(Hey, everyone else seems to have written one; why buck the trend?)
I'm not the first to observe that there are really two books inside the covers of Army of Davids, each occupying about half the page count. In the first, Reynolds speaks of what he knows first hand: citizens' media, the forces that have created them, and much of the social impact. As living proof that you don't have to build a portal to wield influence in the Web, Reynolds brings the credibility that he can surf that particular set of waves. In the second half of the book, he opines on matters such as space, nanotechnology, and biotech, where he has no direct experience. Reynolds is not a technologist or businessman, and it shows.
The good news is that the quality and credibility of the first half make the buy worthwhile. Many of his themes, such as virtualized companies, mobile offices, and peer production, have been sounded in the futurist and organizational literatures and by consultants for some time. Reynolds will reach a wider audience, and here's where his credibility as living existence proof rings true.
I'm particularly pleased to see Reynolds' strong mention of what he calls 'horizontal knowledge': "...communication among individuals, who may or may not know each other, but who are loosely coordinated by their involvement with something, or someone, of mutual interest.". At lot of us call this "community", and the object of common exertion a "commons". It's a use of blogging and other citizens' media that is often shorted by those looking at them primarily as a competitor to the mainstream media. In the worst case, that 'analysis' is simply a dish on the minimally interesting adolescent ruminations to be found on mySpace or LiveJournal, vastly outnumbering the Instapundits of the blogosphere. But that's a bit wide of the point, isn't it? These horizontal communities are about a circle of friends, not designed for gawkers from the outside. And not only are they enabling new types of social grouping around the world, they still absorb time and attention from the MSM. It's to Reynolds' credit that he understands and articulates this, from his own position near the top of the Long Tail curve of attention.
I did miss seeing one set of implications that Reynolds seems uniquely qualified to propose. What about the law, and the school, and the professor? The blogosphere has opened up legal and policy debate to public view, and ripped the covers off an ingrown academy. What's going on with the students - how is this altering the ways of learning and teaching? Are the ways we make and practice the law changing? Where are the legal Davids among us?
In the futuristic speculations of his second half, I suspect that Reynolds is closest in his hopes for biotech driven longevity. Not that I have any particular expertise there either, but many driving forces are obviously in place - initial technology and benefits, funding, plenty of motivation, the scale inherent in a whole world of genetic material to reverse engineer, and the processor power to brute-force many of the tasks. Let's just hope that malicious use of the results doesn't kill us all before we get to the promised land. That's one reason I also hope Reynolds is right about civilian access to space, which I've blogged before. However, we need to realize that due to NASA's ill-directed efforts, we're dealing with a manned space flight learning curve that's been reset back to the 70's, at best, and temper our hopes accordingly.
It's in nanotech that Reynolds is on his weakest ground, having swallowed most of the nanomechanical rhetoric whole, both here and in his blogging. Color me skeptical. Reynolds is missing a lesson that he articulates on his home ground:
"This really isn't a question if big versus small; the key is to have both working together. It's easier to be small because outfits like eBay are big..."
eBay can be as big as it is because the silicon business and the capital it commands are enormous. The semiconductor industry forms a platform on which all of Reynolds' media and cultural visions are erected.
In contrast, the nanotech market today is a conflation of various materials advances that happen to fit into a particular physical scale. As a concept, it's more useful for selling conference tickets and getting grants that as a means for analysis. An investor (and futurist) looking at any particular project needs to work it through from the application markets to the sustainability of advances in the materials. No wonder the urge for a consolidation onto a single platform at nano scale.
It's easy to look at that, and have glittering visions of a future in which nanomech has the same scale and implications as silicon. But the semiconductor business didn't look this way at the start, and the differences with nanomech today are instructive. Here's a useful review of how the first viable integrated circuits emerged from planar silicon transistor technology. Silicon, transistors, and planar fabrication were already valuable and making money, and each incremental step along what became Moore's Law yielded value and further investment in turn. The results soon kicked other materials and fabrication approaches to the curb.
But the nanomech approach championed by Reynolds seems an unlikely pick to follow the same path. Unlike the first ICs, there is no immediate benefit gained by the first steps onto the learning curve. The basic science - let alone the fabrication technologies - enroute to useful nanomech products is an unknown and arduous road without great interim utility.
More likely, any nanotech platform will evolve out of the world's enormous expertise in two elements: Si and C. The surest way to make a buck in nanotech is to come up with an innovation that is synergistic with the existing semiconductor industry. Incremental benefit, backed with the scale of the silicon industry, will beat the leap into the dark. And if Reynolds and I are each anywhere near correct about the biotech future, the reverse engineering of the collective genome will yield a materials toolkit that will be applied to many other uses, after we've turned it on ourselves.
None of this invalidates Reynolds' overall message of the increasing power coming into the hands of individuals and small groups. If anything, it reinforces it, by removing one of those proverbial PERT chart boxes labeled: A Miracle Occurs.
There's maybe this much point in having these two halves within one cover: Reynold's army of new media Davids is being deployed worldwide, with the potential to work past both legacy media and traditional governments. What is said and done by them will help determine the outcome of his next wave of enabling technologies: an optimistic Singularity, or a failure to answer Wretchard's grim questions.