[ghaff]

Oh. I'm not faulting him. When he wrote his books, organizational models were dominated by strict hierarchies whether government or assembly line-type manufacturing companies. Even more collaborative academic research tended to be dominated by big corporate labs and elite research universities. The average person never interacted with mainframe computers directly and information flow was largely mass market broadcast.

Absent any existing examples, the effects brought about by the modern Internet, smartphones, collaborative open source software development, generally less rigid organizational hierarchies, etc. would have been very difficult to visualize. Indeed it would have seemed almost alien.