Welcome to the New Medieval Age

In his blog CultureBy, Grant McCracken offers an interesting perspective on the changing of guards in the overlapping worlds of media and commerce, authority shifting away from large institutions and corporations and congregating around smaller networks and individuals (the Tim O’Reillys and other, dare we say, influentials of the world). McCracken compares this power dynamic, though still very much in flux, to a medieval model of government: the large entities act like nation-states that operate “order-in,” with “an embracing idea, and an embracing bureaucratic order” while new media and influencers (and the events they hold, like O’Reilly’s FooCamp) reign as “order-out” city-states, “[existing] in a larger domain that is relatively chaotic.. [creating] order, most intensely within the walls of the city proper, but also in the concentric rings that run out into the ever more lawless countryside. ”

He continues:

… The question is why this order-out model should now be flourishing when indeed we have magnificent post-monastic institutions in place, richly founded, magnificent in their gravitational powers, indubitable in their authority.  In the words of Max Weber, the great scholar of the modern world, “What gives?”

The answer has got to that the knowledge produced by these events [like FooCamp] is newly nimble, spontaneous, improvisational, responsive, in a word, liquid.  Big institutions can’t produce this kind of knowledge because they are predicated on another model of knowledge, one that is, for all the many things it does well, inclined to grind fine and slow, and mostly slow.

In the Foo Camp and its many counterparts, we are looking at an adaptive response to a world that is itself newly nimble, spontaneous, improvisational, responsive, in a word, liquid.  Large institutions are being in the words of Thomas Kuhn, “read out” of the field.  The knowledge required of a liquid world must almost necessarily come from liquid events, the only places, we now suspect, that liquid knowledge and news of the future now consent to gather.

McCracken’s compelling analogy left us wondering though  - if this is the Second Middle Ages, what will our Hundred Years War be? And what then?

CultureBy: Tim O’Reilly: Now Shall I Compare Thee to a City-State