The Next Economic Paradigm

Tag: Dollar

Look Who Is Stockpiling Knowledge

Preppers were once considered among the more radical fringes of American Society, but now they are coming up with some of the more interesting ideas in sustainability.

Suppose that some financial calamity were to bring the economy to a standstill,  would  your education, intellect, wisdom, civility, and knowledge evaporate along with it?  Of course not, but that is exactly the danger that we face.

The inability to access, coordinate, and deploy our vast endowment of American knowledge assets may be the cause, not the effect, of that proverbial breakdown in social institutions for which the Preppers prep.  

Why wait?

While today’s Preppers are busy stockpiling survival gear, food, water, ammo, fuel, and even gas masks, the rest of us should be asking “where are we stockpiling community knowledge?”  Who will keep the water clean?  Who knows how to restore electricity or grow food? Who knows how to protect citizens?  Who knows how to remove a set a broken bone? Who knows how to teach children to read? Who knows how to fix stuff?

The Sequestration of Knowledge

The greatest danger to human survival may be the corporate sequestration of knowledge assets.  For example; corporations hold “knowledge” behind trade secrets, arcane job titles, and rigid processes where nobody from the outside can ever find or apply it.  Obviously, a company without knowledge cannot produce anything so understandably – whether we realize it or not – our most productive knowledge assets are locked up pretty tight behind the guilded walls of Wall Street.   This is not anyone’s fault – it is just the way we are organized.

It is time to evolve.

On the surface, a company that makes airplanes and a company that makes electric cars have very little in common.  An airplane company could never hire an engineer from a car company (and vice versa) because the job descriptions, production processes, and definitions of responsibility are cut from entirely different performance regimes.  Yet, as far as the engineer is concerned, the methods, systems and techniques for creating, say, graphite composite structures, are identical everywhere on Earth. If many industry could share engineers, not only would a great deal of diversity of new ideas be exposed, but cyclical layoffs could be avoided.

The Knowledge Commons:

What if a central knowledge inventory would represent all skills, talents, passions, and intentions of a community?  What if companies were to index their own skills ontology to a public knowledge commons instead of isolating their workers to the silos of internal processes?  Employees and companies would be more mobile and collaborative instead of secluded, protective, and competitive.

Social Equity Swaps

Suppose that a community could analyze their knowledge commons such that people could swap jobs so that everyone worked in the most qualified job that was also closest to their own home?  Billions of dollars worth of productivity could be preserved, billions of dollars worth of infrastructure could be preserved, and billions of units of energy could be saved.  Worker retention would rise and community unity would improve.

Free Market Enterprise

Suppose a company could read the knowledge commons of a community and produce the things that a community is naturally talented and interested in producing?  Quality would improve and costs would be reduced.  Innovation would increase and strong community collaboration will discourage competitors.

Everyone is an entrepreneur

Suppose that people (and companies) could locate to areas where there is a known deficit (or surplus) in their particular interest and passion? Risk and financial volatility would be reduced where people know that they will have a prosperous and interesting career / workforce.  Population density could decrease as people and companies locate to rural settings.  Countless billions will be saved on infrastructure as food and energy production can coexist with enterprise centers.

How to change everything without changing anything

These are just a few of the advantages of having a knowledge commons that is open sourced and readily accessible to markets instead of sequestered knowledge assets that force people to question their ability to survive in the future economic environment.  The next several blog posts will specify a possible system and structure for a public knowledge commons.

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The Currency Hack

This is the final post of the Financial System Hack Series.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, the currency is the last hack, not the first.  Only after Zertify, Gamidox and Exoquant are established would it be possible to introduce a currency that could compete, if not hedge the dollar.

With Zertify we can estimate the probability that a collection of knowledge assets will be able to execute a business plan some time in the future.

With Gamidox, The Value Game is played where several communities interact around a shared asset such as a condominium, airplane, school, hospital, road, car, or any “product” that has socially redeeming value.

These interactions are measured such that we can assign “value” to the game with the Exoquant algorithm.

So taken together:

If we can predict the probability that the interactions carried out by communities of people (relative to a product) will have a known value in the future, we can represent it as a “cash flow” with a known volatility (risk).  Now, combining many interactions carried out by many communities around many products with known volatilities, we can pool the predicted cash flows into one large diversified cash flow.  Next, we can  cut the large flow into “bonds”, which we can extrapolate to net present value and to fund the community activities.  This very similar to the way that corporation form and raise money – except without the corporation.  While banks continue to issue Debt Bonds, communities will issue Innovation Bonds in parallel

Here is the hack:

In the old days everyone carried gold around with them to engage in trade.  Since gold was heavy, bankers let people keep the gold in their vaults and they wrote little chits that represented the gold.  After a while, people just traded the chits and it was no longer necessary to convert back to gold with each transaction.  Eventually, the gold standard was eliminated altogether and people just traded the paper that now represents their future productivity (debt), not necessarily gold.

The currency of abundance

Likewise, after a while it would no longer be necessary to convert the community currency into dollars.  As the dollar slowly starts losing it’s value under the weight of the debt load people will just trade community currencies.  All of these values are made visible and validated from Zertify, Gamidox, and Exoquant data.

The antigen will not be triggered because this is exactly the same way that corporations interact with banks to capitalizes and securitizes dollar debt, the difference is that we are capitalizing and securitizing community innovation by measuring data, information, knowledge, innovation, and wisdom.  A currency of abundance can then replace the currency of scarcity.

Nothing Changes and everything changes

Corporations and government can continue activities to the degree that they produce socially redeeming value by simply purchasing innovation bonds from the people with their dollars – if they’ll accept them.

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The Game and The Counter-Game

The term “Gamification” is pretty cool, except that it is meaningless.  Anyone who has ever worked a day in his or her life knows that the World is already gamed.  Anyone who follows politics and world events sees the game playing out constantly.  Everyone, including the winners, know that the game is stacked.  The last thing anyone needs is another game layer.

If you are like the majority of people on Earth, you are given a game that you can’t win playing by the rules.  If you are like the majority of people on Earth, you would do anything for a chance to play a game that you CAN win.  Imagine the value of an IPO for a gaming company with that prospectus.

What is a Counter Game?

Wikileaks – love them or hate them – is a Counter Game because they turned the lights on a game that was being played in the dark.  Bloggers play a Counter Game because media was editorialized by powerful interests.  Twitter is a Counter Game because it drives the narrative instead of being driven by it. In fact, any place where there is a broker – someone or something that benefits from you NOT having complete information – is an opportunity to introduce a Counter Game.

An astonishing array of Counter Games is forming in social media and the brokers are falling out of the sky like hailstones.  Power brokers, mortgage brokers, energy brokers, media brokers, even Google is gamed by Counter Gamers.  The better they get at hiding information; the better the Counter Gamers gets at rooting it out.  The harder they try to control a message, the better the Counter Gamers gets at disclosing the truth behind the message.

The game creates the Counter Game.

Likewise, to kill the game is to kill the Counter Game. As such, the only way to kill the counter-game is to kill the game. Think about that for a bit…Do we really want to do that?

The Holy Grail of the Counter Game is the global monetary system. Money is supposed to represent human productivity; otherwise people would not go to work to make things that everyone else needs.  The Game has caused Money to become increasingly divorced from actual productivity.  People who produce the most value are exploited while those who produce the least are most grandly rewarded.  The Game is stacked with money.

The Holy Grail of The Counter Game is to replace monetary currency with a True Value Currency.

The financial system stands on 5 pillars: currency, inventory, vetting institutions, entrepreneurs, and value arbitrage. All of these are slowly being replicated, mimicked, or duplicated in Social Media.  When the 5 pillars integrate in social media systems, a new currency will emerge.  People will use it to store and exchange the value that they create through their work. It will be a no-brainer

The Value Game

The Value Game is outlined in this short video using the now proverbial “Corporate Jet” as the turning point in the global economic paradigm.  The Value Game does not kill the Financial Game, rather, it challenges, corrects, and improves it.  The Value game has reached a critical milestone – it has been funded in dollars by investors.

This is not insignificant.

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Why This Bubble Is Completely Different

I had a discussion with one of my partners that we need 2.5 million users and Social Flights will manage itself.  The partner said, “You mean 2.5 million dollars”.

No, I said, “I need 2.5 million users”.

The partner said tersely, “No, I really think that you need dollars.”

Again, I replied, “I need users…. “

This went on for a while until we both got it: The value of Social Flights is contained within the users, not within the dollars. After that, the conversation could progress in a meaningful way, priorities found their place, and the teams found their roles – including the investors.

Nothing economic can happen until people get together to build something

Financial analysts are aghast at the magnificent valuations that social media applications are delivering; P/E ratios of 1000, valuations of 100 dollars per member, billions of dollars per billion time hours in game play – these are not the ratios that they teach in B-school.  Is this crazy or does it make perfect sense?

The Great Rapture

While highly unlikely, suppose the Almighty Father called upon all good and pious dollars to ascend unto heaven in a glorious rapture of currency – on a single day, all money disappears from the face of the Earth.  What would be left?  What happens next?

At least for a little while, I’ll still be sitting in this café typing a blog post.  The value of the education and social network of the person who I will be meeting for lunch will still be intact.  The value of the roads, bridges, schools, and highways would remain intact.  The value to teachers, firefighters, and doctors will remain.  The sun will shine and gravity will continue to act on matter.  The money may go, but a LOT of value remains.

No Such Thing As Free Lunch

Of course, things will quickly devolve when I tell the café owner that I can’t pay for lunch because my money has been raptured. Of course that would seem like a relatively minor problem given the fact that their money has been raptured too.  In fact, so has their supplier’s money, and their Bank’s money.  Obviously, there can’t be a bail out because the government has no money either.

Each of us would probably stare at each other for a few minutes until somebody asks the other, “well, then, what do you have that I can use?”  Once that conversation is exhausted, we’ll move on to  “Who do you know that has something that I can use?” Etc.

The mother of all hedge funds

If this were a game, the person that knows lots of people who do useful things would stand a greater chance of being served lunch than someone who is isolated and disliked – no matter how much money they once had before the rapture.  Likewise, if you have a lot of money, what “Bank” would you put it in?  What “Stock” would you buy?

This bubble is different.

It may be that the dollar is in a bubble and the true value of our economy is stored and exchanged in communities of people enabled by social media.  Those magnificent valuations in social media companies may actually reflect true value and act like a huge hedge fund on currency in the absence of any other plausible financial instrument.

As our noble politicians continue to play their game of chicken with the productivity of honest, educated, and productive Americans, they fail to see the polarity shifting away from money and into “true value”.

The value is in the people, not in the dollars. now we can have a different conversation about how to manage ourselves.

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Reverse Economics And True Value Social Games

Illustration from Wired (reversed) - Aegir Hallmundur; Benjamin Franklin: Corbis

Debit Cards and Credit cards routinely handle conversions from Dollars to Pesos to Euros and Yen.  The calculation is simple because there are known conversion rates between them.  In Fact, the credit card or debit card is buying the other currency much in the same way that they buy the pair of Levies, IPad, or bag of Tulip Bulbs being purchased.

Trading coupons for coupons

In other words, a debit card or credit card should also be able to use IPads, Levies, or Tulip Bulbs to buy money.  Of course, they would not use an actual IPad any more than a bank uses an actual Dollar – they trade a 100% coupon of a dollar for a 100% coupon of an IPad.  By adjusting the exchange rate between IPads and Dollars,  a 50% coupon for an IPad equals 300 Dollars and it is easy to see we are in very familiar Groupon territory.

The Dollar as a black market Currency

The debit card (or any form of mobile payment system) can, in fact, be used to trade what in earlier technological eras would be called a Black Market currency.  For example, After the Mexican currency crash of 1994-1995, I personally witnessed people empty WalMart to the bare shelves literally overnight, only to find those items circulating as currency the next day – in exchange for Dollars; the black market currency of the less developed World.

Drive the economy in reverse in order to drive the economy forward

With a high velocity and frictionless payment processing system, the economy should be able to operate in “reverse” just as easily – if not better than – it operates in so-called “forward”.  Here is why:

Suppose that Big Box retailer issues a coupon for 50% off all of it’s products for one Christmas Season because they want to beat out every merchant in the country.  The contingency coupon gets applied to all the credit/debit cards of all people that have ever shopped at the Big Box.  Since the local merchants are driven to failure and they’ll need to liquidate anyway, their response is to also honor the Big Box coupons.  This will initiate a spiral and all retailers will begin to accept each other’s coupons.  Soon, the brands such as Nike, Coca-cola, and Canon will be pulled into honoring retailer discounts.   The “coupon” will become the currency instead of the dollars.  The exchange rate between products will be determined by local arbitrage.

Lose the friction, improve efficiency

First, it would become very difficult to tax these transactions.  It would also be very difficult to inflate or deflate a dollar currency against these transactions. Arbitrage opportunities will be based on the true social value of a product in a community.  The dollar denominated conversion factor will become increasingly arbitrary.  The the new currency will be a social currency because people will now favor whatever products have the highest Social Value in their community relative to the knowledge assets of the community.  Advertising friction will disappear.  Assume Market Friction was 50%…..what changes?

In the end game, social priorities will drive Wall Street priorities

Social Currency is real currency.  The technology exists today to make it a frictionless exchange.  The economy may actually run better in so-called “reverse”.  The only thing missing is a True Value Social Game

References:

Sepp Hasslberger The Future of Money

The March issue of Wired Magazine carries an article titled: The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free.,

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Social Currency = Time

Thousands of social currencies are emerging as people lose confidence in the ability of the dollar to store value. At the end of the day, a currency is a social agreement. People need to agree that whatever they use for the storage and exchange of value accurately represents their productivity – otherwise they will not work for it. Social currency is a storage place for social value.

Of course this is much easier said than done. Alternate currency advocates continue to stumble across substantial structural issue is defining their currency; It must be scarce, it must be difficult to forge, debase, or counterfeit and it must be accepted by everyone.

The only thing that fits all of those criteria is ‘Time’

 

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War Is A Social Agreement

I often make the point that a currency is simply a social agreement. People need to agree that a monetary unit represents their productivity so that they will use it to trade their productivity with the productivity of another person. The test question for any so-called currency (coined by Jay Deragon) is: “Yeah, but can you buy groceries with it?”

I am now seeing a SHARP increase in the social interest for an alternate currency to the dollar. The dollar does represent productivity – albeit future productivity in the form of debt – that’s why it is still exchanged for the work that we do. My suspicion however is that the social agreement regarding the dollar is, in fact, increasingly becoming a social disagreement.

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.

That’s just the idea that came to me after watching this video about a soldier questioning the occupations. He is saying something very interesting:

War is simply the soldier’s willingness to fight it. It is a social agreement.

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The 1:1000 Rule; A Social Currency Imperative

What’s the difference between money and value?

Today, I saw yet another doom gloom economic forecast with the proverbial exponential graph of interest-on-debt climbing out to the stratosphere. The prognosis is the same; all bad, very ‘all bad’ things will happen.

So I wonder, to whom is all this interest being paid? Where is all that money stored? It has to belong to someone or be represented by something on the planet Earth, after all, money makes the world go around.

The 1000:1 rule

If I were to take, for example, NOA, the National Oceanographic Agency, and ask someone a Goldman Sachs to place a value on it, they would add up the replacement value of all the ships and weather satellites and come up with a number like, say, 4 Billion Dollars.

Now, if I were to calculate the increase in human productivity that result directly from the ability to forecast the weather – for the purposes of food production, managing all modes of transportation, Energy production, and tangential resource allocation – the value of NOA would be in well in excess of 4 Trillion dollars. This is a factor of over 1000 between the value of the same object in financial currency and social currency.

A bridge spans a waterway and carries 50,000 cars and trucks per day. An alternate route would take each vehicle at least 1 hour longer per day to cross the waterway. 50 billion dollars worth of social value is created over the life of the bridge that cost 50 million to construct; a 1000:1 leverage ratio.

A single Boeing 747 costs 100 million dollars but increases human productivity (including influence ripples) by 100 billion dollars over the service life of the aircraft compared to the nearest alternative mode of transportation. Again, 1000:1

That’s the difference between money and value.

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 1:1000. It’s about control

9.6 Trillion dollars was spent to educate every American. Just because a “corporation” does not exist to employ them and utilize their talents to the highest productivity level, does not mean that the talent and value does not exist. According to the 1:1000 rule, The GDP of the US in Social Currency is a minimum of 9,600 Trillion. What deficit?

It is about control. The dollar has a 1:1000 control leverage over social currency. It is not at all surprising to see social media expand at the rate proportional to that which the doom-gloom crowd predicts that the financial system will collapse. They are related, they hedge each other. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

Again, the imminent collapse of the financial system – no matter what the ‘doom gloom’ crowd says – does not mean that value does not exist; it simply means that the dollar will no longer control the value; that is, the social value wedged between people’s ears is free to be capitalized and securitized directly. We need to capture social currency in a new financial paradigm.

Social currency is not a buzz word, it’s an imperative – it is the Ingenesist Project

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Reality is Simple: Money is Time

Whoever said “Time Is Money” got it backwards. Anyone who still believes this is now moving backwards in economic time.

Reality is simple: Money is time.

We pay to extend our live, we pay to have a good time, we wonder what time it is, we share time, we exchange time, we invest time. Everybody has a limited amount of time on Earth and everybody is competing for a slice of someone else’s time. Money is just the scorecard in a game of time.

Time is limited for everyone on Earth.

Sure, we often trade our time for money, but we also trade our time for many things; our children, families, travels, experiences, sleep, and consuming products and services. There is no other factor to which our behavior is more determined than time. Everyone does whatever they know to make the best use of their time.

How on Earth can the Whole Wide World go bankrupt?

Easy. The interest on money increases with time. When the total amount of money in existence is less than the sum of the principal plus the interest due, the World is bankrupt. We have long passed this point so what happens next is anyone’s guess, but be assured, something will happen.

Here is my guess, Money and Time will swap places. “Time is Money”, becomes “Money is Time”.  The principal will inflate away while the “interest” will continue to changes with time – but it will be pegged to “people” who also change with time.  As such, People and their knowledge become the medium of storage, exchange, and trade.  Knowledge is contained between their ears as social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital.

Social Media Happens

Social Media saves time and people’s interaction with each other on social media is affecting the nature of money.

Google saves time, Wikipedia saves time, Amazon.com saves time, Facebook saves time, Linkedin save time. Foursquare and Gowalla increase the value of social time because going local saves time. Mashable and Tech Crunch save people time. Bloggers, educators, entertainers, and recreation increases the quality of time related to the intentions of the consumer. Trust, engagement, reputation, conversation, relationships, and tribes save time. Social Innovation saves time.

The Time Paradigm and the next generation of social applications

The next economic paradigm will be time based (as the scarce resource) and will probably look very similar to the one we know and understand today. The difference is that everyone will interact with the clock instead of the dollar.

In the next generation of social media applications we see that value will be derived from time saved or punished for time squandered. People will behave in a manner dependent on how much their time is worth.

The new business models will compete against time, rather than price. Quality will be measurable by anyone.  Precision and accuracy will be rewarded and manipulation will be punished. At the end of the day, Money is Time and the quality of time is the quality of money.

The Future of Money is the future of Time:

It’s hard to imagine any product or service that wastes people’s time surviving past the next decade.  It is hard to image any future innovation that does not save time over whatever it replaces.  It is hard to imagine the basis of any currency without a time value.

Image Source

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They Should Pass A Social Currency Option

My new favorite rebuttal to any argument from economic ailment to political controversy is: “I’d like to see a social currency thrown into the mix”.

It is really convenient to have the same position on all issues; Health Care, Terrorism, abortion, financial meltdown, education reform, and political scandal – my response is the same. “I’d like to see a social currency thrown into the mix”.

What the heck am I talking about?

Several recent blogs articles (and here, and here, and here) have converged around the idea that social currency is something that people earn from being active in a community, network, or social organization. Social Currency in lauded upon the recipient in many forms such as Google juice, respect, engagement, trust, re-tweets, reputation, merit badges, check-ins, tokens, Whuffie, wiggly worms, etc…

Regardless of what you call it, all social currencies have a very unique characteristic that differentiates them from a financial currency. Social currencies reward high integrity and punish low integrity.

Social Currency can be earned or converted:

Organizing a community around a common goal is serving a need that government and corporations do not have to fulfill in their “Social Charter”. So it has value.

  • Helping a neighbor find a job supplants the work of the government funded unemployment office.
  • Helping an elderly neighbor with their shopping supplements the Department of Health and Human Services.
  • Adopting a child alleviates expenditures in the foster care system, abortion, and possibly the courts and prisons.
  • Helping local vendors stay afloat by organizing a community of group buying or groupons reduces the demands on bankruptcy courts and social services.

Social Currency can also be eliminated:

  • Public servants and politicians who squander the trust of their constituents through acts of corruption and impropriety
  • Corporations who decimate local priorities in favor of Wall Street priorities.
  • Breaking the law, endangering others, neglect, fraud, breech of social contract .
  • Consumption far in excess of social contribution.

Take any issue and apply social currency

The health care debate is an excellent example. First, let’s apply a social currency to all of the people voting on the bill. Next, let’s apply a social currency to everyone arguing against the bill. Next, let’s apply a social currency to everyone arguing in favor of the bill. Let that count establish the burden of proof of the argument.

Next, let’s pay for Health Care Reform in social currency, not financial currency. That means people with a surplus of social currency receive health care at a certain rate. People with a deficit of social currency receive health care at a different rate.

Finally, compensation to health care providers would also be biased by a social currency. Providers with a surplus of social currency are paid at a different rate than providers with a deficit of social currency.

What about cheaters?, who pays these subsidies? how do you count it?, It’s a job killer, corporations will go bankrupt, losers still lose, Holy cow, this messes everything up!!!!

Actually, it’s not much different than how we allocate money on a credit scoring basis. It’s not any more difficult to count than the blood-money coursing through the veins of an unvetted financial / insurance system. Most importantly, constraining a Financial Currency with a Social Currency sets up a whole new landscape of benchmarks and incentives that accelerate innovation, in effect, printing new currency.

That’s what I mean when I say; “I’d Like to see some Social Currency in the Mix”


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Dollar vs Rallod-A Mirror Image Economy

The problem with the American Dollar is that it is backed by future productivity in the form of debt – that is, our “promise” to pay off the debt. We know this because if America signaled that it was not willing or able to pay it’s debt, the dollar would cease to be used as a trading mechanism.

Innovation is also a promise backed by future productivity. By innovating in a new processes, method, system, or product today you are making a promise to increase productivity tomorrow.

Therefore, debt and innovation are blood brothers or mirror images of the other – they are both “currencies” (means of storing value) backed by future productivity. We can build a new economy around this concept which effectively weeds out the bad parts and keeps the good parts of the institutions and infrastructure that are already in place.  After all, two currencies backed by the same underlying asset  would be fully convertable

After all, the definition of a crook is someone who steals someone else’s productivity. May the best currency win.

Dollar vs Rallod-A Mirror Image Economy

Update: 03/2015  I recently stumbled upon this definition in a Gamification Wiki concerning the Rallod.  Thanks for the shout out!!

Rallod (Dollar spelt backwards) is concept developed by Dan Robles as a social capital currency which is based on the future productivity of innovation. He uses the Bizarro world featured in DC superman comics to provide an explanation of how his concept works. He distinguishes between normal economics revolving around Land, Labour and Capital and social capital which revolves around intellectual, social and creative capital. What is tangible in the normal world is intangible in the Bizarro world and vice versa. Robles believs the two worlds are mirror images of each other.

Visit www.badgeville.com to learn about the global gamification leader

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The Great Currency Shift

I am seeing an increasing amount of articles and ideas related to an alternate financial system. The continued traditional media narrative implies that the current system is unstable and corrupted with insider deals, Ponzi schemes, bribes, and high profile acquittals of financial crime. The underlying age-old assumption is that the wealthy (merchant class) will win and the rest of us (the working class) will lose.

Keep in mind that the Mexican peso crisis was not caused by a foreigners, it was the internal wealth leaving their own currency for safe haven elsewhere that sparked the run on the Mexican Central Bank. The absence of a currency other than the dollar and the integration of the dollar among all other currencies is the only thing keeping that from happening in the US. But this may change.

1. Either a new global currency (like a garden salad of currencies and/or commodities) will arise as a ‘less-risky’ diversified alternative,

or

2. A virtual currency will arise from any number of new developments in social media.

Of course the first option seems far more realistic. But keep in mind that the nature of “Disruptive Innovation” is where the dominant player does not even see the disruptor until it is too late. The thing that social media has not yet figured out is how to capitalize and securitize an alternate currency. But we are getting close. After that, the rest is easy because money is simply a social agreement. What would you rather hold, debt backed currency or innovation backed currency?

Nobody can really say that the entire 65 trillion dollar world economy is not vulnerable to a disruptive currency. Please review The Next Economic Paradigm for a complete specification of Innovation Economics. Thanks!

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A Local Currency Primer-Comfort Dollars

Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting post, indirectly on how local currency can spur social capital.  As more corporate and governmental institutions fail to meet the needs of society, people will need a currency that they can trade among each other. If the dollar fails, the need will be dire.

The difficulties that will ultimately limit such enterprise is the inability to capitalize and securitize a social currency.  Conversational Currency solves this problem by demonstrating how social media, if organized correctly, can simulate many of the functions of corporations and government.  As such, people will ultimately trade the currency they trust most.

I like Douglas Rushkoff’s work.  I suppose the ultimate test of concept would be if he finds this post and contacts us to integrate The Ingenesist Project and Conversational Currency into his thought leadership.  Thanks Douglas!!

A Local Currency Primer-Comfort Dollars

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What If The Dollar Fails?

I have been hearing a great deal about an inevitable collapse of the dollar.  Not today or tomorrow, but more likely over the course of the next 10 years.  The failure will probably not be a stupendous crash since politicians would avoid this as a means of self-preservation.  Rather, it would simply be a slow and grinding inability to “afford” many important things using cash.  Note that this has little or nothing to do with your human ability to produce important things.

Few people disagree that a 50 Trillion dollar debt obligation cannot be paid back without at least 50 Trillion dollars in increased human productivity.  Traditional productivity usually means taking stuff out of the ground, air, ocean, or the forest and making things that eventually wind up back in the ground, air, ocean, or the forest. Today, we are encountering constraints on the planet’s resources.  Something has got to give.

The ONLY technological change that is happening at anywhere near the rate that can conceivably deliver a substantial amount of “increased productivity” is Social Media. But how do we turn it into dollars?  Maybe we shouldn’t.

Here is the problem; the trends for monetizing social media actually slow it down.  People use social media only because of the prospect for increasing their long term productivity as relationships prosper. Entrepreneurs trying to get paid for their innovations invariably need to introduce “friction” by attempting to convert “short term” user productivity into cash.  There is no business case on short term productivity making their innovation nonviable.  Therefore, the monetization problem introduces a threshold over which most great innovations simply cannot reach.

The purpose of this article is to consider what people will use for trade if the currency becomes ineffective AND their productivity does not.   If the dollar does fail, people will attempt to meet their daily needs until a financial system is corrected.  Many countries that have experienced currency problems and the most common result are the emergence of a black market where Levi’s, Cigarettes, or other commodities serve as a de facto tax-free currency.

While on-line gaming industry is pioneering virtual tax-free currencies with extraordinary results, back in reality, people will begin trading services.  Plumbers will find dentists, farmers will find laborers, and teachers will find landscapers.  Matchmaking will become a financial instrument. People will use Facebook and Twitter, Linkedin and many others in new ways in order to keep the game in play.

In fact, perhaps they already are.

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Critical Value of Conversational Currency

Can the value of conversation fluctuate when compared to a “basket of conversational currencies”?  The translation is as follows;  If several conversations are taking place at the same time, does yours hold more or less value depending on the value of the others?

Same as a Lie?

If you ask a newspaper whose lead story was trumped by an unexpected celebrity death, the answer is yes.  If you tell a political activist whose rational message is lost to  more radical activists, the answer is yes.  If your speech is interrupted by a heckler, the answer is yes.  If you are caught lying about your Nuke Plant, the outcome is unintentionally the same – a loss of credibility, value, equity, and associated increase in risk, volatility, etc.

In today’s world of floating currencies, almost every currency rises and falls against other currencies at one time or another. But a currency that is persistently weak or continually falling relative to others presents a problem. If the dollar’s value were to continue to fall to new lows, eventually this would trigger rising inflation pressures. That’s because inflation can be defined as the loss of purchasing power of a unit of currency.

Inflationary Pressure on Conversational Currency?

Likewise, weak and falling conversational currencies are also bad for growth, since they scare away investment by another conversant. Who wants to invest time and knowledge in a conversation if there exists the real possibility that one’s investment will be eroded by a falling currency? At the very least investors require special incentives (i.e., premiums) to invest in an conversation with a weak currency.

Incentives Packages of Social Media Space

Weak conversational currencies are symptomatic of a variety of factors: cheap talk, lack of references, weak economic growth prospects, lack of confidence in the other participants, weak currency demand, and bad fiscal policies (e.g., wasteful discussion, high cost of participation, low quality venue or presentation). Strong conversational currencies, on the other hand, typically reflect tight topic control, vetting policy, strong growth prospects, confidence among participants, strong currency demand, and good fiscal policies.

The Critical Breath Mint

For better or worse, in order to “mint” conversational Currency, a discussion must be made accessible to largest audience possible.  The discussion must also be directed to those most “qualified” to engage in the discussion. When the value of the conversational currency reaches a low level threshold in either factor, the discussion ends with no resolution to continue and no tangential discussions taking place.  This can often be attributed to disruptive innovation making old conversations obsolete.  But it can also happen to worthy conversations infected by a parasite such as spam, hecklers, radicalization, flame wars, and emotional versus rational articulation, vendetta, sabotage, etc.

Critical Level of Conversational Currency

The critical level of conversational currency is where supply and demand cross.  The value of conversational currency will be determined by the ability to match the most worthy knowledge surplus with the most worthy knowledge deficit.  We use the financial analogy because the idea is the same – a currency is a currency.  Many of the same rules, methods, and calculus hold.  What is missing in Social Media are an inventory and accounting system for knowledge assets. While such systems are emerging on FaceBook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.  Some intervention is needed to integrate a social media system we can bank on, literally and figuratively.

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YOU are MONEY

Some HR bloggers are calling for a new profession called “Social Media Administrator”.  While there are many opinions and wide agreement about the roles and responsibilities – most of which I fully agree with – I would like to add the following considerations:

The corporate social media administrator should have a direct connection, responsibility and accountability with other social media administrators external to the corporation.  Not unlike a board of directors having diverse membership.  The membership and reputation of member of a Social Media BOD is also on the line.

Social media is just that, social.  It cannot be sequestered fully behind corporate walls and must be open and transparent in it’s message.  The Social Media administrator must protect the voices of those who speak.  While there is a constitutional amendment for freedom of speech in our government and the basis of democracy, none exists for corporations who use the information or the social media enterprise that hold “possession” of the information for eternity.

A market can only be efficient with adequate vetting mechanisms; the SEC vets Wall Street, The FAA vets Airlines, and the system of Checks and Balances vets government.  When the vetting mechanism fails, so too does the market.

Few people can see why this is important largely because the reasoning lies in economics and market theory.  Simply put, we are entering a new economic paradigm unlike anything we have ever seen or could imagine.  The idea that each and every iota of knowledge, experience, and opinion that exists between your ears behaves like a financial instrument has not fully been explained.  YOU are MONEY in every definition of the word.  Your productivity supports the value of the dollar. You own your knowledge, it is your property – you can waste it, you can mint more of it, you can borrow it, and you can lend it – and you should be able to capitalize in any currency of your choosing.

The only thing missing is a financial system for your knowledge. If we are smart – and ONLY if we are smart, this system will arise with the continued convergence of social media.  Among the KEY elements that MUST be in place is a public accounting system for Social Media Administration.

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The 1.6 Trillion Dollar Waste of Time

Countless blog articles and news reports complain about information overload in our society.  People are so occupied filtering information that they no longer have time to act on what is deemed important.  Every thought, idea, message, and picture that enters the human mind is stored somewhere by the magnificent human brain.  But the onslaught continues in spam, junk mail, billboards, pop-ups, aesthetic pollution, and road signs.

Endless War:

It’s a war that we cannot win so we just resign ourselves to the noise. Adult attention deficit syndrome is on the rise and I personally forget ideas quickly as they are replaced by new data appearing in my field of view.  I am increasingly aware of the huge time expenditure and the tremendous loss of productivity that is induced.

Money is time:

The underlying premise of Innovation Economics is that money represents human productivity and the only way to sustainably increase the quantity of money is to increase human productivity.  The only way to do this is to innovate.  This and other articles from the Ingenesist Project predict the value of innovation economics by the amount of productivity saved through the application of IE principles.

The Ad Spend and who really pays?

In the United States 2% of the Gross Domestic Product is spent on advertisements, not including the production cost of the ad. This is equal to 280 billion dollars per year.

Although direct response professionals usually project a response rate of less than 0.1% which means that 99.9% of the views are irrelevant noise. Time, energy, bandwidth and human productivity are consumed in seeing the ad, determining it is irrelevant and moving on (or sitting through the ad if you are captive such as TV commercials).

Pass Complete Ratio:

On super bowl Sunday, 90 million people will sit through a 30 second commercial that cost the advertiser 3 million dollars to air.  For an irrelevance rate of 99.9% , 375 man-years of productivity are lost.  For an average salary of 50,000 dollars per year; 18.8 Million dollars of productivity is burned by a single commercial.  For an 18.8M dollar productivity loss on a 3 M dollar ad spend, the ratio is about 6:1.

This means that for every ad dollar spent, 6 are lost in unrealized human productivity.  For a 272 Billion dollars spend at 6:1 irrelevance, then 1.6 Trillion dollars worth of human productivity are lost every year.

The most willing viewer is the most worthy viewer

The Ingenesist Project specifies a knowledge inventory system where a person’s knowledge inventory is represented by a packet of computer code.  Since the dissemination of this code is in the power of the owner, money spent on advertising can now be spent on compensating people for their time viewing and responding to an advertisement that they are actually interested in.

Economies of scale for advertisers can be produced by supporting groups that bring communities of people together in social media activity.

Spread the word:

So if media advertising disappears, what will the rest of us do with all of our spare time?  We’ll spend it with our families, friends, communities, and groups talking about what we know best – and the great products that empower us.

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The Invisible Currency Among Us

Liquid Swords - by Megan Olson

Invisible Currency

On my birthday, I received many greetings on Facebook from friends and family.  So, let’s say for example that Hallmark sold 10 less cards (@$3.95 ea), the telephone company sold 10 less long distance phone calls phone calls (@$.60 minute),  FedEx delivered no additional packages, oil companies sold no gas, and my friends did not deploy, say, 20 hours (@$25/hr) of human productivity buying stuff, licking stamps, or delivering mail in my honor.  Total productivity savings can be valued over $500.00; or roughly $50.00 per message.

Conversational Capital

One billion messages are sent on Facebook every day.  Each message sent and received constitutes a conversation.  Each of these conversations has a value that can be expressed in terms of productivity saved and assigned a dollar value. Suppose that each Facebook message has a value of only $1.00 per person engaged in a conversation.  That comes out to 730 Billion dollars per year of human productivity saved – enough to fund TARP.

Twitter is worth a cool 100 Million tweets per day.  Let’s assign a net productivity gain of $1.00 per tweet sent (not received).  If you think that tweets are not productive, follow the Iran Crisis; a revolution fought with liquid swords.  So let’s assign Twitter $36 Billion per year in increased human productivity.

Next, according to Google analytics, about 100 real people spend enough time on my little blog every day to read at least one article.  Suppose each blog article increases human productivity by $1.00 each. Technorati tracks well over 100M blogs.  That is 10 billion dollars per day – or a whopping 3.6 Trillion dollars per year.  Let’s discount that by 50% to only $1.8T in fairness to the skeptics.

The grand total is 2.5 Trillion Dollars worth of conversational currency – 2 times the 2009 national deficit and 5% of America’s entire debt obligation – and growing.   Where is all this productivity going?

What’s happening is what’s not happening.

People are NOT sitting through hours of TV commercials anymore.  People editorialize their own news and do NOT watch what is designed to corrupt them.  People are NOT letting their ideas die unheard.  People are NOT letting politics run them down and have now elected health care, the environment, and the end of warfare to the Presidency of this and other nations.  People have become far more focused and more productive through the rediscovery of family, friends, Art, Music and social priorities over debt enslavement.  Next, social media is coming to the neighborhoods.

Millions of people practice “social media” in their spare time.  This is invisible productivity that effectively magnifies the productivity of others with an astonishing multiplier effect.  Craigslist, CarFax, Zillow, Epinion, Amazon, and Expedia are all eliminating arbitrage opportunity and sending brokers scurrying for a real education. Product reviews are killing the scams and delivering the right product to the right market.

The Anti-buck

Maybe the Dollar is not so overvalued after all. Maybe the dollar deficit is counter balanced by this new invisible currency.  Suppose the more inflation that occurs, the more this invisible currency will affect the overall economy.  Suppose people are hedging dollar currency with conversational currency.  Suppose social priorities are replacing Wall Street Priorities.  Suppose we are approaching a new equilibrium rather than an impending free fall – except for those who try to control it.

Special Thanks to Megan Olson

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The Global Financial Crisis; The End Game

The year is 2024, no burning cities, no mass hysteria, no bread lines; the economy is on an exponential growth curve.  It took a while, but the financial crisis of ended in an anticlimactic sort of way.  Sure, lots of hedge fund bankers became unemployed, some went to jail, and many companies once deemed titans of industry have disappeared, but nobody seemed to notice much anymore.

Government debt has been eliminated and Wall Street has become the steward of what has become an Innovation Economy rising from the ashes of debt economics.  The transition, in fact, was surprisingly smooth.  Social Network applications such as Facebook, Linkedin, G+, and many more, developed a clever way to make knowledge tangible outside the construct of Wall Street and the traditional corporations and people began trading knowledge like currency.

When inflation hit, the dollar started to fall in value, people began trading a different currency called the rallod (dollar spelled backwards).  The rallod was backed by future productivity resulting from innovation rather than future productivity supporting debt.  When the dollar finally crashed, it pegged to the rallod and the economy began to grow again with an astonishing, yet peaceful, transfer of wealth and power to open sourced self-regulating communities; i.e., society in general.  The vicious cycle of debt economics was reversed just in time.  It’s still hard to believe what happened.

Today the engines of economic growth are tens of thousands of hot new start-ups that exist in the form of “Value Games” related to specific technology areas rather than the old corporation model.  They automatically cluster around a technology and spin off other start-ups at an incredible rate in a strange nesting arrangement called the “tangential innovation” market.  Most innovation is open sourced because the “Patent” (and protectionism in general) is no longer the center of the innovation finance universe, rather, the “secret sauce” of social, creative, and intellectual capital is the most valuable asset today.

About 15 years ago, something resembling the human genome project mapped all knowledge in the form of social, creative, and intellectual capital that exists in society to a very high granularity.  An API standard was created to represent knowledge assets like packets of code that are processed by a community algorithm. The CV/resume is an old bar joke now. Thanks to a visionary government, 1st amendment protections were built into this inventory with anonymity laws and privatized TOU; creators own what they create.

An open source percentile search engine was created to enable entrepreneurs to build unique collections of knowledge assets and predict the probability that various combinations of these assets could successfully execute a business plan.  High diversification induced hyper-innovation around technologies and the resulting innovations are spun out to be reabsorbed by different and diverse communities of practice in continuous iterations forming a virtuous vortex of new systems, methods, and solutions.  Sketched out, these arrangements looked like electrical “integrated” circuits.  Wealth creation is intense.

Since the knowledge inventory has mapped all knowledge and the Percentile Search Engine calculated probabilities and scenarios, the Innovation bank formed to make most worthy and optimal matches between knowledge surplus and knowledge deficit in a community.  Since the probability of innovation success has become predictable, innovation risk is now diversified away.  Innovation insurance products abound. With near-zero innovation risk the cost of venture capital has approached 5-7 % instead of 500-2000% of less than a decade ago.  Banks now issue innovation bonds on the public market to finance innovation in society.  For an investment of such high return and such little risk, participation is near universal.  This created another virtuous circle; the more innovation that occurs, the more money is created.  The more money that is created, the more innovation occurs.

Instead of having jobs, many people in a geographic area are pinged by the Percentile Search Engine which calculates the likelihood that their interaction together will increase the probability of successful execution of a business plan when combined with other knowledge assets.  Instead of earning wages, people collect micro-royalties specified by contracts on capital asset sub-sections. These micro-royalties add up to substantial residual income enjoying a multiplier effect as their work continues downstream over their lifetime. The government funds social security through it’s own innovation ventures. Service workers such as police, teachers, fire fighters, nurses, local merchants, etc., are key beneficiaries because of their impact on the community is directly associated with productivity.

Many of the senior knowledge workers have determined that they can earn more money by taking an equity position in their students, and the students of their student.  Unlike a decade ago, pyramid schemes in innovation economics are sustainable and generate astonishing profits.  Mentors have entered the landscape in vast numbers and apprenticeships have become abundant.  The income potential for the “creating creators” boggles the imagination.   Again, a virtuous circle has formed between the mentor and the student. In aggregate, wisdom is being retained, refined, and transferred efficiently throughout social networks.

University “degrees” have disappeared in favor of unique combinations of knowledge assets that are continually SEO’d for best Percentile Search Engine Placement.  People do not compete directly, rather, they compete with the Percentile Search Engine in the local market place by cooperating among each other.  As owners of their knowledge assets, the entrepreneurial spirit is ubiquitous.  No individual has either a monopoly or an identical knowledge set as anyone else.  Everyone has perfect information about the knowledge assets in a market.  People are pinged for different reasons at different times for different rates depending on supply and demand.  Continuous education is a social event in itself, often mistaken for recreation!

Even the poorest areas of the planet are getting into the action because, by definition, the parts of an economy with the highest potential for technological change correspond to opportunities that return the highest dividends in an innovation economy.  Arbitrage opportunities between master and oppressor have disappeared worldwide.

Like a neural network, the economic system of tangible knowledge is self-correcting, fault tolerant, and self-regulating.  Governments across the globe tried to stop the social network driven innovation economy – but they eventually gave up.  It was like trying to stop water; it flowed between the cracks and simply eroded the barriers.  The most incredible outcome is that innovation now reflects long term social priorities instead of short term Wall Street priorities.

Oil production has been replaced by superconducting wind turbines, global temperatures have stabilized, all cars are electric or “water leakers” (as the hydro’s are affectionately known), many diseases have been cured, and the list goes on.  It is hard to believe this happened in only 12 years.  Then again, the Internet had only been widely used 15 years prior to 2009.  Did I mention, we’re finally sending a multinational expedition to Mars…

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That Pesky Little Problem With Market Capitalism

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.]

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2008 Financial Crisis – The End Game

The year is 2020, no burning cities, no mass hysteria, no bread lines; the economy is on an exponential growth curve.  The financial crisis of 2008 ended in an anticlimactic sort of way.  Sure, lots of hedge fund bankers were unemployed for a while and many companies once deemed titans of industry have disappeared, but nobody seemed to notice much.

Government debt has been eliminated and Wall Street has become the steward of what has become an Innovation Economy rising from the ashes of debt economics.  The transition, in fact, was surprisingly smooth.  Social Networks figured out a way to make knowledge tangible outside the construct of Wall Street, the central banks, and the traditional corporations.

When the dollar started to fall, people began trading a different currency called the rallod.  The rallod was backed by future productivity resulting from innovation rather than future productivity supporting debt.  The vicious cycle of debt economics was reversed just in time.  When the dollar finally crashed, it pegged to the rallod and the economy began to grow again with an astonishing, yet peaceful, transfer of wealth and power to self-regulating communities, society is general.  It’s still hard to believe what happened.

Today the engines of economic growth are millions of hot new start-ups that exist in the form of “Communities of Practice” related to specific technology areas rather than the old corporation model.  They automatically cluster around a technology and spin off other start-ups at an incredible rate in a strange nesting arrangement called the “tangential innovation” market.  Most innovation is open sourced because the “Patent” (and protectionism in general) is no longer the center of the innovation finance universe, rather, the “secret sauce” of social, creative, and intellectual capital is the most valuable player today.

About 10 years ago, something resembling the human genome project mapped all knowledge in the form of social, creative, and intellectual capital that exists in society to a very high granularity.  A programming language was invented to represent knowledge assets like packets of code that are processed by a community algorithm (The CV/resume is a bar joke now). Thanks to a visionary government, 1st amendment protections were built into this inventory with anonymity laws.

Part of Google was democratized in a public takeover and spun off to design an open source percentile search engine to help entrepreneurs build unique collections of knowledge assets and predict the probability that various combinations of these assets could successfully execute a business plan.  These unique combinations then induce hyper-innovation around a technology and the resulting innovations get spun off to be reabsorbed by different and diverse communities of practice in continuous iterations forming a virtuous vortex of new systems, methods, and solutions.  Sketched out, these arrangements looked like electrical circuits.  Wealth creation is intense.

Instead of having jobs, many people in a geographic area are pinged by a Percentile search engine which calculates the likelihood that their interaction together will increase the probability of successful execution of a business plan when combined with other knowledge assets.  Instead of earning wages, people are paid with micro-royalties specified by contracts on capital asset sub-sections. These micro-royalties add up to substantial residual income enjoying a multiplier effect as their work continues downstream. The government funds social security through it’s own innovation ventures. Service workers such as police, teachers, fire fighters, nurses, local merchants, etc., are key beneficiaries because of their impact on the community is directly associated with productivity.

Many of the senior knowledge workers have determined that they can earn more money by taking an equity position in their students, and the students of their student – such pyramids are in fact sustainable and generate astonishing returns.  Mentors have entered the landscape in vast numbers and apprenticeships have become abundant.  The income potential for the “creating creators” boggles the imagination.   Again, a virtuous circle has formed between the mentor and the student. In aggregate, wisdom is being retained, refined, and transferred efficiently throughout social networks.  Universities have begun doing the same forgoing tuition in exchange for an equity position in students.

University “degrees” have disappeared in favor of unique combinations of knowledge assets that are continually SEO’d for best Percentile Search Engine Placement.  People do not compete directly, rather, they compete with the Percentile Search Engine in the local market place – although virtual work is becoming popular again.  As owners of their knowledge assets, the entrepreneurial spirit is ubiquitous.  No individual has either a monopoly or an identical knowledge set as anyone else.  Everyone has perfect information about the knowledge assets in a market.  People are pinged for different reasons at different times for different rates depending on supply and demand.  Continuous education is a social event in itself often mistaken for recreation!

Since the knowledge inventory has mapped all knowledge and the Percentile Search Engine calculated probabilities and scenarios, the Innovation bank formed to make most worthy and optimal matches between knowledge surplus and knowledge deficit in a community.  Since the probability of innovation success has become predictable, innovation risk is now diversified away.  Innovation insurance products abound. With near-zero innovation risk the cost of venture capital has approached 5-7 % instead of 500-2000% of less than a decade ago.  Banks now issue innovation bonds on the public market to finance innovation in society.  For an investment of such high return and such little risk, participation is near universal.  This created another virtuous circle; the more innovation that occurs, the more money is created.  The more money that is created, the more innovation occurs.

Even the poorest areas of the planet are getting into the action because, by definition, parts of an economy with the highest potential for technological change are the same places that return the highest dividends in an innovation economy.  Arbitrage opportunities between master and oppressor have disappeared worldwide.

Like a neural network, the economic system of tangible knowledge is self-correcting, fault tolerant, and self-regulating.  Governments across the globe tried to stop the social network driven innovation economy – but they eventually gave up.  It was like water; it flowed between the cracks and simply eroded the barriers. China learned to show it’s sense of humor exporting some of the funniest jokes ever conceived.

Oil production has been replaced by superconducting wind turbines, global temperatures have stabilized, all cars are electric or “water leakers” (as the hydro’s are affectionately known), many diseases have been cured, and the list goes on.  It is hard to believe this happened in only 12 years.  Then again, the Internet had only been widely used 12 years prior to 2008.  Did I mention, we’re finally sending a multinational expedition to Mars…

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