Does Wikileaks Mean The End Of Big Business And Big Government?

One can hope! Nevertheless, I don't think so. The need for uniformity of service probably means the "Bigs" are here to stay. I find it hard to picture providing services on a large scale in a manner more suited for running a conspiracy. But some disagree:

The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information. It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.

At the most basic level, organizations have two functions: They make stuff (loosely defined) and they coordinate the activities of makers of stuff. The efficiency with which they do these things helps determine the organization’s size. So, for example, IBM can produce its own keyboards, or it can outsource its keyboard-making. Which option it chooses depends on whether IBM can produce keyboards more cheaply than a supplier can; and on whether it’s harder for IBM to coordinate with the supplier—getting the keyboards built correctly and on time—than to sort out those details internally.

...A government agency faces a roughly analogous choice. The State Department, say, can focus entirely on managing relationships with foreign governments. Or it can perform other tasks on top of that, like providing development aid. Because it’s generally easier to work with people who operate from similar assumptions, rely on the same data, and share a common set of goals and values—which is to say, it’s easier to coordinate with co-workers than with outsiders—organizations often perform these functions in-house. Indeed, that’s one reason they’ve historically grown so large. This has even been true over the last generation, when many business gurus predicted that information technology would make outsourcing nearly frictionless.

Now consider what happens when you plug Wikileaks into this equation. All of a sudden, the very same things that made it more efficient to work with your colleagues—the fact that everyone had a detailed understanding of the mission and methodology—become enormous liabilities. In a Wikileaks world, the greater the number of people who intimately understand your organization, the more candidates there are for revealing that information to millions of voyeurs.

Wikileaks is, in effect, a huge tax on internal coordination. And, as any economist will tell you, the way to get less of something is to tax it. As a practical matter, that means the days of bureaucracies in the tens of thousands of employees are probably numbered. In a decade or two, we may not only see USAID spun off from the State Department. We may see dozens of mini-State Departments servicing separate regions of the world. Or hundreds of micro-State Departments—one for every country on the planet. Don’t like the stranglehold that a handful of megabanks have on the financial sector? Don’t worry! Twenty years from now there won’t be such a thing as megabanks, because the cost of employing 100,000 potential leakers will be prohibitive.