I think you’re overlooking the real drivers behind the Internet and information technology in general: Moore’s Law and the analog exponential laws for storage and bandwidth. Invisible to most casual observers of the Internet, but far more crucial than some crappy software written by MSFT or Open Source coalitions (compare Linux to flavors of unix that have existed for 30 years or more—not a big improvement).

Who is behind the Moore’s Law and associated exponential growth curves? Hard core technologists in physics and electrical engineering, with some basic research funded by government grants (including, uh oh, defense spending), but, crucially, the bulk of it funded by for-profit companies like IBM, Intel, AMD, Applied Materials, Fujitsu, NEC, etc.

Imagine what the Web/Internet would look like today if CPUs and memory had not improved drastically since 1995. (Remember the 486 and megabytes of hard drive space?)

It’s these advances that are largely responsible for the productivity boom, not blogs, wikis or open source projects.

“You get a lot of criticism for preventing unions from organizing your workers. Are these sort of employee-friendly processes ones that you really couldn’t implement with unions?”
“They’d be much more difficult to implement with unions. First of all, it’s a lie that Whole Foods somehow prevents unions from organizing. That’s against the law. We can’t prevent anybody from organizing a union; if our team members want a union, we can’t stop them. Our team members can have unions, but they don’t want unions because they create this adversarial relationship in the workplace. “

I’m also very curious to hear how YouTube and Flickr are non-commercial or content producers.

… says an academic whose business is documents and ideas writing on a blog post.

You really should get out more.

It doesn’t go to your point about whether innovation is driven by the market economy, but saying it’s all about the web is too narrow.

Even staying close to the web, it would not have been possible without semiconductors (Moore’s law keeps on going), fibre optics, hard disks, batteries, display technology, satellites, etc.

But staying close to the web is itself short sighted. I think the waves of the future will be biotechnology, both agriculture and medicine (yeah, just like they said in the 80s) and energy. The foundations for that innovation has been laid in the last 20 years.

Adopting a “hypocritical pose of general concern” is the most natural and common thing civilized people do. There is no need to fake anything, since it is, quite openly, only a pose of general concern.

It’s like when you say “how are you?”, “nice to meet you” (or, for that matter, “g’day, mate”) – that’s often a ‘hypocritical pose of concern’, but there’s absolutely no problem with faking it, it’s expected. And people do think you’re a nicer guy than if you had told them what you really think.

Money can kill innovation.

Of course, money can also spur innovation but it is most definitely a double-edged sword.

You’re suggesting human beings enjoy having a sense of purpose beyond that of an economic cipher? That social Darwinism isn’t the sole driver of national well-being? That utility reaches beyond the utilitarian?
That gaining the world is nor worth one’s, or a culture’s, soul?
How perniciously absurd.

May you live long and thrive creatively.

Optimist.