HOWZAT

In the We-Think economy people don’t just want services and goods delivered to them. They also want tools so that they can take part and places in which to play, share, debate with others.

Traditionally, workers can be instructed, organised in a division of labour. Participants will not be led and organised in this way: the dominant ethos of the We-Think economy is democratic and egalitarian. These vast communities of participation are led by antiheroic, slight leaders — the likes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Linus Torvalds of Linux. Such people are the antithesis of the charismatic, harddriving chief executive in the Jack Welch mould.

These collaboratives change the way in which people come up with new ideas. Innovation and creativity were once elite activities undertaken by special people — writers, designers, architects, inventors — in special places — garrets, studies, laboratories. The ideas they dreamt up would flow down pipelines to passive consumers. Now innovation and creativity are becoming mass activities, dispersed across society. Largely self-organising collaborations can unravel the human genome, create a vast encyclopaedia and a complex computer operating system. This is innovation by the masses, not just for the masses.

My book We-Think is an effort to understand this new culture; where these new ways of organising ourselves have come from and where they might lead. They started in the geeky swampland — in open-source software, blogging and computer gaming. But they are so powerful that increasingly they will become the mainstream by challenging traditional organisations to open up. They could change not just the ways in which the media, software and entertainment work but how we organise education, healthcare, cities and, indeed, the political system.

We know that children spend 85 per cent of their time outside school, so what they learn through computer games and the internet is critical. Innovative approaches to virtual learning, such as the Notschool.net initiative to encourage children excluded from school to learn online, may be a sign of what is to come for mainstream education that seeks to be available at any time and anywhere — imagine a system organised along the lines of eBay or Wikipedia, with learners seeking out teachers and materials from a wide range of sources.

If the computer games industry can get millions of children to see themselves as player-developers, how could we instil some of that culture of disciplined self-help and creativity into the education system? When children play computer games they feel part of the action; too often, at school they feel as if they are being “done to”.

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The Jubilee 2000 debt campaign, which changed the way we think about debt, development and trade, started with one campaigner working in a shed in South London in the mid-1990s. By 2000 it had a petition with 24 million signatures, had spawned a network of 69 national campaigns and mobilised hundreds of thousands of people in the UK to protest. At least $36 billion (£19.4 billion) of Third World debt has been written off as a result — no mean achievement for a campaign that was organised largely by Pro-Am campaigners, had little formal structure and few professional staff.

That spirit of participation is starting to creep into formal politics. As Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, warned the Conservative Party conference last week, politicians had better get used to living in a much more transparent world, in which citizen journalists will nag away at their lies and half-truths far more insistently than the traditional journalistic insiders.

At the start of the 21st century this should not be happening. The last decades of the 20th century bore witness to the triumph of the market and corporations. Co-operative and collaborative values were in retreat. In an increasingly materialistic and venal world, people do not do things for free: there has to be something in it for them. And if there is nothing in it for them, they have to be told — instructed what to do by managers.

We are still told that to be organised we need an organisation. Yet the examples above are complex and highly organised activities in which no single organisation is in charge of all that goes on.

We are told that for order to be maintained someone has to be in control. Yet these activities seem ordered precisely because no one seeks to be in control, so people have to exercise their sense of responsibility — adjusting to one another, sorting out disputes as they go. The order comes from within, not from the top.