Pondering how to put more purpose into my blogging, tweeting, Facebook, LinkedIn etc…while maintaining a full-time+ job role.

I have fuzzy thoughts about hybrid (1-2 year) platforms for building a larger consulting business while building/enhancing friendships, client relationships.  Somehow this all fits together along the lines (I think) of what your pondering David, but it hasn’t crystallized yet in my head.

Like the post, really good to examine value in a digital world.
But I think you should be really careful distinguishing between new and old economies. ‘The Economy’ has always described transactions. Before money, it were transactions in gold, shells or anything else. Then there was money, and now there is something as a social value. Call it popularity, call it ‘respect’, but that’s a new currency that’s traded besides money. It could be the same economy, but with just a different currency.

I’m on vacation visiting my mother in Little Rock, and today I visited Central High School where all the ruckus about school segregation went down fifty years ago.

What started out defending my position on the importance of states rights turned into a really interesting though about why greed/corruption seems to have permeated the American political system and special interests, etc. seem more common now than ever before.

It actually relates to the list of various memes/fields in your post because I really feel that the blatant disregard for states’ rights in the Brown v Board decision (which involved a school in my home town of Topeka, KS) set a dangerous precedent by eschewing the importance of small group and individual decisions. Since then, the federal government has taken on all kinds of roles that I feel the founding fathers would have taken issue with, and because we have folks in Washington making blanket decisions that would normally have been made at a more local level (schools, family values, marriage, abortion, etc.), it’s hard for the politicians to really see their decisions as affecting real people back home. Because of this, I wonder if they’re more susceptible to influence by special interests, money, etc and perhaps are more willing to abandon the real issues in favor of raising money, getting reelected, etc. On the whole, I feel that all these things may have contributed to a shift away from the importance of the small group or individual.

Now, the common thread I find so great in things like DIY, Social Media, Open Source, Crowd Sourcing, Bar Camp, independent art/music, establishing a personal brand, the long tail, and the good ol’ face to face ‘let’s get things done’ session is that they all place a particular importance on the individual, or at least emphasize that it doesn’t take big, bloated organizations to get really awesomely creative/artistic/innovative/profitable/global/exciting things done. It seems that the economic pendulum has been shifting away from the feelings/hopes/passion/capabilities/worth/value/spirit of the individual for the last 50 years. This may have been because of the increasingly involved federal government, or perhaps that phenomena was really just a result of something else. Regardless, all of the things that people like you and me get really excited about and the things that are becoming more and more mainstream are things that throw that pendulum back the other way HARD. The increasing ubiquity of the internet has resulted in an international opportunity for almost anyone to learn almost anything with enough resolve and time, and that may be the key to the ‘new’ economy/social system/globalized world that everyone feels is emerging but no one can really identify.

Who knows? Let me just say that it’s a very exciting time to be a 19 year-old, or a free-thinking person of any age for that matter.

I think you are on to something; the evolution of personal/social/political/economic change is actually a quiet revolution of personal responsibility. I agree with Benjamin Goering, our governments, particularly the federal government have taken over. The but is – we let them along with other institutions.

The quiet revolution began for me in the 70’s with holistic health. I learned that I was responsible for my health and I could change it, I could improve it. Today with the technology we are learning we with open information we can be informed, we can communication directly without going “through the church” of the day to have our own divine relationship.

Knowledge and choice is power… we have it. We want more.

With all revolutions, they begin before the first shot. This economic revolution began before our recession as you point out. It is paralleling and building on other revolutions. The last to see the synergistic effect of these multiple revolutions are the institutions that we are revolting against.

You are connecting the dots within the economic context. Let’s connect the contexts.

The original definition of “subversive” was from Latin meaning “under” and “change”, and simply meant “Change from below” (as opposed to change implemented by senators or generals).

One theme of current times is that technology has once again allowed subversion to become feasible.  You don’t have to get elected to office to change the world, you just have to create an amazing YouTube video that gets people interested.  You don’t have to sit around waiting for CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to do something, you can get together with a thousand people on Facebook and do something yourself.  The “new economy” isn’t about “important people”, it’s about us.  Real people, on the ground, doing things that matter.

The economy is definitely changing, and has been for a while. More and more people are “going Galt” as best they can - in order to hide or protect their income from confiscatory taxes and intrusive government regulation.

I suspect that things (like unemployment, mortgage defaults, etc) are going to get worse for a while yet before they get better. Those that are prepared to be agile, flexible, and willing to relocate/telecommute in order to make a living will get through it okay. The rest, people that are stuck in the old mindset of the old economy are going to get smushed.

I think one of the reasons we come up empty-handed when we cast for new economic models to work with this emerging ethos is precisely because this ethos is not built around profit as motivation/expected outcome of effort. It may be that if we embrace this new ethos big time, our need for ‘earning’ will go down. After all, the last 50 years saw us work more and more hours for the sake of aquisition. When we Reduce, Reuse & Recycle, generally reduce our carbon footprint and take an active role in a society that shares and exchanges rather than sells, knowledge, goods and services, our need for money is reduced…and so therefore are the number of hours we need to be able to clock as ‘earning’ in the traditional sense. I think it’s worth paying close attention to alternative revenue streams and unexpected and difficult-to-quantify benefits that result from the ‘unpaid’ work we do, these are the keys to how our new economy are going to evolve.

A very interesting topic and a lot of insightful comments on that. Thanks for sharing!
I am very interested in the connection of the different trends you mention, David. Somehow they are related, but it’s hard to pin down… probably due to the myriad influences from all the people participating in it. There’s no grand government plan behind it, but it’s “us”, like Amanda wrote. So in the end, it’s kind of anarchistic, maybe an on-the-fly creation of mash-up economics that combine the need to make money to survive with the desire to bring along change and deliver value to other people.

Security in exchange for fealty worked for a long time, but security is going away. We have been seeing it for years now, when companies lay off expensive senior employees in order to hire younger/cheaper staff - or simply automate jobs out of existence. (For example - I am pretty sure almost no one takes dictation any more, let alone having an entire department of people to transcribe recorded letters.)

In addition, the current economic downturn leads employers to focus very tightly on spending, many of them are cutting back on staffing levels, even at the risk of lessened customer service. A corollary to this is the rise of the freelance/consultant market, where people work on limited-time projects and then are out the door. These people know they have no security, so there is no fealty.

The economy and the nature of the workspace are changing in unpredictable ways, and while there will probably always be a place for some workers who are satisfied with just getting by in a dead-end job, I am predicting a profound change in the baseline. How much of it will be the current alternative economy and how much will be the old-fashioned style is harder to guess.

Bruce Sterling (Distraction) and Cory Doctorow (Makers) have taken a look at this dilemma in fiction books, both of which I highly recommend as thought-exercises.

Both terms remind me a bit of Wuffie, the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow’s science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.