We live intense days. Not so much so politically or historically, but from a way more interesting perspective; that of our personal lives in relation to the greater context.
These past few months, a realization has occurred to me frequently that must be similar to how people first reacted to the meme ‘time is money’. I wonder, for instance, whether we are communally going through an irrational patch when we throw ourselves into ventures that reward us for our contribution through friendship/hyperized experiences, rather than economically.
Everybody that’s familiar to the lambasted ‘time is money’ phrase would have had similar ponderings when this meme gained its notoriety half a Century ago.
We´re human and instinctively have hardened to the full extent of the words. Generally, the struggle for survival in its everyday, ‘benign’, form resembles a cruise along an elongated corridor that with a bit of unapprehensive control is not all that unpleasurable.
Now it´s time for a rethink on this; off late, our perception of ease has become augmented. Online collaboration, facilitated by swift tools, is what makes us expect greater things from ourselves, from others and from the world. That is why it is that the question of how we can eradicate monetary exchange from the platforms altogether is not illogical anymore. We no longer expect a free lunch to create abnormal situations. Everybody is in on it, that is why.
Never before did we realize the value of pure ‘peer’ would be absolute zero. The most important question now is this one; voluntary participation in online collaboration schemes enhances the love but will the schemes ultimately lead toward a productivity that can stop us from going hungry?
Initial studies into the viability of economic systems running on ‘karma’ sound enthralling. Prophets of the newest of new economics preach a message holding a sway that is strangely invigorating yet totally self explanatory. In pointing out what is going on, these guys have little to dream up. No, their message explains trends, rather than sells you something supposedly new, slimy feeling, theories. Which you instinctively fear will have a catch every five minutes.
Perhaps the catch is spread out over planes traceable by coordinates as yet also unknown to the participants themselves. But nevertheless, it’s a relief to see how the thinned out version of the forest is still revelatory of THAT MANY trees. I feel like I should be wishing for different trees or so. Does ‘bring on the trees!’ sound like the appropriate opening line for sustainable conversation by any chance?
The conversation about the recalibration of modern economics is pregnant with buzzwords, that’s for sure. They include such phrases as peer production, participation, post democracy, adventure/experience/intention/attention economy, and intellectual property. These all have one thing in common; they all provide good material for models. Slap a model on any idea that you have and which involves ‘parties’ of any sort and you’ll find that the world soon isn’t functioning the way you thought it was. This is something that a model does naturally to the untrained eye. But the world also is really changing, and that is highly visible in the models.
There is no way to tackle this subject head on in any way comprehensively, so I’ll simply just ‘dive in’ by giving you a model’s roughshod reflection of what I have been writing about thus far; how our networked realities are hyperizing human development regardless of the fact that they are cutting out monetary exchange, and how this reflects on our communal refusal to let the notion ‘time is money’ sink in.
The model could be summarized as
Consumption=Consumer -> Attention Span -> Consumer.
Robin Good, the well known self proclaimed new media master, explained how come online social media are blooming as far back as two years ago. He introduced his readers to shifting economic models, saying “The social media sharing platforms you see today blooming all around you survive from selling you the reader’s attention span, NOT the use value you have created yourself”.
The replacement of one component by another one has been the bread and butter of economists analysing social change for ages. It’s nothing new. What is new however is that Good is not hinting at a replaced component, but at merged components; Good actually points out that the reader’s attention span IS a writer’s use value.
As a matter of fact, it has always been this way, but we have never really been all that aware of this and neither has this been apparent in any economic models. The new interactive social platforms have opened a new dimension altogether. ´Time is money´ might actually read attention span = attention span. No more no less.
This is becoming the new, accepted, standard throughout the world. Successful new businesses appear to thrive on models that involve giving away. Key here is that the provision of content is no longer subject to scarcety. Now, it’s the readers’ attention span that is subject to scarcety.
So what is next? Gerd Leonhard, a music industry insider, who’s in the middle of writing a free book entitled ‘The End Of Control’ believes that there’s more to the phrase ´paying attention´ than ever before. People have easy, cheap, and unfettered access to content on the internet as consumers themselves have become the producers overnight. “Once they have paid attention in this way (note the word “paid”), a content creator or media provider can harvest a myriad of opportunities”, says Leonhard. He says that there´s still going to be some form of economic exchange at random points in the process.
He predicts that in the near future several economic models will begin to circulate through these systems and he likens the payment hesitance to people’s voracious hate for tollbooths initially; ultimately you accept tollbooths as part of life. “The tollbooth has moved up the road a bit but this is now a trusted and reliable road that will inevitably lead to the monetization point. Put the tollbooth too early and 95% of digital travelers will turn around and look for other ways to get there!”
There are others that are saying the ‘tollbooth’ won’t necessarily have to feature in all future social networks. An expert in models and the changing economic landscape, the Belgian scholar Michel Bauwens, published a number of hybrid models which show how various types of peer-informed modes of production can find their way in economic conditions of scarcity. They also show what the models based on free sharing look like. Bauwens’ models are brilliant, because they reflect a sliding scale illustrating the various cases in which producers are receding and consumers are dominating as well as the shift toward left and right of the actual exchange itself. Outlines like this are shining beacons of clarity because they facilitate a slight comprehension of a general world that is beginning to lag stretches behind the rise of an unfathomable particular.
This is the schematic Bauwens’ model.
1. consumption
Consumer -> cash -> company’s products/services made entirely by company
2. Self Service
Consumer -> choice -> cash -> company’s products/services made entirely by company
3. DIY Do it yourself
Consumer -> degree of involvement in the value chain -> cash -> company’s products/services made by the company
4. Co-design
Consumer -> customizing the product -> cash -> company’s products/services for partial products made by the company
5. Co-creation
Consumer -> actual involvement in design/production -> (cash ->) open sourced produced product ->(possibly a company or not, ie Wikipedia).
6. Direct peer production of use value with no concern for monetization
Consumer -> idea -> (cash ->) consumer produced/manufactured product. Example: couchsurfing.com.
7. Direct peer production of use value with concern for equitable monetization
Consumer community-> a commons -> peer production -> cash -> equitable production and commerce
8. Direct production of use value by groups with commons-oriented business ecology
Customer community -> ecology of business producing marketable, scarce goods through a foundation on non profit basis -> consumer consumes. (Linux)
9. Direct production of use value by individuals with monetization of attention through proprietary platforms
Consumer -> (Intellectual) Product on a communal (proprietary) platform -> Cash -> Consumer (Web2.0)
10. Direct production of exchange value by groups: cooperative production
Consumer communities -> cooperative format of product -> cash -> consumer (Old model of producer cooperatives).
11. Direct production of exchange value by individuals
Consumer-> product distributed using local infrastructure for distributed production-> cash -> consumer (Ebay, a person designing something that operates a machine in a far off place to churn out the product)
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these models is that they highlight the evolved forms of us trading our attention span. The ´evidence´ that the development won´t stop short at a simple attention span exchange is that marketers are finding their way into these models too. A poignant example is Facebook´s announcement last November of its advertising strategy, which allows targeted ads to be included in some of its applications. For instance, if you tell your friends about your purchases on Ebay, targeted ads will show up underneath the announcement. This is sad, because it involves a person´s life. It is also worrying because Facebook’s model is very clearly designed around garnering revenue ultimately through advertising. The popular platform had been going for a few years, building a critical mass of users first, before announcing just how it was going to ‘abuse’ them.
In some ways, the latest technology offers even more scope for these type of practices than older models did. Nevertheless, people’s direct involvement also gives them greater opportunity to object. Bauwens predicts a significant change in marketing practices ‘according to which pole is being addressed’. He believes that ‘we can expect the emergence of a new set of businesses and marketing agents, catering for the peer production polarity directly’. When this reality takes shape and gains ground we´ll have once again become defeated by powers that are, at the moment, defeatable.
On an individual level we have a chance to go back to square one economically now. If you take into consideration how direct personal exchange as described by the last model in Bauwens´ list compares to the situation of our ancestors during the pre-technological period, you’ll see the parallels. In the pre-industrial stage, people confronted the objective world much like form confronts matter. Their labor tied the two together, which is the wholesome situation of humans themselves being the mediums, linking directly to their surroundings; humans linking form and matter.
This direct link was replaced when the market economy society started off. The price we paid for more wealth was a submerged individual under a more complex system. Ever since the market economy took off, the search for mediating factors uniting the human experience to their surroundings has flaundered.
Jeremy Shapiro, a Marcuse expert, says this is because people have always attempted to achieve a unification in the realm of thought and not in the tangible relation between form and matter. He sums up a list of dualisms that he says capture all experiences of human beings in Western cilivilization thus far; these are (aside from form and matter) universal and particular, man and nature, mind and body, labor and leisure and conscious and unconscious. Attempts to unify of the two sides were driven by the fact that the relationships of dualisms used to be structured vertically; the higher against the lower. The arrival on the scene of immersive technologies might mean that the different levels are eradicated. We are beginning to figure out ways of understanding this, which leads to wholesome behavior.
Just like the arts, man´s confrontation of nature from a survival motive is increasingly finding mediation that is to some degree perfect. A healthy interiority of the relationship between man and survival is established with the help of technological tools. This is what we are experiencing right now.