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Ideas Want to Get Freaky Together: Video

The habit of exchange - of sharing things, of collaborating - is crucial to human progress. Yes, it's also the backbone of our distressed market capitalist economy. But without exchanging goods, services and ideas, we won't be able to pull out of our...

The habit of exchange – of sharing things, of collaborating – is crucial to human progress. Yes, it’s also the backbone of our distressed market capitalist economy. But without exchanging goods, services and ideas, we won’t be able to pull out of our current crisis. And zoologist and writer Matt Ridley argues that we certainly will emerge stronger, because we’re so good at getting our ideas into bed with each other.

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"Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution," Ridley writes in his new book The Rational Optimist, and "the more human beings diversified as consumers and specialized as producers, and the more they then exchanged, the better off they have been, are and will be. And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process. The more people are drawn into the global division of labour, the more people can specialize and exchange, the wealthier we will all be."

Clay Shirky argues this in his book Cognitive Surplus, and urges that we embrace the Internet, not to fulfill our carnal desires but to let us collaborate better. To wit: When we interviewed transhumanist proponent Jason Silva recently, he suggested that Motherboard was a fine place for ideas to get freaky with each other.

But should we valorize unbridled ideasex (I think it sounds better as one word, even though this is hardly a new idea), which fits into Ridley’s praise of free markets, at the expense of regulation, or at the expense of individual knowledge? Should ideasex be, well, unprotected? The Renaissance Man may have given way to the Collective Brain, but is that really a good thing? “We all know little bits but none of us knows the whole,” says Ridley. “We’ve created the ability to do things that we don’t really understand.”

Ridley apparently, inadvertently, has already demonstrated the dangers of this problem. As George Monbiot recently pointed out in the Guardian, Ridley, as chairman of bailed-out UK bank Northern Rock, helped form what Parliament called a “high-risk, reckless business strategy.” And his book is riddled with cherry-picked ideas, especially about the environment, that come across as just plain wrong. Few reviews seemed to note these things, wrote Monbiot, because “Ridley is telling people – especially rich, powerful people – what they want to hear.”

Ideasex is nice and all, but what about love, or even better, deep respect? That’s an idea you can get freaky with.