Now, strangely enough, "the Simplification" is exactly what I see coming since our current complexity and conflict is already commencing to bring our financial systems down around our ears.

This Simplification will be a consequence of the widespread adoption - because they WORK - of collaborative business models, and of disintermediated "peer to peer" enterprise models where participants have an interest in the outcome.

My interest lies in the "legal protocols" that bind us together in our economic relationships. The current "one way" protocols - "contrats de mandat" - are detailed and prescriptive because they deal with conflicted - intermediated - economic relationships.

It is these conflicted and complex protocols which have been holding us back. We have been unable to see any alternatives.

The consensual protocols ("contrats de societe") I observe emerging, and am working to develop, are in my experience an order of magnitude simpler. This explains why the majority of lawyers ("programmers" really - "Law is Code") see such collaborative law as a threat to what is to all intents and purposes a combination of monopoly and religion.

Likewise the legions of other professionals paid by the hour, rather than the outcome, whose business is based - like other religions before them - upon complexity, arcane language, and opacity.

An illustration of the advantages of simplicity in law is its status in a naturally collaborative and consensual society like Japan. To go to law in Japan is to lose face.As someone said, there are as many Sumo wrestlers in the US as there are lawyers in Japan. You say in a 3 page agreement in Japan what your US attorney says in 300.

The point I am getting to is that simple consensual "legal" protocols will IMHO be the next iteration of the Internet - the "Semantic Web" so much talked about.

We will see the end of double entry book-keeping; the end of "profit" and "loss" - because there is no "profit" within a partnership, merely value created, exchanged and shared; the end of hierarchy; the "Abolition of Labour" and the "Abolition of Property" Marx wrote about in his early days, only to get cold feet subsequently in the face of machines.

We will examine the ancient knowledge - what is still out there - establish why it works, and update it simply, and sustainably.

We will simplify, because it will be in our self interest to do so when collaborative solutions give rise to a better outcome in which we share.

And in doing so, I believe, we will find that "Ethical is Optimal" and will achieve the spiritual peace of mind our current "civilisation" denies us.

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson