The subject of privacy and anonymity are again rising up with the latest move by Facebook to integrate updates across the Internet onto the Facebook platform.
Conspiracy theories about Facebook and the CIA continue to flourish. Meanwhile, the marketing and advertising industry seems poised to reboot their dwindling influence under a new cloak and dagger of social media data hustling and predictive demographics rather than playing by new rules of engagement.
Money is one thing and value is another.
I am astonished that people willingly and freely give up huge volumes of information about themselves when they really don’t have to. In earlier times, marketers and advertisers would pay a great deal of money for far less information that people give them for free. People do not understand the value that is stored between their ears or how easy it would be to set up an alternate economy that trades in social currencies.
If advertisers can pay someone to cold call me, to graph my data across the web, or sneak around my social networks, then they can certainly pay me to answer the phone.
The Ingenesist Project specifies an Innovation Economy built on the platform of social media. While that thesis is extensive, let me summarize that the primordial soup of the Innovation Economy is called the Knowledge Asset Inventory.
Anonymous assets
One essential element of the new economic paradigm is the ability to combine knowledge assets so that innovation becomes predictable and therefore capitalized. However, a side effect is that such code makes the individual containers anonymous. Marketers will have to pay you to find you. here is why:
Now think about it this way – if you remove 20-dollar bill from your wallet to buy a Latte, you do not know (nor do you care) whether the last transaction performed by that 20-dollar bill was a donation to a charitable cause or a drug deal. The dollar bill is anonymous – but you, as an asset, are not.
Social Currency is a Social Imperative
Dollar denominated money is a system to control social currency at a leverage factor of 1000:1. Take away the dollar currency, and the leverage disappears. Add a social currency and the national debt disappears.
Almost as a bonus, it is an absolute impossibility for marketers and advertisers to store and exchange value denominated in a social currency without extraordinary changes to the way they engage their clients….like, uhm, …don’t waste our time.
If we are smart, we can shut down the privacy issue in a hurry – anonymity of knowledge assets is the key.
