Pre-Debate: Is this real, this internet discussion?

[Sanjeev Sabhlok <sabhlok@almaak.usc.edu>]

Just got something thought I'd share. This is about Hayek's view of
competition and spontaneous order. I haven't read "The Fatal Conceit" but
I would probably do so now, and would request anyone else who has read it
to tell us what it is about. 

In a sense, it appears odd that we are talking to each other over
thousands of miles, without even knowing each other, but I am convinced
that the internet is the harbinger of a completely different world order,
and that a 100 years from now, the world will be distinguished into two
stages: pre-internet and post-internet, just like pre- and
post-Renaissance. 

This is for real. The discussion, the debate, the cost-saving in tapping
the highest quality of information and knowledge, and the re-definition of
man's role on the planet Earth. Neither will India nor will any other
nation be the same again. No Hitler will ever be able to emerge since the
organization of resistance will become trivial (remember how difficult it
was to organize the Mutiny of 1857: but today, we can organize a Mutiny
against socialism and corruption within a few years, and at very low
cost). And this will be true of all nations. Pakistan too will have these
entrepreneurs over the internet who will overthrow its feudalism and let
the people speak. The time has come for totalitarian and corrupt
governments all over the world to become really, really, scared of this
phenonomenal power of global communication across like-minded people.

This is chaos theory of the ultimate form: a small butterfly (e.g.,
IndiaPolicy) fluttering its wings, changing history for ever. Even if we
don't, as tiny insects in our own little nests, for sure, the internet
will, sooner or later enable this change into an anti-hierarchical order. 
I suspect that in the very long run, the nation state itself will become
completely redundant. 

Management gurus, political gurus and economic gurus must all re-evaluate
the earth-shaking change taking place due to the internet **right now**.

SS

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[From a new magazine called Business 2.0 -- Rob Knautz]

He's Hot.  He's Happening.  And He's Dead.

It's not often that a dead economist and social philosopher generates a
stir in high tech.  But one of the newly emerging prophets of the Network
Economy is Friedrich Hayek, whose books are suddenly hot properties on the
campuses of tech firms.  Management Guru Tom Peters even says he rereads
Hayek's 1988 book, The Fatal Conceit, every 18 months or so, "just to make
sure my religion has not slipped."

Why the buzz?  Although Hayek's death in 1992 preceded general business use
of the Net, he understood the value of its free-form work environment.
Hayek wrote of "competition as a discovery procedure," wherein new ideas
are best nurtured through decentralized trial, error, adaptation and
improvisation.  Such a notion forms the heart of the antihierarchical
Network Economy.  Hayek's belief that marketplaces form in a "spontaneous"
order -- the result of human action but not of human design -- presaged 
the emergence of a widespread network organism, whose vitality derives 
from continual mutation.  On the Net, stasis equals stagnation and death.  
The mess is the message.


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