I've long been baffled by those that think the future is digital. Those who believe this seem fixated on the idea that it is the technology that makes change, rather than what people do with it.
When the technology of the printing press arrived, the end of the story wasn't the development of the book. It was what people did with books that counted - how they spread ideas.
And in the printing press model, the changes to the way society organised echoed the mass production centralised way of doing things that the printing press - and later more forms or mass production - represented.
No, the future now isn't digital, it is self-organised (as I have suggested before). The web's role is to enable adhoc self-forming groups of purpose to form more effectively than at any time in history. And since communities of this kind reduce the cost of action - they cut the cost of achieving what more of us want, more effectively, than at any time past. The future that delivers is emerging and accelerating towards us now.
So what does that mean for the world we know? For your business? For your political party? Your form of government?
Well perhaps it's wise to reflect on what survived from the feudal world to the capitalist one? How many of the richest families in Britain were among the richest in Britain on both sides of the divide? And if there are any that survived, were they among the first to adopt capitalist principles of organisation - of both capital and labour?
What of our God and King? In Feudal times the Church sat alongside the King - in terms of power; and always well ahead in terms of wealth. Both saw their places tumble in the age of capital. Today they are at the peripherary: Pomp and splendour - about as relevant as the role of hand illluminator of Bibles.
God and King were superceded by Parliament (democratic legislatures) and the Law.
The question facing all who would mediate, all who would organise from the centre, all who would impose one size-fits-all-solutions on a fragmented fitness landscape, is: are you prepared to adapt to the looming self-organised future, to survive?
Are you prepared to start listening, start adapting to real time need, start opening up, start thinking like a platform to make change with the people who want the same as you (both inside and outside your org)...
If you aren't, then expect the rest of us to be self-organising to answer the question of what replaces you any day now.
The networked world will overturn many traditional business models which focus on low cost - often driven by the desire to feed on the economies of scale of mass production.
In a networked world we have the potential to scale relevance and should focus on that first.
Relevance - or fit with our specific needs - is reduced by the focus on economies of scale that mass production delivers. Relevance = Utility; in that the more relevant it is to me, the more useful it is to me.
We all have a preference for the thing we find most useful - and place most value upon it. Mass production can't deliver relevance - at least it can't beyond meeting lowest common denominator requirements. The bargain we enter into, when accepting mass produced approximations of fit with our specific needs, is low cost.
There is a balance point between utility and cost - which varies for each of us dependant on circumstances.
I believe our ability to connect with those people like us seeking solutions to the same problems we do, which the web enables, swings the balance strongly in favour of relevance, fit, utility.
And as it does so, so we must start considering, and delivering, new business models which seek to serve the network and not the world of broad mass production; models that make delivering relevance (highest utility) their key driver.
An example; we'd all prefer a made-to-measure, bespoke suit. Not only can we specify it to our taste, it will also be optimised for relevance. In other words it'll fit not just our taste, but our specific shape. To service our bespoke requirement in this regard is costly - particularly when compared with the price of an off-the-peg solution.
Granted suits on pegs are not sold quite at the level of one-size-fits-all, but they are certainly sold against a series of broad 'fitness' points. Very rarely, a buyer's specific taste and shape requirements will be matched by an off-the-peg suit. And on that rare occasion no doubt the rare buyer will rave about the quality of the fit of the suit to all his pals (who no doubt will find buying the same off-the-peg-suit far from satisfactory).
Consider how the networked world could make suits. Let's assume that people are able to accurately measure themselves in all the dimensions a quality bespoke tailor would (and yes, that is quite an assumption, but play along for the thought experiment, please).
Imagine a platform which could gather the meta data of these measurements, associated with their owners (a website, if you like, where people enter the relevant data) where those with excellent matches are introduced to one another - on a global scale.
Now these customers are formed into a group via the meta data of their shared dimensions and taste. Assume thousands of them (remember, we are operating on the global scale of billions of internet users) are a match - and they can all buy together. Now they can get the same order of utility (hand stitching aside, if that is indeed an advantage) as the individual bespoke suit buyer - at the same order of cost as anyone buying a mass-produced off the peg suit.
Imagine the relevance-first model applied to your industry.
The network has the ability to scale fit (relevance) in a way traditional mass production can not. In the complex adaptive system of the economy, those best adapted to the actual fitness landscape are best equipped to survive.
It's another example of how the web reveals the true role of the organisation as a platform - and the web as a place where orgs make things with (others) rather than take things from.
I had lunch with some of the guys from ThirdEyeT yesterday, and apart from business (I'm pleased to say I sit on the advisory board) we talked about something I think could be as revolutionary as the peer-to-peer publishing ability of the internet.
It all stems from a notion raised by Dom Penrice, one of the big brains behind the very interesting publishing model driving www.basedrift.com
Dom suggests the new owners of the means of production/control are not all of us (as you may conclude from the fact that we are all publishers now) they are, in fact, the coders. (image courtesy)
The ownership of the means of production has always been a pretty centralised affair.
Way back when, The church owned the books and their production so it owned information. And that gave it control.
With the arrival of the printing press those who owned the means of creating and distributing information multiplied.
The result was new ideas spread more rapidly and were put into action faster, creating value for more and more people.
Or, the Renaissance, as it's otherwise known.
As industrialisation got swinging, and mass production started matching lowest common denominator needs, we developed faster and faster printing presses and distribution processes.
Cinema, radio, tv are all examples. Faster printing presses with ever broader reach.
Ownership of the means of production was still in the hands of the few though.
With the arrival of the Internet we all became publishers. Control of information was suddenly harder to make money from. Ask any traditional media owner.
Where once the ability to publish information (and therefore control it and everything reliant upon that) was scarce (and therefore valuable) now that ability had become abundant.
Publishing is virtually ubiquitous now. And almost ubiquitously virtual.
So a new currency emerged, a new scarce means of production: code.
Programmers now decide our experience and control our opportunities. They are the new press barons.
Except there are lots of them. Not ubiquitous. But lots.
So we've reached a new stage of control where more people (those with programming skills) have control, but still not enough for the true group forming value of the Internet to fulfil its potential.
How so? Well, just as an idea benefits from evolution, so an implementation.
If I share an idea, you will take elements of it that you find useful to share among your peers. Your feedback to me may benefit my version of the idea. Your evolution of it (with your next community of purpose) may make the idea a better fit for you and/or a better fit for the larger fitness landscape (the evolutionary model).
Ideas benefit from complex adaptive systems - such as peer to peer digital networks. The Internet.
They benefit so effectively from this today because our ability to publish our ideas one to another has become ubiquitous. We (pretty much) all know how to do this peer to peer publishing of ideas thing.
But far less of us know how to implement them when it comes to the coding and design.
And when an idea reaches that stage the evolutionary processes slow right down. There are too few people available to lend their skills to adapt code to make it a better fit for their purposes in rapid iterative processes of the kind we have for ideas.
Imagine if we could make it as easy to code as it is to publish.
Look what ubiquitous publishing has done for the production and exchange of content/information/ideas/
human relationships.
More content uploaded to Youtube in the last year than broadcast by TV ever.
Ubiquitous publishing.
Imagine ubiquitous coding.
That's precisely what Dom Penrice has in mind: finding ways to allow anyone to manipulate code, parcel up the value created and pass it on to the next person with shared need. The next person can then add their value to hone or reshape for their community of purpose. And so on ad infinitum with evolutionary processes amplifying or damping as dictated by the fitness landscape.
Dom's vision is that at each iteration those that have contributed get paid, feeding back, pyramid style, to the originator.
It is a supply web, networked world approach to programming and one which could be as revolutionary as the arrival of ubiquitous publishing itself.
ThirdeyeT are starting to put the idea of ubiquitous coding to practical effect in their new publishing cms. It allows them to change the design of their site (and not just reskin it) in two days flat - without the need for any specialist skills.
I know many a editor who would be very grateful of that.
In the days of the constant relaunch giving control directly to the people with the vision has to be a good thing.
We're all publishers now. All advertisers, all marketers.
When we are all coders, then the next revolution will begin.
I have a feeling those of us old enough to use search are getting rather tired of it. Search fatigue is setting in. I've hinted as much before and more recently at /message.
Indeed my own informal research (ask the kids you know) suggests the latest generation of digital natives aren't even bothering to try it long enough to tire of it. They are skipping straight to friend recommendation. (image courtesy)
I've been doing the January thing. Searching for a holiday. What a chore that has become. Dead end after blind alley after irrelevant results. SEO without the social can do that to an Internet.
Thought: wouldn't it be good if SEO was all about an improved experience for the customer, rather than the vendor? We might be more inclined to surf the resulting SEA (search engine accuracy) with more joy in our hearts.
I digress. Search fatigue is driving us to opt for a strategy of 'good enough for me' results, by which we mean 'if it's good enough for the friend I trust, it's good enough for me'
Recent questions I've been asking of the humans Itrust on Twitter include where should I go for a holiday with guaranteed hot weather, all inclusive, safe and fun for my 4yr old with kids clubs and baby sitters. Oh and at the right credit-crunch adjusted price.
People understand what I mean by all that. And if they don't, they ask questions. People who come to know me also know what makes me happy.
We're not being lazy. We just trust our friends (our adhoc communities of purpose) more than we do search returns.
Algorithms eat your heart out.
And so to Twitter's missing millions. Everyone is asking how this phenomenon can turn all this two-way flow of conversation into cash.
And most struggle to see an answer. And I think that's because it's like looking into the fourth dimension from a world of just three.
We want to apply business models we know - ad models, banners, affiliates etc. to a networked world we are glimpsing in the corner of our eyes - a blur of a ghost we think we may have seen.
But before google gave us adsense few would have predicted such a brilliant fit with the third dimension of the digitally disaggregated world. It gave us ads that served as content by virtue of their potential to be so relevant to the content they were served against.
That was something that couldn't be done in the two dimensions of print - and couldn't be conceived of from those thinking in those two dimensions.
Twitter - and the other peer-to-peer networks which make up social media are different from the broadcast style websites which went before them. It requires a different model again to monetise.
There IS money being made in Twitter, via conversational p2p marketing. We're all buying stuff on the recommendation of those who make up our social graphs - of our ad hoccommunities of purpose.
The vast majority is done with zero involvement by the brands getting the benefit. And zero involvement by Twitter.
So how will Twitter stake a claim on those missing millions?
What I do know is there IS a key to unlocking this - trouble is, not only do we not know where we left it, we don't even know what it looks like.
The adsense moment for social media will come. My guess is it'll involve a combination of conversational marketing, co-creation webs and ways of enabling production by communities of purpose.
Social media's monetisation will be less from the traditional broadcast model (cash spent to persuade us to buy the mass produced) and more from the networked world it inhabits - a model enabling a crowd-sourcing response to deliver against global, real-time niche needs.
The fourth dimension in this case is not just time, it is right now, real-time - and the adhoc communities of purpose who act in it.
The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?
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