Think The Unthinkable
Can you envision a society without money? Can you conceive of a functioning economic system without corporations or in which corporations as we have come to know them play a much-diminished role? Can you imagine a truly participatory governance system beyond Congress, Parliament, or Duma? The mere prospects seem jarring, if not subversive. And yet, I would argue, if you are not thinking these thoughts, you are not paying attention. Because looking across the landscape of deep global recession, environmental crisis, and ongoing technological transformation, it is clear that we are at the beginning of a large-scale organizational transformation that will impact everything we do—from how we organize production to how we grow our food to how we govern ourselves.
It is hard to imagine this today, but people have been conducting economic activities for millennia outside of formal organizational frameworks. In such “traditional” or “peasant economies,” humans were engaged in production of a variety of goods and services in which they sold or traded with others in their geographic proximity. You knew who was a good baker, a good shoemaker, who repaid debts on time, and who was a cheat. However, such transactions were limited in scale. The genius of the types of organizations we’ve perfected in the 20th century is that they allowed us to massively increase the range and scale of these interactions by aggregating resources among strangers and by becoming institutional proxies for the kind of trust we previously reserved for our neighbors and family. We needed large hierarchical organizations in order to find, aggregate, and allocate resources efficiently at massive scales.
What happens, however, if we can increasingly find, aggregate, and allocate resources without the organizational infrastructure we’ve created? What if we do not need organizational proxies, or at least, the kind of proxies we’ve come to rely on, for most things we do? In his book “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky, professor of new media at NYU, writes, “When we change the way we communicate, we change society.” Today, we are indeed changing the communications infrastructure and are just beginning to feel the reverberations of this transformation in our economic life. Publisher Tim O’Reilly calls the infrastructure we are building the “architecture of participation,” and its existence will lead us to re-invent ourselves as a society and as individuals.
After all, organizations we have built are not pre-ordained, inevitable, or immutable creations—they are products of particular times, outgrowths of existing technological, social, and demographic forces. Or as Doug Ruskoff, writer and media expert, puts it, “Economics is not a natural science.”
The new architecture of participation will cause us to reweave the social fabric that links the individual to others and to the larger whole in entirely new ways. It will enable people to find each other, to connect and trade with each other in efficient and productive new ways that are outside of established organizational structures.
So pay attention to new organizational forms that are beginning to dot our landscape. From Kickstarter and LendingClub (new platforms for giving, raising capital, and lending); to Patientslikeme and Curetogether (grassroots platforms for sharing detailed health and treatment data); to numerous mission-oriented project organization platforms like Groundcrew; these are all harbingers of things to come. What is important to study is not whether these particular organizations will survive but the larger shifts they represent. Their design usually does not emerge as a whole from the outset. Rather, we see new structures emerge little by little from the contribution of many. In this, they resemble biological structures in which complexity emerges without a grand central design.
The emergence of new organizational forms coincides with discoveries in neuroscience, biology, quantum physics, and increased ability to model and understand interactions in complex systems. This latest scientific knowledge will usher in new frameworks for how to organize people to get things done.
Scientific management of the 20th century was a brainchild of Frederick Taylor, mechanical engineer and efficiency expert. New gurus of organizational management and design may well be people like Frans De Waal, a primatologist studying empathy and cooperative behavior in groups.
Tags: economy, organizations
December 10th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
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December 19th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Interesting – and persuasive!
Over the past few weeks, i’ve been noodling on a quite simple, “soft launch” approach to test the idea.
Specifically, I’m getting ready to offer personal “gift vouchers” of free time as a way to help good causes in our rural community.
Each of these vouchers can be redeemed by the recipient – or his/her assigns – for me to do a specified number of hours of work. I plan to number and personally sign each voucher.
Each voucher would have a link to a personal web site, describing my skills, experience, and reputation, based on feedback from users receiving from the gift voucher. (As the system grew to include other time donors, an independent site would be created to track each voucher’s date of issuance, # of hours offered, recipient, and history work/feedback.)
The new aspect of this approach would be the ability of the gift voucher recipient to choose either to use the voucher, or to barter/sell the gift voucher to third parties. These could include contractors or employees who would otherwise need to be paid via a traditional currency. The value of the voucher in each case would be set by mutual agreement between these two parties. Before setting a value, the prospective new recipient would be free to check the skills, experience, and track record of the time donor.
This approach could lead over time to the emergence of online time-based gift voucher exchanges (akin to what LoyaltyMatch.com is offering for near-currencies such as frequent flyer miles) and communities functioning without money.
I can’t believe, coming from an Ayn Rand-influenced perspective, that I’m actually moving in the direction of a society that may operate on the basis of reputation rather than money. But given that Jimmy Wales launched Wikipedia from a similar philosophical springboard, I’m optimistic that the vision you’ve outlined can become real.
Best,
Mark Frazier
@openworld
December 23rd, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Mark,
Do you know about the metacurrency project http://metacurrency.org/? They are trying to build platforms to make such non-monetary transactions possible and to scale up the system. Keep me posted on how your time vouchers are working out. I am very interested.
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Marina,
Thanks for the response!
I had an enjoyable evening with Art Brock several years ago. Your reply has just prompted me to go and register as a member of the Metacurrency community. It looks like a well-designed, deep, and potentially world-changing initiative.
Since my earlier comment on your post, an idea has sprung up for an app or mashup that can speed the launch of personal (time-based) currencies. In brief -
1. Augmented Reality apps on cameraphones will help individuals size up opportunities to exchange personal currencies with interested parties – simply taking each other’s photo.
Individuals with such AR-enabled cell phones could outline their wants and their standing offers of time/skill donations. When a conversation with another person led to a decision to share personal AR information, the app or mashup would show this information – and link the two phones to a trusted third party site where they could see summaries of past work done and explore feedback ratings earned in past services.
From this, the parties might agree an exchange rate (e.g. Marina’s 1 hour = Mark’s 3.5 hours) and commit to give one another personal time donation vouchers for the agreed number of hours and types of service. The vouchers could be redeemed by the agreeing parties, or (by mutual consent at the outset) transferred to third parties within predefined boundaries described by the issuer of each voucher on his or her AR-linked web site.
2. If the parties disagreed over the “exchange rate” for their respective time donation offers, the AR app would offer a potential solution. It would give the parties an opportunity to hold a (near) real-time auction for a given number of pledged time donation vouchers hours on eBay or on a similar Metacurrency spot auction site.
This auction – if successful – would set the market value of the individual’s time vouchers in terms of preferred currencies that other party was seeking.
I’m sure that there are a number of capabilities (secure data sharing, online dispute resolution, digital notarization, etc) that would have to be built into or tlghtly coupled with the AR app. But it seems likely that many of the pieces are in place for a mashup of a working prototype – perhaps with Square, Google, Nokia, Apple, or Amazon.
Do you think it would make sense to try to crowdsource a spec for such a mashup? If so, I’d welcome your thoughts on any next steps.
Best,
Mark Frazier
Openworld.com
@openworld
2.
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December 24th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Hmm, interesting idea. Mark, would love to be able to give you advice on this but I feel like I just don’t have enough expertise in the mechanics of how such markets work and how to set them up. However, I am all for crowdsourcing this idea–getting many people thinking about how this might work.
Also, you might be interested in this ARG we did recently called Ruby’s Bequest. Here is a link to the report http://www.iftf.org/RubysBequest. One of the ideas discussed is establishment of a “caring currency.”
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