Categories
Economies

Browsing Toward a New Currency

Air on MacBookPhoto: kayakleader

This is a continuation of How the iPad is (Thankfully) Destroying Our Economy.

Historically, money wasn’t necessary. Within a community, barn raisings, shared child care, and borrowing tools all occured as part of the gift economy. You used trust, reputation, and identity as your currency and money was only used between communities that didn’t know each other.

(Money is a type of currency; it isn’t synonymous.)

This is essentially the same today.  My neighbor will give me his lawnmower or I can go buy one at Home Depot. In the transaction with my neighbor, we might say I got the lawnmower for free, but really I used our relationship as currency. In the transaction with Home Depot, I used money.

Money only exists because traditionally – and this is important – you haven’t been able to scale the gift economy. The bigger your neighborhood gets, the more difficult it is to know everyone. The more difficult it is to know, the more difficult it is to trust. As strangers, and without trust, we need a way to exchange value.

Whereas the gift economy might leave loose ends (relationships are messy, after all), an economy based on the exchange of money leaves no loose ends; it is something for something. Our current economy is built on that idea of quid pro quo, but the Internet came along and turned that on it’s head for a few reasons, some of which we’ve talked about:

1.  The Internet allows us to live by our screens, not among objects, decreasing materialism and increasing the value we put on knowledge and experiences.
2.  The decentralized web increases the viability of the peer-to-peer economy that doesn’t rely on or include large companies.
3.  The networked web is ruled by plentitude, not scarcity, which changes what we value, how we exchange value, and how we measure and acknowledge it.

In essence, the web allows our social architecture to scale. What that means is that for the first time ever, there is the potential for an economy that isn’t based on money. It means that currencies other than money – reputation, identity, data – can be used to exchange value on a peer-to-peer level and on a larger scale than ever before. And it means that we’re relying less and less on money as a currency (i.e., why we’re seeing our current economy collapse).

Take a moment to wrap your head around that; it’s exciting. Or possibly scary, depending on how you look at it.

“Trust networks are able to be tapped for recommendations and referrals, while predictive analysis algorhithms can suggest the kinds of people, products, services, or events that would resonate with our personalities or value set,” argues digital theorist Vanessa Miemis. “A new set of filtering tools are emerging that are shaping where we direct our attention and resources, namely intentions and actions… These contextual clues around data become currencies in themselves, as they give us more information in order to make a choice or decide who to trust.”

Soon, it won’t matter that I don’t know you. We will still be able to transact with each other – I’ll borrow a dress from you, or you’ll take a spin in my car – because our reputation, identity and data currency will travel with us. The goodwill you build on Twitter, or at your job as an insurance salesman, will inherently influence the transactions in your life.

Early efforts at the peer-to-peer web, eBay rankings or reviews on Etsy for instance, show a small piece of that reputation currency. You can also see some attempts at personalization on today’s web. But that’s really all only the beginning. Facebook, for instance, has the power to be the ultimate bank, building a new economy based on the identity information we feed into our profiles and the mass amount of data they’re collecting. Even better, if this type of data were open across the web and we could own it, these currencies could inform the foundational underpinning of our interactions. And then, well, I can’t even wrap my mind around those possibilities…

You can see why who has the most data, and who controls the data, is increasingly important then. Every byte is almost like a dime in this new economy we’re building on the web.

I’ll continue to dive deeper in this series on digital economies and currencies in future posts, including the drawbacks of reputation as currency, why these new currencies aren’t the same as Free, and the rocky transition time we have ahead of us in this half-changed world.

Categories
Happiness

The Delusions of Happiness

Happiness is relative, but I’ve been really happy lately.  Secrets to happiness? Yes, I’ve got those. Try exercising, meditation, setting goals, spending time with friends and family, trying new things. Those should all sound familiar; people tell you those things all the time and they may or may not work for you. The real secret? I’ll get to that in a moment… (and it isn’t something foolish like follow-through).

Meditation, though. That’s something people are hot about lately. “It’s like a key that opens the door to the treasury within,” filmmaker David Lynch tells a New York Times columnist. “Here’s an experience — poooft! — total brain coherence. It’s what’s missing from life today: unbounded intelligence, creativity, bliss, love, energy, peace. Things like tension, anxieties, traumatic stress, sorrow, depression, hate, rage, need for revenge, fear — poooft! — all this starts to lift away. You see life getting better and better and better. Give the people that experience and — poooft. Man, it’s beautiful.”

This coming from the man who created Twin Peaks and Mullholland Drive. The point of meditation isn’t bliss (as any earnest attempt to understand the practice will reveal), but let’s look at the delusions supported in Lynch’s statement – primarily, that meditation will bring you peace. While the practice certainly can do that for you momentarily, we are decidedly fooling ourselves if we think that we can rid ourselves of negative emotions all together.

A great many people try and fail in that pursuit of happiness. Blogger Jenny Blake wrote a book on the topic and shortly after its launch admitted that “The book is meant to be aspirational — even for me.” It’s aspirational, but is presented as realistic. No one could possibly do or be everything in Blake’s book, and yet, that is the ambition. Why is impossible the ideal?

Society gets off on when you compare yourself to others, when you try to live by other’s beliefs, or when you try to get others to live by yours, and so and so forth. Unconditional happiness is just as destructive as uncontrollable anger. But the happiness ideal states you should learn from failures (instead of feel upset) and find lessons in whatever goes wrong. Theoretically, these happy nuggets serve to make sense of your pain but in reality, all they do is suppress it which is exhausting.

“Those who keep a check on their frustrations are at least three times more likely to admit they have disappointing personal lives and have hit a glass ceiling in their career. But those who let their anger out in a constructive manner were more likely to be professionally well-established, as well as enjoy emotional and physical intimacy with loved ones,” reports a study by the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

“People think of anger as a terribly dangerous emotion and are encouraged to practise ‘positive thinking’, but we find that approach is self-defeating and ultimately a damaging denial of dreadful reality,” says Professor George Vaillant, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.

Let’s go back to meditation. One type of meditation is yoga, which is a study in the union of opposites (think Dog/Cat). In that vein, I’d like to suggest that happiness is not the end goal, but that you are always feeling happiness, and you are always feeling pain, in every moment. And that the union of these two emotions, and indeed many others, is the end goal, not the glorification of one over the other.

Struggle isn’t something to overcome then (and feel good about after), but just is. Some days things will go your way, and some days they won’t. Personal growth advocates assume you want to avoid those bad days whereas I don’t think that’s possible or necessary. In the moment you are failing, you are also succeeding.

Life is great and it sucks, always simultaneously. Most people can’t live in that environment so they live in delusions. Religion, personal development, companies – all are too eager to create those delusions for you. But life is a duality and I’m all for happiness, just not at the sacrifice of negativity, depression, anger, tension, anxiety, stress, hate, rage, or sorrow.

Categories
Business Entrepreneurship

Without a Map (Part 1)

A born entrepreneur, the ex-CEO of Seventh Generation talks about today’s labor movement, changing the rules of business and politics, and the biggest failure at his old company.

More than twenty years ago, Jeffrey Hollender founded Seventh Generation and went on to build the fledgling company into every affluent customer’s favorite badge of sustainability. In October of last year, Hollender was forced out of the company. Today, he continues his fight to provoke business leaders to think differently about the role they and their companies play in society.

K: What’s going on with business and politics nowadays? The Federal government almost shut down last Friday. Are business and politics inseparable with the amount of lobbying, influence and corporatism?

Hollender: Business has far too much influence in politics and that is bad, on the one hand, because citizens feel disenfranchised and don’t feel that they have a vote and don’t participate in the political process. But worse, we have a situation where a relatively small group of very large companies have our political agenda and our economy effectively held hostage to their own interests.

If you just look at the recent controversy surrounding the fact that General Electric pays no taxes and in fact will get a $3-4 billion tax refund, we have also created a terribly uneven playing field. How can small and medium-sized companies that create most of the jobs and are critical for our economic recovery compete with large companies who get large subsidies from the government and don’t get to take advantage of the loopholes that a company like GE gets to take advantage of?

It’s a serious, serious problem that is, I think, crippling our economy and spoiling our environment.

I want to circle back to that, but first let me ask you this. I just moved to DC from Wisconsin, and am wondering, have you been following the fight with WI Governor Scott Walker and his attempt to eliminate collective bargaining?

Yeah.

To me, it seems like Walker was trying to destroy the Democratic party and it wasn’t really about labor unions. However, the idea of eliminating labor unions doesn’t seem all that outdated to me in a world where transparency is king. Curious to know your thoughts.

Over a 30-40 year period we’ve seen membership in unions fall roughly around thirty-five percent to under ten percent. A significant amount of that decline is a result of business’ influence on politics that have increasingly made it difficult for unions to organize and acquire new members.

There is no question that there has been a campaign by politicians as well as certain companies to marginalize, if not totally eliminate, the union movement in the United States. And I think that’s dangerous because the unions were probably the only significant political counter balance to big business in America.

Right…

As a co-founder of an organization called the American Sustainable Business Council that has 65,000 small and medium-sized companies as members, more of these businesses have taken a position to support labors like collective bargaining and we don’t see that as bad for business. We believe, as I do, that we need more good-paying jobs because an economy where people are making minimum wage is an economy where the government will endlessly have to subsidize families because they can’t afford the services that they need to survive.

Do you see any differentiation between public and private sector unions though? Where public sector unions might not be as necessary as private sector unions?

No, you know, I don’t see a large difference. I think there are a huge number of challenges with the way the teachers’ union has functioned. And I think the challenges that we have in eliminating bad teachers from the system are problematic. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a teacher’s union. I think the issue is that we need to make some changes in the way a teacher’s union functions. But I would not ever go as far as saying teachers should not be unionized.

Okay. Let’s move on. It seems like a lot of your initial drive in this area of social justice was a result of the privilege that you had growing up. Do you see, at all, that being socially conscious is a luxury of the privileged class?

No, I think that being socially conscious is in no way something that is a luxury of being privileged. There is a tremendous social consciousness within the union movement. There is tremendous social conscious in all aspects of society. I wish there was more social conscious within the privileged. I think too many people who are very comfortable and affluent don’t accept their responsibility to share that wealth with too many other people and to advocate for people are aren’t was well off as they are.

It’s sad that, statistically, lower income people give away a greater percentage of their income than affluent people do, and I think that one fact alone would cause one to not come to the conclusion that the privileged are more socially conscious than the unprivileged.

What about being environmentally-friendly? Is that a luxury of the privileged class?

Well, environmental consciousness has become too much of a luxury of the privileged class for a couple reasons. One, environmental products are often more expensive than traditional products and one would not expect people from all economic classes to choose to pay a premium. Secondly, because people who are more affluent tend to take advantage of and access higher levels of education, they better understand the reasons why sustainable products are important.

I have always said that one of the biggest failings of Seventh Generation was that it reached primarily more affluent consumers who were already healthier and living more sustainable lives, and was not effective at reaching more people broadly.

That is true generally of all types of green products and organic food, and underlying that is an economic problem. Why is it that green products or organic foods should cost more money? They shouldn’t. They cost more money because those businesses don’t externalize their costs on to society the way other businesses do. By internalizing those costs, the product costs more money. But it shouldn’t be that way; it should actually be the reverse. Sustainable products – because they don’t have as negative an impact on society and the environment – should actually cost less money.

I completely agree. What is the solution?

Well, the solution goes back to where we started the conversation. As long as large companies control the political process, we won’t make much headway in changing the tax laws or any of the issues that allow businesses to externalize their costs. We take one example alone, global warming, and we can’t even get there to be a price on carbon. We’re a long, long, long way from changing that playing field. Unfortunately, we live in a society today where we make products that are often bad for your health and bad for the environment artificially cheap. People consume those products that adversely affect their health and the environment and we move more quickly down the road in the wrong direction.

So what’s bad for you is good for the economy? Is that how it’s playing out?

What’s bad for you is good for a select group of large companies.

Right.

It’s actually not good for the economy because when people eat the wrong things and don’t get healthy, what we see is rising health care costs that ultimately make America less competitive with the rest of the world.

What we have today is a paradigm where companies are making the most money they’ve made in sixty years. Corporate profits are at an all-time high and growing faster in the fourth quarter of 2010 than they’ve ever grown in sixty years. At the same time, as we have massive unemployment and an environment that is being degraded. And unfortunately we’ve created a system that allows companies to make huge profits while people are unemployed and the environment suffers. So we have systemic problem in the way we’ve designed our economy.

In Part 2 of this interview (coming next Friday), Hollender talks about how he would launch a company today, the tensions of scale, and what motivates him the most.

Categories
Politics

The Rise of Transparency and the Fall of Dialogue

When Republican Governor Scott Walker recently sought to eliminate collective bargaining rights, it was less about Wisconsin’s budget deficit or labor unions themselves, and more of a thinly veiled attempt to destroy the Democratic party. That’s because labor unions are one of the few organized groups that can counter-balance large companies in the money department when campaign time rolls around. Without the backing and support of labor unions, the Democratic party would be in trouble.

Walker’s actions weren’t unjustified however, nor representative of solely the Republican party. Today’s elected officials align themselves with their political party over their constituents, and find it more beneficial to abide by the party line than to compromise. That’s because the need for transparency necessitates every comment be combed through with a fine-toothed analysis thereby crippling what was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative bodies.

“Mr. Walker’s conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War,” argues UW-Madison professor William Cronon in the New York Times. “Many citizens are furious at their governor and his party, not only because of profound policy differences, but because these particular Republicans have exercised power in abusively nontransparent ways that represent such a radical break from the state’s tradition of open government.”

But Walker didn’t create partisan dysfunction; he only lit its fire. Transparency is the real culprit, and while yes, transparency is a mechanism to keep officials accountable, it is also an enabler of partisanship.

C-SPAN was the first to flip on the light of accountability. “After C-SPAN went on the air, the cozy atmosphere that encouraged both deliberation and back-room deals began to yield to transparency and, with it, posturing,” argues George Packer in The New Yorker. “The weakened institution could no longer withstand pressures from outside its walls; as money and cameras rushed in, independent minds fell more and more in line with the partisans. Rough parity between the two parties meant that every election had the potential to make or break a majority, crushing the incentive to cooperate across the aisle.”

Today, bloggers are the ones that carry transparency’s torch in the name of open government. “Bloggers carry so much influence that many senators have a young press aide dedicated to the care and feeding of online media,” says Packer. “News about, by, and for a tiny kingdom of political obsessives dominates the attention of senators and staff, while stories that might affect their constituents go unreported because their home-state papers can no longer afford to have bureaus in Washington.”

Transparency has become the enabler for what The Daily Beast’s Washington bureau chief Howard Kurtz calls an “era of sound-bite warfare on steroids.” Partisan organizations now exist whose sole aim is to discredit public officials and craft previously benign remarks into incendiary blows. Sound-bite snippets are volleyed up and copied into the broadcast and blogger media while these organizations claim that they “make their research transparent,” and are thus able to escape culpability on the denigration of our political system.

Senior Senator Lamar Alexander (Republican) describes the effect as “this instant radicalizing of positions to the left and the right.” No longer do the right and left sides speak to or even look at each other. No one is actually even in the governing chamber when their colleagues stand up. And whereas Senators in the seventies would have lunch together, if a Republican joins a lunch full of Democrats today, their identity is kept a secret to protect their reputation. Trust is non-existent, and the tradition of politics – that of “substantive, thoughtful and moderate discussion” – is swept aside.

Massive demonstrations around Wisconsin’s Capitol led to the eventual block of Walker’s legislation – hey, don’t mess with a Sconnie – but most protesters understood they weren’t marching for the right to retain collective bargaining, but against the pure ego-centric, heavy-handed idiocy that is Scott Walker. They were marching for the right to have a conversation. Wisconsin’s Democartic Senators went so far as to flee the state and hide out in Illinois to stall the passing of the bill.

“Walker doesn’t negotiate. Whether it’s with state workers or Democratic lawmakers, he wouldn’t come to the table,” State Representative Joe Parisi said. “And that’s the problem.” So the Dems decided not to show up either. Instead, both parties talked to the press as if media were meditator, and the bloggers and media did what they do best, reducing an issue to one remark versus another and one party against the other.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t reported that both sides – Republicans and Democrats – came to march around the Capitol. And lest we forget, during the winter in Wisconsin, that is an especially big deal.  It wasn’t reported that the demonstrations were peaceful and respectful. And it wasn’t reported that demonstrators showed up to talk to each other when our politicians would not.

Categories
Privilege

What Do Black People Want? Opening a Dialogue on Racism and Privilege

This a guest post from Ramou Sarr.

One of the most frustrating aspects about discussions of race, racism and privilege, is that you are never quite sure when you are finished. The resolution is dissonant and it can be disheartening to trudge through so much emotion but emerge sans resolution. One party – the White party – is often left wondering what exactly it is that the other party – the Black party – wants from them.

White privilege is a set of unearned privileges that one benefits from because they are White. It is both a favored state of one race over another as well as a systematic conferred dominance of one race over another. Research scientist and anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh has become the point person for the unpacking of Whiteness since her 1988 article, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, listed twenty-six examples of how she benefits from her race. Among these benefits were:

I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.  I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

These privileges benefit White people without them having to do anything in order to receive them. The fact that these privileges just are is in part what contributes to the uncertainty among White people when it comes to what to do about it.

Let me first tell you what Black people don’t want. We don’t want your guilt. White guilt does absolutely nothing for me or any other person of color. While your hours spent Googling poverty in America or examining the mass incarceration of Black males leaves you feeling as though you want that burden of privilege lifted, you leave us – the Black folks – rolling our eyes and annoyed that you have managed to turn a discussion about racism and Black oppression into one about you. The problem with White guilt is that, in addition to being incredibly useless, it serves as a passive approach to shift responsibility away from yourself; as if feeling guilty about your privilege is your contribution to ending racism. That’s it. You wipe your hands of it.

Writer and filmmaker Molly Secours attended a diversity conference alongside African American diversity activist, Dr. Francis Cress Welsing, and told Welsing that because she understood White privilege and veered away from certain terminology she didn’t feel as though she was privileged. Secours had concluded that because she was aware of racism and privilege she wasn’t a part of the system that oppresses the Black community. To which Welsing responded, “I beg to differ. We don’t need you to fix us. What Black and brown people want from White people is to fix yourselves.”

This encounter highlights a rather interesting aspect of privilege denying that often occurs when a White person is confronted with their privilege. In some instances a White person will become defensive, deny that their privilege exists, and point to the Black community as the source of their own oppression. On the other end, and as Secours has done here, a White person will acknowledge their privilege, feel guilty about Black oppression, and then attempt to separate themselves from those White people who contribute to racism. Secours’ guilt had seemingly alleviated her of any responsibility she had to address the problem of racism that continues to tug on our proverbial coat sleeves, daring us to look. Secours’ acceptance of White privilege and acknowledgment of Black oppression seemed to her to be enough. And that is precisely it.

Issues of racism and privilege have always fallen on the shoulders of the Black community. The problems that plague us are perceived to be problems that we have brought upon ourselves by continuing to fall into the stereotypes of lazy, poor, unintelligent criminals, who refuse to pull ourselves up by our metaphorical bootstraps in order to escape the burden of Blackness that we have carried on our shoulders for so long. White people today feel no responsibility for the state of the Black community because slavery and the Jim Crow era were so long ago!

No, you may not have owned slaves. And maybe you have never personally contributed to the systematic oppression that has for hundreds of years led to substantially higher unemployment, poverty and incarceration rates among the Black community. But here we are. Acknowledging that you are a part of the problem, despite not intentionally contributing to the oppression/privilege dichotomy, as well as part of the solution is imperative to confronting the issue.

Now what do Black people want? Quite simply: We want you to get over yourselves. What is perhaps the hardest concept to grasp when discussing racism and privilege is that despite the White (mostly male) population being looked to as the authoritative voice on pretty much everything, this is quite possibly the one subject in which there is no doubt that people of color are, and always will be, the experts.

I ask that you listen to your Black counterparts when they attempt to explain these subjects to you. We have in almost every instance been thinking about these subjects and discussing their implications and significance for far longer than you have, as your privilege allows you to be oblivious to them everyday. Your privilege makes it possible for you to not see race, to buy in to the ideology of a “post-racial America,” an ideology that is nearly laughable to people of color, to rid yourself of the burden of race and racism.

You must continue to be diligent in examining your privilege as people of color continue to examine their other-ness. Not a day goes by where I do not think about my Blackness. I am constantly aware that I am Black and often stepping into White spaces, either on the Internet via various social media, or in my everyday life – when I get on the T, get post-work drinks with friends or take advantage of panels and discussions around Boston. I am aware that I am almost always one of few people of color nearly everywhere I go and this is an awareness of which I, and many of my Black brothers and sisters, are incapable of escaping. What we want from you, White people, is an acknowledgment that these things exist and will continue to exist so long as we stray away from the sometimes painful and emotion-laden discourse that seeks to rush race and privilege to the forefront, no longer hiding behind the veil of this being someone else’s problem. We need to talk about it until it doesn’t hurt anymore.

About the Author: Ramou Sarr is a Boston-area public defense paralegal and social sciences graduate student. She can be found drinking her fifth cup of coffee at a Harvard Square bookstore or online at www.ramou.tumblr.com.

Categories
Economies

How the iPad is (Thankfully) Destroying Our Economy

iPad 2 - HomescreenPhoto: connorsmac

There are a cohort of people who are still buying McMansions in the suburbs; I see the photos on Facebook, “Our New Home!” revealing beige wall-to-wall carpeting (still mysteriously associated with upward mobility), reminiscent of the early 90s, chosen to soften the echoes of monstrously high ceilings usually reserved for public spaces. The outside of the home is similarly beige with french windows framed by a brick veneer and a peaked roof that inevitably evokes some strange sense of American pride and envy… for it does look nice if you’re just glancing by in a car.

But despite the constant commercial endorsement of this wearisome American Dream, such idyllic photos no longer sway the hearts or pocketbooks of the majority of young people who have made it clear they will not be the ones to save the housing market. Even the young billionaire Mark Zuckerburg rents, and in the city, not the suburbs.

It wasn’t too long ago that people flaunted materialism. “Goods [were] exclusive or status related rather than universal, private rather than public” reports economist Tyler Cowen. But whereas the automobile enabled freedom for previous generations, today’s generation use digital devices as a means for self expression. That has made possible an economy focused on knowledge and experiences, not consumer goods.

E-book author Ev Bogue took a photo of every single item he owns and encourages visitors to his site to “count, there aren’t many.” His belongings total a fundamental 32 things. Bogue is a proponent of augmented humanity, and encourages his readers to “cultivate presence at the intersection of life and Instagr.am,” a popular iPhone photo app.

“The incentive with these apps is to live a more extraordinary and present life,” Bogue argues. “If you aren’t living, there’s nothing much to Instagr.am, and thus people will forget about you. No one necessarily wants to see an Instagr.am of a desk. We know this, so I don’t often see photos of desks on Instagr.am.”

While Bogue may fall on the side of extreme in the experience economy for his privileged stylings, his penchant for walks in the forest over a new dining set is shared by his peers. We prefer to live by our screens, not among objects, and so the knowledge economy is just that – in our minds (and on our iPads) and not in the revenue-generating sector of the economy.“The funny thing is,” Cowen argues, “getting away from materialism on such a large scale – whatever the virtues of the switch – really, really hurts. It is the hurt that we in America are living right now.”

We assumed innovation would arrive the way it always has, but technology gave innovation new forms, and insistence on the-way-it-always-was kind of economy subsequently delivered the situation we’re in today: a growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis.

Cowen admits “you can be an optimist when it comes to our happiness and personal growth yet still be a pessimist when it comes to generating economic revenue or paying back our financial debts,” and “even if we can, at the personal level, manage to feel fulfilled under slower economic growth, it is not compatible with how modern politics [and economics] is structured, namely as a ravenous beast.”

Obviously Cowen knows something screwy is happening. But for all of Cowen’s awareness of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, he never goes as far to eschew the current economic framework, a system simply not suited for a knowledge and experience-based economy.

That system is legacy-based, and its “operating system for money is obsolete,” argues media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. “It is optimized for a different era than the one we are living in today. It is incompatible with Web 2.0 and the Interneted world.”

The Internet has allowed an economy where money, the dependency and abstraction of which has caused the financial crisis, is not the singular centralized currency. On the decentralized web, reputation is a currency. Authority is another. Data, influence, badges, credits and identity are also currencies. There are several currencies on the free and open web in fact – none of which are widely recognized at J. Crew. Increasingly that’s because the point is not to exchange value for consumer goods, but for the stuff inside our screens.

I’ll take a deeper dive into the economy and currencies our digital lives are creating in part two of this post later this week.

Categories
Oxymorons

“Chain of Fools” No Longer

what is it about Duane Reade?Photo: Esther Dyson

Chain, chain, chains…. the seduction of big-box stores call to us in the deep, sultry sound of discount, and the lure of low prices are hard to deny. But things are changing. As suburb residents flee back to the city, the scale of monotony is being downsized and localized.

National chains are becoming local brands.

The average Walmart store is close to 200,000 sq ft; that’s the size of Facebook’s new office, four football fields, and three-hundred sixty-three New York studio apartments. But in 1998, Walmart tested a 40,000 sq ft Neighborhood Market store, and now has 200 of those around the country. Not be outdone by itself, Walmart then cut their stores in half again to the 15,000 sq ft Marketside prototype that focuses on fresh food. This month, they’re down to a miniscule 10,000 sq ft in an existing building on the college campus of Arkansas. And soon, Walmart will materialize in New York City, one of the last bastions of place.

But it might all end up alright; don’t shed a tear just yet.

The U.S. Constitution’s basic tenet is based on the federalist rule of national governments allowing States to operate independently. National chains can do the same. I like to call it corporate federalism: the notion that national brands can allow local stores to operate independently. Imagine a business where novelty isn’t fed to us as New and Improved!, but as genuine difference and discovery. The national chain’s local brand would depend on the area’s local identity and needs.

Here’s an example. Duane Reade recently responded to chain disdain from young hipsters and yuppies in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn by including something most neighborhood drugstores do not have: a specialty beer bar that features nine local, craft and imported beers – and the store allows for tastings.

Duane Reade is the first to undercut local businesses not just on price or assortment, but on experience.  And not just a brand experience (any old chain can do that), but a local one. In an ideal world, corporate federalism would mean local chains purchase goods and services from other local businesses and return more of their revenue to the local economy – just like local businesses do.

Essentially, national chains would create local brands within their umbrella that would benefit from the efficiencies of the larger organization. Local employees would be free to adapt the brand to their neighborhood. It’s a tall order, but with the behemoth giant Walmart actually becoming smaller, and Duane Reade customizing their stores to match neighborhoods, it’s not too far off.

Our shared experiences no longer need to be those of purchases and parking debacles from Ikea, Walmart and Starbucks. Instead, national chains have the opportunity to build and expand upon the je ne sais quoi feeling that defines a sense of place.

If chains operated as local brands, the money would stay local. The focus would be on the depth of the experience, not the scale of the box. Economies would improve. And there wouldn’t be too much to crow about anymore. Perhaps there wouldn’t be as many local jobs since the national headquarters would remain elsewhere, but that is the reality of scaling a business, and the changing nature of work. Our jobs can be location-independent, but the places we live cannot.

Indeed, if chains were operated as local brands, it would be hard to find a weak link.

Categories
Media

The Devolution of the Huffington Post, Forbes, and Hopefully Not The New York Times

With the arrival of the open web, it was okay not to pay writers. And when you didn’t pay writers, you needed more of them. As an editor, perhaps you invited writers to contribute that you wouldn’t normally to increase page views. You weren’t serving the reader, you were serving the advertiser. Soon you had the Huffington Post, which at one point was the darling of the free and open web, with nary a question on the model, because the content was good.

Inspired by its decentralized technology, the open web was supposed to shift the power from the corporation to the people. Many imagined a sort of utopian society that relied on abundance instead of the current economy’s premise of scarcity. And the web did fulfill the promise of abundance in the form of Free, but utopia would have to wait.

With distribution came dislocation, and companies were able to use the web to extract more and more value out of the people creating the value. The same industrial model worked on the networked net because technology still favors efficiency over say, any other human value.

As a result, the most popular articles on the Huffington Post today read more like TMZ or People magazine: “Awkward Wedding Photos: Who Knew That Tying The Knot Could Be This Hilarious?,” “Khloe Kardashian Talks Weight: ‘Love Handles’ And ‘Fat Days’,” “Courteney Cox on ‘Strictly Platonic’ Vacation With Co-Star Josh Hopkins,” “’Dancing With the Stars’ Recap: Week Two Elimination,” and “Woman Can’t Close Her Eyes After Bungled Plastic Surgery.”

Not to mention, the advertisements on Huffington Post are indistinguishable from the content, and both are seemingly designed that way: “The Original Crime Family – The Borgias Premiere Sunday 9p e/p on Showtime.”

Whatever Arianna Huffington banked from that list of articles (ads?) allowed her the audacity to poke fun of the New York Times paid subscription model this past April Fools’ Day. To be fair, the post pokes fun at the New York Times and the Huffington Post simultaneously, declaring in jest that the Huffington Post’s move to digital subscriptions will be “one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world.” (We’re all in on the joke; Huffington hasn’t valued high-quality journalism for a great while.) Later, Huffington facetiously describes HuffPo’s signature offering as an adorable kitten slideshow. Which isn’t far from the truth. In fact, a kitten slideshow might be an improvement on their most popular offerings.

Nevertheless, other sites have followed suit (if anything, the web excels at copying). Almost a year ago, Forbes.com announced that it would open the door “to 1000s of unpaid contributors and [rather than commissioning quality in-house journalism] ‘Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent,’” reported Tech Crunch writer Paul Carr.

Carr predicted that the Forbes decision would result in the magazine suffering the “Death of a Thousand Hacks,” which has two meanings: “The first, much like the death of a thousand cuts, is that they’re chipping away at everything they used to represent by replacing real reporting with SEO-driven bullshit and an army of unpaid amateur hack bloggers. The second meaning is that those thousand hacks are going to kill their brand.”

Since then, hundreds of bloggers received invitations to join Forbes.com including myself. The email I received implored me to “Just continue to do what you do best–write. I am not looking for exclusive content (although it’s most welcome), request copyright or ask that you blog any more than you already do. Forbes does not wish to control, alter or affect your blog in any way,” the editor told me. “You can publish simultaneously on your blog and your personal Forbes.com blog… As an uncompensated contributor, your posts will be available to millions of dedicated Forbes readers.”

To be clear, the editor is only requesting permission to copy my work onto the open web in exchange for increased exposure instead of compensation. I wouldn’t even have to be held accountable for blogging regularly. When I inquired about the possibility of a consistent, paid position, the editor replied: “Can I *promise* regular, consistent writing position? That’s something you can do with your blog. Which brings us to your next question: Can I *promise* paid writing at a later date? I can say it is a possibility.”

Her response seemed fair and promising. However, when I asked her to point me to any examples of any bloggers on Forbes that started uncompensated and were now paid, the editor came up short. “This is such a new platform that I honestly can’t,” she replied. Instead, the editor supplied me with the contact information of a writer she had to cut when she lost her freelance budget, but was now excited to bring back with “some compensation.”

I expect this would be no surprise to Carr if he heard. He argued Forbes would do “what the Huffington Post does: pay a meager stipend to a tiny percentage top traffic drivers to save face [indeed, Forbes admits this proudly], and then expect the rest to work ‘for the exposure’. As the old saying goes, people die from exposure – but in this case, it might just be the whole publication that’s not long for this world.”

Companies of formerly strong reputation take on the content farm model, and then editors have the job of throwing spaghetti on the cupboard to see what sticks. Forbes calls this curation, but I sensed a distinct desperation from the editor who emailed.

The value shift from core product to peripheral offerings on the free web means companies extract enormous amounts of value from writers who rely on the promise of monetizing their exposure, in the form of, say, speaking engagements or TV appearances, instead of their work.

“Of course, the people hiring us to do those appearances believe they should get us for free as well, because our live performances will help publicize our books and movies. And so it goes, all the while being characterized as the new openness of a digital society, when in fact we are less open to one another than we are to exploitation from the usual suspects at the top of the traditional food chain,” argues digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff.

“The very same kinds of companies are making the same money off text, music, and movies—simply by different means,” argues Rushkoff. “Value is still being extracted from everyone who creates content that ends up freely viewable online. It’s simply not being passed down anymore.” Writers aren’t being paid, but advertisers are.

The New York Times has thus refused such a model in the interest of creating value, not extracting it. Good journalism, after all, is expensive. It takes time, money, bodies, effort and significant resources. While it can be replicated by machine, it can’t originate from one.

The recent introduction of the New York Times pay wall however, did not inspire the valuation of content from readers, but a further alignment with corporatism.

“When we insist on consuming it for free, we are pushing them toward something much closer to the broadcast television model, where ads fund everything,” argues Rushokoff. “We already know what that does for the quality of news and entertainment. Yet this is precisely the model that the ad-based hosts and search engines are pushing for. By encouraging us to devalue and deprofessionalize our work, these companies guarantee a mediaspace where only they get paid. They devalue the potential of the network itself to create value in new ways.”

So eager are we to let advertising dictate the availability of quality content that the free and open web has only given us an abundance of copies. The aggregation of creative material and original thought has declined.  No longer can we rely on corporate interests to create, sustain, build and evolve our platforms in a post-scarcity society. The solution, simply, is to value content, to respect the labor of individuals.

Lest you think such an approach is pie-in-the-sky, turn your attention towards The New Yorker, which “puts investigations of national security on the cover instead of celebs, yet it has the highest subscription renewal rate of any magazine in the country. A privately owned company, it is thought to be turning a profit of around $10m. Editorial decisions there are never made by focus groups,” reports Matt of 37signals.

If we want anything more than the most mediocre culture to survive, inform our consciousness and influence our future, writers deserve to get paid.

Categories
Creativity

Specialize in the Mission, Not the Medium


Photo: Scott Belsky

You probably know Scott Belsky from his bestseller Making Ideas Happen. But before the book, there was Behance, the company that led him to the book. What follows are the best parts from our recent interview.

By the way, at the end of the interview, Scott mentioned these were some of the best and most thought-provoking questions he’s received. Oh Scott, I bet you say that to all the girls.

1. I read that your business model is unlike anything you learned in business school. Can you elaborate?
Well, technically we are a technology and social media [company] that develops a paper product line, runs a think tank, and produces an annual conference. This pretty much defies everything they teach in business school about specialization and operations management.

But, in the era upon us where the barriers to developing new technology are low – and operations management can be more automated – it is easier for a business to attack their mission from various angles.

For Behance, our specialization is OUR MISSION rather than OUR MEDIUM. We want to organize the creative world, and we’re open to using every/any medium to do it.

2. What are your strategies to make the Behance network of sites grow? Are you focused on one site or another?
(Behance, Action Method, The 99 Percent, The Served)
Early on in the history of Behance, we realized that “organizing the creative world” would require a focus on both the MACRO and the MICRO needs in the creative community. We structured our team accordingly. The 99% and Action Method initiatives help creative individuals and teams get organized. While the Behance Network is a powerful platform all about organizing the creative world’s work.

The sites have grown organically through word-of-mouth. We feel extremely fortunate to have a community of extremely talented participants that care about developing the platform organically. We get a lot of feedback, which we take into account.

3. How would you define your core audience for Behance products?
Our core audience is made up of people and teams that generate ideas for a living. We serve an audience that, in most cases, has too many ideas to begin with and wants help in organization, promotion, and ultimately making more of their ideas happen.

4. Describe your vision for Behance. In what ways is it rewarding or difficult to stick to that vision? How does the company fit into your longer-term plans?
We believe that, with better organization and platforms for navigating creative industries, there will be more of a “creative meritocracy.” We imagine a day when the greatest talent gets the best opportunities (rather than be at the mercy of antiquated systems).

This has always been our collective vision for Behance – a more organized and empowered creative world. Our challenge is not falling into the trap that plagues most creative teams: doing projects because they are fascinating rather than because they achieve the mission. At times it is difficult to ground our excitement with sound judgment about WHY we do what we do, and to stick with it.

5. What is it like working as a young entrepreneur? Talk about your strengths and weaknesses.
My greatest weakness is impatience. I have so little patience for standard procedures and the long process of development. In my mind, I always want everything to be “done” until I realize that rushing the process is, in fact, rushing life…and I certainly don’t want to do that. Luckily I have a team of people who are better at setting the pace and ensuring that a process is tempered with the right questions.

As for strengths: I try to do a realistic gut-check every night about where everything REALLY stands. I try to identify where I screwed up that day, what I would change if I could, and I try to keep learning amidst the blur of every day.  I think this is an important strength that every aspiring leader should develop.

6. Describe your philosophy on work and life. Boundaries? Balance? Blur?
Realistically, I think balance is not an every day achievement, but rather something achieved over time. Busy periods in life come and go. Right now I am in a busier period. But if you love what you do, such periods are easier to manage. I try to listen to my body. When it tells me to slow down, I try to obey. But it’s not easy.

7. Describe a good team member. How do you recognize those qualities?
The best team members take initiative. When we bring on new members of a team, we look more for evidence of “taking initiative” than past experience and skill sets. Our mentality is that, as a growing company, we are developing each other. Past knowledge is less important than the tenacity to help make Behance happen.

We also ruthlessly fight apathy at Behance. We have many heated arguments about features, systems, and user experience. Sometimes we fight, but we stick with it. We don’t tolerate apathy, and we think it is the biggest detriment to reaching the best solutions.

8. Is there a question I should have asked, but didn’t? Please let me know, and answer it.
Other entrepreneurs ask me if one needs start-up capital or personal wealth to start a business. Behance is actually a bootstrapped enterprise! We did do a very small friends/family round to get us off the ground, but we decided to bootstrap the business instead of raise major financing.

Why? Partly because we were selling some products from the very beginning and didn’t require too much capital. Partly because we wanted the team to become owners of the business. But the major reason is that we wanted to feel the texture of the business, work within our means, and develop a sustainable business model rather than lurch toward an uncertain future.

Categories
Women

A Brief History of How We Fail Women

Women were raised with the idea that we have a choice – a choice to be single or not, to have kids or not, to delay marriage, to pursue a career or not, to have it all, to live our lives the way we want to… or not. Female empowerment by way of the pill, Sex in the City, and a steady backlash towards Marie Claire all created a compelling feminist march.

And choice sounded good until hitting the reality of biology.

Feminist back-tracking all the way to mainstream 60 Minutes and others inundated female consciousness with some alarming counsel:  career women risk infertility, miscarriage and general unhappiness. So don’t wait; there is a deadline for “having it all.”

It was a lose-lose situation. Choose a career and risk having a family, or choose a family and risk having a career. The biological clock guaranteed you couldn’t have both. Many women tried – and failed – to sneak marriage in at just the right moment to have a career without kids for a few years, but not too late that the fertility window closed. It turned out only women of privilege could pull that off, and only through the latest scientific advancements.

Despite reality, choice brought about certain expectations. Women were expected to fill the same categories as men. If men shot guns and went to war, women should not only be able to do the same, but with the same performance. Women could hold public office or play sports or fix houses just as well as men.

None of that happened in large numbers however. After 30 years, women today aren’t represented in positions where men have traditionally held power, and still can’t close the salary gap. Faced with such disheartening realities, scientists, journalists, and feminists decided the reason wasn’t because discrimination and difference are still rampant (apparently, society is too evolved for such a notion), but rather that men and women are different.

The differences extend far beyond having a penis or a vagina, and supposedly prove that women simply aren’t interested or wired to thrive in traditionally male-dominated areas like say, math.

Brain scans show that women aren’t good at math so women will never be engineers, technologists, or scientists. Women are too empathetic to be CEOs. Women aren’t competitive enough to be in start-ups. Career blogger Penelope Trunk exemplifies the prevailing attitude in a recent post: “It’s outdated to think there are no differences between men and women. And once we accept there are differences, we need to study them instead of downplay them.”

Trunk goes on to make the argument (with brain scan images and all) that “we can say, with a decent amount of certainty, that the average girl is as good at math as the average boy,” because of decades of data.

Author Cordelia Fine argues in her methodical and myth-busting book Delusions of Gender, that “[those] who argue that there are hardwired differences between the sexes that account for the gender status quo often like to position themselves as courageous knights of truth, who brave the stifling ideology of political correctness,” but these claims made by so-called experts are “simply coating old-fashioned stereotypes with a veneer of scientific credibility.”

And that veneer is easily cracked. The things that hold women back aren’t biologically wired, but socially and culturally ingrained. Fine methodically turns popular science on its head to punch a giant hole in neurosexism.

“Although it’s not yet clear what it is, exactly, about neuroscience that is so persuasive, it’s been found that people find scientific arguments more compelling when accompanied by an image showing brain activation rather than, say, a bar graph showing the same information,” reports Fine.

It turns out white versus gray matter in the brain is a relatively useless determination of what creates gender difference. The real cause is something that’s much easier to understand, but harder to accept – we create it, every day.

Gender is socially constructed to the point that simply asking a person to mark whether they are male or female, or having a person write their name, will prime their behavior and actions, and affect how they achieve on tests and in life.

Most data will show men test better than women in math. But when women are tested on their math ability and told that “despite testing on thousands of students, no gender difference has ever been found,” they “outperform every other group – including both groups of men. In other words, the standard presentation of a test seemed to suppress women’s ability, but when the same test was presented to women as equally hard for men and women, it ‘unleashed their mathematics potential,’” reports Fine.

Trunk isn’t alone in propagating neuro-falsehoods, however. We’re now told that to walk into a classroom or workplace without knowledge of how the brain works (and how certain abilities are biologically pre-determined) is actually detrimental in terms of treating both genders equally.

Well-loved VC Fred Wilson recently posted an interview with his wife Joanne Wilson in which she argued gender difference starts “from the time you come out of the womb. Boys gravitate towards blocks. Girls gravitate to the dolls. That’s a generalization but in general, its true. I look at my own kids – my son, gamer extraordinaire. My daughters used to play those games but then they lost interest.”

Wilson is wrong on both accounts – as a result of gender priming and salience, gender difference starts far before a child exits the womb.

“Women who knew the sex of their unborn baby described the movements of sons and daughters differently,” reports Fine. “All were ‘active,’ but male activity was more likely to be described as ‘vigorous’ and ‘strong.’ Female activity, by contrast, was described in gentler terms: ‘Not violent, not excessively energetic, not terribly active were used for females.’”

And the gravitation for young girls and boys towards certain types of toys is not because of a biologically ingrained or wired reason, but because children start learning the gender ropes early on. Fine reports: “As they approach their second birthday, children are already starting to pick up the rudiments of gender stereotyping.”

It is no mistake that having not achieved equality by choice, or through the impossible success of “having it all,” that women are now being told that they are just born that way (as women) with all the rules and limitations the gender entails.  It is no mistake these supposed biologically ingrained differences are too large to surmount. It is no mistake that while consciously reported beliefs are modern, progressive and indicative of an enlightened and evolved society that unconscious actions and behaviors are remarkably reactionary and indicative of the large discrimination, difference and inequality that still exist.

It is no mistake gender is one of the most salient social constructions. And it is no mistake the construct consistently fails women.

Categories
e-Commerce

Why E-Commerce Needs to Stop Aggregation and Start Getting Social

Most of us would agree that the internet is biased towards social connection, yet many e-commerce or f-commerce experiences are not. In the olden days, bazaars weren’t only about consuming “stuff,” but were a social space to meet up with friends and exchange information.

Today, instead of a peer-to-peer economy, we have relationships with our brands. We don’t learn what’s happening in our world, but instead learn how much smaller the new iPad is.

The mom blogosphere in particular has risen to fill that void, up to a point. Bloggers and readers exchange ideas, rumors and facts that matter to them, but companies quickly co-opt the majority of well-intentioned blogs to sell more stuff instead of creating more social value. Ultimately, such actions have degraded blogs to what we have today: a list of product features and giveaways.

Companies do this because of their inability to embrace nuance, being solely dedicated to the dollar. You can see this play out in how companies structure themselves. Many companies create an e-commerce site that is simply an inventory list with no social value whatsoever. This means that many other companies can then take advantage of those sites because they don’t offer anything except a price on a product. So those other companies rise up another level of abstraction and become a search engine or aggregator, which creates even less value than before.

What we’re seeing now, as a result of the recession, is that you can’t just keep abstracting how you make money at a higher and higher level. Indeed, each time we distance ourselves from the most basic of human interactions – that is, a face-to-face conversation – the more dangerous it is for our economy.

Take a look at Appaloosa, a hedge fund that employs 250 people and Apple, a company that employs about 35,000 people and earned around $6 billion in 2009. “Appaloosa, the hedge fund, earned about as much as Apple in 2009 by speculating on… well, we don’t really know,” argues Jeffrey Hollender.

And many would argue it was just that kind of speculation – or abstraction – that got us into all of our financial problems in the first place.

For e-commerce and f-commerce, this means an opportunity to pivot to new models by combining commerce with community to replicate the peer-to-peer economy, where value isn’t limited to dollars and point of sale, but expands to include the concept of sharing and access just as it would in real life.

Ultimately, that is what every e-commerce site should be doing – not attempting a relationship between brand and customer, but enabling connections and conversations between customers.

Which even in this age of social media, very few companies do successfully.

Categories
Introduction

Never ask the end

Welcome! The impetus for this blog is briefly, “the urge to inhabit a more intelligible or a less mysterious world.”

Or at least one that’s more interesting than Charlie Sheen.

The blogosphere is shifting. Few sites find the happy medium between snark, gloomy prose, and snappy self-effacement. Kontrary aims to be well-written, lively and smart, and will act as my continuous, unconditional activity of trying to understand what’s going in the world.

That means Kontrary will pick up where the rest of the web left off. The site will provide analysis and opinion on how we live and do business, unearthing incremental and emerging changes in thinking, products and processes that are relevant today and might change everything tomorrow.

I think you’re going to like it.

So, I’m asking you to register for full access for $5/mo. Give it a chance.

– I will be raising the monthly rate after the initial launch. If you’re at all interested, I would strongly encourage you to register now.
– You can cancel at anytime so there is no risk and nothing to lose.
– Learn more about why I’m charging here >

I hope that you will register to support me, to support my writing, to engage in a new experiment, yes, but mostly I hope you will register because you’ll learn something on Kontrary. And that is worth something.

Register now >

Thank you in advance. I’m excited to take on something big, new and intimate, and I’m looking forward to having the support of readers like you. Remember, this blog won’t be for everyone, so know that you can cancel your account anytime – there’s no risk and nothing to lose. I will publish new posts starting tomorrow, so don’t miss out. I look forward to raising the bar.

Register now for full access >