In typical DC Beltway pundit pomposity, the New Republic’s Noam Scheiber claims “Wikileaks Will Kill Big Business and Big Government.”

Scheiber’s claim: In an age when organizational secrets are porous commodities, big orgs shouldn’t have a lot of people around who know them. That, in turn, will require smaller, more cohesive orgs. Perhaps no bigger than 500 workers (the size of Obama’s campaign organization, which held great internal discipline).

“The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information.” Scheiber asserts. “It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.”

We’ve discussed this dream of de-consolidation in the past, with local author David C. Korten’s 1999 book The Post Corporate World. Where Korten saw utopian promise in small businesses and housing co-ops, Scheiber sees business (and government) as usual (or close to it) surviving by becoming smaller, nimbler and tighter.

At once, Scheiber’s and Korten’s visions contradict and support one another.

Scheiber sees big institutions going small to retain strict top-down control.

Korten sees grassroots people-power ventures offering an alternative to strict top-down control.

In reality, both could happen. And in some ways, they already are.

The Republican wins this past midterm election largely occurred in spite of the national Republican Party. They were the works of more decentralized big-money whores of all genders and many ethnicities, who’d directly solicited big campaign cash from corporations and billionaires.

And with so much of America’s personal wealth concentrated on the top one or two percent of the population, a lobbyist-lovin’ politician only has to successfully nab a few mega-donors to run a “friend of the little guy” campaign.

And as we’ve learned in the ecological and economic and workplace-abuse fields in recent years, an institution doesn’t have to be big to do bad things.

Still, decentralization is an interesting starting point for a conversation about the world and its future. Lots of folks these days despise the world of global business and its capacity for harm, but I’ve not met many people with well-thought-out alternatives to today’s capitalist system.