processes — the engines of flux — are now more important than products. Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or t… - Kevin Kelly

processes — the engines of flux — are now more important than products.

It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that — in slow motion — is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived — appliance repair person, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer — each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.

Before the internet there was simply no way to coordinate a million people in real time or to get a hundred thousand workers collaborating on one project for a week. Now we can, so we are quickly exploring all the ways in which we can combine control and the crowd in innumerable permutations.

As far back as 1813, Thomas Jefferson understood that ideas were not really property, or if they were property they differed from real estate. He wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” If