A Crabby Preface

There’s a story about crab fishermen who wanted to improve their yield. The crabs they were after are more valuable if they are fresh. The fishermen would place traps in the ocean and when they came to collect the crabs, they could not collect the crabs from all the traps because the crabs from the first traps would not be fresh by the time they made it back.
So they came up with a simple and cool idea. They would tie the crabs from each trap to one another, forming a circle of crabs. They would leave them in the water and move on to the next trap. When they were done and ready to go back to shore, they would sail back picking up the circles of crabs, that waited for them in the water.
How is it that the crabs stayed put? Well, they did their best to escape. All the crabs would do their best to swim away from the rope. Since all crabs were about the same size and all were pushing outward, their efforts canceled each other out and the entire circle didn’t move.
This is the story, definition and value of collaboration - combining, sharing or aligning efforts, resources and actions towards a shared purpose or a more efficient result in a way that is beneficial to all participating parties. Collaboration is a mutual exchange - a transaction.
Collaboration is good because it allows us to do things we would not be able to do alone, or it allows us to do them faster and with less effort.

The age of collaboration

Reality is a Form of Transactional Collaboration

Collaboration is responsible for everything we see in our world.
For collaboration to happen we need to be able to transact.

Physics is collaboration - the application of forces on and between different things and the transaction of energy and forces.
Chemistry is collaboration - the interactions between different chemicals - one losing an electron, one donating a proton - all chemical reactions are transactional.

Life as we know it, and especially life after the development of sexual reproduction is based on collaboration. At first living organisms multiplied by different forms of cloning. They collaborated with their environment - with the chemicals around them - but they did not need another living thing to reproduce.
Sexual reproduction was a game changer. It exponentially increased variance. Two living things shared their DNA to form a new living thing that was a combination of both their DNAs. We can easily see this as a transaction between two parties that combine their resources in order to create something new, something they could not accomplish on their own and something that through an evolutionary prism, was highly beneficial.
Since we can view sexual reproduction as a transaction of information - we can think of it as a form of communication.

Insects are very good at that. Chemically orchestrated collaboration dictatorships.

From shouting distances to instantaneous hyper-connectivity

All forms of lingual communication (gestural, vocal or written) are transactions of information.
Language allowed us to develop new forms of collaboration.
“You pull, I push!”
Still, for a long time, there was a limit on the ability of humans to maximize their collaborative potential. The first limits were the visible and audial limits. We used fires on top of mountains, or smoke signs to share rudimentary pieces of information over large distances. However, efficient communication was limited to short distances - shouting distances.
That changed a few times in history.
The first time it changed was with the invention of written language around 5000 years ago (although there are indications that some basic forms of written language existed long before - certain signs in caves that date tens of thousands of years, were found in different sites over thousands of kilometers and years apart). Written language meant we could share information without needing to physically be there.
Still keeping records on paper or clay or stone - was prohibitively expensive. At least until ~1439.

There is a sharp incline of literacy in the world that follows the dissemination of mass printing capabilities. The 15th century marked a point in history where a larger percent of humans could apply their resources (e.g., cognitive) on existing challenges and collaborate more efficiently beyond shouting distances.

The next giant leap came with the invention of the telegraph. The Telegraph is the “Australopithecus” of the current state of information and communication technologies (ICT). It allowed us to share and transact with information over huge distances, instantly.

The final leap is the industrial digitalization. Here’s the thing, communication as a form of transaction that stems from and at the same time fosters collaboration is great but if what you want to do is build a house - sharing information fast over continents will not replace the fact that you need bricks to be laid next to each other. This changed and is changing today. The development of ICT is transforming industries - making them information enabled. 3D printed homes already allow a team of architects, designers, and builders to collaborate, without ever meeting and physically construct a new building. That is just one example.
We have reached an age in which physical and informational collaboration and transactions are converging.

END OF PART ONE

I am out of time - will complete this later.

Shahar