There's a lot of discussion among anarchist circles about technology, if it's good, if it's bad, if it's neither, if it's both, if it's going to eat you, if it's going to bake you a cake. I just wanted to toss out this quote discussing open source technology and the fairly profound implications embedded in it.
"One important direction in which the open source experiment points is toward moving beyond the discussion of transaction as a key determinant of institutional design. . . . The elegant analytics of transaction cost economics do very interesting work in explaining how divisions of labor evolve through outsourcing of particular functions (the decision to buy rather than make something). But the open source process adds another element. The notion of open-sourcing as a strategic organizational decision can be seen as an efficiency choice around distributed innovation, just as outsourcing was an efficiency choice around transactions costs. . . . As information about
what users want and need to do becomes more fine-grained, more individually differentiated, and harder to communicate, the incentives grow to shift the locus of innovation closer to them by empowering them with freely modifiable tools."
From Weber, The Success of Open Source