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09 Nov 09

Richard C. Cook » Blog Archive » Thomas Greco’s “The End of Money and the Future of Civilization”: A Review by Richard C. Cook

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economic-crash economics USA money

Rather it’s about individuals, groups, and communities taking control of the monetary system at the grassroots level and creating an entirely new basis for trade than bank-owed debt.
So let them have their weapons and wars. With all due respect to those brave enough to protest, it’s time for people simply to walk away and set up their own economic and monetary systems as a prelude to a rebirth of humanity as ethical beings in sustainable communities of choice.

The keys, says Greco, are simple: “Promote the establishment of private complementary exchange systems—and use them. Buy from your friends and neighbors wherever possible. Contribute your time, energy, and money to whatever moves things in the right direction.”
3 more annotations...
- Greco also recommends that the unit of exchange for alternative currencies be based on the value of commodities—not necessarily gold or silver, which bankers and governments manipulate, but those commodities readily available within a trading system.
- ystems of exchange reflect entirely different perceptions of the world. Bank-money exchange reflects and creates a system of elite control and human slavery. Reciprocal credit exchange reflects and creates a democratic system on a level monetary playing field.
- The difference points to the fact that such reform is, above all, a spiritual endeavor. Thomas Greco has devoted decades to this quest and is one of its foremost visionaries. In an Epilogue he writes: “We will either learn to put aside sectarian differences, to recognize all life as one life, to cooperate in sharing earth’s bounty, and yield control to a higher power—or we will find ourselves embroiled in ever-more destructive conflicts that will leave the planet in ruins and avail only the meanest form of existence for the few, if any, who survive.”
  
  It’s a vision we can all strive to embrace.

09 Jun 09

Bullion and Bandits: The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold | Threat Level | Wired.com

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dot-com e-gold economics

18 Nov 08

Gapminder - Home

hans rosling
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html

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stats statistics data economics research visualization

07 Nov 08

Reinventing Money Thomas H. Greco Jr.

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economics collaboration community free-economy private-innitiative

02 Nov 08

Clay Shirky's Internet Writings

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economics culture media community open-source

24 Sep 08

better_than_free - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

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economics free-economy kevin-kelly technology network-economy

how does one make money selling free copies?
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
14 more annotations...
- When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
- In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them "generatives." A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.
- Eight Generatives Better Than Free
- Immediacy -- Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released -- or even better, produced -- by its creators is a generative asset.
- Personalization
- Interpretation -- As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000.
- Authenticity -- You might be able to grab a key software application for free, but even if you don't need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You'll pay for authenticity.
- Accessibility -- Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our "possessions" by subscribing to them. We'll pay Acme Digital Warehouse to serve us any musical tune in the world, when and where we want it, as well as any movie, photo (ours or other photographers)
- Embodiment -- At its core the digital copy is without a body.
- Patronage -- It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators.
- Findability
- A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen;
- Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse.
- In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

28 Nov 07

the cluetrain manifesto

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book business cluetrain consumerism corporate-culture e-commerce economics internet marketing manifesto marketing

We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But
we are not waiting.
Our allegiance is to ourselves—our friends, our new allies
and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that
have no part in this world, also have no future.
27 more annotations...
- We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the
  light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive,
  more interesting, more fun to play with.
- We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll
  change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of
  our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it:
  who needs whom?
- When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you
  didn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd be
  among the people we'd turn to.
- Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's
  not the only thing on your mind.
  
  Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of
  one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?
- You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.
- We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some
  better service. Stuff we'd be willing to pay for. Got a minute?
  
  You're too busy "doing business" to answer our email? Oh gosh,
  sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Maybe.
- We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
  
  If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it
  something interesting for a change.
- We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are
  creating it.
  
  You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the
  door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!
- We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and
  strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will
  not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block
  with eye candy but lacking any substance.
- However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online
  perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that
  are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.
  
  This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.
- There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One
  with the market.
  
  In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost
  invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete
  notions of command and control.
- Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect
  for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.
- Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about
  human concerns.
  
  The community of discourse is the market.
  
  Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will
  die.
- Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market
  might see what's really going on inside the company.
- Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to
  the people with whom they hope to create relationships.
- Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take
  a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their
  market actually cares about.
- Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At
  them.
- People in networked markets have figured out that they get far
  better information and support from one another than from
  vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to
  commoditized products.
  
  There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than
  companies do about their own products. And whether the news is
  good or bad, they tell everyone.
- In both internetworked markets and among
  intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each
  other in a powerful new way.
  
  These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of
  social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
- Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
- The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that
  were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
- Online Markets...
  
  Networked markets are beginning to
  self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally
  served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better
  informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from
  most business organizations.
  
  ...People of
  Earth
  
  The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day.
  Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our
  world, our place to be. Whatever you've been told, our flags fly
  free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth,
  remember.
- if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to
  >
  
  get...
  >
- Markets are conversations.
- Markets are conversations.
- Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new
  networked conversations. To their intended online audiences,
  companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.
- There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One
  >
  
  with the market.
  >
  
  In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost
  >
  
  invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete
  >
  
  notions of command and control.
  >

20 Nov 07

The wealth of networks - by Yochai Benkler - book online

www.benkler.org/...Main_Page - Preview

books-online economics gift-economy incentives network-economy social-change social-production to-read yochai-benkler

07 Oct 07

profile of Roland G Fryer at Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

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black-studies blackonomics economics nature-nurture profile roland-fryer

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

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economics freakonomics nytimes profile social-science

06 Oct 07

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

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book-excerpt crime economics freakonomics research

Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong . . . How "experts"—from criminologists to real-estate agents to political scientists-bend the
facts . . . Why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key
to understanding modern life . . . What is "freakonomics," anyway?

30 Sep 07

Kevin Kelly -- This New Economy

kk.org/...newrules-intro.html - Preview

book economics kevin-kelly network-economy technology

The new economy is about
>

communication
>
, deep and wide. All the transformations
>

suggested in this book stem from the fundamental way we are
>

revolutionizing communications. Communication is the foundation
>

of society, of our culture, of our humanity, of our own
>

individual identity, and of all economic systems. This is why
>

networks are such a big deal. Communication is so close to
>

culture and society itself that the effects of technologizing it
>

are beyond the scale of a mere industrial-sector cycle.
>

Communication, and its ally computers, is a special case in
>

economic history. Not because it happens to be the fashionable
>

leading business sector of our day, but because its cultural,
>

technological, and conceptual impacts reverberate at the root of
>

our lives.
>
So how can we make the claim that
>
all
>
businesses
>

in the world will be reshaped by advances in chips and glass
>

fibers and spectrum? What makes this particular technological
>

advance so special? Why is the business hero of this moment so
>

much more important than its recent predecessors?
>

Because communication—which in the end is what the
>

digital technology and media are all about—is not just a
>

sector of the economy. Communication is the economy.
>
5 more annotations...
- The geography of
  >
  
  wealth is being reshaped by our tools. We now live in a new
  >
  
  economy created by shrinking computers and expanding
  >
  
  communications.
  >
- This new economy has three distinguishing
  >
  
  characteristics: It is global. It favors intangible
  >
  
  things—ideas, information, and relationships. And it is
  >
  
  intensely interlinked. These three attributes produce a new type
  >
  
  of marketplace and society, one that is rooted in ubiquitous
  >
  
  electronic networks.
  >
- The key premise of this book is that the
  >
  
  principles governing the world of the soft—the world of
  >
  
  intangibles, of media, of software, and of services—will
  >
  
  soon command the world of the hard—the world of reality, of
  >
  
  atoms, of objects, of steel and oil, and the hard work done by
  >
  
  the sweat of brows.
  >
- The tricks of the intangible trade
  >
  
  will become the tricks of your trade.
  >
- "Listen to the technology," advises Carver Mead, one
  >
  
  of the inventors of the modern computer chip. "Find out
  >
  
  what it is telling you." Following that lead, I have
  >
  
  assembled these rules of thumb by asking these questions: How do
  >
  
  our tools shape our destiny? What kind of an economy is our new
  >
  
  technology suggesting?
  >

30 Aug 07

Daniel B. Klein, Rinkonomics, A Window on Spontaneous Order: Library of Economics and Liberty

www.econlib.org/...Kleinorder.html - Preview

coincidence-of-interest economics emergence mutuality social-order spontaneous-order

Rinkonomics

A Window on Spontaneous Order

by Daniel B. Klein*

May 1, 2006
An important quality of collision is mutuality. If I collide with you, then you collide with me. And if I don't collide with you, you don't collide with me. In promoting my interest in avoiding collision with you, I also promote your interest in avoiding collision with me.
7 more annotations...
- The key to social order at the roller rink is this coincidence of interest. I do not intend to promote your interest. I am not necessarily even aware of it. Still, by looking out for myself I am to that extent also looking out for you. My actions promote your interest.
- Skating on the floor of the roller rink is an example of what Friedrich Hayek called spontaneous order. The process is beneficial and orderly, but also spontaneous. No one plans or directs the overall order. Decision making is left to the individual skater. It is decentralized.
- The contrast is centralized decision making. Again, intuition tells us that the only way the complex social good can be achieved is by central planning. Yet Hayek tells us that sometimes another way it can work is "decentral" planning. He tells us, in fact, that, often, decentral planning is the only way it can work.
- Your local conditions—your opportunities, constraints, and aspirations—are best known by you. No one else comes close. College knowledge is no substitute for what Hayek called local knowledge.
- The principles find direct application in economics. Just as we want to discourage collisions, we want to encourage voluntary exchange. In both cases, the key is mutuality. Gains from trade are mutual, giving rise to coincidence of interest: In promoting my interest in gaining in a voluntary exchange with you, I also promote your interest in gaining in a voluntary exchange with me. You would not enter into the exchange if you did not stand to gain.
- But more importantly, we live in a world of mutualities. I want others not to mess with my stuff so that I can use my stuff to best participate in mutual relationships. The point is not self-centeredness; it is to center control over stuff in the owner, so that action draws on local conditions and advances mutual betterment. The bonds of mutual relationships form the vast network of society, and when its members are individually empowered and motivated to advance those bonds, we have a society that is well cared for.
- Economists who study occupational licensing agree that, rather than protect consumers, the requirements hurt consumers by restricting the range and competition of spontaneous developments.

07 May 07

Social lending gains net interest - BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click |

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economics kiva social-lending zopa.com

02 Apr 07

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Customer value and the network effect

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business ebay economics marketing network-economy network-effect social-web

In transportation infrastructure planning it has long been understood that the value of a system as a whole increases exponentially with linear increases in the number of nodes. Reason is that the network becomes more useful--you can go more places. This is known, but very frequently not taken into account,
Gupta says that he's currently

working on understanding and modeling complex network structures such as those of MySpace.
Here the issue that we are grappling with is the tangible and intangible value of customers. In other words, customers provide tangible value to a firm through direct purchases but they also provide intangible value through network effects or word of mouth.
> It is quite possible that some customers have low tangible but high intangible value. Traditional models would label such customers as low value and would miss a huge opportunity for a firm.
5 more annotations...
- While heavy markering spending is required in the early days to attract a critical mass of buyers, the network effect itself becomes a larger attractant than marketing as the business grows, allowing a company to cut back its marketing budget over time.
- (To put it another way, the network effect of a buyer on a seller was far stronger than the network effect of a seller on a buyer.
- But a recent paper by three business-school professors - Sunil Gupta, Carl Mela, and Jose Vidal-Sanz - offers a new approach for estimating the value of nonpaying, or, as the professors term them, "free," customers.
- What's the value of a customer who doesn't pay you anything? If you're running a hot dog stand, the answer is probably "zero." But if you're running a two-sided market - a market, like eBay or Monster.com or AdWords or YouTube or Digg or even Second Life, that needs to attract both buyers and sellers (or content generators and content consumers) - the answer may be "a lot."
- Customer value and the network effect
  
  March 08, 2007

01 Apr 07

CorpWatch : Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power

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corporate-rule economics globalization politics

CorpWatch : Index

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activism capitalism corpwatch economics ethics globalization politics transparency watchdog

24 Mar 07

the cluetrain manifesto - chapter seven - Post-Apocalypso

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advertising book business cluetrain consumerism economics internet manifesto marketing social

Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.

Yeah. Imagine that.
But if you think of yourself as a company, you've got much bigger worries. We strongly suggest you repeat the following mantra as often as possible until you feel better: "I am not a company. I am a human being."
9 more annotations...
- How do you speak in a human voice? First, you get a life. And corporations just can't do that. Corporations are like Pinocchio. Or Frankenstein. Their noses grow longer at the oddest moments, or they start breaking things for no good reason. They want to be human, but gosh, they're not. They want the Formula for Life -- but they want it so they can institutionalize it. The problem, of course, is that life is anti-formulaic, anti-institutional. The most fundamental quality of life is something the corporation can never capture, never possess. Life can't be shrink-wrapped, caged, dissected, analyzed, or owned. Life is free.
- And next time you wonder what you're allowed to say at work, online, downtown at the public library, just say whatever the hell you feel like saying. Anyone asks you, tell 'em it's OK. Tell 'em you read about it in a book.
- The Demonic Paradox
  
  Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or
  
  as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its
  
  philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our
  
  thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The
  
  situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system
  
  but we still carry its genes.
  
  Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist, 1991
- One thing the Net is good for is organizing markets. Especially if you're invisible and powerless, ignorant of how things are supposed to work, ignorant of business-as-usual. Especially if you're intent on end-running the empire.
- So what is the Net really good for? Besides chatting, that is. Well, there's the small matter of coordinating distribution.
- There never was any grand plan on the Internet, and there isn't one today. The Net is just the Net. But it has provided an extraordinarily efficient means of communication to people so long ignored, so long invisible, that they're only now figuring out what to do with it. Funny thing: lawless, planless, management-free, they're figuring out what to do with the Internet much faster than government agencies, academic institutions, media conglomerates, and Fortune-class corporations.
- We will strive to listen in new ways -- to the voices of
  
  quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices
  
  of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices,
  
  and the voices that have despaired of being heard.
  
  Richard M. Nixon, first inaugural address, 1969
- People by the millions are discovering how to negotiate, cooperate, collaborate -- to create, to explore, to enjoy themselves.
- chapter seven
  
  the following is the complete first chapter of
  
  The Cluetrain Manifesto:
  
  The End of Business as Usual

the cluetrain manifesto - chapter one - Internet Apocalypso

cluetrain.com/...apocalypso.html - Preview

book business cluetrain consumerism corporate-culture economics marketing

The attraction was in speech, however mediated. In people talking, however slowly. And mostly, the attraction lay in the kinds of things they were saying. Never in history had so many had the chance to know what so many others were thinking on such a wide range of subjects.
As would soon become obvious, the Net was a powerful multiplier for intellectual capital.
48 more annotations...
- But I think the Internet still has a radicalizing effect today, despite all the banner ads and promotional hype and you-may-already-be-a-winner sweepstakes.
  
  The something special is what the Manifesto calls voice.
- The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking respect for centralized authority, whether that "authority" is the neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the corporate annual report.
- This conversation may be irreverent of eternal verities, but it's not all jokes. Whether in the marketplace or at work, people do have genuine, serious concerns.
- And we have something else as well: knowledge. Not the sort of boring, abstract knowledge that "Knowledge Management" wants to manage. No. The real thing. We have knowledge of what we do and how we do it — our craft — and it drives our voices; it's what we most like to talk about.
- From Ancient Markets to Global Networks
- Markets are conversations. Trade routes pave the storylines. Across the millennia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand.
- But because of its increasing divorce from the day-to-day concerns of real people, commerce has come to ignore the natural conversation that defines communities as human.
- These economies of scale led to enormous profits because they enabled selling a far cheaper product to a far wider market.
- Because of its effect on workers' knowledge, de-skilling is a term strongly associated with mass production. And as skill disappeared, so did the unique voice of the craftsman.
- This was de-skilling of a higher order: design, production, and marketing knowledge began to fractionate, and in some cases, to atrophy.
- In a classic reversal, what was suddenly good for America was anything but good for General Motors. The auto industry didn't see these changes coming, and as a result lost enormous market share to offshore competitors.
- Overnight, global competition turned mass markets into thousands of micro markets
- Knowledge worthy of the name is highly dynamic. It requires deep understanding, not just rules and algorithms. While machines are lousy at this sort of thing, people are remarkably adaptive and intelligent. People learn. Real expertise is changing too fast today to lend itself to automation.
- Understanding, learning, exploration, curiosity, collaboration — qualities that had been bred out of workers by industrial management — were now being desperately elicited by the All-New, Culturally Revolutionized Organization.
- Conversations are where intellectual capital gets generated.
- In contrast, genuine conversation flourishes only in an atmosphere of free and open exchange.
- The Net represents cheap natural resources (data), cheap transport (the pipe itself), and most important, cheap and efficient access to global know-how.
- Instead, the future business of businesses that have a future will be about subtle differences, not wholesale conformity; about diversity, not homogeneity; about breaking rules, not enforcing them; about pushing the envelope, not punching the clock; about invitation, not protection; about doing it first, not doing it "right"; about making it better, not making it perfect; about telling the truth, not spinning bigger lies; about turning people on, not "packaging" them; and perhaps above all, about building convivial communities and knowledge ecologies, not leveraging demographic sectors.
- The New Workplace: Breaking the Silence
- "Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses —
  
  for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it..."
  
  Herman Melville
- A new kind of logic is emerging, or needs to. I call it gonzo business management — paradox become paradigm. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto, and we might as well get used to it. There's a huge opportunity here for individuals to keep their day jobs but at the same time to indulge their natural human bent for self-expression.
- In contrast, the Internet invites participation. It is genuinely empowering, well beyond the cliché that word has become. And corporate intranets invite participation in the same way.
- Why the denial? Could it be that companies are afraid the Internet and intranets will make people smarter? While no company would ever admit to it publicly, this is precisely what many fear. In the "good old days," consumers weren't expected to make suggestions or ask for new features. They were simply supposed to buy the product
- Networks greatly facilitate the sharing of relevant knowledge within a community joined by like interests. As a result, the lowest common denominator of informed awareness tends to be much higher online than it ever was in the context of broadcast media. Plus, this informed awareness tends to increase much faster.
- When he said, "in wildness is the preservation of the world," I bet Thoreau wasn't just thinking about old-growth trees. He also wrote a little ditty called On Civil Disobedience. There is a connection.
- More important, all of us are finding our voices once again. Learning how to talk to one another. Slowly recovering from a near-fatal brush with zombification after watching Night of the Living Sponsor reruns all our lives.
- If you're OK with this, then eat it up. There's a bulimic's dream-feast of killer kontent on the way. But if it already makes you want to puke, get angry. Write it, code it, paint it, play it — rattle the cage however you can. Stay hungry. Stay free. And believe it: win, lose, or draw, we're here to stay. Armed only with imagination, we're gonna rip the fucking lid off.
  
  There's your market.
- The carrier wave has been tuned at huge cost to deliver a single message: you are not free, you desire nothing but the products we produce, you have no world but the world we give you.
- What you'll hear is the sound of passion unhinged, people who have had it up to here with white-bread culture, hooking up to form the biggest goddam garage band the world has ever seen.
- Don't make us feel small. Remind us to be larger. Get a little of that human touch.
- The corporation pretends to speak, but its voice is that of a third-rate actor in a fourth-rate play, uttering lines no one believes in a manner no one respects.
- Consciously or not, millions of us are using the Internet to pass along this unconditional permission to millions of others. When enough people do that, something viral happens.
  > It's not hypothetical, it's happening — when we say what we think, when we feel what we say, when we listen for the music of authentic presence. We are constantly searching each other out, linking, talking, shaking things up. Consciously or not, by the very nature of the permission we give each other, we are working to bring down business-as-usual.
- Consciously or not, millions of us are using the Internet to pass along this unconditional permission to millions of others. When enough people do that, something viral happens.
- The word that's passing like a spark from keyboard to screen, from heart to mind, is the permission we're giving ourselves and each other: to be human and to speak as humans.
- Why has the Internet grown so rapidly? Why did it catch so many businesses off guard? The audience is listening because people are attracted to precisely the difference the Net provides: the sound of human beings talking with one another as human beings — the sound of a million conversations whose primary purpose, for once, is not to sell us something.
- That's how I discovered PR doesn't work and that markets are conversations.
- I couldn't wait to get back to work on Monday morning.
- What I cared about was how technology applied — or didn't — to the world of business and the actual people who worked there.
- I gave myself blanket permission: to be curious, to learn, to speak, to write.
- Who gives us permission to explore our world? The question implies that the world in fact belongs to someone else. Who gives us permission to communicate what we've experienced, what we believe, what we've discovered of that world for ourselves?
- More than any market that's ever existed, the Internet is a collection of unique individuals. I'm one of them.
- In the late eighteenth century, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham imagined a little nightmare he called a "panopticon" — a prison in which the inmates could be seen at all times, but couldn't see their jailers. A few hundred years later, mass media inverted this scenario. The imprisoning TV eye now sees nothing, yet we all watch it for clues to our cultural identity.
- The New Marketplace: Word Gets Around
- Zen master Suzuki Roshi once said, "To control your cow, give it a bigger pasture."
- The question is whether, as a company, you can afford to have more than an advertising-jingle persona. Can you put yourself out there: say what you think in your own voice, present who you really are, show what you really care about? Do you have any genuine passion to share? Can you deal with such honesty? Such exposure? Human beings are often magnificent in this regard, while companies, frankly, tend to suck.
- Sometime soon, companies will have to open up significant portions of their intranets — while still protecting their few genuine secrets — in order to create relationships with their markets rather than barriers against them.
- Sure, data security is necessary and needs to be done well. However, many corporations are desperate for firewalls because they don't want the market to see they have nothing worth stealing inside them. That's not security, it's paranoia. You can't identify best practices without sticking your neck out — but if you don't, you risk premature death. You can't invite customers to contribute design ideas by holding them at bay.
- The broadcast mentality isn't dead by any means. It's just become suicidal.

the cluetrain manifesto - chapter six - EZ Answers

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advertising book business cluetrain consumerism economics internet manifesto marketing social

chapter six

the following is the complete sixth chapter of

The Cluetrain Manifesto:

The End of Business as Usual
EZ Answers

Christopher Locke and David Weinberger



Tell ‘Em What You Told ‘Em
14 more annotations...
- Mass production led to mass marketing, which led to (ta-da!) mass media. Broadcast applied the fundamental mass-production brainstorm to marketing communications. This development signaled the dawn of junk mail. Corporate speech became mass produced "messages" jammed into a one-way spam cannon aimed at a dream that hasn’t faded since: interchangeable consumers.
- What Quality really meant was: "We changed our minds. Please don’t check your brain at the door."
- Markets and workers are once again crafting their own conversations, and these conversations are also about craft -- things we do that we actually care about.
- And increasingly, we value only two qualities:
  
  The engagement and passion-for-quality of genuine craft.
  
  Conversations among recognizably human voices.
- So what, if anything, can businesses do at this juncture? They can begin by searching out people within the organization who understand what’s going on. In almost every case, they’re there. Make friends with them. Make friends with the marketplace again. Start listening. Find your voice. Then start talking as if your life depended on it. It does.
- The Web is inherently and intrinsically free. Businesses will perceive this fact as either a blessing or a curse depending on how much they value freedom, a quality of mind and heart not typically underscored in the average corporate mission statement.
- This leads to a funny conclusion. Ironic, actually. We ask questions about the future of the Web because we think there’s a present direction that can be traced into the future. But in fact, the questions we ask aren’t going to predict the future. They will create the future.
- So, our hearts ask questions, with dread as well as excited curiosity, about the new public world and its relation to the private. What is the relation of our night selves and our day selves, our self behind the company walls and outside of them? Why do we think of our private selves as our real selves? What would privacy be like if it weren’t connected to shame? What is the fierce price we pay for every desire, every whim, every idea we stamp "Secret"? To what degree are shame and embarrassment the expression of the will to control? If we abandon the illusion of controlling private behavior, what type of public-ness will we have? How is the control we yearn to exert over the behavior of others -- at work and beyond -- identical with the white-knuckle control we need to preserve our selves?
- More questions meant to distract us: How will we know what’s junk on the Web and what’s worth believing? How will we avoid being fooled by anyone with a plausible story and a Web address? What will be the new criteria, the new marks of authenticity? These questions express a longing for someone to take charge of our knowledge. We want experts and authorities, just as we crave censors more than we crave sex and prefer certainty to freedom.
- But our hearts have a different set of questions: when we can’t rely on a central authority -- the government, the newspaper, the experts in the witness box -- for our information, what new ways of believing will we find? How will we be smart in a world where it’s easier to look something up than to know it? How will we learn to listen to ideas in context, to information inextricably tied to the voice that’s uttering it? How can we reverse our habit of understanding matters by jumping to further levels of abstraction and instead learn to dig into the concrete, the personal, and the unique, told as stories worthy of our time?
- We’re asked, How can you tell if the person you’re talking with is really the person you’re talking with? when our hearts want to know what people we will really become online and what having a disembodied identity will mean.
- We are asked, How are the poor people of the world going to get Internet access? when our hearts want to know how we can connect with the poor of the world, because there isn’t a single person we don’t want to talk with. And once we talk, we know the conversation will make palpable the injustice of today’s economics.
- The Cluetrain Hit-One-Outta-the-Park Twelve-Step
  
  Program for Internet Business Success
  
  Relax
  
  Have a sense of humor
  
  Find your voice and use it
  
  Tell the truth
  
  Don’t panic
  
  Enjoy yourself
  
  Be brave
  
  Be curious
  
  Play more
  
  Dream always
  
  Listen up
  
  Rap on
- The Web got built by people who chose to build it. The lesson is: don’t wait for someone to show you how. Learn from your spontaneous mistakes, not from safe prescriptions and cautiously analyzed procedures. Don’t try to keep people from going wrong by repeating the mantra of how to get it right. Getting it right isn’t enough any more. There’s no invention in it. There’s no voice.