Dear Warwick exec MBA people,

I tried to address a number of issues in my presentation, perhaps too many, but there was a common theme. That theme was to do with trust, cooperation and the limitations of over centralised institutions and control systems (be they computer systems, banks, corporations or governments).

I talked a bit about cooperation theory from Axelrod and recommend his book "the evolution of cooperation" to anyone interested in this kind of work (computer simulations and their implications for new ways of understanding human institutions and social behaviour). There is a chapter in the book relating what was found out from the computer simulations to the real world (behaviour in institutions, wars and other situations). You kind find some details here (but you need to buy the book):

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

I talked a little about BitTorrent a P2P file sharing system that dominates the internet (in bandwidth) but has no central servers and hence is hard to shutdown (hence Piratebay legal tussles but the files are still being shared). See:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)

Note that the British government now use BitTorrent to distribute large data files to citizens:

   http://data.gov.uk/dataset/coins

I talked a bit about decentralising the banks in a P2P way and present a couple of P2P attempts at money and credit creation:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_monetary_system

You can find the videos I showed by searching on Youtube.

I showed a funny video called "ultrahedge" making fun of hedge fund economic models. You can find that video here:

   http://www.zyen.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=618

One of the producers of this was Michael Mainelli who is involved in the Long Finance Initiative and gave an excellent series of open lectures at Gresham College, London, on economics (they are available somewhere on the Gresham College website). See:

   http://www.longfinance.net/
   http://www.gresham.ac.uk/

I believe I mentioned Elinor Ostroms work on governing the commons (i.e. how human groups organically find ways to stop cheating and anti-social behaviour in distributed ways without central controls from government). See:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

She proposes a number of "design principles" for cooperative human institutions derived from extensive field work.

I had a few discussions on the day after the talk with various people and I forget everything that was discussed. However I think I talked about Benkler's book "Wealth of Networks" - which you can download free under Creative Commons licence. See:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks

I also am sure I mentioned Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) to someone. This pushes decentralisation into military affairs:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_generation_warfare

Here's a link to kind of "magazine" article I wrote you might find interesting (it's quite short):

   http://www.perada-magazine.eu/view.php?source=003444-2010-12-06

I think I put up this page about Fred Wilson saying social upheaval was the next internet opportunity:

   http://gigaom.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-the-next-internet-opportunity-is-in-social-upheaval/

Here is a recent (18/6/2011) radio4 podcast (Peter Day's world of business) with Gary Hamel (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Hamel) that touches on how centralisation of power has been a problem for capitalism recently:

   http://www.davidhales.com/gary-hamel.mp3

I am sure I have missed things I said I would send but please to ask me directly if you have any questions, suggestions or general impressions of this whole line of thinking (negative evaluations are very much appreciated and I am happy to have a debate).

e-mail: dave@davidhales.com
web: www.davidhales.com
stream: tv.davidhales.com (this is experimental, I am putting up interesting videos, lectures and other things that stream 24hrs a day, sometimes there may be live streams)