[LINK] Disorganised but effective: how technology lowers transaction costs

[Kim Holburn]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/21/how-technology-lowers-transaction-costs?cat=technology&type=article

> Disorganised but effective: how technology lowers transaction costs
> 
> The most profound social revolutions in human history have arisen whenever a technology comes along that lowers transaction costs for everyone

> Since our primate ancestors began to band together to collectively share hunting, child care and sentry duties, every one of us has been subjected to an invisible, crushing tax. That tax is what economists call "transaction costs" and it is the friction that arises when two or more people set out to do something together.
> 
> It was once the amount of time our monkey forebears spent checking in on their "friends" to make sure that the one who was up the tree "watching for predators" wasn't actually taking a nap.
> 
> Today, it is the hours spent in meetings, filling in forms, synchronising our diaries, issuing memos, reading memos, standing in queues, agreeing on the procedure for redress arising from misunderstanding, implementing that procedure, auditing the implementation, arguing about the audit – the endless litany of stuff that isn't getting stuff done, but is the stuff you do so that you can get stuff done.
> 
> You might ask why we even bother? It's all such a crushing bore, half-Kafka and half-Solzhenitsyn. The short answer is that doing stuff together makes us super-human. Literally.
> 
> The things that one person can do define what is "human". The things that transcend the limits of an individual – building a skyscraper, governing a nation, laying a telecommunications network, writing an operating system – are the realm of the super-human.
> 
> The most profound social revolutions in human history have arisen whenever a technology comes along that lowers transaction costs. Technologies that makes it cheaper to work together lower the tax on super-human powers.


-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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