Tag: arbitrage

Sell-ebrity Sects

On September 8, 2010

Waiting in the grocery store checkout line, there is never a shortage of glossy media about the sex lives of Celebrities. The stories are always the same, only the Celebrities change.

There are no glossy tabloids in the DIY check-out line where the objective is to check you out as fast as possible in order to meet a competitive “service quota”. In either case, however, the consumer is being extorted of value.

A sect is a group with distinctive religious, political or philosophical beliefs. In modern culture the term can refer to any organization that breaks away from a larger one to follow a different set of rules and principles. A sellebrity is someone who sells distraction for a living – they may talk about something that sounds like productivity, but it is really a distraction designed to maintain a status quo.

When marketers want you to do the same thing over and over again, you get Sellebrity Sects. When marketers want you to change your behavior, they remove the Sellebrity sects. The absence of sellebrities is equally interesting, and somewhat counter intuitive. Yet, consumers think it is the exact opposite. In either case, the consumer is extorted of value.

Sellebrity Sects refers to a set of rules or principles set out as different from the rest and used for the specific purpose of liberating you from your values; your time value, social values, financial values, even your family values.

Social media is introducing a host of new Sellebrities peddling some object designed to fortify their credibility, usually a book tour, keynote address, “Reputation”, social currency, or an A-list client. The ‘pitchman’ preoccupies the consumer into standing still long enough to create an arbitrage position for those who can exploit the TIME that you are not acting – either for branding or automating. When the arbitrage position collapses, a new sect is formed and the game continues.

Keep in mind that “Value” exists in many different forms, the game is intense, Time is the currency, and the story never changes. Look at the sellebrities all around you. Ask yourself why they are there. Try to identify the sects. Guard your social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital very carefully – use it to increase your productivity alone. Most of all, be different – they will either ignor you or pay you.

That Pesky Little Problem With Market Capitalism

By Admin

On December 11, 2008

In General Information

Technological change must always precede economic growth. We are going about the process of market capitalism as if economic growth can precede technological change. Somewhere along the line we have gotten the cart in front of the mule.

It seems that this situation can be fairly easily corrected – after all, it’s the same cart and the same mule. All we need to do is get the same driver to point the same carrot on the same stick in the opposite direction; and the system should turn itself around. Impossible we ask? Well, maybe not….yet.

The same species…

Economic growth and technological change are the same species; each is represented by human productivity. If I take a loan to buy a house, the debt is “counted” as economic growth backed by my future productivity. If I go to work and invent a method that provides a better way for people to accomplish something, that same productivity increases with my innovation. They should hedge each other much like insurance. The problem arises when we forget to count the mule.

If A = C and B = C, then A = B

If any two currencies are backed by the same standard, they should be readily convertible. If Euro’s and Dollars are both backed by Gold, they would be convertible between each other and the market can simply choose to trade one or the other. Arbitrage opportunities would keep the system balance.

This is the same case with debt and innovation; two currencies represented by the same standard, i.e., productivity.

What if a new currency was introduced and pegged to human productivity? That currency would also be proportional to the dollar. Arbitrage opportunities between debt and innovation currencies would seek a balance. The two scorecards would hedge each other as they should.

It is going to happen eventually, why wait?

While this may seem odd to talk about one State, two currencies, it is not so odd to talk about what happens if the dollar fails. People will start trading a different currency. The Plumber will trade ideas with the lawyer who will trade with the doctor, carpenter, teacher, grocer, laborer, etc. A computer enabled society will build a knowledge inventory of who knows what. Reputations will arise thus organizing knowledge in the form of a financial instrument. This social medium will be the tool that organizes trading schemes and establishing supply and demand. An Innovation Bank will keep track of who owes what to whom and distribute wealth in the form of tangential innovation. Venture “capital” will be the cheapest money in town – it’s like money in the bank for an innovation economy. This is in fact, the nature of society and largely the function it has served for thousands of years.

Little carrot on a big stick

The difference between now and any other time in history is that society is computer enabled. Human knowledge has been held hostage behind the construct of “intangible assets” on a corporate balance sheet for too long. There is a great deal of energy building up and it can now find a productive outlet through social media. The best government policy is to accommodate what people will do naturally. It would be extremely inexpensive to empower society to form an innovation economy to hedge market capitalism. People need a currency that is first and foremost natural for them to trade. Later, Wall Street can convert and gamble at their peril. But first, point the stick in a different direction and the system will correct itself.

[The Ingenesist Project (https://ingenesist.com) has specified three web application which if deployed to social media would allow social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital to become tangible inside social networks.]

The Next Economic Paradigm