June 17, 2003. On an otherwise quiet evening, in an otherwise quiet section of the world's largest department store, some 200 people simultaneously appear. 24 hours earlier they each received an e-mail, generated by someone named Bill, with instructions on how to form an "inexplicable mob".

The e-mail was terse, requiring its recipients to synchronise their watches, show up at a predetermined meeting point, and follow one of the team leaders (who could only be identified by a trucker hat he or she would be wearing). From the meeting points, the group receives instructions to make its way to the Fancy Rug department of Macy's. "If you are approached by a salesperson," the e-mail noted, "explain that everyone present lives together, in a huge converted warehouse in Long Island City, and that you are there looking for a 'Love Rug'. Explain that you make all purchases as a group."

The group, closely followed by NYPD officers who were tipped off about the gathering beforehand, made its way towards a huge Pakistani rug and spent exactly seven minutes debating whether they should each pitch in fifty dollars to buy the $10,000 ornament. They voted against the purchase and then quietly went back home.

Given the fact that the whole thing was a joke, you could label this as a childish hoax or some capricious Big Apple behaviour, and you'd probably be right. But that would be missing the point. The point is that for the past few years something is happening around us that is making a significant impact on the way we work, live and play.

Consider the following, seemingly unrelated factoids:

- January 2001: Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos take to the streets for demonstrations that end up toppling president Joseph Estrada. SMS messages serve as the main tool for coordinating these protests.

- November 2002: Gillette announces it will purchase half a billion Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. The wireless tags would hold digital information about the products they would be attached to, transmitting this information to computers that would monitor the whereabouts of shaving gel, batteries and so on.

- May 2003: In May alone, UK mobile phone users send 1.7 billion text messages (SMS) to each other. Over 60% of the local population now sends text messages. In 1998 this figure was 0.1%.

"The pieces of the puzzle are all around us now, but haven't joined together yet," notes Howard Rheingold, founder of The Well, one of the first and most important online communities. Last year Rheingold wrote an important book dedicated to phenomenon such as the Macy's mob in New York.

"Smart Mobs", explains Rheingold "emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive."

"The pieces of the puzzle are all around us now, but haven't joined together yet"

But if the pieces of the puzzle are in front of us, what does the completed picture look like?

Think of this puzzle as a web of connections. Connections between people, devices, organisations, governments and so on. The power struggle I'm talking about is between those that favour an open network, allowing as many links to be formed, and those that favour a closed one, where only a limited, predetermined set of connections are allowed.

The Macy's mob is important not because it's a cute anecdote of how weird New Yorker's can be. It's important because it underscores the power struggle between organising ourselves as we see fit, and between being told how to be organised by someone else.

So why should you care?

According to Rheingold, "Media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume".

Take the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for example. Though Napster, the first music-sharing program, could have been the best thing to have happened to the music industry since the Beatles, the RIAA closed it down. Instead of changing the way it does business to mirror technological innovations and changes in consumer demand, the industry spent the last four years trying to resist change. It took an innovative computer company (Apple) to come up with a business model that not only makes money from selling music online, but actually takes into consideration how people want to buy music. In the process, Apple re-invented itself to become an entertainment company.

But don't be fooled. This is not about technology. It's about how we interact with each other and how companies are missing out on opportunities to benefit from these interactions. It's about how we've evolved much faster than the companies that were set up to sell us products and services.

At the basis of this struggle is resistance to change, resistance to new forms of communication and resistance to exploring new ways of creating value. Take a quick look at your company and consider how the way it currently does business restricts it from discovering new paths to growth. If a group of 200 bored New Yorkers can spontaneously organise themselves to do, well,

"At the basis of this struggle is resistance to change, resistance to new forms of communication and resistance to exploring new ways of creating value."

nothing, then what kind of excuse does your company have for not marshalling smart mobs behind it?