Exploring The Adjacent Possible

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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Attention Scarcity, The Power of Pull, and The Sociopath

by Greg on May 19, 2011

The internet is turning us into sociopaths.

For those not familiar with the reference, I do not mean “sociopath” as used in the common vernacular. I mean sociopath as popularized by Venkat Rao in his series of blog posts on The Gervais Principle. In a follow up post Venkat characterized the sociopath as follows:

First, sociopaths are driven by unsentimental observation of external realities, no matter how unpleasant. Second, they use the information they acquire through reality-grounding in skilled ways. Third, their distrust of subsuming communities and groups leads them to adopt personal moralities. Whether good or evil, the morality of a sociopath is something he or she takes responsibility for.

Finally, and most importantly, sociopaths do not seek legitimacy for their private morality from the group, justify it, or apologize for it.

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Rising Income Inequality & Shifting Identities – The Specialist & The Omnivore

by Greg on May 13, 2011

*Please note that this is not a political commentary. I will leave the political punditry to the people who think politicians are actually capable of accomplishing something.

I have recently come across a number of debates about income inequality so I am going to try to contsruct some context around this issue. A recent article from The Economist notes that income distributions have become more unequal in the large majority of developed countries:

American society is more unequal than those in most other OECD countries, and growth in inequality there has been relatively large. But with very few exceptions, the rich have done better over the past 30 years, even in highly egalitarian places like Scandinavia.
Reports such as this provide easy fodder with which to demonize your favorite economic villian, but before we jump to conclusions it will prove worthwhile to pause and ask a few questions:

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Reconciling Attention Scarcity with Cognitive Surplus

by Greg on May 6, 2011

Last week I wrote about attention scarcity, arguing that institutions and particularly brand will face an uphill battle in the attention market. I realized after the fact that I never defined a specific notion of attention scarcity, and that oversight was particularly glaring in light of the fact that other popular buzzwords seem to directly contradict the notion of attention scarcity. The most obvious of these is Cognitive Surplus. Attention scarcity would seem to posit that people generally have a shortage of attention, yet cognitive surplus suggests there exists a vast reservoir of attention waiting to be redirected towards crowdsourcing platforms and other user generated content. If we are all short of attention where is this vast reservoir?

Defining Cognitive Surplus

Since Clay Shirky first coined this term, it has often been used as if it refers to some uniform resource just waiting to be tapped. But people are not just sitting around doing nothing and waiting for the next internet sensation to absorb their free cycles. People are out living their lives and applying those ‘free cycles’ to the best uses they can find. In other words, there are no free cycles.

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Understanding Attention Scarcity – Why The Attention Economy Belongs to Peers, Not Brands

by Greg on April 28, 2011

Attention Scarcity has recently become a big buzzword. Unfortunately, nearly all of the thinking and coverage of this concept has focused only one specific type of attention: consumer attention for commercial messages and media content. Businesses are feeling the pain as consumers increasingly tune out broadcast messages and want to figure out how to capture more attention. A recent article by Adrian Ott demonstrates this bias clearly. It begins:

Thinking in terms of time and attention will quickly start to change the way you think about products and services, customer behavior, even business models. This is the great frontier for innovation for the next decade, this author believes. Companies that master time and attention innovation will find lots of market traction. Readers will learn how to get that traction in this article.

If a new product is launched and no one notices it, does it really exist?

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Marketing and Money: Why They Matter, Even For The Techno Utopian Visionary

by Greg on April 19, 2011

Walk into a room of techno utopian visionaries – these are people who are excited by stimulating intellectual conversation and understand the power of emerging technology to free ideas from the shackles of ivory towers.

Now mention how important you think marketing and money really are.

Odds are, the room wasn’t happy with your insertion into the conversation. Eyebrows raise, faces become stony, and you are reminded of all the reasons why money is absolutely not a good thing in the eyes of the techno utopian visionary:

People should be working for intrinsic reward, rather than for external compensation. Working for external compensation not only dulls enthusiasm, but it supplants the true reason and corrupts the motivation for enlightened work and exploration.

Marketing convinces us to buy things that we don’t need, and creates attachment to things that aren’t important. It ultimately robbing us of the freedom to choose our own destiny because we’re so tied down with useless stuff that doesn’t really matter.

Consumerism has wreaked enormous destruction over the years and centuries. From human trafficking, to the exploitation of developing nations, to the destruction of entire eco-systems, to the creation of serious physical and mental epidemics like obesity and ADHD.

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