dark Valley.”

*I don’t have 1930s catered dinner parties, but I do have stuff like this WELL conversation.

I noticed that Yochai Benkler, “Mr Commons-Based Peer Production,” weighed in. So I quote him.

“Free market ideology "This is not a technical innovation but a change in realm of ideas. The resurgence of free market ideology, after its demise in the Great Depression, came to dominance between the 1970s and the late 1990s as a response to communism. As communism collapsed, free market ideology triumphantly declared its dominance. In the U.S. And the UK it expressed itself, first, in the Reagan/Thatcher moment; and then was generalized in the Clinton/Blair turn to define their own moment in terms of integrating market-based solutions as the core institutional innovation of the “left.”

"It expressed itself in Europe through the competition-focused, free market policies of the technocratic EU Commission; and in global systems through the demands and persistent reform recommendations of the World Bank, the IMF, and the world trade system through the WTO.

"But within less than two decades, its force as an idea is declining.

"On the one hand, the Great Deflation of 2008 has shown the utter dependence of human society on the possibility of well-functioning government to assure some baseline stability in human welfare and capacity to plan for the future.

"On the other hand, a gradual rise in volunteerism and cooperation, online and offline, is leading to a reassessment of what motivates people, and how governments, markets, and social dynamics interoperate.

"I expect the binary State/Market conception of the way we organize our large systems to give way to a more fluid set of systems, with greater integration of the social and commercial; as well as of the state and the social. So much of life, in so many of our societies, was structured around either market mechanisms or state bureaucracies. The emergence of new systems of social interaction will affect what we do, and where we turn for things we want to do, have, and experience.”

When Confucius was asked the first thing he would do upon taking office, he replied that he would “rectify names”, as “If names are not rectified then language will not flow. If language does not flow, then affairs cannot be completed.” In the same way, whenever we try and talk about thing “new economics of the commons,” it is nearly impossible to have a sensible discussion, as not only are there no precedents to work with, there are not even any words to discuss it with, sort of like newspeak in reverse. It was part of the reason novel concepts such as democracy and atheism took so long to get off the ground, as the relevant concepts could not be adequately expressed.

If we are to seek some precedents, I suggest the classics. The politicians of ancient Athens gained power by supporting the needy, starting schools and building public monuments. The concept of “gravitas,” so inherent in the Roman system, important enough to cause Caesar to march on Rome, has disappeared from the English language, and has found no replacement.

Perhaps Sarko and Obama are a new type of politician riding on the blogosphere?

The 21st century looks more like the 14th century than it does like the 19th or the 20th. As in the 14th century, we now have empires, religious groups and fanatics, fears of the plague and superstition, multinational corporations, and city-states—Dubai is the new Venice. That is really what the world looks like today. It doesn’t look the 19th century, with clean-cut territorial empires.

There is a rich – if unexpected – source of inspiration for this kind of collaborative space in the history of the 19th century mutual improvement societies, reading clubs and other self-organised, working class institutions. For example, the church halls and upstairs rooms of pubs where many of them met are still common enough – and would be worth exploring as possible venues for a group trying to set up such a space today

What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.