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By Root 623 0

twenty-first century, and make laughable errors of extrapolation. ‘It’s tough to make predictions,’ joked somebody, perhaps Yogi Berra: ‘especially about the future.’ Technologies I cannot even conceive will be commonplace and habits I never knew human beings needed will be routine. Machines may have become sufficiently intelligent to design themselves, in which case the rate of economic growth may by then have changed as much as it did at the start of the industrial revolution – so that the world economy will be doubling in months or even weeks, and accelerating towards a technological ‘singularity’ where the rate of change is almost infinite.

But here goes, none the less. I forecast that the twenty-first century will show a continuing expansion of catallaxy – Hayek’s word for spontaneous order created by exchange and specialisation. Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up; work will become more and more specialised, leisure more and more diversified. Large corporations, political parties and government bureaucracies will crumble and fragment as central planning agencies did before them. The Bankerdämmerung of 2008 swept away a few leviathans but fragmented and short-lived hedge funds and boutiques will spring up in their place. The collapse of Detroit’s big car makers in 2009 leaves a flock of entrepreneurial startups in charge of the next generation of cars and engines. Monolithic behemoths, whether private or nationalised, are vulnerable as never before to this Lilliputian assault. They are steadily being driven extinct not just by small firms, but by ephemeral aggregations of people that form and reform continuously. The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers. Google, dependent on millions of instantaneous auctions to raise revenue from its AdWords, is ‘an economy unto itself, a seething laboratory’, says Stephen Levy. But Google will seem monolithic compared with what comes next.

The bottom-up world is to be the great theme of this century. Doctors are having to get used to well-informed patients who have researched their own illnesses. Journalists are adjusting to readers and viewers who select and assemble their news on demand. Broadcasters are learning to let their audiences choose the talent that will entertain them. Engineers are sharing problems to find solutions. Manufacturers are responding to consumers who order their products à la carte. Genetic engineering is going to become open-source, where people, not corporations, decide what combinations of genes they want. Politicians are increasingly corks tossed on the waves of public opinion. Dictators are learning that their citizens can organise riots by text message. ‘Here comes everybody’ says the author Clay Shirky.

People will more and more freely find ways to exchange their specialised production for diversified consumption. This world can already be glimpsed on the web, in what John Barlow calls ‘dot-communism’: a workforce of free agents bartering their ideas and efforts barely interested in whether the barter yields ‘real’ money. The explosion of interest in the free sharing of ideas that the internet has spawned has taken everybody by surprise. ‘The online masses have an incredible willingness to share’ says Kevin Kelly. Instead of money, ‘peer producers who create the stuff gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction and experience’. People are willing to share their photographs on Flickr, their thoughts on Twitter, their friends on Facebook, their knowledge on Wikipedia, their software patches on Linux, their donations on GlobalGiving, their community news on Craigslist, their pedigrees on Ancestry.com, their genomes on 23andMe, even their medical records on PatientsLikeMe. Thanks to the internet, each is giving according to his ability to each according to his needs, to a degree that never happened in Marxism.

This catallaxy will not go smoothly, or without resistance. Natural and unnatural disasters will still happen. Governments