The power of Us

Last Week's Business Week featured a cover article about the new economic order emerging from the power of widespread collaboration and consumer empowerment. We have indeed arrived at Alvin' Toffler's "prosumer" -- the lines between production and consumption have totally blurred.
I finished reading Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind". Finished it more-or-less in one sitting. Well written, and Pink did an admirable job of personalizing the processes he suggests as ways to achieve left/right brain integration. His core tenet -- that the emerging creative society (what I'd call the Design Service Society" in oriented much more around "right brain" traits and activities. It's an interesting thesis, and he runs with it. The book is worth it if only for the Portfolio sections which are full of references. The website contains updated references and info.
What I'm seeing is the emergence into reality of the concepts I thought and wrote about in the first third of the 90's. It's all developing the way I foresaw it. While it's easy to say that a lot of people foresaw the emergence of a collaborative prosumer paradigm, fewer saw the importance of design (Don Norman, Steve Jobs). And their focus on design is a second-order effect -- it was more a capitalization on the value of design, not recognition of the shift toward a societal restructuring around servicing design. Target has nailed it in terms of the impact on the Zeitgeist, although I don't see too many people (beside Pink who does so somewhat more obliquely, as his focus is on the personal ecology of design, and not the societal impact)