The Movement for Black Lives can profit doubly from my Amazon-/Microsoft-/VC-praised designs of particular online markets. Keywords: equity crowdfunding, MFBL’s contact list, finder’s fee.
Once implemented, said markets will power 21st-century variants of the reform press and lecture circuits described in the below excerpt.
From 2007 book The Populist Vision, published by Oxford University Press:
“[T]he Populist revolt [in America during the 1890s] reflected a conflict over divergent paths of modern capitalist development.
. . . By the 1880s, two firmly entrenched parties dominated the political scene. At the national level, Democrats and Republicans held much in common as they shared a conservatism that was acceptable to the financial and corporate establishment.
. . . Progressive Era legislation in the first years of the new [i.e., 20th] century expanded the role of government in American life and laid the foundations of modern political development. Populism provided an impetus for this modernizing process, with many of their demands co-opted and refashioned by progressive Democrats and Republicans.”
“The Farmers’ Alliance [was] the largest and most important constituency of what would become the Populist coalition [of the 1890s].
. . . From its earliest stirring [in the 1870s], the Farmers’ Alliance defined itself as an educational movement.
. . . The farmers needed to organize for self-education to better engage the complex problems of modern society . . .
To get people reading and thinking required what [Alliance president Macune] described as a modern educational machine. The engine driving this machine was the reform press.
. . . By the late 1880s, the Alliance had grown to an intellectual enterprise that stretched across much of rural America . . . [The Alliance] built lecture circuits across thirty states, and a network of approximately one thousand weekly newspapers.”
“The Farmers’ Alliance . . . realized that without the political levers of control, even the best-laid business plans would come to naught. . . . Convictions about . . . political action flowed directly from business strategies.
. . . Most of the Populist ‘revolt’ took place not in the streets but in lodge meetings and convention halls, where participants pored over problems of commerce and government and adopted resolutions for the creation or expansion of state and federal agencies, institutes, commissions, departments and bureaus.”
Re: said 21st-century variants will be a huge help to MFBL
Details below.
Praise for previous versions of my market designs
From a 2004 email sent to me by Amazon.com’s first Director of Personalization:
Frank, I just spent about an hour surfing around your website with a bit of amazement. I run a little company . . . We are a team of folks who worked together at Amazon.com developing that company’s personalization and recommendations team and systems. We spent about 1.5 years thinking about what we wanted to build next. We thought a lot about online education tools. We thought a lot about classified ads and job networks. We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems. . . . I guess I’m mostly just fascinated that we’ve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe, without having a solid name for it (we call it “the age of the amateur” or “networks of shared experiences” instead of CLLCS [i.e., customized lifelong learning and career services], but believe me, we are talking about the same patterns and markets, if not in exactly the same way). Thanks for sharing what you have — it’s fascinating stuff.
From a 2004 email sent to me by an analyst at top venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson:
Hi Frank, Thanks for your time today. If you would like to provide us with further information about your [business] plan, we would be happy to review it in more detail.
From a 1998 email sent to me by the then Manager of the Learning Sciences and Technology Group at Microsoft Research:
Frank, you are a good man. Have you thought about joining this team? Your only alternative, of course, is venture capital. But their usual models require getting rid of the “originator” within the first eighteen months.
Details about my current designs
Form of the write-up
My serial novel Post-Romantic Comedy: A Startup Comedy
Re: startup comedy
Via equity crowdfunding, readers of PRC will be able to own part of my planned startup. After my startup is funded, the 1.0 market specified in my business plan will be implemented and PRC will be used to:
- raise awareness of the (coming) website
- showcase site users (e.g., MFBL-ers)
- spin off complementary startup comedies
Re: the making of PRC
Since 2006 my primary focus has been learning how to run marketing and site-user showcasing as a profit center. More precisely, how to manage an analytics-savvy variant of Alloy Entertainment, a book packager and television-programming producer that was acquired for $100M in 2012. In 2011 I became aware that the U.S. Congress was working to legalize equity crowdfunding.
Re: said 1.0 market
A next-gen variant of LinkedIn that will feature:
- a market for the advertisement spaces on solo-blogger blogs (e.g., portfolio blogs)
- a virtual currency (cash transactions will be supported also)
Prices in this virtual currency will contain/reflect only truthful peer ratings of work samples. Ratings of this kind are a top predictor of work performance, according to a much-cited meta-analysis of 85 years of personnel-selection research (3580 citations as of August 1, 2016). So prices in the virtual currency will be ideal for ranking people within individual job/skill categories. These rankings will make it much easier for people who best complement each other to identify one another. The site will be named Adver-ties.
Precedents for Adver-ties:
- Google’s PageRank search algorithm (first use of hyperlinks to inform search results)
- Peer assessments associated with popular MOOCs
PageRank 1.0 was based on insights from social network analysis that were decades old when PageRank was conceived.
Number of search engines launched before Google: 20.
From 2013 paper ‘Tuned Models of Peer Assessment in MOOCs,’ co-authored by several employees of MOOC startup Coursera:
Peer assessment — which has been historically used for logistical, pedagogical, metacognitive, and affective benefits . . . — offers a promising solution that can scale the grading of complex assignments in courses with tens or even hundreds of thousands of students.”
IMPORTANT: Bloggers will be able to parlay a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in virtual currency into cash via sales of (other) ad spaces, and via subscriptions.
From a February 2, 2015 article on GigaOm.com:
Ben Thompson launched his site, Stratechery, in April of last year as a fairly unknown blogger — certainly not a household name, even in tech circles — with a tiered “freemium” subscription plan that was based primarily on long, analytical blog posts and a daily newsletter with similar content.
Within about six months, he had over a thousand subscribers paying him $100 a year for access to his newsletter (the shorter daily posts on the website are free). That meant an annual revenue run-rate of about $100,000 — enough to make it a living, along with some speaking and consulting . . .
Thompson says that he just passed the 2,000-subscriber mark, which means he now has a revenue run-rate of about $200,000 a year (the “churn” rate, or the rate at which subscribers drop off, is less than 10 percent he said). And this proves a niche model that serves a specific interest group will work, Thompson argues — as well or better than a model that relies on mass advertising revenue.
. . . [Andrew] Sullivan’s own success helps prove this case as well: in just a year, the Daily Dish blogger managed to convince more than 30,000 subscribers to contribute money, and by last year was pulling in close to $1 million in revenue solely from subscriptions. That may look sad compared to the revenues of a site like BuzzFeed or Vox, but it’s an amazing success for a small blog.
FUN facts
Popularizing Adver-ties will be foundational for establishing the most popular online market for customized education (CE).
The CE market will help MFBL-ers amass competency-based education (CBE) credentials (e.g., amass via building a case for reparations).
Re: CBE credentials
From an October 29, 2013 article in The New York Times:
To be accredited, universities have had to base curriculums on credit hours and years of study. The seat-time system — one based on the hours spent in the classroom — is further reinforced by Title IV student aid: to receive need-based Pell grants or federal loans, students have had to carry a certain load of credits each semester.
. . . In March of this year, the Department of Education invited colleges to submit programs for consideration under Title IV aid that do not rely on seat time. In response, public, private and for-profit institutions alike have rushed out programs that are changing the college degree in fundamental ways; they are based not on time in a course but on tangible evidence of learning, a concept known as competency-based education.
. . . Frederick M. Hurst, who directs Northern Arizona University’s new Personalized Learning Program, says that competency transcripts do a better job of communicating a graduate’s value to employers.
From an April 15, 2015 article on InsideHigherEd.com:
The U.S. Department of Education has granted federal aid eligibility to two new academic programs that do not rely on the credit hour — a form of competency-based education called direct assessment. So far six institutions have earned approval from the department and regional accreditors for direct-assessment programs.
From an October 26, 2015 article on InsideHigherEd.com:
In just two years, we have gone from a handful of CBE programs and almost none offering direct assessment — the unwieldy name for CBE programs not tied to the credit hour — to more than 600 institutions working on such offerings.
More re: Adver-ties and the CE market will help MFBL
From 2016 book This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century:
After two years of research, Chenoweth crunched the numbers. Examining the first data set of 323 campaigns [i.e., social movements], she . . . found a direct correlation between the success of a campaign and the popular involvement [in it.]
. . . Chenoweth found that, in fact, “no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population[”] . . .
This is not an insignificant number: in the United States, 3.5 percent of the population would mean gaining the support of some 11 million individuals.
. . . Spurring people to this level of engagement is not easy.
From 2011 book SuperCooperators, by Harvard professor Martin Nowak:
“Whenever individual behavior is relevant to the public good, it should itself be made public to avert tragedy. Advertising is critical. . . . We need new ways to advertise how people behave.”
From the chapter in 1995 book The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word that Moved America titled “Bearing ‘The Gospel of Freedom’: The Mass Meeting”:
[T]he mass meetings held throughout the South . . . provided a continuous social commentary on fast-breaking events, a forum for information and tactical planning, a school for correction and instruction in nonviolence . . .
More re: PRC and spin-off startup comedies will help MFBS
From 2015 book Humor and Nonviolent Struggle in Serbia, published by Syracuse University Press:
This book examines . . . the growing popularity of humor in the protest repertoires of activists around the world. Drawing on the insights of the 1996–97 protesters and Otpor activists in Serbia . . .
From 2016 book This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century:
“The model that Otpor developed has been studied in dozens of other countries and adapted to local circumstances in widely varied parts of the world.
. . . When asked about their formative influences, Otpor’s founders were fond of citing Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”
“[A] group of student revolutionaries in Serbia [i.e., Otpor] struggled in the 1990s with their own questions of [organizational] structure and mass protest. The marriage between the two that they forged would represent a major breakthrough: a form of momentum-driven mobilization that could sustain the energy of uprising over multiple years — and that could prove powerful enough to topple a tyrant.”
More re: the upside potential of my planned startup
From 2008 book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns:
Students need customized pathways and paces to learn.
. . . The second [phase of the disruption of standardized education] will be the emergence of a user network, whose analogues in other industries would be eBay . . .
Disrupting Class was co-authored by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, originator of the canonical models of disruptive innovation.
From 2015 book The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere:
“I asked Michael [Staton, a partner in a venture capital firm focused on education and technology] to introduce me to some of the startups that he found most exciting . . .
[Clayton] Christensen was cited ad nauseum by everyone we met.”
“The University of Everywhere will solve the basic problem that has bedeviled universities since they were first invented over a millennium ago: how to provide a personalized, individual education to large numbers of people at a reasonable price.”
“[Venture capitalist Michael] Staton made a[n] . . . argument [about major technology shifts] in the offices of Learn Capital, using a series of graphs and charts. The first chart featured four circles. In the upper left corner there was a small circle that said ‘Enterprise Software, $0.3 trillion.’ Next was a bigger circle that said ‘eCommerce, $0.8 trillion.’ Then ‘Media & Entertainment, $1.6 trillion.’ Then a big yellow circle taking up more than half the screen that said ‘Education, $4.6 trillion.’ Each circle represented the size of a global market.
. . . According to one set of estimates from the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development, there were about 1.8 billion people in the global middle class in 2009. . . . By 2030 it will be 4.8 billion strong. . . . Even after adjusting for . . . inadequate primary and secondary education and other factors, the number of additional people who will want a college education over the next twenty years could exceed the number of people who have ever been to college in all of human history.”
From the August 2000 article in Business 2.0 magazine titled “Peter Drucker, the foremost business thinker of our age, tells what is wrong (and right) with the New Economy”:
[Drucker:] The continuing professional education of adults is the No. 1 gross industry in the next 30 years . . .
All told
MFBL-ers and MFBL supporters can profit doubly — and maybe ENORMOUSLY — by owning part of my planned startup.
So MFBL can expect to earn a finder’s fee by alerting its members and supporters to this equity-crowdfunding opportunity.
Addenda
The first spin-off from PRC will be a prose-centered online serial titled Sexcerpts and the City.
SATC will center on the production of a (doubly fictional?) prose-centered online serial titled Girl Groups.
The first season of GG will be set in 1959, at and around the Brill Building in New York City.
From 2005 book Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era:
[T]he music not only embodies a long-gone era but anticipates and speaks to our own. Expressing the optimism and outrage of the early civil rights movement, it amalgamated black, white and Latino sounds before multiculturalism became a concept . . . and integrated audiences before America desegregated its schools.
. . . [T]hese songwriters . . . pioneered a distaff doo-wop, the girl-group sound . . .
From 2002 book Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970:
Many contemporary observers described the fifties as the Age of Anxiety. . . . To all this, a large segment of the young said no, first through the music . . .
My Jewish mother, née Aronow, will be the basis for the female lead in GG. My mother was born in 1937, grew up in Brooklyn, received her bachelors from The Fashion Institute of Technology in 1958, worked in NYC during the Brill Building Era, and a few years into her career became the first woman at her company to hold her managerial position.
From Always Magic in the Air:
This is the story of seven songwriting teams, fourteen men and women . . .
All but one of them was Jewish, and Greenwich, the odd woman out, is half Jewish. Most of them were born or grew up in Brooklyn. . . . As Brooklyn Jews, raised on the Rosenbergs and Jackie Robinson, they developed a political and racial awareness . . . [T]hey fell in love with African-American [music] and, at the height of Puerto Rican emigration to New York, Afro-Cuban music.
. . . [T]hey helped create modern soul music . . .
