My earlier post about influence vs intention created several interesting conversations on several blogs where it had been re-posted [1], [2]. My assertion is that an influence based currency may be an easier path to forge but a dangerous path to follow.

Any new currency that claims to improve on the current financial system must ultimately be able to be capitalized and securitized.  Indeed, people should be influenced to use Zipcars  – but how exactly did the Zipcar get there?

Influence goes nowhere

Sorry folks, I know that the Klout people are working awful hard to become the standard of online influence. Fueled by corporate marketers, It is also clear that those who have influence in this domain are going to try to keep it at nearly any cost.  It is obvious that there is increasing pressure to monetize social media and Twitter is easy to scrape into loads of data that must mean something economic if one were to look at it hard enough.  The end game on influence, however, is Politics – influence currency will ultimately resolve to a state of mutually opposing forces.

Skipping stones

Assume that the pond is calm.  My influence causes ripples that cause others to react or take action.  Likewise, the people around them react as well, and so forth into a set of infinity consequences.  By definition, consequences are not intentions.  The only intention is to influence and the only influence is to induce consequences to an otherwise calm place.

Intension Currency is a far more difficult nut to crack, but crack it we must.  Intensions are organic – everyone has them.  They originally appear in a person’s God-given natural interests, talents and passions.  Intensions appear in what a person studies, the collection of knowledge that they choose to accumulate and subsequently act upon. Unfortunately, far too often the influence of the few interferes with the intensions of the masses – again, allow me to make a reference to politics.

Intention lives in our knowledge inventory

Rational people act on a basis of what they know how to act upon. Predicting intensions is a function of reading a person’s organic knowledge inventory.  Unfortunately, the human knowledge inventory remains sequestered behind the corporation, HR file cabinets, and the deeply flawed and archaic resume system.   There is not, however, an inventory of what people know in a community, what they are passionate about, and what they intend to do with their lives.  Knowledge is the most basic storage and exchange of value – but where is the inventory?

Goldman Sachs knows this well

There is no economic system that capitalizes and securitizes the intentions of a person, a community, or a network of persons except the “Corporation”, which happens to be the ultimate political influence machine.  We need to be really really careful about falling down the vortex of “Influence” currency – we may just be walking into a trap.

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