Though there is a great deal of complexity, in both our world and our universe, nearly every one and every thing can be reduced to polarities. Ones and zeros, yin and yang, white and black... We are consumed by states of Good and bad, left and right, full or empty. Perhaps this is nothing more than an issue of perception, an understanding of the laws of nature shackled by our own ignorance. But it might well be that opposition is a universal necessity, that reality itself demands that its component forces shake down into conflicting camps that eternally vie for dominance. Perhaps conflict itself is a necessary part of life, the engine that drives us to strive for better days. If so, our future is bright. For few of these polarity wars are hotter, and more central to our increasingly technological world, than, open systems versus closed systems, the former of which is exhaustively championed here by Misters Tapscott and Williams.
Defined as a system that relies on altruistic collaboration for its energy and its innovation, open systems are vital to our 21st century infrastructure. From apache and Linux, platforms that provide the Internet its software backbone, to Wikipedia and Reddit, services that shape the information it conveys, the Internet would be marooned without the creative efforts of men and women who eschew profit for cooperation, financial power for social status. Every day, billions of people freely use these and many other services not only with the expectation of never being charged by them, but in the knowledge that they will work, that, even though they are not helmed by CEO masterminds and billionaire companies, they will be reliable and useful in an ever-changing age.
How is this possible? How can relatively unfunded open systems, that seem at times almost adverse to earning profit, deliver products as polished and as useful as the million-dollar alternatives developed by fortune-500 corporations? Pointing out that millions of minds are better than hundreds, or even thousands, Misters Tapscott and Williams argue that open systems triumph thanks to the wisdom of many minds working in concert, training their combined powers upon a singular problem. Moreover, they contend that open systems foster non-hierarchical working groups that empower everyone to voice opinions, provide feedback and, most importantly, make contributions without fear of incurring the censure or the blowback typical of hierarchies. This assemblage of skill, knowledge, goodwill and energy, rather than creating confusion and discord, generate a nearly unstoppable engine of positive change that will, in the decades to come, transform economies and societies as we know them.
Published in 2007, Wikinomics is engaging and energetic work that is, nonetheless, fatally flawed. Adopting an optimistic tone that, at times, borders on cheerleading, Misters Tapscott and Williams investigate the open systems rising to prominence in the modern world and argue that theirs is the model of the future. From Myspace to Wikipedia, from Dig to Linux, they pepper their work with snippets from dozens of interviews with innovators and technologists, all of whom re-affirm the authors' contention that no company is capable of solving a problem faster or better than the will of the educated masses. These are lovely sentiments, ones that most of us will agree with. For it is easy to root for open systems; they are, after all, natural underdogs disrupting the bloated and inefficient ware from gigantic corporations. Moreover, it espouses a heartening vision of humanity that is immune to the corruptions of wealth and power, rejecting them for community acceptance and societal utility.
However, none of this changes the fact that this is a simplistic view that surpasses the naive and approaches the disingenuous. Undoubtedly, it is easy to use the hindsight of these last six years to look back at the heady, Internet world of 2007 and dismiss these conclusions as hopelessly dated. After all, when this book was published, the iPhone, a revolutionary product developed by one of the most closed companies in recent memory, had not yet been made commercially available. Moreover, Twitter and Facebook, the dominant social technologies of the moment, both of which have cynically used the open model to grow before closing it to become profitable, were merely tiny dots on the cyberspace landscape. The fact is, though, that the authors of Wikinomics clearly contend that open will defeat closed, that its native advantages will slay closed, backward-thinking corporate culture. And this simply has not happened. There have been advances, certainly, but open systems are profitless vacuums. Sadly, they cannot generate even a fraction of the revenues that closed systems can. And greed will, at least for some time, win out.
It's a shame that Misters Tapscott and Williams were wrong. For theirs is an optimistic view of humanity that our culture would benefit from embracing. But it turns out, at least as of this moment, the war of open and closed is far more gray than their account would have us believe. A pity... (2/5 Stars)
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