The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [128]
End users, too, have joined in the mating frenzy. Adam Smith recounted the tale of a boy whose job was to open and close the valve on a steam engine and who, to save time, rigged up a device to do it for him. He no doubt went to his grave without imparting the idea to others, or would have done if not immortalised by the Scottish sage, but today he would have shared his ‘patch’ with like-minded others on a chat site. Today, the open-source software industry, with products such as Linux and Apache, is booming on the back of a massive wave of selflessness – programmers who share their improvements with each other freely. Even Microsoft is being forced to embrace open-source systems and ‘cloud computing’ – shared on the net – blurring the line between free and proprietary computing. After all, even the cleverest in-house programmer is unlikely to be as smart as the collective efforts of ten thousand users at the ‘bleeding edge’ of a new idea. Wikipedia is written by people who never expect to profit from what they do. The computer-game industry is increasingly being taken over by its players. In product after product on the internet, innovation is driven by what Eric von Hippel calls ‘free-revealing lead users’: customers who are happy to tell manufacturers of incremental improvements they can suggest, and of unexpected things they have found they can do with new products. Lead users are often happy to free-reveal, because they enjoy basking in the reputation of their peers. (Eric von Hippel, incidentally, practices what he preaches: you can read his books on his websites for free.)
This is not confined to software. When a surfer named Larry Stanley first modified his surfboard to make jumping possible without parting company from the board, he never dreamed of selling the idea, but he told everybody how to do it including the manufacturers of boards and now his innovations can be bought in the form of new surfboards. The greatest lead-user innovation of all was probably the World Wide Web, devised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 to solve the problem of sharing particle physics data between computers. Incidentally, nobody has yet suggested that research in software and surfboards must be government-funded because innovation in them would not happen without subsidy.
In other words, we may soon be living in a post-capitalist, post-corporate world, where individuals are free to come together in temporary aggregations to share, collaborate and innovate, where websites enable people to find employers, employees, customers and clients anywhere in the world. This is also, as Geoffrey Miller reminds us, a world that will put ‘infinite production ability in the service of infinite human lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, greed, envy and pride’. But that is roughly what the elite said about cars, cotton factories, and – I’m guessing now – wheat and hand axes too. The world is turning bottom-up again; the top-down years are coming to an end.
Infinite possibility
Were it not for this inexhaustible river of invention and discovery irrigating the fragile crop of human welfare, living standards would undoubtedly stagnate. Even with population tamed, fossil energy tapped and trade free, the human race could quickly discover the limits to growth if knowledge stopped growing. Trade would sort out who was best at making what; exchange could spread the division of labour to best effect, and fuel could amplify the efforts of every factory hand, but eventually there would be a slowing of growth. A menacing equilibrium would loom. In that sense, Ricardo and Mill were right. But so long as it can hop from country to country and from industry to industry, discovery is a fast-breeder chain reaction; innovation