This is phenomenally good, as in it articulates the phenomenon that puzzles every person who believes business models and institutionalised process are the only way to make money or to make an impact. A must see.

Here are the bits that made me go yesss!

What has happened, and what is happening in our generation, right, is that we have a set of tools for aggregating things that people care about, in ways that increase the scope and the longevity, in ways that were unpredictable even a decade ago. The coordinating tools we now have, and I am not talking about anything fancy, I am talking about mailing list, usenet, and weblogs, wikis… those tools turn love into a renewable building material.

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…standing from today, looking towards the future, you will make more accurate predictions about software and in these web services, if you ask yourself not what is the business model but rather do the people who like it, take care of each other? That turns out to be a better predictor of longevity.

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Now this doesn’t mean that the market is going to wither away and we are all going to be living in some sort of lovely post-capitalist commune. There is lots of commercial opportunity, there has always been lots of commercial opportunity, there will always be lots of commercial opportunity. It does mean that the ability to aggregate non-financial motivations, to get people together outside of managerial culture and for reasons other than the profit making has received a huge comparative advantage. It also means that many of the future commercial opportunities will be inextricably intertwined with that kind of work and those kind of groups.

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We always loved one another…. but up until recently, the radius or half-life of that affection has been quite limited.  With love alone you can get a birthday party together, with coordinating tools, you can write an operating system. In the past we would do little things for love, but big things required money. Now we can do big things for love.

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