The Rise of the Cooperative Economy, cont.
The Balance Shifts
In a society where a company is largely transient and its membership is
even more so, the traditional measures of the value of work begin to break
down. In most companies today, the value of an individual's work is based upon
a number of factors: seniority, the degree to which the individual manages
others, the degree to which his or her financial contribution to the company
can be quantified, the type of work that the individual does (especially with
regard to handling money), the cost of replacing that individual, and the
skill of the individual, more or less in that order.
Until fairly recently artists, writers and programmers were near the bottom
of the ladder, because their skills were non-managerial, they were perceived
as easy to replace, most such individuals were young, and their work was done
as part of a team, making it difficult to quantify their contributions to the
bottom line.
Sales staff, on the other hand, had definite metrics that could be easily
quantified and they were often seen as critical to a company (a good
salespersons could sell even bad services, but a poor salesperson might botch
even the best product in the world). As such, the majority of managers were
drawn from the ranks of sales and marketing, and with very few exceptions the
career path of a programmer was fairly limited and that of an artist almost
non-existent.
The rise of the cooperative economy, on the other hand, is turning that
equation largely upside down. Once you equalize the channels of distribution,
the quality of content becomes far more important than the delivery mechanism.
The process of buying and selling data services can itself become automated,
meaning that the role of the salesperson decreases. Marketing becomes more
important (and indeed a marketing guru is likely to be as hot a commodity in
tomorrows market as a programming guru), but this also becomes a more
technical field as the requirements for gaining an edge in an automated
bidding field approach high mathematical complexity.
Creative talent consequently plays a bigger role in the team/company, which
will also be impacted by such demographic factors as a shrinking number of
children worldwide (already very much a factor) and the ability of people to
work anywhere. This already is hindering companies' abilities to hire
technical talent, and is beginning to affect hiring creative talent as well.
Many company executives are bemoaning the cost of hiring people that were once
considered fairly inexpensive, but in fact this is a facet of the change in
perceived value from the sales/marketing to the technical/creative side of the
equation.
As mentioned earlier, any social revolution is ultimately fueled by a
change in the underlying system of valuation. The new valuation system uses a
very different system of determining a person's worth in work. In descending
order, the new value system seems to be shaping up as follows:
- The ability and inclination of that person to communicate information.
- The ability of that person to produce original (i.e., value-added)
content.
- The ability of that person to create information in a timely manner.
- The adaptability of an individual.
- The technical competency of an individual
- The person's relevent network.
Notice that this metric is largely network based -- it is not the number of
people that work under you but the number and reputation of the people that
are in your immediate network of associates. Similarly, the ability of a
person to adapt to changing conditions is far more critical in this
environment; a hierarchy discourages things that jeopardize one's standing in
the hierarchy while a network tends to encourage out of the box solutions. An
individual who communicates freely, who helps others and builds up a
reputation extends his or her network, and consequently the strength of the
network connections. Finally, when media is highly malleable original content
becomes more valuable -- innovative concepts, compelling stories, insightful
articles, intriguing paintings (or worlds), all of these are of greater worth
than derivative works. (Indeed, it has been said that irony has become largely
passe, as irony is by definition derivative).
As is also typical of value revolutions, the metric of success in the older
economy is largely meaningless in the new, and vice versa. In the cooperative
society, those who have the greatest worth are often relatively poor in the
competitive society. Again, this is not unusual -- those who are already well
vested in the older economy typically have little incentive to want to change,
while those that are poor in the older economy have little to lose in adopting
new ways of thinking. Certainly there are those at the edges that are able to
reap the benefits of both (it is not surprising that richest man in the world
at the moment was also one of those responsibility for building up the global
information infrastructure, but it can also be argued that the attempt to make
Microsoft an agent of the monetary economy has also significantly weakened its
influence in the communication economy).
The next several decades should be interesting. We will see the rise of
quantifiable metrics for determining value in the cooperative economy -- the
money of this new era, if you will. The competitive economy is built upon
scarcity of physical goods (whether through the cost of materials, the cost of
manufacture or the cost of distribution, all of which are in turn predicated
upon the cost of energy and the limiting of information), and every
transaction is zero sum.
The cooperative economy, on the other hand, is predicated upon the ready
flow of information, effectively limitless resources, and the strength of
interconnected networks. Of these, unlimited resources (in the form of
unlimited energy) is still some ways out, although the realization of the
finiteness of energy sources and a better understanding about the nature of
physical processes is pushing us to develop such solutions, quickly. However,
even with that caveat, the cooperative economy is no longer zero-sum.
Money will never be the same.
Manifestos are always popular, the "throw down your arms and unite against
the oppressors" screeds that claim that the revolution will bring world peace,
a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. Of late, manifestos in the
computer sphere (with the chicken in every pot replaced by free Internet
access) seem to be popular as well. This isn't a manifesto. Rather, this is
intended as a perspective about a change that is already well underway, a
movement that will dramatically alter the way that our society operates.
In that sense the paper (as ironic as the term may be) is intended to
provoke, to inform, to enlighten -- to make people think about this society
that we are creating. Our present economy is increasingly unbalanced as every
more energy is pumped into it due to the explosion of interconnections, and
when any system (and an economy is essentually a valuation system) becomes too
unbalanced it undergoes a catastrophic collapse, to quote the chaos theorists.
The cooperative economy is a network economy -- it is an emergent economy
rather than a created one, and as such it will end up superceding the
competitive economies that are currently the currency of capitalism.
These are the views of the author, who welcomes comments (and criticisms)
about what you may think about the article or what it discusses.
Email TopXML