Toward A Literacy of Cooperation

Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, will be giving a talk called Toward a Literacy of Cooperation in Palo Alto the evening of Thursday, March 17th. [via Renee Blodgett].

I hope to be able to be there.

I've long been interested in spontaneous order theory and have read many books by Friedrich Hayek. The Evolution of Cooperation is another interesting book on this subject. These themes continue to repeat themselves in various human endeavors. Eric Raymond's essay/book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, illustrates how evolutionary cooperation underlies the Open Source software movement.

Renee mentions Charles Darwin in her blog entry, and I commented that Darwin read an intellectual biography of Adam Smith after his return from the Galapagos islands (but I wasn't able to use hyperlinks on her blog.) Hayek was influenced by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment who were perhaps 250 years ahead of their time.

The Internet is fertile ground for spontaneous order and things like Wikipedia, blogs, and open source software have surprised almost everyone with how they can bring order out of seeming chaos.