Charles Leadbeater

Charles Leadbeater, the acclaimed innovator and new media analyst, predicts a transformed landscape: a new ‘networked’ capitalism in which the state plays a part but cannot pick winners — a system that is chastened, subdued and fraught with social danger We should be searching for a new kind of capitalism, and not just according to the far Left. That is the message from Washington dinner parties and in the pages of the Financial Times. For most people the next year will not feel like a search for a brave new economic model: it will be more like hand-to-hand combat to keep hold of what you have. Yet the world is being turned upside down not by wild-eyed revolutionaries but sober central bankers and civil servants.

Archiving is not regarded by most people as sexy, glamorous or even interesting. Odd then that most of us, and especially the young, hip and trendy, seem to have become avid archivists without even realising it. My archive, which I keep on the web, and in my computer, mobile phone and iPod, is neither particularly extensive nor interesting: several thousand digital photographs, play-lists of songs, endless dull policy reports, papers and presentations, some internet postings, Facebook friends and connections. Teenagers, however, are archiving their lives as they happen through blog entries and photos taken on camera phones, much of which they organise collaboratively, in semi-public, on the web. We have become a society of mass archiving.