Chapter 60 11.5 Everything in China Unicom

Features of Emerging Network Economy - Executive Outline: In my opinion, several models will prevail in the economy in the near future.Any economic plan needs an executive outline.Of course, it won't be me.Listed below are some of the characteristics that I consider a network economy to have: Distributed Core - The boundaries of companies become blurred.Tasks, even core ones like finance and manufacturing, are subcontracted across the network to contractors who subcontract further.All companies, from one-man to Fortune 500, became societies of work centers with dispersed ownership and geographical location.

Adaptive Technology - If you can't do it in "real time", you're screwed.Bar codes, laser scanners, cell phones, numbers starting with 700, cash registers that upload data directly to satellites, review devices, and delivery vans all control the production of goods.The price of lettuce, like the price of an airline ticket, flickers and changes on LCD screens on grocery store shelves. Flexible Manufacturing - Goods that are needed in smaller quantities can be produced in shorter cycles using smaller machines.Photographs that once took weeks to develop in a handful of centers across the country can now be done on a small machine on any street corner and available instantly.Modular equipment, the disappearance of conventional inventory, and computer-aided design have shortened product development cycles from years to weeks.

Mass customization - all products produced on the assembly line are personalized and customized products.A car adapted to the climate of your region, a video recorder set according to your habits... All products are produced according to individual specific needs, but sold at mass-produced prices. Industrial ecology - closed-loop, waste-free, zero-pollution manufacturing; products that can be disassembled and recycled; gradual transition to biocompatible technologies.There is growing intolerance for violations of biological norms. Global Accounting - Even small companies are global in some sense.Geographically there is no longer an untapped, unknown economic "frontier."And the game has changed from a zero-sum game where "every win means someone loses" to a positive-sum game.Only those players who can call the system a unified whole will be rewarded.Alliances, partnerships, collaborations—even if temporary or even contradictory—became fundamental and normative in the industry.

Co-evolving consumers – companies train and educate consumers, and consumers in turn train and educate companies.In Internet culture, products become improvable franchises that improve and evolve as consumers continue to use them.Consider the example of software upgrades and registrations.Companies become clubs or user groups of co-evolving consumers.A company cannot learn from consumers if it cannot educate and train them. Knowledge-based - Connected data makes all work faster, better and easier.But data is cheap, and it's plentiful, even tiresome, on the web.Your strengths are no longer in how you get things done, but in what you do.Data can't tell you this, but knowledge can.Applying knowledge to data is invaluable.

Free Bandwidth - Access is free, but the choice of access and not access can be very expensive.You can send anything to anyone at any time; but choosing who to send, what to send and when to send it, or to choose what to receive and when becomes a matter of brain.Choosing what not to access becomes key. Increasing returns - who has it, gets it.The giver, the sharer, gets it.Whoever comes first gets it.A network whose value grows faster than its users.In the non-network economy, if a company increases its customers by 10%, its revenue may increase by 10%.But for a networked company, such as a telephone company, a 10% increase in customers can lead to a 20% increase in revenue, because conversations between new and old customers grow exponentially.

Digital Currency - Digital currency for everyday use replaces bundles of paper money.All accounts are updated in real time. The Hidden Economy - The creative frontiers and fringes expand, however, they are now connected in an invisible way into encrypted networks.Distributed cores and electronic money are the forces driving this hidden economy.The negative result: unregulated economic activity sprouts everywhere. In the online economy, consumers will enjoy ever-increasing speed and choice, and at the same time, as consumers, they will also assume more and more responsibilities.And all functions of suppliers will become more and more decentralized, and the symbiotic relationship between them and consumers will become closer and closer.Finding suitable consumers in a disorderly network composed of infinite information has become a new game in the era of network economy.

In this coming age, the core behavior is to connect everything together.Everything, big and small, is plugged into the vast network on multiple levels.Without these vast networks, there would be no life, no intelligence, and no evolution; with these networks, all these things would exist, and more would emerge. My friend Barlow—or at least his disembodied voice—had already connected everything in him.He lives and works in a real network economy.He gave information—for free, of course—while others gave him money.The more he gives, the more he earns.In an e-mail to me, he had this to say about the emerging network:

Computer gizmos are far less technocratic in themselves than they are a sort of half-knowledged vision of alchemy: the wiring of mass consciousness with wires to create a sort of planetary brain.Teilhard had described this idea many years ago, but he too would have been shocked to see how tedious the means we use to realize it are.It seems to me a cozy irony that the ladder to what he calls the "final point" was made by engineers rather than mystics. The boldest scientists, technologists, economists, and philosophers have taken the first step—connecting all things, all events, into one vast, complex network.As this vast network permeates every corner of the man-made world, we get glimpses of things emerging from these networked machines that come to life, become intelligent, and can evolve - we see new biological civilizations .

I have a feeling there will also be a global awareness emerging from online culture.This global consciousness is the unity of the computer and nature—the unity of the telephone, the human brain, and more.It is a thing of immense complexity, formless, held only by its own invisible hand.We humans will have no way of knowing what this global consciousness is thinking.This is not because we are not smart enough, but because consciousness itself does not allow its parts to understand the whole.The unique thoughts of global consciousness - and the actions that follow - will be beyond our control and beyond our comprehension.Therefore, what the network economy will nurture will be a new soul.

A major difficulty in understanding the global consciousness shaped by Internet culture is that it has no central "I" to which we can appeal.There is no headquarters, no head.This is where it gets most irritating and discouraging.In the past, explorers have sought the Holy Grail, the source of the Nile, the kingdom of King John, or the secrets of the pyramids.In the future, people will look for the "I am" of the global consciousness and the source of its inner consistency.Many souls will do everything in their power to find it; and there will be many theories as to where the "I-am" of global consciousness is hiding.But as always, it will be a never-ending quest.