Last week Daniel over at Innovation Zen posted about the differences between continental and anglo-saxon capitalism. This brought up an old issue for me about the tension between open and closed systems.

The Financial Times has a great article on this question. If we hadn’t created the internet 15 years ago, would we do it today? “Control and ownership seem intuitively the right way to go,” the article says. “We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production.”

So learning to design for giving up control is sort of like learning to fall–it may be easy to do, but it doesn’t feel right and we’re going to resist it like hell. Its like that scene in the Matrix where Neo learns to break free of his constricted perceptions by trying to leap from building-top to building-top. No one gets it the first time. But we have to get it.