Institute For The Future

WikiLeaks and the power of the Internet

Mercury News columnist Chris O'Brien published a column this week about the power of the Internet and its potential to erode the power of nations and large corporations. IFTF Research Director, Jake Dunagan is quoted in the article, citing the long-held belief by futurists that "large organizations such as nations or even corporations, which are built on a centralized hierarchy, are helpless to fight flatter, more decentralized organizations designed around networks."

Executive Director Marina Gorbis touched on this idea recently in her blog post "Inventing Social Organizations." Our social technologies have become so advanced that in order to fulfill their promise, we need to design new governance models and ways of creating value. We are already seeing organizations that rely on their networks to provide value, think Wikipedia's crowdsourced encyclopedia, or Creative Commons' open-source sharing of ideas. Several others use alternative financing mechanisms that are in line with their public and commons-like structure. But the majority still operate under the same hierarchical structures of the pre-web days. 

And as networks of anonymous "hacktivists" launch cyberattacks against sites and major organizations like MasterCard, PayPal, and even U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, it's becoming clear that "cyberspace is threatening national sovereignty." 

Jake argues that the impact of the decentralized web could be positive or negative, depending on the response. In this case, transparency appears to be the answer. Says Jake, "It can be positive for democracy where people are more transparent and are held more accountable for their actions."

Transparency isn't the only answer, organizational change will have to come on a transformational scale, something IFTF calls "superstructing." To adapt to this new world, we'll need to create structures that go beyond the basic organizational forms with which we are familiar. We'll need to collaborate at extreme scales, from the micro to the massive. We'll need to learn to work, play, invent, and innovate across boundaries, and not rely on closed, hierarchical models.

Click here to read the full column, "WikiLeaks cyberbattles signal rise of new powers"