The last post “How To Kill a Debt Monster” ended with the following line: How do you inject the debt monster in the head with New Value antibody without messing everything else up? Hint: stop whacking it in the foot.
Of course, this is a silly analogy but still quite fun to riff on…
Many of the brilliant ideas in the New Value movement are too rich to ignore. The problem that many face is that these efforts can only be articulated as grassroots start-ups or single entrepreneurs battling in the morass of relative anonymity against the titans of convention. The Debt Monster Process Manual states explicitly that those not pre-ordained must work their way up from the bottom of the food chain where resources are scarce and economic forces are harsh.
Then, when one becomes successful, the debt monster assimilates the innovation into it’s fortress of influence. Get too radical and the debt monster will squash you, bury you, or slander you. So, we can’t beat this thing by whacking it in the foot, we need to go for the head.
Collaborative Consumption At The Top of the Food Chain?
So why am I designing Social Flights? Social Flights is a social media application that helps people fly on corporate jets. A corporate jet burns more fossil fuel in a hour than I’ll burn all year in my car. Private jets are the most visible display of excess for the wealthy, powerful, and exclusive members of society who can afford to isolate themselves from the huddled masses. Private jets are extremely expensive relegating huge amounts of capital to sit in waiting for their master to beckon them to the tarmac. Why would I be doing this? (disclosure: I love airplanes and the majority of my professional career is in Aviation and Space Transportation)
Electric cars were not sexy until Tesla built one that smokes a Ferrari – albeit, 23 minutes at a time.
The answer is simple – applications of the New Value Movement need to be introduced at the top of the food chain not at the bottom. Social Flights is a collaborative consumption game based on the The Value Game. It takes an inefficient industry and makes it less so – at a profit. Travel Tribes essentially convert inefficiently allocated capital into more efficiently allocated capital – and take a profit for doing so. If you look closely, this is a reversal of the direction of most culprit Capitalist flows, yet it remains entirely Capitalist – at a profit.
In fact, The Value Game is so similar to the de-Value Game that it will go unnoticed by the Debt Monster’s immune system and therefore not generate a defensive attack. Millions of dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneurs will quickly identify new ways to create profits without fully realizing that they are, in fact, dismantling the old Capitalist system piece-by-piece (and in the proper reverse order) and replacing it with a corrected version.
Social Flights impacts the Airline Industry, The Advertising Industry, The Travel Industry, and Information Monopolies, and sends them back to school – all for profit. The same can be done with any shared assets and their associated corporate captors.
The Value Game creates real and fungible profits that articulate social value, human capital, a shared biosphere, collaborative production, and ultimately a higher order of expression for the things that people create, store, and exchange together.
That’s why we start with Jets.
Note to Debt Monster: we’re coming after you.
