We’re about to launch the world’s first disorganized religion. We haven’t got a name yet and we’re looking at a shortlist of deities to worship. We’ll almost certainly get back to you at some point in the not-too-distant future with our decision. We had our first meet scheduled for July 7th but someone forgot to book the church and/or temple. We’ll more than likely get back to you with a confirmed in due course. In the meantime, you’re all going to our version of hell. Probably.

Being big isn’t nearly as important as it used to be. Even the new corporate giants are comparatively tiny compared to their forebears. IBM, with a market cap of $170bn, employs over 350,000 people. Google, with a similar market cap, employs just 19,000.

Big is plodding. Big runs at the speed of its slowest employees. Big is hard to maneuver. The economies of scale that big used to command are supplanted by the need for nimbleness and the ability to constantly re-adapt and re-focus. The way forward for the economy is based on millions of small businesses built to do specific tasks, not on a few big business that promises to do them all.

One can see a parallel in the production of technology itself. In the early 90s, software began to be built with a method called object oriented programming. Developers created individual modules that served a particular purpose – like, say a calculation function. These modules could then be joined to others to create a program: a new app was really just a bunch of pre-existing objects.

We already see businesses operating in this way: Google allows companies to port their map function to a plethora of devices. PayPal offers an easy way to introduce e-commerce to your site. Even on a Facebook page consumers can add functionality by introducing weather forecasts or show times. And outsourcing has been standard practice in the manufacturing industry for years.

This also provides a much-needed financial model for online businesses, too. After all, even though entrepreneurs are unable to charge consumers anything for their online services, someone, somewhere has to make money on something. In the object-oriented economy, new companies can be built by paying for and bundling the services created by a multitude of small existing ones.

Small is not only beautiful, it’s profitable. Big is neither.