I first came across Machiavellian Intelligence and Chimpanzees over morning coffee in the staff common room of the St Andrews University School of Psychology. I should quickly clarify that there were no chimps present, the academic politics at St Andrews was no more vicious than at any other University and no animals have been injured by Web 2.0 or any of the work cited. The explanation lies in the then frequent presence of Dick Byrne, an eminent primatologist. As I have no relationship with Amazon, I am merely using this book link as a reference resource. Readers can be assured that my motivation is purely altruistic - or can they? The problem is that behaviour is not always easy to explain. Why do Chimpazees sometimes hand out food to strangers?

You might now be starting to see a basis for the impending polemic “mashup” of my earlier post on openness, Lawrence Lessig’s Economies of Culture and Jon Udell’s Library Lookup Project. First, back to Machiavellian Intelligence which departs from the conventional view of evolutionary psychology. While the later explains development of human intellect in terms of tool use and the requirement to improve cooperation through communication, Machiavellian Intelligence suggests that the driving force was social expertise - in essence the subtle manipulation of others. This might not be too appealing to the ideologically driven, but whatever the motivation of the providential hand, the banana is probably still worth having.

I provided the Amazon link to Dick Byrne’s book because the synopsis provides better information on Machiavellian Intelligence than the Wikipedia entry. In doing so I’ve effectively reused the Amazon’s site for a purpose other than that for which it was intended: to sell books. Actually, many potential buyers will have choked on the price and made for the library. Now check this out for serious reuse of Amazon: Jon Udell’s Library lookup Service allows you to browse Amazon’s catalogue and search a library for availability. So why is Jeff Bezos talking at the Web 2.0 Conference and not hunting down Jon with an army Armani clad lawyers (Jeff was apparently cool with it)? Well, if my earlier post gave the impression that Web 2.0 is all about the small guy, it was misleading: it’s a broad partnership. Amazon is a serious player in the new Internet. Jeff has done books and he’s moving on, bringing some good old fashioned economics to the emerging business party. Amazon has created massive economies of scale and taken huge chunks of cost out of the supply chain. Basically Amazon knows how to take orders, deliver stuff and run data centres. The next step is to extract more value from its investment by opening up the infrastructure nurturing a developer ecosystem. It’s a compelling proposition: Amazon have effectively demolished barriers to entry for new entrants who no longer have to worry about many operational details.

Now for the Economies of Culture. Lessig observed the presence of at least one parallel economy alongside the purely commercial transaction based variety (based on not for profit, sharing, P2P etc). He goes on to discuss the problems in developing a hybrid, though from the particular perspective of the Creative Commons Licences (CCL). There are indeed specific long term issues related content adaption that need to be addressed, but they only pertain to a subset of user generated content: that which is derivative. Economic Psychology might be a more immediate concern. There is experimental evidence to suggest that most people would rather have no deal than make a small gain with the consequence of a fat cat banquet.

The conclusion I want to draw from this post is that Web 2.0 should be an inclusive enterprise involving disparate players who have a range of sometimes unfathomable objectives. Success will stem from gradual coalescence rather than the assembly of a complete jigsaw.