Here's a review I wrote for the Independent on Don Tapscott's and Anthony Williams' Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Not very favourable, I have to say. An extract:
There's a weird blindness at the heart of this book, with its gushing celebrations of how corporate collaboration might produce the next Boeing airliner, or a new kitchen wipe. As the peer-to-peer visionary Micheal Bauwens has written, the problem is that we regard what is truly plentiful as scarce (information), and what is truly scarce as plentiful (our finite natural world). There is virtually zero consciousness in Wikinomics of the limits to global corporate activity that our environmental crisis must impose. Indeed, with an award-winning cheesiness, the book opens with an anecdote about a goldmine – revived, of course, through wikinomical means.
As Jeffery Sachs noted in his BBC Reith Lectures this year, mass collaboration through informed networks will be one of the key tools whereby we might heal the planet, environmentally and geopolitically. You would hardly learn of that grand ambition from this comically opportunistic book. The spectre of consultantism hangs over it more oppressively than anything else.
An excellent discussion of my review took place on the mailing list, iDC (Institute of Distributed Creativity), available here.
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