Tag: financial crisis

Look Who Is Stockpiling Knowledge

On November 15, 2012

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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Seeding the Clouds of Social Media

By Admin

On November 18, 2009

In General Information

OK, so what part of: Governments and industries have no intention of fixing things that they broke are we still having trouble with? The climate change summit ended in a draw after Kyoto ended in party pooper. You can count the financial crisis, endless warfare, world hunger, slave labor, forest-to-dump consumerism among the same pile of sun dried bullshit. Does anyone still trust the “leaders”?

There is a way out. People need to organize themselves around their a social media financial system. This is actually a relatively easy thing to do. Social media is like a big cloud – a big gray mass with no beginning, end, center or physical boundaries. The only way to engage the cloud is to talk to it. If you talk to it the right way, it delivers rain. If not, the well stays dry.

Now here is the trick. As social media applications continue to integrate, a correlation between conversation and rain becomes “diversified”, the randomness begins to disappear. Steady, consistent, and sustainable conversations across a wide array of social action will delivers steady, consistent, and sustainable rainfall across a wide area of social landscape.

At some point, someone will notice the similarity between the social media rainfall and the behavior of large diversified cash flows. They will develop a financial instrument to “capitalize” this value because it has become predictable. Predictable value flows can then be “securitized”. Unfortunately, the dollar is a debt backed currency and a productivity backed currency will need to arise in its place.

China accuses the weakness of the US dollar for driving speculation bubbles in anything and everything of “value” that is not a dollar. The problem is that the dollar is the only game in town. If there were an alternate currency with superior representation of human productivity, all dollar denominated assets will be converted to the new currency. The entire 50 Trillion dollar debt pressure on the US dollar will convert to a productivity backed currency forced to drive innovation at a comparatively astonishing magnitude – almost on the scale of the problems that face humanity.

A productivity backed currency means that those who are most productive earn the most money. Think about that for a minute, then go read The Next Economic Paradigm.

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The Invisible People

By Admin

On October 16, 2009

In General Information

There is no knowledge inventory. There is no knowledge inventory. There is no knowledge inventory.

This is a stunning omission for a society that intends – no, a society whose future is irrevocably dependent on it’s ability to innovate it’s way out of inevitable monetary collapse.

America does not know what Americans knows. Entrepreneurs do not know what knowledge is available to them. Markets do not know the supply and demand of knowledge assets. The self-correcting magic of market capitalism is utterly unavailable if people and their knowledge assets are invisible.

There is a story out of the past mayor (someone who performed their civic duty to run for elected office) of Bennett Colorado who is one eviction letter away from living in a Ford Explorer with her 4 dogs.
Thousands of older Engineers are unemployed when Congress is crying for more Engineers. This is the reason why there are none – the career has been reduced to a lousy bet.
Experience is knowledge, yet older workers also have a tougher time finding new jobs once they become unemployed. The average duration of unemployment for those age 55 and older is almost 30 weeks.
About 38 percent of the older workers and 26 percent of the younger workers had been out of work for 27 or more weeks in June.

Our economy needs to be able to efficiently match knowledge surplus with knowledge deficit in order to produce things and educate each other. Diverse knowledge assets need to be combined in new and strategic ways. Knowledge assets need to be matched by proximity as well as innovation potential. Investors need to know the probability that a collection of knowledge assets can execute a business objective in order to decrease innovation risk.

Nothing can be accomplished without a knowledge inventory. We have empowered corporations to be the stewards of the US knowledge inventory and the associated innovation economy. Information, knowledge, and innovation act as a system. Without one of the pieces, you cannot have the other two. If we outsource the knowledge economy, we lose the innovation economy.

The great promise of Social Media is that the knowledge inventory becomes a public reference. People need to know what other people know so that they can build things.

Once you are outsourced – you become invisible. Who will be the next invisible person in your neighborhood?

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What If The Dollar Fails?

By Admin

On October 1, 2009

In General Information

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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Unspoken Communication and the Bottom Line

By Admin

On September 23, 2009

In General Information

As a community developer for several websites, I go through lots of different information sources. I am looking for stories and nuance that demonstrate how conversation behaves like a currency. The more I look, the more I see. The strength of the analogy is quite remarkable.

Unspoken Values

I can also see how the unspoken communication stores as much value as the spoken communication. In the U.S. , there are race troubles, financial troubles, trust troubles, and confidence troubles. Many fears and anxieties can be accelerated by Social Media in unpredictable ways. First, information riles people up quicker than facts can follow, and second, the shelf life is much shorter as issues are dissipated by new ones. Much is left unprocessed.

The Micro-Trauma

What happens when important issues in life go unresolved? The life of a soldier may offer some clues where events can happen faster than the mind can process them. Perhaps the life of a child offers some clues where every day brings so much new information that all new events are processed in terms of basic necessity. Perhaps any traumatic event such as a divorce, loss of a family member, or victimization places us in the realm of the unspoken communication. This is a protection mechanism, not a delivery system.

As the World Churns

Billions of people hustle off to work and spend their day producing stuff in order to earn imaginary money so they can spend imaginary money. This helps things move from the forests to the dumps. They have no idea the sophistication of the micro-trauma delivery system that acts on how they process information.

The unspeakable drives our fears, interests and concern and influences how we process future information. I am amazed at how two people will arrive at opposite conclusions from the same data and the inability for those two people to speak to each other rationally. Advertisers, politicians. PR firms, and traditional media can deliver bits of information and dissipate them quickly leaving an unprocessed data-packets behind.

Opting Out:

I just closed my land line, canceled cable TV and purchase a subscription to on-line music radio that I play constantly. I “hide” the fringe mongers on my FaceBook, and get my news from Google alerts, feeds, and sources that align with what I am able to process mentally and emotionally. What I cannot process, I have a network of trusted friends who can process the information and guide me through the issues. I am quite happy, in fact, as many areas of my life are improving; health, friends, family, productivity, and finances…etc.

There is a tremendous opportunity available in delivering the right information to the right people with the intent of helping them to successfully and completely process information. This is more work up front, but the loyalty in the long-run is exactly what politicians, marketers, and news sources are competing for. Instead they are killing the patient to cure the disease.

In order to monetize in the new economic paradigm, help the unspoken communication become speakable and then listen to your friends.

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You Can’t Eat Gold

By Admin

On September 3, 2009

In General Information

The following is a question and answer that I responded to on a Linkedin economics forum. This question still occurs in so many forms when it is also abundantly obvious that Social Media is driving so much value in so many directions. The irony is that the question is asked within the currency that it fails to recognize.

Art credit

Question:

Fiat money is the cause or always the main cause of financial crisis. Reverting back to gold standard can give stability. How can this be implemented?

Answer:

It cannot. Everyone agrees that money needs to be backed by something tangible. However, gold has a host of problems as well that are discussed extensively on-line and cannot be ignored.

A successful and stable currency must be backed by the productivity of the [citizens of a country] users. So these two words should be interchangeable; i.e., a country spends productivity to fight a war. A country spends productivity to fund universal health care, etc.

The cause of financial crisis is when the money becomes divorced from the productivity. Debt is a transaction that exchanges current productivity for future productivity – assuming that productivity will increase at least by the so-called ‘risk’. CDOs and other exotic financial instruments further obscure true productivity until money becomes driven irrationality and emotions completely separated from productivity.

If people lose trust in the currency, they will no longer trade it – they will find something else. Your hope is that they will find Gold.

Note clearly that innovation is also a transaction that exchanges current productivity with future productivity (due to the innovation). As such, a currency backed by innovation is of the same species as a currency backed by debt. Therefore, the entire financial system does not need to be torn down and rebuilt to serve a new non-debt backed currency.

The answer to your question is to look toward the places where extraordinary innovation is occurring today, right now. It is clear that social media is developing this new currency. The problem now is fairly simple; making human knowledge tangible. This is where the innovation is. Here are some resources of people working on this problem:

http://ingenesist.com

http://relationship-economy.com

http://conversationalcurrency.com

Our deepest concern should be to feed the Goose what’s been so good to the Gander all these years. Of course one argument in favor of gold is it’s scarcity. However, it is difficult to imagine that in an era of scarcity of so many resources, the basis of a currency ought to be more scarcity. Knowledge, conversation, and innovation are scarce relative to the problems that they must be deployed to solve. We’re in this together.

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Are we competing with the truth?

By Admin

On March 21, 2009

In General Information

The blogs are going wild, the headlines are snappy, and late night comedians bristle with glee. First it’s a $165M payout to AIG executives, now it’s AIG’s $75M lobbying campaign and payout to the politicians who were supposed to vet them in the first place – and the majority of the beneficiaries were Democrats!

Far greater crimes have been committed in the financial meltdown, but this one is catching fire and it’s trying to burn the house down.

As if fanning the flame, Obama loosens the reigns on the Freedom of Information Act, publishes bailout beneficiaries, identifies stimulus projects, opens doors to Iran, health care, education, and forces earmarks front and center. He is taking political bullets from all corners, but so is everyone else – nobody is safe. Not even Rush Limbaugh; now neutralized and tossed in the surf like a beached whale. People flood to social media, traditional media fails. When everyone is to blame, the finger points backwards.

So the competitors are actually cooperating; with the right information everyone has the incentive to make the game fair (and the highest probability of surviving).

By far the most important job in any sport is a referee. The referee wears the black and white stripped shirt in order to contrast with visual information in the field of play. They blow a whistle in order to contrast with the audio information in the field of play. They stop the game if the rules are violated in order to contrast with the dynamics of play. If a violation is too close to call, they consult the slow motion replay. Both sides agree to play fair and to obey the referee or else they get thrown out of the game. Contrast is good.

Obama is relentlessly pushing as much information onto the playing field as he is pushing money. Could it be that information and money are related in some inherent way?

Innovation is the science of change and economics is the science of incentive. Information, knowledge, and innovation are profoundly related. High rates of change of information yield higher rates of change in knowledge inducing still higher rates of change of innovation.

There is nobody to blame except the truth.

What Obama is doing is irrelevant to a manufacturing economy because market forces are a sufficient vetting mechanism for product quality. It is also irrelevant to the knowledge economy because that is destined to be outsourced.

However, Obama’s actions are definitive for an innovation economy.

Not unlike the financial meltdown; the only ones who don’t see it coming are the ones who don’t want to. Are we competing with the truth?

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I Am Capitalist and So Are You

By Admin

On March 16, 2009

In General Information

In case you have not noticed, it is largely in the best interest of one group of people to keep another group of people poor, weak, and disorganized. I’ll let the reader connect these dots as they see fit, however, the fact is that is how capitalism works – there must be a merchant class and there must be a working class. And even after all the inequality that this arrangement implies, capitalism is still the only game in town for creating and distributing wealth.

As the burden of supporting the capitalist system is increasing with interest on debt that can never be funded, the pressures on the working class will enter a phase of rapidly diminishing returns.

The Poor:

The inherent conflict is that the working class will always seek to maximize their wages and the merchant class will seek to minimize those wages. Inadvertently, there is a suppression of information, and therefore education, to the working class. The result is a net loss of intellectual capital.

The Weak:

The inherent conflict is that the working class is assigned the tasks of carrying out the wishes of the merchant class even if it is not in their own best interest. Inadvertently, conformity becomes a survival strategy for the working class. The result is a net loss of creative capital.

The Disorganized:

The inherent conflict is that the working class will organize themselves into collectives as a means to match the relative power of the merchant class. Again, inadvertently, if people are held below a certain economic threshold, they will fail to organize because their concern is greater for simply feeding their family. The net result is a loss of social capital.

Diminishing returns

The result of the net loss of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital is the inability to create new wealth. While these conditions were once the exclusive domain of less developed countries especially under communism, similar conditions are now arising in the United States under capitalism. That is, before Social Media was used to enrich, empower, and organize.

I am a capitalist:

The tools of the old merchant class trade are eroding. As the financial crisis envelopes the United States, more and more people are turning to Social media. Traditional media is over commercialized, polarized, and gentrified while the audience can now control their bandwidth, seek multiple opinions, and become highly diversified. The draw to social media is nothing less than extraordinary even among those who still have jobs. When people are released from the clutches of the merchant class, they wake up, look around and inspire each other. The innovation economy is upon us.

Innovation Economics

The paradigm shift is really quite subtle. It behaves as a function of the human embodiment of innovation. For example; most of us do not wake up every day aspiring to improve the Ipod, the Wii platform, the better mousetrap, or any other inanimate object for that matter– instead, we seek to improve ourselves, and by extension, those around us. This is the self embodiment of innovation – something improved with an economic outcome. To improve one self is to innovate; social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital are the factors of production and social media is the corporate structure. I am Capitalist and if you have read this far, so are you.

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Is The Banking System Corrupted?

By Admin

On March 9, 2009

In General Information

The following video series is one of the most important videos that you can watch right now. These were published in 2006 but it’s the best place to start understanding the current crisis. It will also give you an understanding of what Barak Obama is doing and why.

Finally, after viewing these videos, you will have a greater understanding of what money is, what the future holds, and why the Ingenesist Project is therefore so Important.

Part 1/5; Cartels Robbing the Public

Part 2/5; How Money is Created

Part 3/5; Money Is Debt

Part 4/5; Monetary Reform

Part 5/5; Warning About the New World Order.

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The Global Financial Crisis; The End Game

By Admin

On February 18, 2009

In General Information

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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Social Media; the Integrator of the Innovation Economy

By Admin

On November 24, 2008

In General Information

Where are the gray suited diplomats holding each others forearms against a world map backdrop vowing to correct the world’s innovation system? Where are the politicians joining across party lines about how to inject 700 billion dollars to fix the nation’s innovation system? When will the Federal Reserve Chairman find the flaw in our national innovation system? Hey, when will someone notice that we don’t have a national innovation system?

Schumpeterian Economics argues that corporations represent our nation’s innovation endowment. However, the primary function of a corporation is to make money, not explicitly to innovate. Sure, they innovate if they must – most likely to beat down a more innovative competitor. But, as soon as bad times hit, most will shift money from R&D to marketing.

If we look back only 400 hundred years, everyone on Earth lived on an average of about 500 dollars per year. Then the innovations from the prior 2,000,000 years started to converge. Counting backwards; the knowledge economy was “derived” from the information revolution, which was derived from the manufacturing revolution which was “derived” the Industrial revolution which was “derived” from the scientific revolution, which was “derived” from the agrarian economy. Each revolution “Integrated” the tools of the prior revolution; The Knowledge economy integrated the tools of the information age and the information age integrated the tools of the manufacturing economy, etc. By the way, the term “derived” is related to the term “derivative” – the primary hedging tool integrated in our current financial system.

Each economic revolution was marked by a tremendous increase in human productivity – we no longer need to milk our own cow. Victoria trades a dollar’s worth of her time as an airplane engineer for a dollar’s worth of the Robert’s time as an agricultural engineer. Bill Gates is worth 50 billion dollars because he increased the productivity of a minimum of a billion people by a minimum of 50 dollars each. I save 5 dollars in gas by not driving to the library when I can just search Google or Wikipedia.

The only way to “make” more money is to increase human productivity and the only sustainable way to increase human productivity is to find better ways of doing things. Anything else is simply a transfer or redistribution of money. Both are important – but often we confuse them under the same terminology: “making money”. Or, we reverse the two by literally making (printing) money and then transferring it to corporations under the assumption that they will innovate enough to support everyone else plus the debt. This system worked great for many years and in many political forms – it brought us from living in caves to a 65 trillion dollar global economy. But like the economic revolutions before it, the current economic structure will soon give way to a new paradigm as we are forced to reach for higher productivity.

What the brilliant economist, Joseph Schumpeter did not have in his time was the technological breakthrough of Computer Enabled Society. Taking a hint from the past; the new economic paradigm will be derived from the knowledge economy by integrating the tools developed during the knowledge economy. That is why we now have Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube – and all the rest.

Everyone agrees that information, knowledge, and innovation are profoundly related. In fact, we can say that knowledge is derived from information and that innovation is derived from knowledge. The new paradigm will be called the Innovation Economy and it will arise from the integration of the tools of the knowledge economy using social media. We see terms like open-sourcing, crowd sourcing, social networking, groundswells, innovation exchanges and a host of new Social Media Internet applications. All of these have one thing in common; the tangibility of human knowledge. This is the Holy Grail of modern finance and it is not a coincidence – it is now within our grasp.

In the past, human knowledge was only tangible inside the construct of a corporation – the corporate structure integrated knowledge assets to make things people want and need. However, with Social Media, knowledge assets will become tangible outside the corporate structure and integrated by knowledge communities, social networks, crowds, groundswells, etc. Knowledge communities will mix, combine, interact, and share knowledge; inevitably the end result is innovation – to make things that people want and need. These knowledge communities will become the next “corporation” acting directly as the integrator of human knowledge. Ironically, Social Media “outsources” management. Traditional corporations will not disappear as the agrarian economy never disappeared – they will just integrate.

Ideally, Wall Street is a simply a horse race where money is bet on corporations to fund innovation. There is nothing wrong with that. We don’t need a new financial system; we need a new and improved innovation system. We have the technology; all we need now is the “integrator”. The Ingenesist Project is the only viable comprehensive integrator now being proposed. Perhaps it is not perfect, but the next economic paradigm will be certainly be derived from its improvement.

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The Tangibility of Knowledge

By Admin

On November 9, 2008

In General Information

Knowledge Tangibility should be the most important conversation in Social Media circles given the current financial situation in America.

I lived through financial devaluation in another country and the effects were crushing: after the run on the banks, there will be a run on Walmart. People will buy TVs, small appliances, shoes, and useful stuff that will hold more value tomorrow that they cost today. These items may become a de facto currency of trade. Americans will be astonished by how fast a devaluation event plays out; hours and days, not months or years. When things settle down, the government will retire the old dollar and introduce a new currency at an exchange of, say, 1 megabuck equals 1000 old dollars. Then the chips are cleared, assets are transferred, and the same game can start all over again.

The difference is that for the first time in history, there is a window of opportunity for social media technology to break this cycle. Please let me explain:

Suppose that a BMW costs $50,000 dollars and a KIA costs $10,000 dollars. These prices reflect the quantity and quality of the car in terms of availability and popular amenities such as, handling, road noise, comfort, status, etc. Suppose the government introduces a new currency called the “megabuck”. Suppose the government pegs the megabuck to cars saying that all cars will have a value of 30,000 megabucks. Since these cars are not equal, people will begin trading; the BMW will be bid up to 50,000 megabucks and the Kia will be bid down to 10,000 megabucks based on supply and demand – right back where they started.

Admittedly an oversimplification, but the point is does not matter what you call the currency – the most important thing is the quantity and quality of the asset. This brings us back to the idea of knowledge tangibility.

Suppose that, on average, 1 hour of human labor is worth 20 megabucks. As above, hard labor will be bid up while soft labor would be bid down. The same is not really true with knowledge because knowledge is invisible and it can’t be counted with bricks or bushels. There is no knowledge inventory in America’s communities. Therefore, there is no way to establish supply and demand for knowledge assets. People in a community do not know what other people in the community know. This is where social networks will make a huge difference.

Human knowledge, if formatted correctly, would make an excellent asset upon which to peg a currency. Today, accountants say that human knowledge is “intangible” but social media demonstrates otherwise; human knowledge is simply invisible – hidden inside corporations under the thumb of Wall Street. Social media demonstrates that knowledge assets are itching to be release to the public domain in a highly tangible manner. Believe it or not, we are now 95% of the way toward real knowledge tangibility today. We should be very excited about this because everything changes.

Like the example with the cars, we need to have a comprehensive inventory of the knowledge assets in our communities so that they can be strategically combined into productive organizations. This inventory must be formatted in terms of quantity and quality and include all knowledge living including social, creative, and intellectual capital. If done correctly, it will not matter what happens to the dollar or what currency is used as a scorecard, the value of human knowledge assets will remain intact.

Again, the value is in the asset, not the currency – it is in you, me, and our diverse communities who will favor community priorities rather than Wall Street priorities. This is how where we will find equity, sustainability, and fairness in a capitalist system.

The Ingenesist Project has specified exactly how to create knowledge tangibility in a capitalist model using 3 simple web applications for Social Networks; a Knowledge Inventory, a Percentile Search Engine, and an Innovation Bank. Please read the intro and the articles on page IEc101. If you agree, please pass it on. If you do not agree, please help us make it better. If you don’t understand, email me. This needs to happen fast and unfortunately nobody will do it for us – we must do it ourselves.

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The Ingenesist Project – press release

By Admin

On October 21, 2008

In General Information

We have launched The Ingenesist Project. The Innovation Economy is an absolutely huge and necessary step forward for all of us. The current financial system is unstable and it will fail. At best, the innovation economy can increase human productivity sufficiently to support the debt load. At worst, there needs to be a system of trade in place for society in the event of a crash or devaluation so that people can purchase the necessities until the recovery can take hold. So yes, this is serious business.

Anyone following this blog please spread the word. I need to get people to the point where they will read the 18 articles – after which, hopefully, their outlook on the tangibility of knowledge in social networks will be permanently altered.

My challenge, of course, is to make a very difficult subject matter easy to explain and compelling enough to call people to action. Those 18 articles condense 400 years of financial industry development and history into a few pages. Yes, the analogy between social networks and finance holds well. This is not easy to explain, but the solution to the financial mess is right under our noses. It’s almost too simple to see.

The forum has been added to solicit threaded comments to the 18 articles. This is the backbone to the open source development. I hope to build future posts on the comments that arise – a feedback loop. We will identify the sub components, partners, strategies, and action items together. Participants will pay each other in a new currency.

I will soon simplify and interpret the preferred embodiments from the patent which will illuminate the countless new-to-this-world business opportunities that will become available to entrepreneurs in this environment.

As a demonstration; vetting mechanisms make markets more efficient. Ebay has the feedback score, Craigslist has the flagging feature – this is fact. Social networks are perfectly suited to act in this manner across the entire spectrum of commerce. This is a multi-billion dollar industry that can be very easily monetized in the innovation economy. I hope that others can see this too. There is a great deal of wealth to be generated for each other.

I would like to thank all of the people who advise this program. I soon hope to invite a Board of Directors and formalize the growing concern that is The Ingenesist Project. Anyone reding this, I am an open networker on Linked in – sent me a invite and I’ll respond.

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For immediate release:

The Ingenesist Project; Putting an End to Debt Economics

(Seattle) The Ingenesist Project is an open source economic development program that will challenge America’s financial meltdown head-on by creating an innovation economy trading rallods (dollar spelled backwards) backed by innovation instead of dollars that are backed by debt.

“Deficit spending is unsustainable. When the dollar crashes, People will need an alternate economy to trade in – one whose currency is backed by something tangible; and there is there is nothing more tangible than the human imagination, including gold”, says originator, Dan Robles. “Capitalism likes competition; well today, Social Networks are the ultimate competitor”

The Ingenesist Project has identified three relatively simple web applications which, when applied to Social Networks, will allow human intellect, social capital, and creativity to become tangible outside the construct of Wall Street and Corporations.

By definition, the rallod is pegged to the national debt, as such, The Ingenesist Project has 10 trillion rallods (and counting) to distribute. Participants in the Ingenesist Project Development Forum will award these rallods to each other on a reputation scale for their work in design, development, and improvement of the three web application that will release society from the shackles of debt economics.

The forum is open to anyone and participants can earn millions of rallods for their work in developing these applications.

The New ‘Stock’ Market

The Ingenesist Project has a patent pending for an Innovation Banking System to finance social innovation and will release all rights to the public domain.

“This is one of the most important patents applications published in our time. Countless ‘new-to-the-world’ business plans and patentable methods, systems, and devices will result from the The Ingenesist Project”, says Robles “Everything changes from the University System to the prioritization of global resources. Wall Street will be come the steward instead of the master”

Entrepreneurs are encouraged to patent, protect, or contain all intellectual property that they develop in the new economy and become as wealthy as they possibly can under the condition that they pay royalties, equity, or options to their knowledge inventory.

The entrepreneur’s “Secret-Sauce”, however, must be shared with The Ingenesist Project in order to improve the Percentile Search Engine Algorithm for the benefit of the public domain.

The Rallod

The U.S. National Debt is over 10 trillion dollars. Assuming deficit spending stops today, every man, woman, and child in the US is responsible for $33,500.00.

This means that $33,500.00 of every person’s productivity has already been spent. Obviously, the only way to pay the debt is to increase every person’s productivity by exactly $33,500.00.

The only sustainably way to increase human productivity is innovation. If the dollars crashes and pegs to the Rallod – the innovation economy will replace the debt economy and those who build it will become the bankers of tomorrow.

More Information:

Please review www.Ingenesist.com

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