Just some random thoughts, as I’m returning from a lecturing trip in Europe, which I combined with reading a remarkable book by Lawrence Taub, The Spiritual Imperative, Sex, Caste and the Last Age. Some other things that prompted my thoughts below, was an incredible lecture by Menno Van Doorn (Sogeti) on the rapid growth of crowdsourcing, reading an article in Business Week on the open source car project, and recent coverage of the explosion of the Asian blogosphere.

Taub has written the type of book you may find many details wrong with, but which overall, sets you thinking, and its immense value lies in generating so many questions. In short, as we will return on this book as Book of the Week later, he argues that rather than see the world as an evolution of class, we should look at it as an evolution of caste, with caste referring to deep seated preferences for a particular way of doing things and of conceiving the world. In short, he claims, as the Hindus would agree, we moved from the prevalence of the spiritual caste, to an evolution towards the subsequent dominance of warriors, merchants, and workers (the bureaucratic-technocratic structures of today), with a coming return of the spiritually-inclined.

An interesting points he makes is the following. In any transition, three phases can be recognized: 1) the pioneering phase which takes place in the dominant countries of the old sphere (example: emergent of merchants in feudal/imperial Spain and Portugal); 2) a revolutionary/evolutionary phase: the revolution takes place at the periphery (i.e. the merchants take power in Holland and England), while in the former dominant countries, an evolutionary caste merger takes place. But the countries where the revolution takes place, become the new dominant power centers. Example: the workers revolution’s took place at the periphery in Russia and China, but in the West,the elite of the worker’s caste merged with the merchant class to form social-welfare with technocratic capitalism.

Now to my own point. Think of the new OSCAR open source solar car project. Who in the West would be interested? It seems unlikely as workers would take a pay cut, and capital would be weary of operating without the IP projection that guarantees state-protected extra profits. But what of the Asian capital owners, who are in any case already illegaly copying many IP-protected designs. Why would they not be interested in taking up such copyright free designs? I see such an evolution as a distinct possibility.

A recent study of the Asian blogosphere pinpoints another important trend. It shows the enormous growth of blogs, but also that they are taken up by youth and women, and disdained by the older masculine elites which are still so dominant in the more authoritarian post-feudal cultures of Asia. The youth, already educated in the new ways, with access to the internet, are using blogs for expression and to bypass social limits, creating a new culture that is in headlong conflict with the older culture. Such an evolution could be a seed for a generation gap, and resulting social revolution, a kind of Asian 1960’s, that would enormously speed-up the uptake of the open/free, participatory and commons-oriented paradigms. Following Taub though, we should acknowledge that China for example, as an expression of the worker caste dominance, would be unlikely places for such radical change, and that we should look more to the Asian periphery, see Iran, or Malaysia?

What the future will bring is unknown, but I think it is important to open our minds to the possibilities that the major P2P evolutions, after the pioneering phase in the West and East Asia, may in fact emerge in full force elsewhere.