Rand Simberg has already covered an Army of Davids here. Consider that some of the last vestiges of the old media that author Glenn Reynolds eulogizes. Simberg got a pre-print, I didn’t. There will soon be scant difference between the press and the public making the question of who to receive a pre-print something to be settled in shades of gray by Slash Dot ratings and auctions. That will make it easier for a media outsider like me to compete on a level playing field with more traditional media that gets their books early.

Reynolds’s book stands at the precipice of the future and treating different subjects seeks to penetrate the “fog of war” obscuring what will happen shortly. In places, Reynolds is foresighted and confident, especially in areas far along the path to individual control. In others, he seems flummoxed to explain what lies right around the corner despite having a well developed theory in another context.

In this extended review, I will take many of Reynolds’s claims and incomplete predictions and fill them out and complete them.

Reynolds starts by explaining that beer was once the province of the individual brewer, became mass produced, became vulnerable to innovation by individual brewers, became mass customized and is now a heck of a lot better for the journey.

Each technology that Reynolds addresses is in some stage of that journey. Journalism was once the province of the town crier and wandering minstrel, became mass produced with the advent of the newspaper, is now vulnerable to innovation by bloggers, podcasters, independent filmmakers (e.g., Fahrenheit 911 and Control Room) and video bloggers. As we all have the resources to produce Max Headroom’s Edison Carter’s investigative video blog with GPS and the Internet for our controller and Amazon tip jars and Google ads for our pay, expect broadcast and print news to get better.

Will countries like China survive the transition? I am perhaps hoping as much as the American News Anchors did when they witnessed the Tiananmen Square people power that democracy and individuality will break out. Had there been satellite video bloggers present in 1989, my opinion is that the ensuing carnage would have brought down the Government. But a fleet Party can try to stay one step ahead of the searing light of Glasnost by turning that light on itself a little bit and cracking down hard well before things get too big to spin. If the US can be pilloried for torturing at Abu Ghraib via a couple of uncomfortable pictures, can Chinese prisons stand up to such scrutiny when it arrives as it must?

On p. 19, Reynolds notes that Davids can’t pursue specialization the same way the gray flannel oldsters can. This is temporary. Bloggers may be temporarily limited to good spellers. It’s only a matter of time before editors and writers team up to do vanity blogs and some of them hit the big time. I grabbed the “EditMyBlog.com” domain a year ago. I just let it lapse so have at it. Teams of like minded part timers have done garage startups for years in Silicon Valley. It is only a matter of time before the virtual corporations of Davids start springing up and putting specialization to work against the Goliaths.

My own company SpaceShot, Inc. has one employee, ten consultants who earned more than $600 last year and another ten who earned less. Our office is in my basement. All of the consultants are part time (and the employee). We have calls on Freeconference.com, we use opensource software, we get cheap leased equipment, have cheap credit pushed at us and generally face a friendly business climate. Why spend hundreds of dollars per employee on an office, a computer, a network and so on when all of that infrastructure is now a standard home and coffeeshop entertainment item? It is high time to construct the virtual corporation where all the mobile workers get paid an extra few hundred bucks a month, but have to find their own office space, network and computer.

Specialization and foreign trade are coming to the lowliest of activities. If you are too busy to play a video game to garner status from fancy virtual body, mind and materiel, you can hire third world clickers to slay the virtual ogres for you and buy their virtual booty on ebay or even do a complete virtual brain transplant to a new virtual body. Who would have thought the main problem with identity crime in video games would be the poor third world would-be hacker giving their buff identity to a rich first worlder for a price?

No, there will be no specialization deficit among the Davids.

Will the Davids yearn for health plans as Reynolds worries on p. 21? No again. As wages rise at a faster and faster rate to keep the poor sods who still are doing work they hate in their corporate jobs, there will become less and less of a need for insurance of any kind. It’s the first $9000 in health care coverage that are expensive. The next couple of million is astonishingly cheap for the typical healthy person. The average household income is already $50,000. As they become richer, they will become more risk accepting of small risks. They will be more easily deterred by the Goliath practices of making filing health claims annoying. They will start opting for health savings accounts. Some will decide the $3000 or less in taxes they save by insuring is not worth the trouble of all the expense accounting, pre-authorizations, and denials. Does anyone opt for the $25 towing coverage any more? That used to be a day’s work 30 or 40 years ago. Now it’s only a couple of hours. If you add in the time to file the silly claim, it’s a very bad bet. Insurance will still get takers, but it will be more like coupon clipping and collecting frequent flier miles than the life or death political struggle of the Clinton years.

The service economy is an opaque riddle to Reynolds. He is not alone. This issue of Foreign Affairs has Alan Blinder going down similar blind alleys (I’ll cover that later). In the 18th century, the rich had cooks, but everyone else had to scrape by and do a rotten, barely specialized job of cooking for themselves. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we went through a series of food innovations leading to faster preparation, better ingredients per unit labor, more specialized capital, Goliath doing mass production and now what? Now even a cook can have a cook. Someone who works at McDonalds can provide meals for thousands of people and pay a very small portion of their pay for food for themselves prepared by someone else. Mass customization is nearly here as big freezers and a massive wealthy class emerges that can afford outsourced home cooked meals. Fast gourmet food is competing with home chef service. As the technology gets better for food preparation, storage, reheating, presentation and so on, fewer and fewer people will need to spend less and less time to feed us better and better. The answer to Reynolds’s riddle on p.27 about where we get the money to pay for all these services is plain once revealed: we serve each other. We cook for each other, give each other massages, paint for each other, write stories (punditry blogs?) for each other, and more.

As colleges go virtual–is UC Berkeley already virtual because of the satellite classrooms–many services become obsolete (newspaper boy springs to mind) and many others move overseas where capital markets, government policy and human capital will make it better to do old things, what will the rest of us do? One thing is for sure. It will pay better (in $ and life quality) than manufacturing or whatever is going virtual or overseas. If it didn’t people would still do it. I once thought society would restratify into superrich demanding traditional services from hordes of servants. Now, I think it will be more like now. Rich, finicky servants will only serve the way they want. When the innovation of the day was artisanship, Bruegel was able to make a mint painting portraits. Did he keep zillions of servants? No, he adorned his house with craftsmanship. Sculpture. Leather walls. Wonderful furniture. Fabulous stone masonry. Nine servants was enough.

We will have to make due with one servant. That’s because we will be hired out to be someone else’s servant on average so we will be served on average no more or less than we serve others. But that service will take many wonderful time shares. A few minutes of someone’s time for medical care. A few minutes for food. A few minutes for someone to keep my house from falling down. Leaving a fabulous surplus for new activities. Read on to find out what they will be.

On p. 69, Reynolds reviews why modern technology is making it hard to surprise us for long. He does not make a key generalization. If cell phones and CNN prevented an attack on the Whitehouse minutes after three similar attacks were perpetrated, then perhaps the most critical failure of US Iraq policy was to postpone putting up cell phone towers in occupied Iraq. Cell phones empower the good guys to call the cops. It is therefore ludicrously self-destructive to turn off the cell phone system in the event of a terrorist attack. Better would be to broadcast emergency pricing on the cell phone system as Vickrey who won the Nobel called for 35 years ago. That way, people who had a juicy story, or a lead on the bad guys could use the system to stop the bad guys cold. There are many more good guys than bad guys. Wikipedia manages to keep the spammers out.

It will be very hard to poison us all at the same time. The ones who drink the water, eat the pills or whatever first will alert the rest of us to the danger (albeit indirectly). There is enough skepticism of technology that there are several competing architectures waiting in the wings to emerge if one falters. Microsoft was reported to be licking its chops over RIM’s doom even as RIM’s shares were trading high enough to reassure everyone that it’s patent woes were exaggerated. It’s a lot harder to roll tanks with satellites.

I’d bet on the good guys developing a cure faster than a disease can spread. The good guys tend to be smarter and have more resources. Once we get the government out of the way of providing vaccines and cures and take our own responsibility (like say buying our own course of Tamiflu), then we will be even more resilient to disasters both natural and manmade. Same with the frankinfears of biotech and nanotech. Expect citizen watch groups to pay more attention to levees.

Computer viruses are just one more service. Anti-virus software is currently mass produced. Less vulnerable operating systems, digital immune systems and such rate to be able to keep up with the viruses, but even if they don’t we rate to be Ok. Computing power is becoming tradable. High computation time jobs can be done by teams of individual computers working together to form supercomputers. These computers can work together voluntarily to search for extraterrestrial life or any of a number of grand challenges or work together involuntarily to conduct denial of service attacks if they have been taken over. Adam Smith’s invisible hand should eventually guide selfish hackers to eventually win out over the malicious hackers. Just as syphilis eventually became less virulent, computer viruses should eventually evolve to parasites that routinely send out new credit card info, harvest spare processing time, and even start to protect against other competing viruses, worms, trojan horses and so on. The virus producers that don’t frag their customer’s hard drive, don’t annoy them enough to reformat the hard drive and don’t take too much out of their wallet are likely to be better capitalized and better able to defend their turf against rivals who are less well capitalized. Put in these terms, the theives who steal computer time, credit card numbers and so on may evolve to provide the same service at a competitive rate with the antivirus companies. The drain from the credit card has to be too small to notice. The computational degradation has to be too small to notice. Evolution and greed should drive bad guys to create a global computing resource and efficient global crime syndicate that will result in the same thing. Awesome immune systems for our computers with a minimal drain on our wallets and attention. I think the bad guys will be outspent by the good guys and the bad guys who are effective will evolve into good guys just as the raiding theives of antiquity were eventually deputized as armies and police.

Military and political power are just two more sets of goods and services that can be easily fit into Reynolds’s framework once stated in that fashion. Governments, armies, R&D, policing and so on used to be a local tribal thing. Then it became mass produced. Now, it is becoming more of the domain of the individual again. Stateless actors such as bin Laden can afford his own private army and weapons R&D. We don’t need a town guard and a big wall any more. People can buy enough fire power to hold off the Federal Government long enough to become martyrs vastly nullifying the police powers and army. The power of the pen can find out what the last of the Soviet troops were going to do against Yeltsin’s people power. Knowing the rules of engagement, the players boldly continued. Power will continue to devolve to the people.

• Information warfare will be joined by bloggers and the vast array of non-state organizations.
• Vigilante hackers will take it on themselves to start their own private wars against the bad guys.
• Jay-Walker-style omnipresent surveillence will make it much harder to sneak around, even if it is only random people viewing random webcasts.
• Private firepower and training will eventually come into their own if government fails them, empowers them or just ignores them.

I must admit it’s a little opaque for me too. But DoD will need to continue to innovate to provide service in the face of private armies and private security forces competing with them. Maybe castling or building private arsenals like in Vinge’s short stories.

On p. 159, what would happen if the laws of economics are repealed and we have plenty of everything? Won’t happen. You broke the speed limit, Mr. Reynolds. I can certainly say that if manufacturing capacity is nearly free, I will buy all of it and produce a generation ship to go to Alpha Centauri. It will always remain expensive enough that we can only afford our fair share on average. But seriously, if people have serious manufacturing capability to rival the Pharoahs, the Carnegies, and governments, what would they make? My guess is Pyramids, libraries and universities, and grand challenges like national health services and space programs.

Microsoft is a good case study. As a group, they have bought hundreds of billions of dollars of palaces. Every Microsoft Millionaire has a house nicer than King Arthur. The locks, the central air and heat and TV alone would be enough. Once everyone has their mcmansion, their Fahrenheit 451 wall screen, their supercomputer, their fancy sports car, vacation house, etc. etc., what are they to do? Gates has founded his own world health organization and is making great strides toward vaccination and malaria research. Allen has founded his own space program. He’s dabbled in direct democracy.

Follow the billionaires’ money to figure out what we will all be doing when we are all billionaires. Dabble in politics like Ross Perot. Topple governments like Rhodes and bin Laden. Space programs like Allen, Bezos and Branson. Vast philanthropy like Carnegie, Soros and others. We will sponsor art, education, research and more. Some of us will be able to control the resources that Queen Isabella did and conquer the Moon, the planets and the asteroids.

Personally, I am trying to start a little of all that well before I get to be a billionaire. I commissioned some art for a few percent of my income. I invested some money in startups. I sponsored a prize. I filed a patent. I hired a band to play my daughter’s school. I commissioned some custom furniture. I hired an errand person. I donated some money to a political campaign. I even started my own micro space program. Inflation and rising wages will raise the average family income to $300,000 in 30 years. The $50,000 a year average household income used to be the prize offered by million dollar sweepstakes. Now we need $10 million or $100 million prizes to attract interest. Millionaire nation.

Reynolds misses that NASA as Goliath is vulnerable to Davids like Musk, Bezos, Bigelow, French and others taking to the Moon and the planets by themselves. Just as Richard Branson could start Virgin records with a song and a prayer and rise to become a major label with little more than the chutzpah that Reynolds is just shy of himself with his home recording, and personal personality cult, Branson has started his own space program and may yet unseat NASA as the biggest space organization on the planet. $50 billion a year in government space research could quickly be eclipsed by a space tourism industry dominated by 2-4 players bigger than NASA if it exceeds 10% of the terrestrial tourism industry.

In the talk of clinical immortality, Reynolds makes two errors. The first is that he assumes we will be impoverished by global crowding. This is false. He should read Julian Simon’s Ultimate Resource 2. The second is that he accept’s deGray’s analysis that kids will become more scarce. Why won’t the trend of starting a new family every thirty years or so keep going? Especially if artificial reproductive techniques such as cloning (or someday artificial sexual reproduction from non-sexual cells) extend reproductive years, then why wouldn’t kids just keep coming? If a frontier opens up on the Moon, the planets, the asteroids and beyond, there will certainly be room for them.

So if it’s possible, I envision an even more empowered set of Davids accomplishing even more even more effectively than Reynolds foresees. Many many services will become cheap enough to produce at home part time, outsource cheaply or obtain local or telepresent help. We will be the service providers. Every service is vulnerable. I think humanity will win the race to survive its homeworld, its sun and even its battle to fly apart fast enough to escape the connectedness that is enabling this (near?) future mass exodus.