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.
Take the twelfth century as an example o f how close the world once came to turning its back on the catallaxy. In one fifty-year period, between 1100 and 1150, three great nations shut down innovation, enterprise and freedom all at once. In Baghdad, the religious teacher Al-Ghazali almost singlehandedly destroyed the tradition of rational enquiry in the Arab world and led a return to mysticism intolerant of new thinking. In Peking, Su-Sung’s astronomical clock, the ‘cosmic engine’, probably the most sophisticated mechanical device ever built at that date, was destroyed by a politician suspicious of novaelty and (t)reason, setting the tone for the retreat to autarky and traditionthat would be China’s fate for centuries to come.
In Paris, St Bernard of Clairvaux persecuted the scholar Peter Abelard, criticised the rational renaissance centred on the University of Paris and supported the disastrous fanaticism o f the second crusade. Fortunately, the flames of free thought and reason and catallaxy were kept burning – in Italy and North Africa, especially. But imagine if they had not been. Imagine if the entire world had turned its back on the catallaxy then. Imagine if the globalised world of the twenty-first century allows a globalised retreat from reason. It is a worrying thought. The wrong kind of chiefs, priests and thieves could yet snuff out future prosperity on earth. Already lords don boiler suits to destroy genetically modified crops, presidents scheme to prevent stem-cell research, prime ministers trample on habeas corpus using the excuse of terrorism, metastasising bureaucracies interfere with innovation on behalf of reactionary pressure groups, superstitious creationists stop the teaching of good science, air-headed celebrities rail against free trade, mullahs inveigh against the empowerment of women, earnest princes lament the loss of old ways and pious bishops regret the coarsening effects of commerce. So far they are all sufficiently localised in their effects to achieve no more than limited pauses in the happy progress of the species, but could one of them go global?
I doubt it. It will be hard to snuff out the flame of innovation, because it is such an evolutionary, bottom-up phenomenon in such a networked world. However reactionary and cautious Europe and the Islamic world and perhaps even America become, China will surely now keep the torch of catallaxy alight, and India, and maybe Brazil, not to mention a host of smaller free cities and states. By 2050, China’s economy may well be double the size of America’s. The experiment will go on.