Wright applied to the history of civilization the same game theory that Axelrod had used to explain biological and social phenomena, concluding (controversially), that humans throughout history have learned to play progressively more complex non-zero-sum games with the help of technologies like steam engines and algorithms and metatechnologies like money and constitutions.
More than just a technical architecture or an organizational format for knowledge exchange or collaboration, Peer to Peer keeps appearing as a model in many arenas, from technical to cultural, to social and political, and it is ultimately leading to the establishment of a new civilization.
Scientific and technological developments such as the Human Genome Project, GNU/Linux, Global Positioning Satellite data, file-sharing distribution of music and cinema, the cost of drugs for global epidemics such as AIDS, has necessitated new models for paying for public goods, such as compulsory licensing, competitive intermediators, and nonprofit matching funds.
People are subject to self manipulation, which opens the door to being manipulated by others, and therefore people making decisions should always keep in mind of the following:a) be aware that engagement triggers predictable behaviors, b) do not hesitate to re-consider a decision, c) learn to consider each decision individually (and not take into account previous decision), d) do not overestimate your freedom of choice.
The authors propose a market-based methodology, that accounts for public information, for predicting future outcomes using a small number of individuals participating in an imperfect information market and they verify the method demonstrating that predictions outperform the market and the best predictor in the group of participants.
The changing nature of technologies of information and communication has presented a case for reconceptualizing collective action, using the principle of boundary-crossing between private and public domains.
The empirical and theoretical research stimulated by Garrett Hardin's 1968 conclusion that users of a commons are caught in an inevitable process that leads to the destruction of the resources on which they depend indicates that while tragedies of the commons are real, they are not inevitable.
Benkler defines a class of “shareable goods” whose use and distribution is more efficient under regimes that encourage sharing rather than through traditional markets.
Without a concerted effort against it, the trend of privatization and enclosure threatens to sacrifice the environmental, political, cultural, and information commons that communities rely on for their long-term health and prosperity.
Healthy social, technical, biological and professional networks are built on cooperative frameworks that enable them to quickly spread information and phenomena regardless of beneficial or malicious intent; this appears to be a deep structural characteristic of "small-world" or "scale-free" networks that have a relatively small number of hubs that enable extensive interconnectivity across large numbers of nodes.
