Teachers are “threatened” with layoffs. In some cases, the profession is openly mocked. Meanwhile, corporations are staring blankly at the knowledge gap in their industries. The older generation is retiring, moving on, and taking their knowledge with them. Teacher’s unions are busted and disappearing. Apprenticeships are a thing of the past. Everyone is asking “where are the jobs – there is plenty of work to do”
Education is obviously a financial instrument. Think about that for a minute – it is an investment like any other investment. Wall Street has an arbitrage instrument for every market anomaly – why not education?
What would happen if teachers were given an equity position in their students? Isn’t this what families do to prepare their kids to take over the family business? Isn’t this what happens in corporations where executives pick proteges? Isn’t this what happens in politics where knowledge is traded among a closed group?
A school like Harvard University or MIT certainly hold and equity position in their students. What if every community viewed every child as an asset instead of a liability?
Social media used to be so cool – a way to bypass the mediated reality of editorialized content. Real people coming back with real ideas and real opportunities from the crystal clear waters of cooperative community. Then legacy media and their ad-rev departments started to wonder “Hey, where did everyone go?” Marketer started saying, “Hey, these CPM numbers are F***ed – something is cutting into our pie ?!?!?”
Then came the Social Media Gurus
like the tattle-tale kid brother intent on spoiling a perfectly good game of hide and seek, screeching: “There they are, there they are!!!….Can you see ‘em?…see, see, your customers are hiding in the shadows… there, in the shadows….quick!!! Can you see ‘em now?. By the way, pay my fee, buy my book, and did I mention my latest ‘keynote’ yet?”
Next, the Gurus went mainstream as legacy media analysts!! Legacy media picked up the ball on the run-away ad spend. They glossed poetic on the “effects” but not the “causes” of social media. And, OH Gawd, what a nuisance all those pesky bloggers are to the dignified art and science of professional journalism.
A Monster was Born
Facebook declared that people really want to share their personal details with the world, and a monster was born. So now we are stuck with Corporate Media on steroids. Your data are scraped so they can find you. Images are reproduced infinitely. Lies and deception grow legs half way around the world before the truth can even be awakened from it’s slumber. Say one thing wrong and it haunts you forever.
Casualty or Causality
Social Media has become another casualty of the broken financial system where people fight for artificial scarcity. It is no longer a means to empower and enlighten, it is becoming another means to exploit and oppress. Special recognition goes out to all the so-called social media gurus. I can’t blame them though, everyone has the right to make an honest living.
Together with the financial banking, these two system engage in the dance of the virtuous circle of innovation enterprise. Apart, they collapse into the swirling cesspool of eternal debt and infinite interest (pun intended).
Through some secret signal, all of the World’s money barons will come together and agree to simultaneously lop off three zeros (000) from all financial balance sheets. This will effectively reboot the world economy.
Most good ideas can’t find a place to be profitable in a silo, so they are scrapped. This is not the fault of talent or the idea, but invariably, both are lost.
The Ingenesist Project tries to string this all together with just enough specificity so that an alternate financial system will jump start itself and become both visible and available to everyone.
It follows to reason that all of the innovation that could return somewhere between 10% and 1000% goes largely un-capitalized. Now, suppose that an innovation bond were to come along which produces a risk adjusted return of, say only, 15% per year denominated in a fungible currency, investors would seek refuge in the Innovation Bond.
The knowledge inventory is the most important part of Social Capitalism. It is also the only piece that will require everyone to think substantially differently about how we are organized in communities. Once we can get over that hurdle – it’s smooth sailing into the next economic paradigm.
People have a deep seated unease with what the dollar is and what the dollar represents. To escape the dollar is to escape a tangle of influence that impacts everything we say, do, and think about ourselves and about each other. It almost seems that to escape the dollar is to escape ourselves.
The top ten reasons for business failure are due to a lack of knowledge, not a lack of money. In fact, the lack of money is itself a failure of knowledge.
Money is a convenient way to store and exchange value. Unless the world enters into a free trade agreement with Martians, Earth is the physical boundary of all existing value.
In Tara’s book, Whuffie is roughly synonymous with ‘new’ social capital – a hugely complex financial instrument that is currently emerging before the eyes of all practitioners of social media. In 2010, almost everyone still struggles to articulate social capital with a 1999 vocabulary of new conversations living in old financial markets
I am astonished that people willingly and freely give up huge volumes of information about themselves when they really don’t have to. In earlier times, marketers and advertisers would pay a great deal of money for far less information that people give them for free. People do not understand the value that is stored between their ears or how easy it would be to set up an alternate economy that trades in social currencies.
The problem arises because our financial system is not able to articulate true value of social currency using a dollar denominated currency so social value remains invisible, not non-existant. Maybe the financial system does not want to articulate social value. After all, dollar denominated currency represents control of social value at a ratio of 1000:1
Social media is about to enter a new phase called “local social”. The hyperlinks that bind the web will become the hyperlinks that bind a community. The difference is that hyperlinks in “Global Social” environment converge down to specific information, Hyperlinks in Local Social will diverge up to diverse knowledge assets.
Any definition is supposed to give the reader enough information to duplicate, recognize, and identify instances of the subject – Preferably before the event has ended. Think about it – if the definition for Innovation were clear, nobody would be asking this question.
If Facebook is not careful, a huge opportunity awaits a competitor to disrupt the Facebook parade with high value, high segmentation, and high anonymity – and still monetize.
If Facebook provides consumers with the same information that they supply to corporations; CEO name and address, preferred music, groups joined, etc. Then we’ll see a level of opportunity and accountability that is required to support a universal social currency. It’s up to Facebook now.
Money happens because people happen, not the other way around.
Wall Street has no idea what’s knocking at their door with the emergence of a new class of Social Media Applications that incorporate geolocation strategy.
I don’t care what the “definitions” by the Experts, the Patent System, Production Systems, Money, corporate bonds, marketing, advertising, or all the rest of that stuff. In the next economic paradigm, knowledge is an asset, knowledge is the only asset that matters because the transformation of knowledge into solutions will become the next currency. If not human knowledge, then what else?
In fact, the cards are stacked in favor of the corporation over the employee; unless, of course, you are both. We teach our kids to be good employees, not to become good corporations. How do we expect social priorities to compete with Wall Street Priorities?
The financial system that we live in today is allocated to us all through chunks of Land, Labor, and Capital. It should be fairly obvious that there are some issues with land (real estate bubble), Labor (high unemployment/out sourcing), and Capital (financial system meltdown).
Teachers are “threatened” with layoffs. In some cases, the profession is openly mocked. Meanwhile, corporations are staring blankly at the knowledge gap in their industries. The older generation is retiring, moving on, and taking their knowledge with them. Teacher’s unions are busted and disappearing. Apprenticeships are a thing of the past. Everyone is asking “where are the jobs – there is plenty of work to do”
