The Waki World of Macrowikinomics

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Author

Tom Slee

Published

October 7, 2010

Note

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Macrowikinomics is the new book from Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, authors of 2007’s “best-selling management book in the United States” Wikinomics. It proclaims the end of the industrial mode of production, that “centralized, one-way, one-size-fits-all mass model controlled by the powerful owners of production and society”. The authors tell us that “The world is broken and the industrial economy and many of its industries and organizations have finally run out of gas”.

But “don’t look to big government or big corporations to supply the answers.” The way forward is Internet-driven mass collaboration, for example “ordinary people everywhere are connecting to create a mass movement that is bringing greater awareness and sense of community to the process of making household and business decisions that can reduce our carbon footprints.”

It’s all relentlessly populist and anti-establishment, so there is something wackily wonderful about this list of endorsers on the book’s web site.

Now if there’s one thing that pisses me off, it’s people who don the mantle of rebellion and anti-corporate populism while promoting the commercialization of our public sphere and the commodification of our private lives, and I suspect that’s exactly what is going on here.

MacroWikinomics has received a lot of publicity, so I’m off to the local bookshop to get a copy tomorrow, and if it lives down to my expectations then watch this space for a page-by-page_ Macrocritical Reader’s Companion to Macrowikinomics, the long-delayed _sequel to my Critical Reader’s Companion to the Long Tail from a couple of years ago.