Exploring The Adjacent Possible

Thoughts from One Year OnTheSpiral

by Greg on September 18, 2011

Year One completed…

I recently received a notice that my first 1-year domain registration is about to expire, which makes this an opportune time to review the past year and round up a number thoughts I have been mulling for a while that haven’t justified a full post.

One year ago I decided to take this endeavor seriously enough to justify registering my own domain name. The posterous blog I originally dabbled with was located at www.spiral-out.posterous.com. At the time the domain spiral-out.com was available, but when I finally decided to register around this time last year that domain was taken. As some of you know, “spiral-out” was a reference to the song Lateralus by Tool, and specifically to the following verse:

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The Unintended Consequences of Transparency

by Greg on August 30, 2011

Before I get started I want to thank everyone for all the comments on last week’s post, Reconsidering Gift Economies. I will return to that topic next week with some revised thinking. This week I want to shift topics, inspired by an interview with election expert David Brady, via Russ Roberts of EconTalk, which suggests some curious conclusions regarding the benefits of transparency.

The part that captured my attention was a discussion of what Brady calls ‘the personal vote‘. He is referring to the trend, beginning in the mid 1960s of congressional candidates running more on the basis of their personal characteristics and relying less on their party affiliation. It is important to be clear, he isn’t arguing that candidates became less partisan…only that candidates increasingly positioned themselves as individuals with unique platforms rather than as ‘the Party X candidate’. Their messaging became more “vote for me” and less “vote for my party”.

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Reconsidering Gift Economies

by Greg on August 18, 2011

One of the most frequent questions I hear is some form of the following:

Do you think gift economies will ever develop to the point where they can supply basic needs?
or
How can gift economies be made more robust so as to supply basic needs?

The short answer is, NO. I do not think gift economies will ever supply basic needs nor do I think they are appropriate to the task. However, if you keep reading the long answer is not so pessimistic…

The basic reason – gifts are fickle. Dictionary.com defines ‘gift’ as follows:

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The Decline of Capital

by Greg on August 11, 2011

It is difficult to do refined work and creative work at the same time. Over the past few weeks I have been pursuing a number of different threads and it takes some time to see the connections between them and produce fully formed insights. Until those connections emerge, it is just a soup of disparate ideas with hints of relevance to each other.

I sit down to try to write something but everything that comes out is half formed garbage, lacking any rhetorical force. I could attempt to refine that garbage, manufacture some rhetorical import, but it would all be fake. Moreover, those manufactured conclusions would only obscure the real insights that are still floating out there somewhere…waiting to be grasped.

Creative work and refined work come and go in cycles. A long creative cycle creates a mountain of material that demands to have some order imposed on it. Extended dedication towards refinement becomes boring and creates a yearning for new direction. Jumping prematurely from one to the other simply creates confusion and frustration.

…

While wallowing in my frustration I realized that this individual struggle provides an apt metaphor for the challenges currently facing the developed economies around the world. The strains on the industrial system have been mounting for some time and the cracks in the foundation are beginning to show. Unfortunately, a fully baked alternative has yet to emerge.

In other words, a creative cycle has been building for some time. The hints of solutions are floating around, but they have yet to cohere into anything ready to be refined and implemented at scale.

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Utilizing Scarcity in the Four Quadrant Value Universe

by Greg on July 22, 2011

What insight can be drawn from the four quadrant value universe? Can it help creative professionals understand how to earn a living while pursuing their passions?

A couple weeks ago I attempted to explore modes of navigating the four economies. That post was largely unsuccessful and a few exchanges with Stefan King in the comments demonstrated the confusion inherent in any analysis of transitions between quadrants. It turned out that asking, “How do I convert?” was the wrong approach.

I eventually realized I was not discussing conversion strategies but instead the social signals that indicate quadrant boundaries. For example, you know you have moved from the attention economy into transactional economy when information begins arriving in the form of a physical product. The transfer of physical product is nearly always an indication that monetary payment will be required.

Does it follow then that refining your attention economy work into a physical product will facilitate monetization?

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The Varieties of Collapsonomics

by Greg on July 15, 2011

What is collapse?

The global financial system is a mess. Peak energy is on the horizon. Growth in developed economies has slowed to a crawl. Governments are impotent. Income inequality is increasing. Education and health care are a perpetual quagmire. Nothing feels safe and the voices of doom and gloom are growing louder.

It is tempting to pool all these challenges together as if they were one enormous conspiratorial offense (obviously perpetrated by the opposing political party), however such hysterics have little basis in reality. The fear mongers would like you to believe that civilization will come to an end unless you jump on their bandwagon. In this post I would like to sketch out several varieties of collapse. I hope this provides some context to the countless apocalyptic predictions bandied about. Next time you hear someone forecasting the end of the world I hope you will ask yourself, “Are we talking about collapse of COLLAPSE?” Chances are you will be hearing evidence for collapse, but you will be led to believe the implication is COLLAPSE.

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Navigating the Four Economies

by Greg on July 8, 2011

How do you know the four economies are real? What evidence exists that they represent something more than arbitrary groupings?

On one level you can’t know. The model is explanatory rather than strictly predictive. Either it helps make sense of the phenomena in the real world or it doesn’t. However, certain realities may serve as evidence that the quadrants do in fact map onto distinct patterns of human behavior. One such form of evidence is the obvious difficulty people encounter when attempting to transition between quadrants.

In a series of posts on the superfluid blog I have been exploring the challenges of transitioning from the attention economy to the relationship economy. I went so far as to suggest that the transition from the attention economy to the transactional economy is simple. I should clarify, by ‘simple’ I do not mean easy. Instead I mean that the path is well worn and there are plenty of examples to emulate. If the transition were easy then I would click a few buttons and quietly collect a nickel for every pageview

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Unifying the Value Universe

by Greg on June 29, 2011

Strap in…this is a long one, and well worth it. The common theme across a majority of posts on this blog has been an attempt to understand the influence of technology on economic behavior. Mainstream media generally accepts the current commonplace institutions as fundamental features of ‘the economy’. Readers of this blog, and others with an eye on innovation, recognize that digital platforms are empowering alternative forms of economic behavior at scales never before possible. Digital currencies, reputation metrics, social capital scores, and collaborative consumption platforms are proliferating at a rapid pace.

Those of us who enthusiastically explore this territory regularly confront the lack of an appropriate language with which to describe these innovations. I have been as guilty as anyone of hastily hacking together terminology to describe ad hoc speculations. Some of these language hacking efforts have been reasonably coherent (see: Attention Currency and Asymmetric Accounting) while others have been condemned to the depths of the archives.

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The Intention Economy and the Evolution of Relationship Management

by Greg on June 22, 2011

Over the past several days I have engaged in a friendly debate with Gideon Rosenblatt about the viability of vendor relationship management (VRM) applications. For those unfamiliar with the concept, VRM is term popularized by Doc Searls and described as follows:

VRM tools provide customers with both independence from vendors and better ways of engaging with vendors. The same tools can also support individuals’ relations with schools, churches, government entities and other kinds of organizations.

In a narrow sense, VRM is the reciprocal — the customer side — of CRM (or Customer Relationship Management). VRM tools provide customers with the means to bear their side of the relationship burden. They relieve CRM of the perceived need to “capture,” “acquire,” “lock in,” “manage,” and otherwise employ the language and thinking of slave-owners when dealing with customers.

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How Much Monetization is Enough?

by Greg on June 15, 2011

How much monetization is enough?

This is the question of our day, showing up in numerous different forms. In some forms it comes across as a normative question, “Do CEOs deserve the exorbitant salaries they earn?”. If you prefer, insert “bankers” or your personal favorite demonized profession in place of CEOs.

As technology allows amatuer enthusiasts to do more and more free we face a steady stream of new versions of this question. Do creative professionals inherently deserve a minimum rate for their work (read: Should the law favor IP monetization)? Does a society need a professional (read: monetized) class of journalists?

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8 Principles For Disruptive Learning Environments

by Greg on June 3, 2011

I am finally giving in and writing my first list post, ugh! But I promise this not some shallow list designed for social media virality. I have been storing away notes and observations on this topic for quite some time. Many of these observations come from my personal experience over the past two years with crossfit – a program and community that is dramatically disrupting the health and fitness industries. Other observations derive from innovations in the start up community and social media. The significant overlap between these seemingly disparate domains serves as evidence that these are real trends rather than passing curiosities. The eight principles:

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Reconceiving Ownership In Three Parts: Recognition, Control & Compensation

by Greg on May 27, 2011

What is ownership? This is one of those words that we think we understand but when you examine it’s usage you find vastly different meanings. This is also a question that is becoming increasingly relevant as the composition of economic activity shifts. It is well understood that the service economy has been growing relative to the material/manufacturing economy for quite some time. More recently we have witnessed the growth of the information economy, consisting of goods that are not only immaterial, but also infinitely copyable and distributable at practically zero cost.

As the diversity of economic goods grows our conventional notions of ownership increasingly strained. Incumbent intellectual property owners are struggling to apply material notions of property ownership to information goods increasingly unconstrained by the limitations of physical materials. Yet, the necessity to reconceive ownership extends well beyond the domain of IP policy.

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