Markets and Antimarkets

Abe Burmeister, on the Emergent democracy list, points to an interesting 1996 essay by Manuel DeLanda
called Markets and Antimarkets in the World Economy.
It reminds me a bit of my father's 1985 Two Kinds of Order paper.

Delanda talks of how bottom-up emergent meshwork markets compete with top-down hierarchic anti-markets, discusses historic exmples, and ends on this note:
Computers, in the form of embedded intelligence in the buildings that house small firms, can aid this catalytic process, allowing the firm's members to reach some measure of self-organization. Although these efforts are in their infancy, they may one day play a crucial role in adding some heterogeneity to a world-economy that's becoming increasingly homogenized.

As David Weinberger succinctly put it -'Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy'