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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

"what is driving people into the service of others is a combination of ..."

Capital has historically been a big factor in that equation as well. A factory worker couldn't very well take his machine around to different factories, whereas a mechanic probably has his own set of tools. Those of us in the computer field are fortunate that, at this point in time, capital requirements are very, very low. In other fields, though, large amounts of money are needed to be able to get off the ground. Who knows what the future will bring... less capital needs or more?

Incidentally, as much as I would have liked to see it, I couldn't take watching a bouncy image of some guy's ear next to a tiny Paul Graham. It would be great if they provided video of the whole thing for those of us not able to be there.

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True, I forgot about that. I'm assuming you're familiar with Toffler and Drucker, but recently Yochai Benkler has added a lot to this theory. In the intro to The Wealth of Networks, he says that the declining cost of capital has three effects:

1) People can do more by themselves.

2) People can do more in loose association with others.

3) People can do more in informal organizations that operate outside the market sphere.

The idea being that if you get 100m in investment to start a steel mill, you need to earn 100m back just to break even so you need these very rigid systems in place to maximize profit. However, when you're business only costs 10,000 to start you can harness the power of informal systems and volunteers and crowd wisdom, etc. The perfect example of this would be Wikipedia. Because it costs so little to run, it can be run by informally organized volunteers and is free to operate as a non-profit.

Anyway it's definitely not a beach read, but it's one of those books where if you take a year or two to fully grok the ideas within then you'll be in a stronger position to MSPW.

There is definitely video of all of the speeches. As a matter of fact, there are videos of _everything_, including random lunch conversations, given that justin.tv was there. This video was taken on my digital camera, hence the crappy quality. The useful part is the audio.

justin.tv's audio was pretty useless...

I do wish that the organizers had an 'official' video guy, with a tap into the house audio system, and uploaded the videos afterwards. maybe next year?

Wasn't there someone in the back with a professional looking camera?

Hey Larry. Thanks for posting this. I could hear everything Paul said and that is good enough for me.

Do you have videos from any of the other lectures? If you do please post them, I am sure I (and everyone else who wasn't there) would be very appreciative

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