Chapter 1

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them"

He had arrived. Heavy men – he could see no women - with voices like foghorns, in serried ranks of striped jackets. Waving, shouting, bellowing with mighty force, arms perpetually raised as if in prayer to the god of money. Hands inward, as though calling the children from the garden – buy. Hands out, as though warding off the devil – sell. The number of fingers signified the last digit of the amount bid or offered. Mine at five ! Yours at two! The waves of buying and selling crossing the market caused a human ripple of activity across the floor. It was simultaneously repulsive and compelling, like watching the agony of some animal, crying in some deep pain known only to God. Or like one of the circles of hell. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.

27 year old Jimmy Wales takes his first job as an ‘upstairs trader’ at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The chaos of the trading floor vividly illustrates to him how order can emerge from a system with no centralised governance or design, as well as suggesting a means for ordinary people to acquire wealth.

Jimbo is deeply impressed by the ideas of economist and philosopher Friedrich August Hayek, the champion of free market thinking and the arch-opponent of the ideas of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Hayek had grown up in the era when communism was still taken seriously by the intellectual establishment, and when the idea of central planning dominated economic and government thinking. Hayek argued that central planning will only work if the planners have all the relevant data. But they don’t have all the relevant data, for there is also a body of very important but unorganized knowledge, of the particular circumstances of time and place, which is only available to those who are there at the right time, and the right place.

Circumstantial knowledge is never given to a single mind to work out the implications. It never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but is dispersed among different individuals, in a disorganised and unsystematic and often contradictory way. Hayek quotes Alfred Whitehead: “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

Jimbo sees this as a blueprint for an online encyclopedia, written by thousands of volunteers, without coordination or planning.

See also

• Wikipedia through the Looking Glass
• Chapter 2