A decade ago Wikipedia burst into a world not ready to comprehend it. Thousands of people cooperating effectively, without price signals to offer "incentives" or managerial hierarchy to direct efforts was an impossibility.
And yet, it moves. And as it moved it combined with a deep shift across many disciplines, from biology and neuroscience to organizational sociology, experimental economics, and social psychology to paint a very different view of who we are, as human beings, and what we are capable of when we build and inhabit systems that rely on our better selves rather than on the cramped, pessimistic view of traditional economic modeling. A decade ago our explanations of Wikipedia depended on the uniqueness of the Net.
Today, we are ready to learn the deeper lessons: that we are more cooperative than we came to believe in the last half century, and that our challenges lie in learning how to build a new field of cooperative human systems design not only online, but for our lives more generally as the kind of social human beings we really are.
Via jean lievens



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Benkler's talk starts at time code: 26:26
This is a VERY important talk by a genius. I've read Wealth of Networks and see I am now a book behind The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest looks amazing and I will pick it up today.
I'm writing a piece on this talk now for ScentTrail Marketing as Benkler's talk beautifully ties design, nonzero altruism as discussed by Wright (NonZero) and Shermer (Mind of the Market) and the intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivations so well discussed in the book DRIVE by Daniel Pink.
To say this talk is important for today's Internet marketers to grasp would be a vast understatement. The fluidity of Benkler's thoughts and the profound shift toward cooperation has never been more completely outlined.
One of the best examples of Benkler's new cooperation is Scoop.it. Inside this ecosystem norms have been established, largely without the Scoop.it's team's need to do so, and cooperation rules, cooperation I am thankful for daily.
More thoughts on this important talk soon on ScentTrail Marketing.