The Global Silk Road: Globalization, Islam and the Creation and Distribution of Knowledge Using the Internet Book

This book develops an explanation of the social evolutionary processes generating human welfare on this planet. Increasingly land, labor and capital is being displaced by globally connected knowledge and understanding as the main productive resource driving growth. The co-ordination required for this is global and self-organizing. It uses the Internet. This interpenetrates geo-political boundaries. Thus states are becoming irrelevant for wealth creation, social control or protection. The result is the emergence of a planet wide thought creation and distribution process with many features similar to those of the human brain. This heralds a new era. Mankind can engage consciously in the evolution of this planetary brain. Each human is a neuron within it. The Internet's communication and computational technology provides connectivity. Inter connected human groups create this brains thought patterns and memories. The processes involved are controlled by the interaction between creative individualistic forces and stabilizing communal forces. The first are epitomized by a society like the USA where individuality is supreme and the second by a country like China where communality is all. Communality stimulates productivity but stifles creativity. The latter often leads to migration in search of freedom in social melting pots like the US. Modern global connectivity encourages physical production to move to communally based societies and value adding creativity to libertarian ones. The result is that the Internet now connects North East Asia with the West much as the Silk Road did in ancient times. In creating knowledge costs are mainly fixed. They are those of initial creation not production. Unit costs fall the more one sells. DVDs, microchips etc can thus have very low prices. If distributed by the Internet these can be even lower. Selling globally to 6000billion at 10cents with costs at 3 is better than high prices in a local market. This encourages the global connectivity needed for the emerging global brain's maturation.Read More