There is a great deal of conversation about collaborative environments built on trust and engagement within corporations or across corporate relationships. The problem is that when layoffs come around, people will throw each other under the bus.

It reminds me of the old backward tipping demonstration where the team dynamics leader would have everyone fall backwards into the arms of their co-workers to demonstrate “letting go” and trusting thy colleague.

People who “Let Go” …  get let go

I’ll spare you the dissertation on Capitalism, competitive markets, and all those nifty sports analogies; the dichotomy is that people are held captive within a corporation and are constrained by the corporation – when they leave, they are invisible to the world. The unfortunate side affect is that they are invisible to their communities as well.

We’re all “Derivatives”

Today, human knowledge is mapped relative to the corporation and not relative to their peers or their open community. The value of human knowledge is derived from the value of the corporation. People are not mapped to their complementary knowledge assets in a community. Intangible assets are estimated to represent 70 percent of the value of a corporation in dollars. But, by definition, they represent 100% of the value of the community – and the trade an invisible social currency.

Corporate Bias

If tangible assets are counted with a financial currency, intangible assets must be counted using an intangible currency. It would seem that there would be a high incentive to put a true “Par” value on knowledge assets and apply a clear understanding to intangible currencies.

Instead, social currencies are caste against the wall of the corporation as a means of ascertaining value. In this light, social values appear as a function of the corporation, not the community. This is the corporate bias.

The Devaluation of Communities

It is typical for a country to respond to hyper inflation with a simple reboot of the the economy by dividing the entire financial system by 1000. For example; Mexico once had a “peso”. Then after their devaluation in the 1970’s, came the nuevo peso = 1/1000 of a peso. So if you had cash. you lost it. But if you carried debt, you were able to erase it. The end game is a mad rush to have equal parts debt to assets, so the system would reboot itself with no net effect on people with ability to access credit.

A financial currency devaluation is, in effect, a transfer of social value. A currency devaluation is the invisible process of “harvesting social currency” from people and transforming it to financial currency. When people are kept below a certain economic level, they fail to organize their communities.

What if everyone were a corporation?

But consider this, Social Currency may be undervalued as much as 1:000 against the dollar. As such, a 50 Trillion dollar debt obligation becomes a manageable 50 billion dollar debt obligation if accounted in social currency.

What are the alternatives

This post is not some big-government-socialist-manifesto – something different will happen this time. Social capitalism is capitalism in occurring with minimum Government AND minimum Corporate influence.

Social media is organizing people around a substrate of social internet applications. These applications are not perfect but they are getting better. Eventually, the pillars of the financial system will be duplicated in social media and an alternate financial system will form in parallel.

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