[Advisors] Where are We in the Diffusion of Digital Technologies?

[Garth Graham]

William Janeway. Which Productivity Puzzle? Institute for New Economic Thinking, April 3, 2017. 
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/which-productivity-puzzle

This is the first thing I've read in a very long time that might cause me to revise my basic premises about the significance of self organizing community in the Digital Age.  Janeway asks and answers – where are we in the diffusion of digital technologies?  He’s defining a path and the direction it ‘s taking.  His first critical assumption is that the impact of the digital economy on productivity won’t be fully realized until IT departments disappear:

“Firms that want the benefits of computing have had to hire their own IT Departments and manage computer operations and application development and deployment.  So the first hypothesis is that access to cloud computing through “real” broadband internet (say, 100 megabits per second) will virtualize the underlying technology even as the grid did with electricity.”

My own critical assumption is that the Internet represents a symptom of a shift in worldview toward self-organizing complex adaptive or distributed systems.  Because community self-organizes, the practices of community online are important as a foundational assumption about organizational structure for local control of decision-making.  The members of IT departments have so far acted as a community of practice for the stewardship of Internet Protocol.  So a capacity to learn from distributed systems thinking has been radically embedded in organizational structure from the beginnings of the digital economy.  Janeway assumes that’s only a step in the path.

This is because he also assumes that the key driver of value and market power has become corporate “deep learning” from the use of neural networks in data analysis as a commodity.  So, unless cloud computing becomes understood as a public good, his analysis implies ever increasing degrees of central control, not the distribution of functions across complex adaptive systems.  I do not have any sense that there’s a social realization emerging that cloud computing is or should be a public good.  I no longer believe that local communities are going to wake up to the threat that the loss of internal learning capacity represents to their self-organizing autonomy.

GG