There’s an occupational category called “futurist,” which involves attempting to guess the likely future based on extrapolations from current trends and their interactions. Now, many people can spot the major currents of change in our time. It’s when a number of those currents intersect, producing all kinds of whorls and eddies and butterfly effects, that things get complicated. Sometimes when trends intersect they reinforce each other.

For example, our era is characterized by two considerably overlapping contradictions or fracture points. First, we’re in the early stages of historic transition from a social organization dominated by large, centralized, hierarchical institutions like corporations and nation-states, to a world of small, self-governing units connected together horizontally through networks. Things like Anonymous, Wikileaks, the Arab Spring, M15 and Syntagma, and what’s going on right now in Turkey, Brazil and Egypt, are vivid illustrations of this trend.

The forces of hierarchy and authority are doing their best to co-opt this change where they can’t suppress it, using “intellectual property” and other state-enforced monopolies to enclose technologies of small-scale production and networked communications within a corporate-state institutional framework. ...