The Legislative Disconnect Of The Meshed Society
It is people, joined together by the Internet, able to interact — to collaborate, to create, to transact and to relate directly with each other — without the need for another person to mediate or authorise. As we discover more and more ways to disintermediate our interactions, society is transformed: from a series of hubs with privileged interconnecting spokes intermediating supply to consumers at their tips, into a constantly shifting meshed “adhocracy” of temporary connections, transactions and relationships of varying length. In the adhocracy, individuals play the roles of user, repurposer, maker, buyer, investor and collaborator in a constantly changing spectrum of combinations.
But the law, gathered as it has around the hub-and-spoke worldview of the industrial society, treats many of these roles as privileged, because they have historically been reserved only for commercial entities. Thus, individuals with small scale, temporary actions run afoul of rules intended to regulate the owners of hubs and their long-term, large-scale activities. Worse, the penalties associated are disproportionate with the acts they address, because they are designed as weapons-grade disincentives for industrial gaming — not as tuning tools for the human-scale actions of the meshed society.
This is toxic for innovation. Facing the changes of the meshed Internet society by merely tweaking the rules of the industrial society will fail; instead, we need to fully refactor those rules to account for the new topology of society.
