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凯文·凯利（Kevin Kelly）在2009年6月号《连线》杂志提出“The New Socialism”(新社会主义)概念。标题为“新社会主义：互联网上正在浮现的全球集体主义社会”（The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online）。

Kevin Kelly说，Wikipedia、Flicker、Twitter等Web 2.0软件所带来的革命并不局限于虚拟社会，更在真实的世界里掀起了一种和平、自由、民主的新型社会主义运动，既取代了以牟利作为检验真理唯一标准的传统资本主义，保留追求人人活得有尊严的旧式社会主义理想，但又避免要个人将权力交给集体、由革命精英代为决定个人前途，最终造成威权的“共产主义”。文章里将新旧两种社会主义列表作一比较，值得思考。
目录
• 新新经济你有份？
• 英文版全文：The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online
• 新新经济的来临
• 新新经济
• 参考文献
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新新经济你有份？编辑本段回目录　　《Wired》是最成功的IT文化杂志，介绍IT创意之余带动思潮，由美国硅谷扩散到全世界。本港的杂志善于追踪IT产品，但绝少提出思想性话题，帮助你预见科技给社会带来的变化、思考个人的出路。文化杂志则只讲艺术人文，与科技完全隔离。虽然，文化人也都爱用Facebook和iPhone。因此，如果你喜欢IT，但又不满足于追求新玩具，又或者想超越狭义的人文，《Wired》值得翻翻。


Kevin Kelly　　经济恶讯开始减弱、港股大幅回升之时，该刊6月号的封面专辑《The New New Economy》(新新经济)高呼，危机打碎了大企业，将很多商机重新释放给市场，赶快创业以把握机会。理由很简单：大企业当初之所以包办整条生产线，是为了减少生产在线下各环节之间的「交易成本」；但规模一大，对市场的反应不及小公司灵活。

　　现在又为甚么有利小公司呢？因为上网就可得知，你的上游工业里，哪个供货商交货最快、索价最低，让你得享本来大公司才享有的成本优势。同样地，你的下游生产商透过网络找到你，从你那里获得最佳的供应。因此，整条生产线虽然包括很多不同的部件商，但所有环节都有最佳的效益。过去这十年，Google狂飙与美国三大车厂面临破产的对比，就是最佳的明证。

　　这个看法并不新，有趣的是专辑的最后一篇文章〈The New Socialism〉(新社会主义)。作者Kevin Kelly说，Wikipedia、Flicker、Twitter等Web 2.0软件所带来的革命并不局限于虚拟社会，更在真实的世界里掀起了一种和平、自由、民主的新型社会主义运动，既取代了以牟利作为检验真理唯一标准的传统资本主义，保留追求人人活得有尊严的旧式社会主义理想，但又避免要个人将权力交给集体、由革命精英代为决定个人前途，最终造成威权的「共产主义」。文章里将新旧两种社会主义列表作一比较，值得思考。

　　该刊总编辑Chris Anderson为此专辑写了一篇前言。此人提出的长尾(long-tail)理论风靡一时。至于此书讲甚么，等各位自己上Amazon和Wikipedia探讨。
英文版全文：The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online编辑本段回目录By Kevin Kelly 05.22.09


互联网上的新社会主义Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.

Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.

We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.


Kevin KellyThe type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there's rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism.

In the late '90s, activist, provocateur, and aging hippy John Barlow began calling this drift, somewhat tongue in cheek, "dot-communism." He defined it as a "workforce composed entirely of free agents," a decentralized gift or barter economy where there is no property and where technological architecture defines the political space. He was right on the virtual money. But there is one way in which socialism is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.

Socialism:
A History
1516 Thomas More's Utopia
1794 Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason
1825 First US commune
1848 Marx & Engels' The Communist Manifesto
1864 International Workingmen's Association
1903 Bolshevik Party elects Lenin
1917 Russian Revolution
1922 Stalin consolidates power
1946 State-run health care in Saskatchewan
1959 Cuban Revolution
1967 Che Guevara executed
1973 Salvador Allende deposed
1980 Usenet
1985 Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost
1991 Soviet Union dissolves
1994 Linux 1.0
1998 Venezuela elects Hugo Chavez
1999 Blogger.com
2000 Google: 1 billion indexed pages
2001 Wikipedia
2002 Brazil elects Lula da Silva
2003 Public Library of Science
2004 Digg
2005 Amazon's Mechanical Turk
2006 Twitter
2008 Facebook: 100 million users
2008 US allocates $700 billion for troubled mortgage assets
2009 YouTube: 100 million monthly US users
In his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements. Groups of people start off simply sharing and then progress to cooperation, collaboration, and finally collectivism. At each step, the amount of coordination increases. A survey of the online landscape reveals ample evidence of this phenomenon.

I. SHARING

The online masses have an incredible willingness to share. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook and MySpace is astronomical, but it's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of photos taken with a digital camera are shared in some fashion. Then there are status updates, map locations, half-thoughts posted online. Add to this the 6 billion videos served by YouTube each month in the US alone and the millions of fan-created stories deposited on fanfic sites. The list of sharing organizations is almost endless: Yelp for reviews, Loopt for locations, Delicious for bookmarks.

Sharing is the mildest form of socialism, but it serves as the foundation for higher levels of communal engagement.

II. COOPERATION

When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it produces results that emerge at the group level. Not only have amateurs shared more than 3 billion photos on Flickr, but they have tagged them with categories, labels, and keywords. Others in the community cull the pictures into sets. The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that communally, if not outright communistically, your picture is my picture. Anyone can use a photo, just as a communard might use the community wheelbarrow. I don't have to shoot yet another photo of the Eiffel Tower, since the community can provide a better one than I can take myself.

Thousands of aggregator sites employ the same social dynamic for threefold benefit. First, the technology aids users directly, letting them tag, bookmark, rank, and archive for their own use. Second, other users benefit from an individual's tags, bookmarks, and so on. And this, in turn, often creates additional value that can come only from the group as a whole. For instance, tagged snapshots of the same scene from different angles can be assembled into a stunning 3-D rendering of the location. (Check out Microsoft's Photosynth.) In a curious way, this proposition exceeds the socialist promise of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" because it betters what you contribute and delivers more than you need.

Community aggregators can unleash astonishing power. Sites like Digg and Reddit, which let users vote on the Web links they display most prominently, can steer public conversation as much as newspapers or TV networks. (Full disclosure: Reddit is owned by Wired's parent company, Condé Nast.) Serious contributors to these sites put in far more energy than they could ever get in return, but they keep contributing in part because of the cultural power these instruments wield. A contributor's influence extends way beyond a lone vote, and the community's collective influence can be far out of proportion to the number of contributors. That is the whole point of social institutions—the sum outperforms the parts. Traditional socialism aimed to ramp up this dynamic via the state. Now, decoupled from government and hooked into the global digital matrix, this elusive force operates at a larger scale than ever before.

III. COLLABORATION

Organized collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of ad hoc cooperation. Just look at any of hundreds of open source software projects, such as the Apache Web server. In these endeavors, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members. In contrast to casual cooperation, collaboration on large, complex projects tends to bring the participants only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the end product. An enthusiast may spend months writing code for a subroutine when the program's full utility is several years away. In fact, the work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective—the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid—that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism.

Adding to the economic dissonance, we've become accustomed to enjoying the products of these collaborations free of charge. Instead of money, the peer producers who create the stuff gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience. Not only is the product free, it can be copied freely and used as the basis for new products. Alternative schemes for managing intellectual property, including Creative Commons and the GNU licenses, were invented to ensure these "frees."

Of course, there's nothing particularly socialistic about collaboration per se. But the tools of online collaboration support a communal style of production that shuns capitalistic investors and keeps ownership in the hands of the workers, and to some extent those of the consuming masses.

The Old
Socialism
The New
Socialism
Authority centralized among elite officials Power distributed among ad hoc participants
Limited resources dispensed by the state Unlimited, free cloud computing
Forced labor in government factories Volunteer group work a la Wikipedia
Property owned in common Sharing protected by Creative Commons
Government- controlled information Real-time Twitter and RSS feeds
Harsh penalties for criticizing leaders Passionate opinions on the Huffington Post
IV. COLLECTIVISM

While cooperation can write an encyclopedia, no one is held responsible if the community fails to reach consensus, and lack of agreement doesn't endanger the enterprise as a whole. The aim of a collective, however, is to engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by all participants. Throughout history, hundreds of small-scale collectivist groups have tried this operating system. The results have not been encouraging, even setting aside Jim Jones and the Manson family.

Indeed, a close examination of the governing kernel of, say, Wikipedia, Linux, or OpenOffice shows that these efforts are further from the collectivist ideal than appears from the outside. While millions of writers contribute to Wikipedia, a smaller number of editors (around 1,500) are responsible for the majority of the editing. Ditto for collectives that write code. A vast army of contributions is managed by a much smaller group of coordinators. As Mitch Kapor, founding chair of the Mozilla open source code factory, observed, "Inside every working anarchy, there's an old-boy network."

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some types of collectives benefit from hierarchy while others are hurt by it. Platforms like the Internet and Facebook, or democracy—which are intended to serve as a substrate for producing goods and delivering services—benefit from being as nonhierarchical as possible, minimizing barriers to entry and distributing rights and responsibilities equally. When powerful actors appear, the entire fabric suffers. On the other hand, organizations built to create products often need strong leaders and hierarchies arranged around time scales: One level focuses on hourly needs, another on the next five years.

In the past, constructing an organization that exploited hierarchy yet maximized collectivism was nearly impossible. Now digital networking provides the necessary infrastructure. The Net empowers product-focused organizations to function collectively while keeping the hierarchy from fully taking over. The organization behind MySQL, an open source database, is not romantically nonhierarchical, but it is far more collectivist than Oracle. Likewise, Wikipedia is not a bastion of equality, but it is vastly more collectivist than the Encyclopædia Britannica. The elite core we find at the heart of online collectives is actually a sign that stateless socialism can work on a grand scale.

Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies allow some private property.

Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of communitarian technology is this: to maximize both individual autonomy and the power of people working together. Thus, digital socialism can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates.

The notion of a third way is echoed by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who has probably thought more than anyone else about the politics of networks. "I see the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based closed, proprietary systems," he says, noting that these activities "can enhance creativity, productivity, and freedom." The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.

Hybrid systems that blend market and nonmarket mechanisms are not new. For decades, researchers have studied the decentralized, socialized production methods of northern Italian and Basque industrial co-ops, in which employees are owners, selecting management and limiting profit distribution, independent of state control. But only since the arrival of low-cost, instantaneous, ubiquitous collaboration has it been possible to migrate the core of those ideas into diverse new realms, like writing enterprise software or reference books.

The dream is to scale up this third way beyond local experiments. How large? Ohloh, a company that tracks the open source industry, lists roughly 250,000 people working on an amazing 275,000 projects. That's almost the size of General Motors' workforce. That is an awful lot of people working for free, even if they're not full-time. Imagine if all the employees of GM weren't paid yet continued to produce automobiles!

So far, the biggest efforts are open source projects, and the largest of them, such as Apache, manage several hundred contributors—about the size of a village. One study estimates that 60,000 man-years of work have poured into last year's release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that self-assembly and the dynamics of sharing can govern a project on the scale of a decentralized town or village.

Of course, the total census of participants in online collective work is far greater. YouTube claims some 350 million monthly visitors. Nearly 10 million registered users have contributed to Wikipedia, 160,000 of whom are designated active. More than 35 million folks have posted and tagged more than 3 billion photos and videos on Flickr. Yahoo hosts 7.8 million groups focused on every possible subject. Google has 3.9 million.

These numbers still fall short of a nation. They may not even cross the threshold of mainstream (although if YouTube isn't mainstream, what is?). But clearly the population that lives with socialized media is significant. The number of people who make things for free, share things for free, use things for free, belong to collective software farms, work on projects that require communal decisions, or experience the benefits of decentralized socialism has reached millions and counting. Revolutions have grown out of much smaller numbers.

On the face of it, one might expect a lot of political posturing from folks who are constructing an alternative to capitalism and corporatism. But the coders, hackers, and programmers who design sharing tools don't think of themselves as revolutionaries. No new political party is being organized in conference rooms—at least, not in the US. (In Sweden, the Pirate Party formed on a platform of file-sharing. It won a paltry 0.63 percent of votes in the 2006 national election.)

Indeed, the leaders of the new socialism are extremely pragmatic. A survey of 2,784 open source developers explored their motivations. The most common was "to learn and develop new skills." That's practical. One academic put it this way (paraphrasing): The major reason for working on free stuff is to improve my own damn software. Basically, overt politics is not practical enough.

But the rest of us may not be politically immune to the rising tide of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism. For the first time in years, the s-word is being uttered by TV pundits and in national newsmagazines as a force in US politics. Obviously, the trend toward nationalizing hunks of industry, instituting national health care, and jump-starting job creation with tax money isn't wholly due to techno-socialism. But the last election demonstrated the power of a decentralized, webified base with digital collaboration at its core. The more we benefit from such collaboration, the more open we become to socialist institutions in government. The coercive, soul-smashing system of North Korea is dead; the future is a hybrid that takes cues from both Wikipedia and the moderate socialism of Sweden.

How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society can this movement take us? Every time that question has been asked, the answer has been: closer than we thought. Consider craigslist. Just classified ads, right? But the site amplified the handy community swap board to reach a regional audience, enhanced it with pictures and real-time updates, and suddenly became a national treasure. Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans from perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Every public health care expert declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, prove that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what you're thinking (Twitter), what you're reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Wesabe), your everything (the Web) is becoming a foundation of our culture. Doing it while collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don't know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step.

A similar thing happened with free markets over the past century. Every day, someone asked: What can't markets do? We took a long list of problems that seemed to require rational planning or paternal government and instead applied marketplace logic. In most cases, the market solution worked significantly better. Much of the prosperity in recent decades was gained by unleashing market forces on social problems.

Now we're trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn't solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective? The force of online socialism is growing. Its dynamic is spreading beyond electrons—perhaps into elections.

Senior maverick Kevin Kelly (kk@kk.org) wrote about correspondences between the Internet and the human brain in issue 16.07.
新新经济的来临编辑本段回目录克里斯·安德森/文

就在因特网正在成型的1980年代末期，一个名为Tom Malone的麻省理工学院教授开始思考这样一个问题：它究竟会如何改变整个工业的结构。在一系列的论文中，他预言说：20世纪那些组织管理严密的举行公司们，将会很快就将“权力下放、并且具象”转化成为多个工业生态系统。


新新经济“想象一下，AT&T分割开来，不是2或者3个不同的公司，而是200或者300个。”在1998年7月进行的一次采访中，Malone告诉《连线》杂志。“这种出于自愿，革命性的解体，对于一些巨型的组织来说，是一种有吸引力的替代性选择。”

理由很简单：巨型的垂直式的综合性大企业之所以会出现，就是因为要将经济学家罗纳德科斯所命名的交易成本（transaction costs）——它存在于团体之间、整个供应链的上下游之间——最小化。现在，分散式的信息网络能够在单一公司的壁垒之外起到相同的功能。网络将全球化推向了极端宽阔的程度。工程们将会向全世界各地的最佳竞争者开放，这创造出了实质上的供应者和工人们之间速变的坚固同盟。他们能够为了一个产品聚集到一起，然后又为另一个产品重组。“小块，松散组合”，就是这其中的至理箴言。

但是，在真正的全球巨型产业的现实当中，相反的一幕似乎正在出现。公司们不断的变得越来越大。在华尔街上，高盛每年赚进将近900亿美元，在不到十年的时间当中，它的年收入就翻了三倍。在制药产业里面，因为数百件的合并与收购，使联盟变得更加稳固。在《财富》10强中——今天包括了沃尔玛和通用电气——自从1990年以来，规模已经增大了三倍。还有AT&T，远远谈不上分散成300000个不同的企业，相反，它变成了一个比之前更大的企业。不仅如此，再一次——至少是对于那些iphone的用户们来说——它又变成了一个垄断者。

而接下来，从去年9月份开始，形势开始大逆转。那些举行的金融公司们，其实是以一种前所未有（希望再也别有了）的杠杆比率冲涨而来的。因为坐上火箭般的油价猛涨和萎缩的消费者需求，巨型汽车公司们遭受了直接的打击。制药巨头们变成了重磅炸弹。沃尔玛不断的关闭商店，与此同时，GE则努力的卖出分支部门。（好吧，AT&T依然在垄断iphone，但是咱等着瞧吧！）


新新经济所以现在，站在巨人们的坟场之中，值得问一问：Malone说对了么？他所预言的哺乳动物时代，是不是直接就被公司恐龙们的最后一次进军给推迟了？

这次危机不仅仅是一个循环的波谷，而且还意味着一个时代的终结。我们将变得不仅仅是更聪明，而且是与以往不同。

在过去的9个月时间里我们所发现的是不断增多的规模不经济。大型公司们已经越来越难以单纯倚靠现金流进行经营，所以他们需要更多的借贷。大型公司们必须进行更大的产品赌注，但是在一个日益分殊的市场当中，它们对于分销和竞争的掌控却是越来越小。那种“一锤子买卖”式的暴利产品开发变得越来越危险，收益也是越来越低。而且，随着华尔街公司们变得越来越有经验，大型公司巨头们正在受到越来越多的规范，限制了它们的灵活性。金融业的明星们变成了小型公司，这是它们现今唯一有兴趣去做的事情。

就像风投资本家Paul Graham所描述的那样，“看起来，‘又大又规范的组织赢得胜利’的规则，需要一个限制性的附加条件：‘是在那些形势改变缓慢的游戏中。’直到改变的速度达到一个临界点之前，没有人知道这一切。”

结果就是，接下来的新经济——唯一从这场崩溃的灰烬中升起的东西——将会钟情于“小规模”。

以底特律为例。在“超越底特律”一文中，Charles C. Mann这样写道：唯一让三大生存下来的方式，就是启用这样的一个创新过程，让无数的尝试开始进行汽车技术的创新。

或者以Google为例。就像Steven Levy在“Google经济的秘密”中所探讨的那样，这个公司采用了一种颠覆性的广告销售方式，不再是由公司们之间的握手，而是硬邦邦的事实数字。


《连线》封面或者甚至是整个社会。一个世纪之前，大众的集体性行动，唯一可能对此进行组织的只有国家。现在，我们则拥有网络。Kevin Kelly复苏了社会主义——没有国家参与在内——“新社会主义”。

所有这些通常的理由，解释了为什么小公司们拥有优势。之前是对于风险的灵活性，现在则增加了新的内容：“云计算”的兴起，意味着初创的公司们不必一定要去购买它们自己的IT设备。源于此，帮助了它们缓解了筹钱的负担也不必再去负债经营了。同样的，在很多产业领域里供应链的网络化——从电子学层面到物理层面上——这意味着，即便是最小型的公司现在也可以进行全球性的订货，跟巨头公司们享受一样的待遇。同样的，一个拥有笔记本和一定进取心的音乐家，他也可以完成之前是由录音室所完成的工作，而一个有野心的工程师可以用差不多的笔记本，发明并制作出一个酷酷的小玩意儿来。

现在，“无意识的企业家精神”已经制造出好几万和巨型超市缔结和约的小型企业和自由职业劳动者。一旦有机会的话，很多人会再次参加全职工作，但是很多的其他人则将选择不会。这次危机或许会将我们的经济变成是小块儿、松散的组合。但是，这将是那些数以百万计的怀着希望那样做的劳动者们的集体性行动。

（原文刊登在最新一期的《连线》杂志。原名为：“新新经济，更多的尝试，更少的巨人，无限多的机遇”（The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity））

克里斯·安德森，《连线》杂志主编，曾著有《长尾理论》一书，获得广泛关注。他的新书《免费（free）》即将于今年下半年面世。
新新经济编辑本段回目录更多新兴企业，更少行业巨头，无限机会。

大型联合企业的时代终结了。

随着互联网在20世纪80年代成形，麻省理工大学的教授汤姆·马龙（Tom Malone）就开始思考互联网将怎样改变工业结构。在一系列论文中，他预测到20世纪那些大而全的公司将很快“去中心化并外向化”到工业生态系统中。

“想象一家像AT&T（美国电话电报公司）这么大的公司，不是拆分成2到3家公司，而是分化成20到30万家公司时的情景”，马龙在1998年7月接受《连线》杂志的采访时表示：“这种自发式的激进‘去集团化’对于一些大型组织来说，是个非常有吸引力的候选方案。”

很简单，创造垂直化大型联合企业的目的就在于最小化——按照经济学家罗纳德·科斯的说法——“交易成本”。“交易成本”存在于团队之间，存在于供应链的各个级别之间。现在，在各个公司的壁垒之外，分散化的信息网络同样也能最小化“交易成本”。互联网，将是发展到极致的全球化。哪儿条件最好，项目就会在哪儿开花；为了生产一种产品，供应商和工作者们会凑在一起，组成虚拟快公司；然后，根据另一种产品的需求，改组成另一个虚拟快公司。“小型、组织松散”才是正理。

但是在世界上的大行业（great industry）中，事情似乎朝着相反的方向发展了。合作规模更大了。在华尔街，高盛每年盈利将近900亿美元。在不到10年的时间里，高盛的年营业收入翻了三番。制药行业经过数以百次的兼并和重组之后，已经高度集中。自1990年以来，《财富》前10大企业的规模翻了三番不止，这其中就包括沃尔玛和通用。而AT&T，远远谈不上分化成30万家企业，规模比以前更大了，并且又一次成了一家垄断公司（至少iPhone用户是这么认为的）。

然后，在去年9月，所有的一切都崩溃了。我们最终发现，那些大型金融企业是债务充大的。债务的规模前所未见（也希望永不再见）。在火箭般上涨的油价和直线下降的消费需求面前，大型汽车企业解体了。大型制药企业风光不再。沃尔玛继续关店，通用则试图出售其子公司。（好吧，AT&T还垄断着iPhone，但是不是不报，时候未到！）

因此，在巨头的坟地中，我们应该问一下：马龙是正确的吗？他所说的小企业时代仅仅是因为那些联合大企业步入历史垃圾堆前的最后冲刺而推迟出现吗？

这次危机不仅仅是一次轮回，而是一个纪元的终结。最终，我们不仅会更聪明，还会与之前不同。

在过去9个月中，我们的发现是日益增长的“规模不经济”（diseconomies of scale）。越大的公司，越难独自维持现金流，因此需要借更多债（衰了！）。在日益多样化的市场中，越大的公司需要下的赌注越大，而其对分销以及竞争的控制却越来越小。赌注带来的风险更高，回报却更低。正如华尔街各个公司学到的，越大的公司越制度化，限制了公司的灵活性。金融才子们纷纷逃亡到规模更小的公司；只有在这些公司，才有希望完成一些有趣的事情。

正如风险投资商鲍尔·格拉汉姆（Paul Graham）所言：“看起来似乎‘规模大，规范的企业赢得市场’这条金科玉律还得加上一个附加条件‘只有在变化小的市场中’。但直到剧变席卷而来时，人们才意识到这一点。”

结果是下一个新经济——自最近这次衰退的余烬中升起的新经济——将倾爱于小。

拿底特律举个例子吧。查理斯·曼（Charles C. Mann）在《底特律之外》（Beyond Detroit）中写道：“三大汽车巨头唯一的活路，就是像众多致力于汽车技术的新兴企业那样创新。”


凯文·凯利或者用谷歌举例。斯蒂文·莱维（Steven Levy）在《谷歌经济学的秘密》（The Secrets of Googlenomics）中探讨道，谷歌销售广告的自下而上的模型不是通过公司高层之间的交流，而是经过严格计算得出的。

举个大点的例子，如社会。一个世纪以前，只有国家才能组织大规模集体行动。现在我们有了互联网。凯文·凯利（《失控》作者，《连线》杂志原主编——译者注）在《新社会主义》（The New Socialism）中再次阐述了社会主义，没有国家的社会主义。

除了所有这些对小公司具备优势的常见解释外，撇开灵活性和风险承受能力不谈，再加入一些新观点：云计算的兴起意味着新兴企业不再需要自购IT设备，这将帮助他们避免筹资、举债。类似的，许多行业（从电气到服装）的供应链都互联网化了，意味着即使是最小型的公司，也可以和行业巨头那样接受全球订单了。同样的，一名音乐人只需一台电脑和一些进取心，就能完成大部分厂牌能做的工作；一名有志气的工程师也只需一台笔记本就能创造并制造一个小工具（gadget）。

现在，“无意识企业家”（自己已经在创业了，自己却没有意识到——译者注）创造了数以万计的小企业，以及一个巨大的合同工和自由职业者市场。其中许多人只要有空，就会干全职的活，而其他许多人却不会选择这么做。这次危机可能会使我们的经济小型化、松散化，但是这将会是一次数以百万计渴望改变并持续改变的工作者参与的集体行动。
参考文献编辑本段回目录http://www.eeo.com.cn/today_media/headlines/2009/06/04/139141.shtml
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_essay
http://www.wired.com/wired/
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5422cd840100053m.html
http://www.de-sci.org/blogs/tsuisioming/?p=31322
http://www.wired.com/print/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism