Daring economy — need you now

how to understand sharing econ, and WORLDS FIRST WIKI SEARCH

In olden days — the structure of hierarchies in society made barter easier, also the crushing conservatism which we may have forgotten about was part of that exchange— but we are indeed to find out within ten yrs or so (oil´s reign is all but over) what to do about it. So coupled with change we get the old society as a stalker — coming back to haunt us…

If you find this to be outside of your responsability, I can only say that it is written for entrepreneurs mostly.

So to me UBER (however despiccable) is the future — and indeed this is a kind of barter — with many variations barter is in our future due to its scientific efficiency (thermodynamics) — history is seldom changed by choice, rather it is most times changed of necessity. The past could be the future, religious people are weird about time, I am not. No disrespect, it is just that the revelation is not science. We are not dealing in wishes, but in realism.

Everything was so much better in the past; are you serious — try dentistry! The sharing economy is here to stay, but the explanation might be in our past, it is not putting on mediaeval costumes, I assure you. So what can we put up to defend ourselves? It is thinking hard though, that might take us over our next hill. Indeed, if we (human kind) are entering a slightly lower energy level, bartering is “better” — most people who (like me) are enthused by this prospect are missing how traditionalism will creep back in — we must first see how rational exchange is in need of anonymous transactions — barter instead is the most un-anymonous of all possible transactions. The great thinker Jeremy Rifkin imagines how we are entering a new age, he calls it zero-marginal cost society, he like many others (including me and possibly you) are missing how we fled unfreedom of traditionalism. I will not take on this subject (traditionalism) here, but a good place to start, is In wake of the affluent society by Serge Latouche 1993. Zed books (orig. La Planète des naufragés, Paris 1991).

What do you work with?

By turning the tables on the “contract society” for lack of a better word — you get conflicts with people — but if you can deliver at a lower price…

We, as specie of consumers, are ourselves packages — our social and proffesional roles are parcels of expected outcomes — packaged and sealed.

Then starts the journey of explaining to these folks what is going on, sure… (how to step out of that big carton).

You may become your occupation, but all of a sudden you can meet real people in… (we like to stick to the irrationalness of anynomous).

Real life, not just “contract suckers”, well I will be glad to explain!

The first question is how to stop being anynomous, and yet pack your things in a commercial wrapper. WHAT YOU REALLY SHOULD ASK YOURSELF IS, HOW DO I CUT IT UP INTO PARCELS OR PIECES ? (see further below, for more clues to be sharing). This is UBER and sharing/ chunky open source.

History

In old and not too distant times some occupations had flavour, the maker of shoes was appreciated when and if he came to your village, the maker of scarce things had an advantage, his salary may not have been great, but he had that respect. And know-how. Respect. Packages. Hrm. Where were we?

I would like to argue that the sharing economy is a bit like business in the old days — but there are some differences, which I will make agonisingly clear. Did you know that ´tradesman´ in old English litterally means a walking man, since ´traede´ in in all of the Nordic languages has the meanings of taking a step, and walking. Sharing economics is not just going back. Trap is the closest word to ‘traede’, or rather trip, as in step. But the future is not a trap, it is the future, full stop.

NEED YOU NOW — a daring move

DARING The sharing economy is seldom thought about deeply; what is it really, and I will shoo the idea that it is a fad away shortly, and why is it coming back so early this spring? There is a short answer to why it is creeping up on us (in my opinion “again”) and that is that we need each other. To calm those who wonder about my knowledge in this area, I can only say that I just rebooted/started a business according to this fad of an idea, and it worked! That was a surprise! It takes daring to be sharing! UBER needs the idea of taking a taxi to work, to run it´s business — in other terms “demand” has to be there. And if you think you can do business without it, think again. UBER is merely used as an example here, you may dislike them, and I will not blame you. It is beside the point. In a sense being global is avoiding the question of demand, the demand bit has to be there. What UBER does is it helps demand (number of small income posts) by going global. But we lack a definition of demand (let´s say we didn´t know already) — going back to the tradesmen of olden times — what I am proposing is that in their case, that “demand” had to be there as well. In the old days there was demand as well, only we tend to forget. For those of you who did some sociology, I think about economics in a social fashion. Let´s say you have a draught-horse. Demand was evidently strong if you had no horse-shoes right now to shoe your horse, making the tradesman powerful in a way. The tradesman was there so you had to grab the bird there and then, would you want to wait one full year? So going back to UBER again, one might think that “demand” is a given, right? Answer is a big fat NO. Price is, the flip-side of demand, so demand comes from the idea of taking a taxi, in this case on the cheap.

Remember the word cheap. I would argue that government imposing taxes will not stop the trend, as they do here in my country (Sweden). When I lack proper arguments I take out my hat, and what I usually find is chaos-theory — I did that this time too. A rat!! What I found was a small enterprise is convertible as well!! Demand is still an issue though.

If you need divertissement (check out some of my other stuff)And a small word about small-scale (vs grand scale). In my piece s— here at Medium, I in fact hint at how gig/ sharing economy is VIRTUAL (holdontoyourhats) VIRTUALISATION (ok sorry) big-scale “data based” has to be faught with FIRE (it´s own element think; X) is combatted using data — the Ubers and distributed sharing models are in a sense virtual virtualisation.

NowLetsGetBackToTheText_________________________________________

Tradesmen in batman dresses

Small is small, Big is big, and small is not beautiful at all. UBER small.

So how did I come up with this sillyness? What do you get if say, you are 47 yrs and you buy a batman lego set, pour over it and start building something new? Answer; Manbat. You see I had a problem, to continue I would have had to hire people, in this new and refashioned model, I could continue anyway. It really, really surprised me, because it worked. The Washington Post has reported recently, that the first batman cartoon featured fighting some Japaneese tycoon, batman had a start in “that part” of the business first. But how did I do it? How did I change by de-volving? UBER approaches demand (as I pointed out) by being cheap but also by being global, what I am saying is any business can be remade according to the sharing model— I did it so can you-I turned my misfortune into sharing economy, i.e. my old business into a new one, doing what I used to, but as you might have guessed, what I did was change everything else, but not the core (in UBERs case it is the computer programming-the basic tenets) the core I did not touch — so all the changes had to do (in my case) with how the customers were approached and handled. I got conflicts initially, but because of my newness to the concept.

The hard edge — demand has to be there

I help people with windows, but few people can handle old windows, so I have a really, really strong edge. My cornering of the market looks much like the old shoemender or the village smith. If this was not the case all comparisons should falter. Increasingly if you can grasp the idea here that I set up my business anew, in an new way, and that I did so using UBER as a model, you will be with me all the way. But I can see how some people have their eyes glazed-over already, now please stay tuned, and you will see the light. Cardboard box speech! Come see the wonder that is, dancing rat!

Now this has enormous consequence — if true, any business can be changed into this kind of business.

I was lucky, I took windows from different customers, thereby lowering my costs, thereby changing the business I had had into a somewhat different one, many customers instead of one or two. I started making piles of money. My customers do not complain, they don´t even give a shit if my business model is right or not, it just so happens that they do without knowing it. So on the one hand it seems the time is right for the sharing, we are fed up with red-tape and anonymity, but on the other it is not a fad- how so? It is not that we have a choice, which might seem odd. My boring answer is that thermodynamically it makes sense, and yes I did some physics so I understand the words dynamic and temperature. How so? UBER (or the business model of sharing) is going to stay with us for long.

CONCLUSION

When you have a go at sharing, it takes two things A) you are not out of DEMAND, and B) the service is cut in pieces reducing TRANSACTION costs. I would compare it to bricks, or standardised packages, this is crucial. In my case customers are the packages, in the old model the windows are instead a whole. I am sure it seems odd but cutting up into pieces is strange at first but of the essence.

The relation between olden times and sharing economy in the guts of it, is similar, but very different at a closer look. UBER for instance is nothing without mobile phones-which is why looking back in history doesn´t cut it. On the other hand UBER (and they just exemplify here) is as we saw a walk to a more personal product, and I would argue all sharing-economics models now taking shape in the cerebellum of the world´s young (as I hope it does), also is sharing in another sense, namely in the sense of barter. This can be seen as a third key characteristic C). But A always ties in with C, as so many other things in life entanglements is the common reality, but one which we can use in our favour, if thought about sincerely.

WIKI SEARCH

Diderot was part of the encylopedians, meaning they didn´t look at the world with just one eye, they had ambitions to describe and catalogue the world. Joking aside, the subtitle get´s its substance from the fact that Adam Smith picked up the pin factory from Diderot (cf. Paucelle 2007). Division of labour is painful to workers, but produces national wealth — how do you reconcile the two? Smith worked out its principles.

In my business, which by nature is small, and yet could expend (is scalable) to some extent — using the idea of sharing had its difficulties. In the world we know the consumer is all-wise, you consume rationally out of budget and self-interest. In the sharing world, the consumer stops being all-wise, in fact one might allude to the needles here. In the world of consumers no contact takes place — thus anonymity is the key. The exchange is not a logic unto itself but a money-logic, a pin-factory over-seer logic. Less so in the world of sharing — the cab driver who just had a bad customer gets to clean up his vehicle, but he get´s the benifits of UBERs network to find customers (that is sharing or more litterally; BARTER). My customer has to live up to my terms, they want the job done, what they do not realise is they just entered the factory, that needle factory, being part of production there. They are the needles being produced. Some do not get it, their egos are just too large, but most of them do. You see I deliver an exclusive thing at a low price. That means DEMAND over-powers ego and control and power-games. The anonymity has to take a step to the side. The UBER driver might live in BIG CITY anonymity so to speak, but it is still one step away from anonymity. Think about it. The olden days had its share of anonymity, but today we know what full-blown anonymity/alienation is or is not. In the sharing model the factors A plus B are applied to “re-enact” solidarity in our distorted world of consumer logic. I did so can you.

Just maybe this is the step back we can take to allow Western culture to regain “meaning” again, if so we have more reasons than one (thermodynamics) to think that sharing is come to stay. I think it is because we need each-other (sociodynamics).

Many more aspects of the sharing economy come to mind, but these are the fundamentals. We are re-inventing barter in my mind. Smith borrowed some ideas about needles, so can you.

Some important real world reults and some explanation (/splaining).

As you see from the final lines, there is in the sharing economical model a seed of history, or to be more (much more) precise, it involves barter. How do I do to explain to my customers what kind of social experiment it is that I am trying on them? I came up with this; SOMETHING FOR SOMETHING, and indeed is this not as old as the hills (hence my harping about history, see above). A guy who cleans the stairs in my house is trying to make a living as a masseur, and it is not working for him (hence the second job). So when I say the fad can be applied to ANY business, let me step up to the plate, and show you what that might be. Peter, my masseur friend might add a quality to the transaction, so that he sells a product with the massage — this puts him in a situation of uniqueness — his prospects will improve (in a kind of massage+ situation) - but for sure it complicates things and at the same time creates a special product. (It avoids in my mind the obstacle: what he reported back to me as the main problem); as he said, what I do is hardly unique… But let me first make clear how the idea of — something for something ONLY applies to the customer. So with that, on to My solution (and it took me two weeks to think about it) was this one; find out what kind of faults the “industry” are committing, without a higher price steer clear of some or any (or all) of them, sell this new product to the customer (finding the customer I will not abroach, but in theory demand is there since wrongs have been righted, any or some) choose a limited geography to go with your tricks, accept fewer customers and let customers take part in (e.g. parts of handeling and paperwork, more likely) handeling of the goods themselves, or have two customers pair up to wrap crates etc — the ideas could vary according to goods or value of and/or size of goods — my idea then is once again, by choosing a geography you become unique, by choosing a set of goods or ways of handeling goods you are REALLY unique — unique pays off in a world of too much uniformity — in my own case things were indeed easier since very few can deliver the service I deliver — the strange thing is adding the more unique (even in my case) becomes a blessing. To those who have studied economics, the new age is an age in which people (as Alvin Toffler points out) where we become producers all of us — creating your own product in this brave new world — heavy stuff! Almost like creating your own currency…

For the cybernetically atuned, we can see how in shifting times, the economic fallacies are often at stake, the master resource is at stake in any historic shift.

Fractalogically (using pure logic, this equates as follows)

idea

Sharing economy is a currency

Sharing economy is two logic steps, a virtual virtualisation

The clue to shifts is (organised disorganisation, or of people and symbols)

Thank you for reading!

SEE ALSO MY, story Nazca lines — Do we understand? here at Medium.com

Happiness HQ

Just found out; What do Madame C.J Walker (the first female entrepreneur), George Carver (the revolutioniser of industrial science) and Elijah McCoy (“the real McCoy”) have in common?