Since our primate ancestors began to band together to collectively share hunting, child care and sentry duties, every one of us has been subjected to an invisible, crushing tax. That tax is what economists call "transaction costs" and it is the friction that arises when two or more people set out to do something together.

It was once the amount of time our monkey forebears spent checking in on their "friends" to make sure that the one who was up the tree "watching for predators" wasn't actually taking a nap.

Today, it is the hours spent in meetings, filling in forms, synchronising our diaries, issuing memos, reading memos, standing in queues, agreeing on the procedure for redress arising from misunderstanding, implementing that procedure, auditing the implementation, arguing about the audit – the endless litany of stuff that isn't getting stuff done, but is the stuff you do so that you can get stuff done.

You might ask why we even bother? It's all such a crushing bore, half-Kafka and half-Solzhenitsyn. The short answer is that doing stuff together makes us super-human. Literally.

The things that one person can do define what is "human". The things that transcend the limits of an individual – building a skyscraper, governing a nation, laying a telecommunications network, writing an operating system – are the realm of the super-human.

The most profound social revolutions in human history have arisen whenever a technology comes along that lowers transaction costs. Technologies that makes it cheaper to work together lower the tax on super-human powers.

Language (which allowed for explicit communication), writing (which allowed for record-keeping), literacy (which allowed for communication at a distance and through time) and all the way up to assembly lines, telegraphs, telephones, cryptography (which lowers transaction costs by reducing the amount of energy you have to expend to keep attackers out of your coordination efforts), computers, networks, mobile phones and beyond.

Decreasing transaction costs means that the powerful can do more. If you've already organised a state or criminal enterprise or church with you at the top, it means that you've figured out how to harvest and distribute resources effectively enough to maintain your institutional stability.

When transaction costs drop, you develop an institutional surplus – you can make your middle-management layer redundant, replace them with automated monitoring systems, and pocket the rest, or invest it in more ambitious projects.

The tendency of technology to increase the power of the powerful is at the heart of stories like Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four – take a totalitarian state, add technology and you get hyper-totalitarian state, something capable of reaching into every corner of human existence, to know each person's every move down to the fleeting thoughts that show themselves on their faces.

But technology lowers transaction costs for everyone, not just the well-organised. The past 20 years has seen radical shifts to the job of activists, which formerly meant spending most of one's time addressing and stuffing envelopes (or distributing handbills, or putting up posters), and using a few stolen moments around the edges to figure out what the posters, letters and handbills should say.

Now we get the dissemination for free – thanks to technologies such as Twitter, mailing lists and social networks – and the major role of activists has shifted to figuring out why and where to mobilise, not on mobilisation itself.

As the cost of working together falls, tasks that once required enormous (and expensive) bureaucracies now make do with much less administrative overhead. The stories of the GNU/Linux operating system and Wikipedia are first and foremost stories about plummeting transaction costs that make it possible to replace large, hidebound bureaucracies with nimbler, less-formally constituted institutions.

Some tasks (like stuffing envelopes) have disappeared as institutional jobs altogether – having all your activists buddies over for an envelope-stuffing party is as weird and unnecessary as inviting them over to help make the paper and set the type for your handbills. We get the word out today in a fashion that is so automated and effortless that it has faded into invisibility.

The same fate has befallen all but the most complex acts of travel-planning, and many other formerly complex industries. It's not relegation to history's scrapheap, rather it's the ultimate vindication of your usefulness – being turned into a utility, as vital and invisible and boring as the forces that lurk behind our water-faucets and light switches.

Computers and networks keep lowering transaction costs. Being turned into a utility is the destiny of many more of our great institutions. Projects such as Wikipedia that are vastly more automated and less formal than their predecessors will have successors that are so automated that they won't even feel like a thing at all. Projects that are still centralised will find automation that makes them as lightly constituted as Wikipedia – Wikipedia skyscrapers, Linux space-programs.

Throughout human history, we have had well-organised, effective institutions – powerful governments, disciplined armies, efficient corporations. We have had well-organised, ineffective institutions – hidebound bureaucracies, corruption-riddled basket-case police states, rigid military units that are cut to ribbons by nimble guerrillas. We have had disorganised, ineffective groups – unruly mobs, playtime at kindergarten, panicked people fleeing disaster.

But there is a new kind of institution that has quietly come into being. An institution so weird that it sounds like an oxymoron, like "jumbo shrimp" and "military intelligence." That institution is the "disorganised, effective" group.

"Disorganised, effective" is groups like Anonymous and Occupy, groups that have no command structure at all, not even an articulated set of goals, no formal membership structure, and in Anonymous's case, no formal deliberative process.

These are groups whose organisational structure is almost entirely automated, more like a queuing system and a repository and a mailing list than a political movement or even a street-gang.

This is, to my knowledge, something new upon the land, sui generis to a world with the internet as an established fact. There have always been dissident bohemias, but there have never been dissident bohemias that could act as a mass. The action isn't precision manoeuvres, and there is plenty of doubling-back and missteps. Nevertheless, this is a remarkable thing.

When I'm wondering about the future, I try to imagine moving today's institutions down the formality ladder. What technology would let us govern nations the way that ants build hills or Occupy runs its general assembly? What technology would make it possible to build and run a tramway the way Wikipedia manages its collective editing process? What would it mean to have networking fade into the background, become so commodified and automated that it more or less built and maintained itself?

Most of all, I try to imagine what "disorganised and effective" groups would do with every area of substantial human activity, from public health to education to astronomy. It's a wonderful and mindwarping sort of exercise – I thoroughly recommend it.