Connecting the connection economy
This is my first Medium.com post. Go easy on me, please?
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about connection and how we as traditional “consumers”, interact with products and services both commercial and non-commercial.
Organisations of all kinds still operate in a top-down fashion; think big, cigar smoking CEO, calling the shots, making the big calls. Yuck.
This might be a cliché but it’s still true. Think Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. These guys (yeah guys) might be clean living, granola griding types who are “moving fast and breaking things” but the truth is, they still have more in common with their historic predecessors with the cigars, suits and secretaries, than they do with any kind of digital revolution. Wall Street, Madison Avenue, you know the score.
They got the Venture Capital, they built an empire so they get to call the shots.
Which is great. Except that, the digital revolution was meant to be about the connection economy, was it not?
“Connection” has, I fear, become a byword for “product virility”, which is another way of saying, acquiring users (probably really cheaply).
For me, this depressing reality means that, when it comes to digital, we’re severely, woefully and detrimentally missing the benefits and opportunities that are presented to us, in favour of quick win, VC funded IPO’s; the kind of winner-takes-all approach that Douglas Rushkoff talks about.
So if the Medium really is the message, then the value that the internet could be providing us has become lost in the race to an easy buck.
To quote the Rushkoff:
“we have to stop optimizing human lives for economic growth, and start optimizing the economy for human prosperity”
Our economy continues to be based on the ideas of ownership of capital, not of information and knowledge and certainly not of connection. For many organisations, digital transformation simply means digitising existing processes, rather than seizing a supposed “once in a lifetime opportunity”. It’s a more of the same approach.
What if.
What if, instead of creating more ways to remove costs and people from a system (a company, a government, a charity) we thought of more ways to become so connected and intertwined that the idea of cost and efficiency weren’t the only reasons to consider digital transformation, but that we aim for societal value with money as a happy side effect.
For example, if you want your football team to be be part of the Deutsche Fußball Liga (the German football league) then, apart from being based in German, you’ll need to not own the whole football club. This means that clubs like TC Freisenbruch are completely owned by the fans.
Maybe it’s not so surprising then that the current FIFA World Cup holder is…Germany.
Some forms of investment have become much more connected. Think Zopa, Ratesetter and Funding Circle but even these examples are so intertwined with our analogue ways of thinking that their real value is undermined by the traditional banking system to which they are inextricably linked.
For some, Kickstarter has become the default method of raising capital. It’s a tool that, without trust, without a sense of community and shared ideas of value, could not exist.
Another example; government.
Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ll have noticed that the political world has been going through something of an upheaval recently. So much so, that my politics degree has never felt less relevant. Why?
Inequality is definitely one answer. A sense of removal of control and empowerment is perhaps another. In a survey conducted just before the UK triggered Article 50, The New Economics Foundation published a poll demonstrating that those who felt the least empowered, were the least positive about the impact of Brexit on their sense of control. NEF acknowledges the situation that many have found themselves, as well as some solutions.
The truth is however, that the major actors, not just in the UK but across the world, aren’t doing enough. The promise of a distributed economy, with greater power and influence devolved to individuals is still a pipe dream. Even Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, isn’t just content to be insanely wealthy. His aspirations are political. So whilst he presides over a “network”, his perspective is most definitely “individual”.
If we want our future to be more secure and our societies more integrated, then we need systems that enable that. Co-operatives, distributed energy, decision making that’s devolved and an approach to digital that extracts the maximum value out of the network effect.
The digital revolution hasn’t started yet.
