Digital Technologies Can Be The Key Building Blocks To A New Economic Future

"New digital technologies are creating a crisis in the business models of the companies that depend on having a monopoly on distribution."

Howard Rheingold blows some fresh and truly inspiring ideas in a short interview on MSNBC.com. Technologies, the ones enabling the individuals to take back initiative and to self-organize in novel ways is a natural breeder of new socio-economic panoramas.

Unsuspectingly, it may likely be that the very negative forces limiting our growth to new and better forms of governance/economics are the ones that, without realizing it, could give most easily way to the emergence of such new possible realities.

What Howard Rheingold sees, is the fact that the very governments/corporations limiting our forms of expressions and self-sustainable growth by strong regulatory action protecting vested interests, may actually significantly weaken those systems and societies where these are strongest, while allowing other nations/groups to leapfrog them in a very short time.

The silent forces at work in this direction include P2P and file sharing, blogs, social networking technologies, digital and video cameras, new types of credit/debt systems, the technology of the Internet, reputation systems, online communities, mobile devices "are all like those technologies...that made capitalism possible." Today, "these may make some new economic system possible."

But as Howard Rheingold correctly points out, the pushback by companies threatened by these trends, such as the record and movie companies are the ones that threaten such innovations the most.

"Never before in history have we been able to see incumbent businesses protect business models based on old technology against creative destruction by new technologies.

And they're doing it by manipulating the political process.

The telegraph didn't prevent the telephone, the railroad didn't prevent the automobile.

But now, because of the immense amounts of money that they're spending on lobbying and the need for immense amounts of money for media, the political process is being manipulated by incumbents."

These new technologies create opportunities that are the building blocks of our innovation and future. If enough people have access to such technologies, and can experiment, communicate and provide feedback to each other through them, they are bound to unsettle the established systems in more than one unpredictable way.

Through these technologies "we now have dispersed the means of individual and collective innovation throughout the world" Rheingold says.