In a poll released today CNN indicated that the public's trust in government is at an all-time low. Only 13% of Americans say the government can be trusted to do what is right always or most of the time, with merely three-quarters saying only some of the time and one in 10 saying they never trust the government, according to the poll.

"The number who trust the government all or most of the time has sunk so low that it is hard to remember that there was ever a time when Americans routinely trusted the government," CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. Only 17% of of Americans believe that big business can be trusted to do what is right always or most of the time.

What if I were to suggest, because of the abovementioned technologies, the world did not need government nor even big business?

Peer production (also known as "mass collaboration") is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals who come together to produce a shared outcome (or outcomes), as opposed to the responsibility-substituting, command-and-control-esque techniques used today via traditional voting, incorporation and so on. This mode of production has brought us many of the aforementioned goods and services.

The content or goods are produced by motivated individuals rather than paid professionals and experts, who collaborate together to market themselves and their personal toolkit (selfish) and to improve the project on which they are focused (selfless). In so doing, provided they contirbute some value for other individuals, they can ultimately earn a living.

This technique of self-organization has been made much easier because of the internet. Free and open-source software are two examples of modern processes of production and organization. A civilization arbitraging these technologies might be called an "open-source civilization" of software, spontaneity and mass-experimentation by (selfishly and selflessly motivated) individuals, which differs from the current "closed-source civilization" of Intellectual Property, monopoly on force and permission slips (licensure) for experimentation, etc.

Peer production might represent an alternative to the traditional form of bureaucracy, which exists in both the public and private sectors. One key question is if such an open-source civilization can establish rational organization and the rule-oriented (read: ethical) functioning of an overall society. And, can it be sustainable?

In an open-source civilization the divide between public and private is collapsed. We already see this in today's day-and-age via the World Wide Web (also known as the "clearnet). We are all being policed for our own douchebaggery on forums like Facebook and Twitter. Never before have our lives been so broadcast like The Truman Show starring Jim Carrey.

Maybe this realization has caused many of us to consider our ethics. Our professional lives and our private lives have never been more enmeshed. (I think this is a good thing, simplifying our lives and allowing us to exist as one individual in the now, as opposed to the the multiple personalities of a day-job/family-at-night existence.) But this is not to say that privacy would be completely dead in an open-source civilization. Those who have followed software development and disruptive technologies over the past fifteen years have probably noticed the dizzying pace at which technology is developed and changed. Metastasizing on the web, the incipient open-source civilization of today is not the same as the mature open-source civilization of tomorrow.

And for that reason, the world of today, as we know it, is not the same as the world of tomorrow: A world in which art is disseminated peer-to-peer in exchange for micropayments of autonomously managed mathematical data, we chat and text with our loved ones (wherever they are in the world) for free and on video, and in our homes, which are dwellings we designed ourselves and printed up, a 3D-printer prints medicines from cheap, readily available and peer-reviewed chemicals, delivered from the darknet, in the kitchen. While I am not sure of the outlook for death in an open-source civilization, objectives historically funded by "taxes" might be crowdsourced. So what's it gonna be? Donating to the most recent bombing campaign "tax" or paying the people who are going to fix your neighborhood road "tax". Neither? That's fine, too. It's your call.

[Editor's Note: Justin contributes regularly to the TDV Newsletter. Learn more here]

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Justin O'Connell is the Head Researcher at Dollar Vigilante and Chief Executive Officer of GoldSilverBitcoin. He is also the author of the first full-length bitcoin book, Bitcoinomics, and administrator of the Bitcoinomics website. Justin is also a co-host at Our Very Own Special Show, a lifestyle podcast about music, news, life and other topics. He lives in San Diego, California. His writings mostly deal with gold, silver, bitcoin, technology and culture.