Cognocracy: The thinkers’ revolution is coming!
Posted on January 9th, 2007 by MichaelTwenty-five years ago I coined the term cognocracy to mean ‘a society of individuals who think for themselves’. I did this to anticipate the coming social revolution empowered by technology and individual thinking.
In an interview for Reason Magazine (October 1982) with Patrick Cox I explained what I meant by cognocracy:
“as communications technology improves and people acquire the tools to think for themselves, systems such as democracy, socialism, and communism–where a few do the thinking for the many, who are, if anything, asked simply to vote on other people’s ideas–will be replaced by societies of individuals who think for themselves.”
The advent of the www has made it possible to directly link technology to global brainpower. This is accelerating a move away from the slow and traditional ‘follow-the-leader’ democracies towards fast opt-in/opt-out cognocracies. These cognocracies are open to anyone, anywhere, anytime … 24/7. Early examples of cognocracies in evolution can be seen at Wikipedia, MySpace, Google, eBay, YouTube, Blogger and LimeWire. Watch this space!
January 10th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Indeed, organisational psychology also predicted this over a decade ago: arguing that with the post-technological revolution and globalisation there was a breakdown of traditional structures such as job for life. People would be forced to think for themselves, to be independent - become entreprenurial in managing themselves and their careers if they were to survive and thrive. Of course, that breakdown of structure has occured across all areas of life: marriage, and family breakdowns, global uncertainty…