Nothing Ever Happens

If you read only ONE article this year, you shall read the See-Through CEO (Wired April cover story). I consider it as one the most important articles of the year. (Read also the related: Microsoft case study and The Office case study)

Despite having always intensively used and worked with the newest internet technologies myself, I was not really aware of the profound transformation, which our society is currently undergoing.

The advent of new social phenomena such as the user-generated content, wisdom of crowds, prediction markets, social network platforms or virtual worlds, marks in my opinion one of the largest shifts in human thought and in the behavior of the human race in its entire history.

A new social tissue is emerging, made of new, destructed and reconstructed social objects. We, the new virtual selves are not a reflection of our-real-selves anymore but are increasingly becoming integral, programmable and interdependent parts of more robust, complex and intelligent virtual structures. Once you are Googled, it’s impossible to get out and once you have a profile and a social network associated to it, it’s impossible to just abandon it. You are not smart anymore, we are. (Also: We Are Smarter Then Me experiment)

I think these processes are ultimately leading to a new world which was merely a utopian ideal in many previous attempts to create a new society (such as communism and others) based on equal opportunities for self-realization and equal participation in the distribution of wealth. We are now just at the entrance and the doors are wide open..

Further reading:
In Praise Of Radical Transparency
Radical Transparency by Wikipedia
Market For Lemons, George Akerlof’s essay is the single most important study in the literature on economics of information, awarded with a Nobel Prize in 2001.
The Transparent Society
Digital Maoism