"Biology is war, in which only the fiercest survive. Businesses and nations succeed only by defeating and destroying and dominating competition. Politics is about your side winning at all costs."

But there is a new narrative that is spreading across and that tells a new story, about how humans and other creatures have and could cooperate together in more efficient and effective ways.

"Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons."

Here the video: Nineteen minutes of great learning. Recommended (to schools and university teachers above all).

And what Howard Rheingold exposes so well in this video is the unquestionable need for us, as a living species on this planet, to start studying, understanding and working around the technologies of cooperation and the economies of sharing that will take us to our next evolutionary step.

He sees the characterizing traits of such cooperation technologies to be defined by:

Easy to Use
Email, Blogs, Wikis

Enable Connections
Webs of Links, Markets are Conversations, Blogrolls create blogospheres

Open
no license needed to publish

Group Forming
eBay, Wikipedia, buddy lists

Self-Instructing
View source, Blog clients

Leverage Self-Interest
Google PageRank

"What forms of suffering could be alleviated and what forms of wealth could be created if we knew a little bit more about cooperation?" Howard asks.

What matters the most at this point is in fact only how much me and you are willing to contribute to this cooperative renaissance.

Only by becoming active actors in this new planetary collaborative effort we can put an optimistic signature on the future awaiting us.

"I don't think that this transdisciplinary discourse is automatically going to happen...

...it is going to require effort.

So, I enlist you to help me get the cooperation project started."

Howard Rheingold -
Reference: TED [ Read more ]