<![CDATA[I've been writing a bit every evening, using comments or postings on Facebook as a prompt. When something captures my attention, I start writing, trying to take an analytic view in the case below of riff on the 2016 Presidential campaign. Some replies on Facebook become a complete idea sometimes.
For example, this evening my friend Scott Anderson commented on an article I posted about Donald Trump.
He wrote: Is he worse than Cruz? They are all bat shit crazy
And the improvisation started:
They’re both in the batshit crazy category, but it is so batshit crazy inside that category that you can never say which is currently more batshit crazy.
You may think one is batshit crazier than the other with a high degree of certainty and just then, with an audibly sharp “Frack,” the other goes batshit crazier to take the lead. I haven’t been able to test it, but I theorize that this happens several thousand times a second. The egos of Trump and Cruz are so massively bat shit crazy that the pressures must be intense. If we could tune into the signal, see the singularity of batshit craziness in the Republican primary, where would that insight lead us?
How about Gore/Warren, with Bernie Sanders designated to become Attorney General or Secretary of Health and Human Services, against Rubio/Kasich (Strident and Duller)? That’s my prediction. Gore’s too rich now to be bought, an idea the Trumpies seem to value, and he could tap the Kennedy era spirit of reinvention in the face of global warming. Gore has the money, and could bring plenty of Democratic money, to battle the Koch Network. Finally, he can take the mantel of economic growth from Bill Clinton, something Hillary can’t do. Just spitballing that Gore idea.
Jump in, Al Gore, jump in! [End improvisation]
I’m going to keep this up. I’ll post the complete ideas that emerge. Some of these will be steps toward broader consequences of the election, but I’ll write about technology and business, too.]]>
<![CDATA[The following in response to Joe Eisner on Facebook:
Maybe Trump will be the man who sells the world. He and his sidekick, Vladimir Putin, will have a reality show that satisfies their insatiable egos. We’ve lived to see the stranger become truth and everything, from the economy to political decisions, fiction.
I hope his presidential reality tv catchphrase will be “Come on Vlad, let’s find some broads” instead of the insidious evil in “Build walls and burn the disagreers–we’ll rebuild at a higher margin per square foot,” which seems to be his current game plan.
Your friend in confusing times. Etc.
Our ancestors lived in various golden and guilded eras, which counted only money as outcomes. The new aspect of our times involve the use of social capital massive advantage. A rich television star and a democratic socialist are leveraging those uncounted advantages this election cycle to rally apparently powerful political bases.
I suggest our current economic-political environment be referred to as “The Age of Guile.” Cunning use of social capital produces a Trump, on the one hand, and a Bernie Sanders on the other. Bernie uses more truth than Trump, as a recent Washington Post analysis, which is debated here, as all analysis ought to be. Nevertheless, Sanders hones his message to be attractive to his base, who are prepared to repeat it in social media wherever he says it, very much like Trump. That’s why Bernie Sanders can marshal millions of dollars in small donations each month without a lot of spending. Trump has broken all records for campaign spending efficiency using the same strategy.
Guile can be used for good, as the Star Wars franchise demonstrated in its first trilogy, when the Force triumphed over evil. Since then the Force has always been on the struggling side of the Skywalker family’s internal battles. Likewise, there seem to be more quiet bigots in waiting for Trump than there will be college kids fired up by Senator Saunders.
Guile has outwitted the Republican and Democratic establishments. Rabid libertarian capitalism has more money to throw behind its candidate than all of academia combined. Wealthy guile is likely to triumph over rambunctious age combined with a youth movement, and only if Sanders can get past Hillary Clinton.
Trump looks like the potential winner who is most tyrannical of all available choices. He’s emblematic of The Age of Guile, and guile’s most dangerous practitioner.]]>
<![CDATA[What does the local on-demand economy mean to companies and their customers? In this keynote address at BIA/Kelsey NOW, Mike Boland and I explain the rise of logistical systems for small business and individuals and how it changes the nature of work. In a nutshell, society built the old economy to keep needed resources on the bench and ready to work. Today, work will be assigned and completed through systems that put customers in control of the supply chains that serve them. It raises issues of fairness, as labor struggles to adapt and rethink how to build a "career."
The whole talk is on YouTube, in case the player below doesn’t load in your browser.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de3F2lUePJo]]]>
<![CDATA[Over at BIA/Kelsey's Local Media Watch Blog today…. LODE in 2015: Household service and travel market penetration currently at 3.9 percent.
I wanted to lay down a foundational number for the on-demand economy, one that reflects how the economy can grow if the rhetoric of on-demand plays out to allow workers to be paid well enough to exchange some paid household labor for household services.
Based on our analysis, the on-demand market today could be worth up to $465 billion (labor fees inclusive), based only on converting some unpaid labor to paid using on-demand marketplaces. But only $18.5 billion in revenue appears to be headed for on-demand company P&Ls this year, so current addressable market penetration is 3.9 percent. And the current addressable market is only about 16.5 percent of the total U.S. population.
Next up, we’ll start to incorporating competitive industries that may be cannibalized by on-demand. At that point, the clear opportunity for lower transaction and logistics costs for LODE companies will be ridiculously self-evident. We’re talking many new billion-dollar markets, some vertical, some horizontal and some purely geographic.
Join me at BIA/Kelsey NOW: Rise of the Local On-Demand Economy on June 12th in San Francisco! Save $100 off the already reasonably priced tickets with the discount code “MR100,” for this one-day briefing and discussion on the Local On-Demand Economy.]]>
<![CDATA[For the past several months, I've been working with BIA/Kelsey, a long-time local media analyst and banking firm, to quantify the Local On-Demand Economy. We'll be holding a conference, NOW: The Rise of the Local On-Demand Economy, at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on June 12th. If you use the discount code “MR100,” you will receive $100 off the ticket price (currently $495 and going up to $595 in mid-May).
This is a convergence of several technical and socioeconomic trends, including automation (keyed entry record-keeping is dead, along with many of the jobs that perform that function in the enterprise), sharing (the eschewing of “stuff” and emphasis on the value of time and experience, the build-out of the last logistical mile that brings enterprise metrics-driven efficiency to the small and medium-sized business, and the end of full-time work as a means of keeping skills in-house even when they are not immediately needed.
There are many issues to discuss and explore in the Local On-Demand Economy, from the potential commodification of labor, including in specialized fields, to the problems of supporting a thriving middle class that works essentially entrepreneurially, for themselves across many different organizations and customer communities. Join us on June 12th to get a bead on the Local On-Demand Economy. Use the discount code “MR100” to save $100.]]>
<![CDATA[I'm working on a project with long-time local media research and banking firm, BIA/Kelsey, to create a new series of sponsored white papers that explore key issues in the local media market from an objective perspective, offering new options and approaches to profitable engagement in local markets.
Our first paper, Optimizing Local Marketing: SMB Marketing Needs Do-It-With-Me Models, which is sponsored by Vendasta, published today. We’re leading a discussion at LinkedIn, which I urge you to join. Do download the paper now and share your thoughts on how to make local marketing work in the LI forum.
The paper examines the pressing need for consultative marketing services that blend easy-to-use digital presence management tools with hands-on marketing expertise for companies that are too large to continue to market on an ad hoc basis and too small to hire and retain full-time marketers while paying for expensive enterprise tools that are often overkill, and over-priced, relative to the SMB’s needs.”
Specifically, it’s the “troubled teens,” when a company is between 10 and 19 employees, that represent the greatest opportunity for local marketing services players to step into a startling gap in success. Even as smaller and larger firms continue to grow, albeit with very high failure rates among the smallest businesses, it is the teen companies that fail at a rate more than an order of magnitude greater than other businesses of any size.
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Categories
Why, I wonder, are we…
<![CDATA[Over at Doc Searls' excellent VRM list, there is a discussion about “governance.” Some like the word, others hate it — the concept is naturally troubling for engineers who generally ignore abstractions. But this is an inevitable crossroads for any large-scale systems development. It’s the Technologist’s Bane: We still have to do society, there’s no building successful systems that will ignore social priorities. That’s what we are arguing about here – the “governance” of the Net, the organization, the partnership all need at every level to be negotiable within a reasonable range in order for transactions to have novel outcomes not reinforcing of previous models.
Government served this function, as the setting for negotiation and enforcer of rights, but we’ve hit the limit of governmental flexibility and responsiveness – thank you, Congress – when crossing the national-transnational boundaries that the Net naturally crosses with impunity. Here, where people’s lives are shaped and reshaped by the system, we cannot shrug off the hard problems because of a distaste for politics, allocating them to the future, so we can “figure them out later.”
This is where trust meets the road, where the cogs have to be aligned, where our initial agreements will be born. Right here is where VRM must say “the battle of all against all” is over and a new alternative exists that can be understood easily and intuitively by all while producing novel socio-economic outcomes.
While working with Dee Hock’s Chaordic Alliance, which worked to establish organizational models that could be adapted, and adopted to specific needs, I repeatedly saw the governance argument derail implementation of a new organizational model. Concerns parochial often won out, preventing organizations from changing too drastically, undercutting the Chaordic model that emphasized self-organization and shared governance to ensure ongoing transparency for NEW members in relation to the founding members. Without the inflow of new members, there is no growth and the system will become moribund.
Rather than reject governance, we need to find a new respect for the nuance of social interaction involved in negotiation and decision-making so that systems can be engineered on standards that include sufficient flexibility for a wide range of experimentation within the model. Instead, people tend to either reject governance or monopolize governance by making the process opaque. Then the system becomes either an ongoing battlefield that quickly destroys the value of the system or it results in a hegemony by the early participants, who know how the system “really works,” which is just another way of saying we’ve found a way to facilitate bald political power in a new environment and you, new people, are on the outside.
This will be the hardest mountain for VRM or any variation on these ideas to overcome. It killed the Chaordic Commons. Tom’s call for analysis and reflection on the existing system and the proposed new system is the only viable next step. Some parts of the old models will still be valuable, represented here by the concepts of private property and fungible value, the ability to engineer a transactional environment in order to profit from facilitating the transactions, among others.
It’s time for experimentation and pragmatic debate.]]>
<![CDATA[Except for Dred Scott v. Sandford, today’s Supreme Court ruling allowing “closely held companies” such as Hobby Lobby to decide what forms of birth control may be available to employees, is the dumbest, most backwardly venal decision by a group of men (all male majority in the case) in the history of the Supreme Court. At least, like Chief Justice Taney, all these men will eventually die and be remembered for this kind of crony capitalist decision, which will be humiliating to live with until it is overturned.
We’ve put women in the back of the medical care bus, a man at the wheel, and decided to close our eyes to gender bias and the influence of money on health care in the United States. Too bad that the conservatives on the Court did not listen to the advice of another conservative Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, who wrote a memo while clerking for Justice Jackson in 1952, when Brown v. Board of Education ended the Scott decision’s influence on public policy by striking down the segregation of schools: “Scott v. Sandford was the result of Taney‘s effort to protect slaveholders from legislative interference.” Taney ignored basic facts to ensure a system of human slavery was sustained, the Court’s majority today is ignoring medical advice to accommodate profit combined with bigotry.
In the meantime, join me in taking a pledge:
I will not shop at any store that places the owner’s religious beliefs above the employees’ freedom to choose medical treatment. America is great when we can each choose a personal path based on our own values, not when it enforces the values of any group, majority or minority, male or female, straight or gay population, regardless of religious affiliation, on the rest of population.
We’ll always have the reversal of the decision to look forward to, which could come with just one more woman on the Court, but we have to wait for it, for now. Hopefully, not for as long as the Scott decision to be tossed out,which took more than a century.]]>