Swarm Economy is one of the eight spokes on The Pirate Wheel. It concerns the transformation of our economy from an industrial employment-based economy into a swarm network-based one.

People are no longer in one lifetime employment. Rather, they have several jobs at one time, some paid and some unpaid, and change jobs frequently. Problematically, the unpaid work is not valued as production at all. Society must adapt to this reality, and particularly find ways to enable valuable volunteer work.

The industrial society is dead and it is not coming back. As we went from an agrarian society to an industrial one, roughly half of the people became unnecessary for production. We are at the brink of a similar shift where we will never again see full employment in the industrial model. Therefore, we need to find new models for the economy.

These models are decentralized and value volunteer work. We have observed in the past decades that people do spend a lot of time on production that builds the next generation of industries and productive means, and yet, this has been counted as non-production.

Examples of this include GNU/Linux and Wikipedia, the existence of which can not be explained by the industrial model, much less their superiority over industrial-model products such as Microsoft Windows and Encyclopaedia Britannica. We are seeing a decentralization and voluntarization of production as such, and policymaking needs to account for this.

We are also seeing that most of the innovation takes place in small companies and informal networks.

Therefore, the economy needs to be as decentralized as possible with volunteer work enabled through a guaranteed-sustenance mechanism. The default for an individual must be to be self-employed in a network of multiple agreements, rather than being one of many full-time employees in a corporate structure. There will be no formal limits as to time and place of work, but this will be up to the individual to meet the goals of the rapidly globalizing network.

Updated 2011-Nov-25.