CHARLES LEADBEATER is a passionate advocate and a skilled exponent of the most accessible economic interactive data transmission and retrieval system devised. He has just written a rather interesting one. It's called a book.

But We-Think describes a world beyond the limitations of conventional publishing. Indeed, a world beyond the limitations of conventional authorship.

No autonomous acts of creativity here. Instead, engrossed by the creative possibilities of open-source software and shared access via the web, Leadbeater acknowledges 257 co-authors on the title page. “Mass collaboration, not mass production” is We-Think's hectoring strapline. This book went out for discussion.

Unfortunately, a grand total of 258 collaborators do not great style make. “When I was about to put the first draft online I tried to explain what I was doing to Polly Coles, a friend of my sister-in-law” is a bit of a clunker as sentences go. Still, given the scale of Leadbeater's vision, a little expressive infelicity is as irrelevant as knowing that Marconi was indifferent to personal hygiene.

The vision is vast and important: the web is the factory of the information age. Just as Ford's production lines allowed a design to be mass-produced, so our pipelines of pixellation and bitspit allow ideas to be immediately distributed and manipulated. The implications are enormous: we can tinker with, for example, product designs and send them down the wire to be manufactured in Taiwan. Ergo, the end of “The Designer” as a manipulator of consumer whim. If you follow this idea through, it suggests the end of oppressive, feudal shareholder ownership in favour of organic and healthy mutuality.

The objections to this? We have had the web for about 15 years and long-range electronic collaboration has yet to design anything (still less produce a literary masterpiece). Moreover, there is nothing new here: the design of complicated buildings, cars and products is way beyond the scope of an individual's expertise. It has always been a collaborative process. Ideas have always been freely distributed among design teams. It's just that they used to be called drawings. Frankly, I'd prefer experts at BMW to design my car, not a freely-sweating amateur geek on a laptop.

We-Think is the latest quest for an “ideal city”, a notion as old as Plato. In the Renaissance, Scamozzi and Alberti had precise architectural visions of perfection. In recent history, the American Dream with its Frigidaire and its Cadillac were another expression of a desire for perfection through the serial production and consumption of solid matter. Leadbeater's idealism is, in contrast, a virtual one, in synch with our dematerialised values, where gigabytes are valued more than concrete or chrome.

There's an attractive, enlightened liberalism about the We- Think ideology. It posits a world in which the ruthless globalisation of Microsoft and Coke can be undermined by a subversive, file-sharing democracy. Unfortunately for the theory, the new consumers in China and India seem very happy to sign up to the old values and the old belief systems that we are all so busily rejecting.

The surly bonds of print do tend to detain new tech. Nicholas Negroponte, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, godfather of Wired magazine, was faced with a similar conundrum. His rallying call Being Digital appeared on paper in 1995. I don't know what we think about this, but I think it means the web is way oversold. It's no more creative than ink.

We-Think by Charles Leadbeater
Profile, £12.99; 256pp

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist