What if I told you that we could occupy Wall Street without actually camping out there? In case you have not noticed, Wall Street occupies your house without you ever seeing any suits milling around your driveway. So what’s the plan?
In the Age of The Internet, redistribution of wealth should not be a very difficult thing to do, yet the approach is surprisingly low-tech. Just look at the pictures; if this is going to be our approach, then we’re in deep trouble.
Here’s the trick. Wall Street is built on a foundation where the factors of production are land, labor, and capital. All we need to do is shift the factors of production to something else. We don’t actually need to shift Wall Street, we need to shift ourselves.
The reality is that the today’s economy is built on social, creative, and intellectual factors of production – these are the factors of production of that so-called 99% of the value of our economy. It’s a knowledge economy, remember?
Now, notice how land and labor are constrained by geography, property laws, political districts, and “national borders”. Also notice that the accounting system (capital) is as anonymous as possible, if not shrouded in secrecy. Do you remember how Steve Jobs told us that it’s OK to copy good ideas?
First, we need to build a knowledge inventory of all the useful stuff in our brains and integrated by geographic proximity so we all can find each other. This is how we’ll mimic land and labor. Next, the knowledge inventory must be anonymous until the point of transaction – this is not for privacy concerns, rather, we need to do this to create scarcity (nothing personal, Zuck). This is how we mimic “capital”.
At the end of the day, your knowledge inventory is your personal API – you create your own value and integrate with others or withhold it as you wish…just like Wall Street. Of course, everyone would then need to become a corporation so that we can pay our fair share of taxes (but not a penny more). That’s code for “too big to fail”.
Have you forgotten about Wall Street yet? If so, it’s not too early to coin the term APIcracy.
