Para fechar e para abrir uma ponte

Para fechar a minha leitura de Matt Ridley e de "The Rational Optimist" a transcrição de alguns trechos sobre um futuro em que acredito e que devia influenciar os pais na preparação dos seus filhos para esse futuro. Muita coisa pode mudar, no entanto, quer num cenário futuro idílico quer num cenário futuro Mad Max, algo será constante: não serão necessários executantes que obedecem sem questionar, sem participar, sem fazerem a diferença:

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“we may soon be living in a post-capitalist, post-corporate world, where individuals are free to come together in temporary aggregations to share, collaborate and innovate, where websites enable people to find employers, employees, customers and clients anywhere in the world.
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The world is turning bottom-up again; the top-down years are coming to an end.
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I forecast that the twenty-first century will show a continuing expansion of catallaxy – Hayek’s word for spontaneous order created by exchange and specialization. Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up; work will become more and more specialized, leisure more and more diversified. Large corporations, political parties and government bureaucracies will crumble and fragment as central planning agencies did before them.
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The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers.
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The bottom-up world is to be the great theme of this century.
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Natural and unnatural disasters will still happen. Governments will bail out big corporations and big bureaucracies, hand them special favours such as subsidies or carbon rations and regulate them in such a way as to create barriers to entry, slowing down creative destruction. Chiefs, priests, thieves, financiers, consultants and others will appear on all sides, feeding off the surplus generated by exchange and specialization, diverting the lifeblood of the catallaxy into their own reactionary lives. It happened in the past. Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the price of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers. The online world will attract parasites too: from regulators and cyber-criminals to hackers and plagiarists. Some of them may temporarily throttle their generous hosts.”

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Estes trechos servem também de ponte para uma nova leitura... "Linchpin" de Seth Godin.