Out of The Loop
I cannot explain a strange ennui that
I've felt the last few days which has kept me off the air. Perhaps it's
the reaction
of
an ex-warrior to the sight
of yet another generation embracing war as the answer
to an existence not quite "meaningful" enough? ...driven yet again
by
transient
office-holders
whose
exquisite
mix of idealism and cynicism
and ego celebrates the triumph of brilliant execution performed in a vacuum
of wisdom.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not categorically against this "war," which
is at once a geopolitical necessity in the historical sense but also
a violation of the most important new way of thinking about power since
the
Magna Carta—our
new collective sense that violence in any form is an affront to our humanity.
It's a failure of our country's management to let go of its legacy systems.
Not Getting Through
My ennui may have been at
work Friday. Just
as I don't discuss science with creationists, I don't discuss the Xpertweb
design
with
people
who don't "get" the
Internet or who believe that its purpose is
to enable B2C commerce. As a result, I live in an artificial state of grace
of enthusiastic support. But yesterday I couldn't articulate the protocol's
plumbing and its larger promise to a guy who totally gets the Internet and
believes
it's
destined to connect individuals in unprecedented, useful ways. His commitment
to the assumptions behind Xpertweb may precede and exceed mine, but he
seems so
sated with the failure of people to embrace small procedural changes
that
he can't
imagine a subculture of process-driven zealots embracing the ritual
of an alternate economy, filling in forms to hire a plumber. That view seems
to me to ignore our willingness to use a form to buy a $6.95 paperback.
Certainly he can't imagine the
protocol
growing beyond the early adopters and scaling through the use of their servers. Mitch says
it's exactly the position he took before he dug beneath the surface.
It's simply a difference in points of view, but my failure
to reach him somehow felt like
part of my
larger
reluctance
to
engage
since
Wednesday. Maybe I'm naive to conduct this design study
or maybe
he knows too much to accept its idiosyncratic premise. We'll see.
Fraternité, Égalité, Trivialité
We can assume that a smooth running Peer Economy won't pump
as much adrenalin as managerial capitalism. Prosperity can be pretty
boring and a smoothly running peer-based
economy won't sound jazzy compared to the corporate vocabulary of conquering markets, killing the
competition and clawing
up the corporate ladder by launching killer products through
triumphant vendor shoot-outs and fly-offs.
Much of this silliness may attract thrill-seekers to combative businesses.
I totally understand that urge. I was a thrill junkie
most of my life, spending a lot of time on mountains with and without
snow and
wrecking
one each
of
three kinds
of conveyance—car, motorcycle and
airplane (coming
so close so many other times). Extenuating
circumstances aside, I purposely put myself in conditions that heightened
the likelihood of an inelegant person-earth interface.
We all strive to be of consequence and so we chafe at the
restraints of the pecking order. Young men are particularly
wired to challenge order and that urge is unlikely to disappear in the presence
of
P2P prosperity
as dramatically different as
is ours from our (anybody's!) ancestors. The need to distinguish
ourselves is at the root
of ambition, whether athletic, academic, entrepreneurial or political.
So where's the thrill in Xpertweb? If there is one, it would
be in participating in a new wave economic system with data structures designed
to focus company-founder levels of reward on its early and almost-early
adopters. Perhaps a lot of restlessness is driven by economic dissatisfaction
and the young and the restless will happily trade the adrenalin for the quiet
abundance of any peer economy, whether Xpertweb or another.
Or perhaps we are once again at the dawn of a fundamental
shift in the type of person who thrives in the new structure. The world was
once dominated by violent warrior kings, ruling by what John Perry Barlow
described as "the divine right of thugs." The people who prevail
now couldn't wield a battleaxe to save their family jewels, but they're better
than others
at
organizing capital. Just as they replaced the brutes before them, a new personality
type may rise to the top in a Peer Economy, though it's hard to know what
type that may be.
Might it be people a lot like you?
The Obvious Economy
My skeptical expert is convinced that people won't extend
themselves to fill out a form, even if the result might be a dramatic transformation
of their lives.
One of the keystones of my Obvious Culture notion
is that it will include an obvious economy. The tools of obviousness are
also the means to help a community to form around a successful protocol.
Each Xpertweb site will point at many others and each will publish its data
in well-documented, highly discoverable ways. But that's just the beginning
of the fun. Of course we'll deliver tools to tabulate seller ratings and
customer
generosity and all the Xpertweb plumbers in your zip code who are available
right now. Like having your own specialized OMB,
you'll be able to list the success rates of all mentors and their protegés,
by region, specialty, last name or any other way you want to view them.
But it can get better. If you've never visited Kartoo,
go there now to see how a search engine can disclose web connections graphically
as you've never imagined. Who knows how current or accurate it is, but Kartoo's
mix of various sized 3D URL orbs and their explicit links makes their data
obvious. We'll provide a similar tool to depict the growth
of the Xpertweb community.
So, using Xpertweb forms, you'll be
able to see where you stand relative to others, how various sellers and their
mentors are doing, where
the money is moving around the community and in what volumes. This might
be a microeconomy, but it'll be the best documented economy in history.
Xpertweb provides a strong incentive to its users to train others who then
train even more others. The payment rituals encouraged by
Xpertweb
roll a lot of little bits of cash into the accounts of the early
and almost-early adopters. If Xpertweb users conform to the forms generated by their own web servers, they'll transform the
lives of a lot of people who serve others
well and teach others that habit of quality service. And, should they
do so, it will be obvious to everybody just how much and how fast
high quality work and high quality money is moving through the system.
As we begin to observe, in real time, the work and money moving
among Xpertweb users, sometimes in great amounts, even the skeptical will
have
a choice
to make: Can you stand to have that much money moving past you without moving
through you?
12:22:21 PM 
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