RU Sirius responds to Rushkoff

OK, I'll take a crack at a few of these, just to get things rolling. I don't know if open source development has led to breakthrough inventions and discoveries of breathtaking originality, or if - so far - it's a way of taking some essential thing and tweaking it, changing it, improving it, taking it in other directions etcetera. But I see it as an emergent way of motivating and organizing creative, productive, "economic", and/or playful activity.

I think we're at the very beginning of a kind of collaborationalism. In particular, it seems to be natural to a certain strata of younger people. From personal experience, I've worked with boomers like myself and I've worked with younger generations, and I've found that generally the younger you go (albeit post-teenager), the less ego insecurity and weirdness gets in the way. I don't think that's entirely an attribution of being young. I think it comes from living in public in "the crowd." I think, if anything we boomers were probably even harder to collaborate with when we were young. "The movement", for example, was pretty much a circular firing squad, right?

Anyway, it seems that a culture of participation and distributedness and collaboration and DIY has been slowly rising from it's rough beginnings as the hacker ethic of the 1980s. This sort of neo-hacker sensibility could be an emergent dominant property of a networked society or it could prove to be nothing more than a powerful minority strain. I could say a lot more, but I'll end my thought there for now.