dotxxxblog

Thanks very much to all the people who have asked me what the hell the site is supposed to accomplish. If not for their unafraid question, I don’t think I’d know. It seems perfectly right to me that an audience, that a market, should have the means to influence what it consumes.

Terms like Information Age, Technocracy and Knowledge Worker have been bandied about for years now, to suggest the shift in value from hard assets to intellectual property. We watched the “value” of “information” swell to unprecedented dimensions — then we had to watch it explode.

The bubble burst because we had not yet understood the relationship between traffic* and money.

Now, that relationship has been discovered and excitedly applied by many companies and entrpreneurs. You might say the Web, as it exists today, was shaped by commerce. Recall that commerce was not the intention of the Web’s makers. If we think about the things we know the Web can do, from the vantage point of the present, and think those things inseparable from commerce, it’s only because that’s all we’ve really seen.

It’s also that the Web has shaped our conception of commerce.

Much of that re-shaping of “commerce” has applied to the Forms of Value.

What a number of visionary people back in 1998-1999 felt, if not quite understood yet, was that the Web was going to offer us radical re-inventions of commerce — not just gentle “re-shaping”. What they foresaw were alternative new Value Flow Dynamics that were going to stretch the limits of the term “commerce” to breaking and beyond. Indeed, the possibilities are so vast, it is necessary to abandon most of the words that convey meaning in business today, if one is to speak of the possibilities at all.

As much as I am itching to write about these possibilities, to use old words as they’ve never been used before, to invent new words because I can, I’m not going to — not here.

Out of respect for the importance of the Issue of the Site and brevity, I want to boil down the consequences of all the Sweeping Change to just a few simple effects:

1. Resources (both human and otherwise) are becoming efficiently available in support of Ideas.

2. These Ideas and the support they inspire will manifest “organizations” that will resemble conventional companies in almost every way but one…

3. These “Companies” will pursue measurable goals that have very little to do with “money” in the traditional sense, but will represent Value of nearly incomprehensible magnitude.

4. As systems are developed to transfer that Value back to the individuals who created it, work will become a thing of the past, having been replaced by “work”.

5. “Working” for an organization will take on some of the social significance we attach today to voting and activism, for there being a greater exercise of choice in the matter.

6. The relative value of Value in its traditional, liquid forms will shrink, as GDP and other (still remarkably useful) metrical terms from Economics Science are enlarged by the addition of New Value Forms into their formulae.

7. Because “companies” are now “recruiting” “workers” using methods of attraction and compensation based in New Value Forms, (conventional) profitability is dethroned as the highest goal of “business”, replaced by the capacity to inspire people.

8. Having built a bridge to the “souls” of their “employees”, “companies” begin to use some of the organizational, communications and marketing methods we associate today with religions.

9. The long-dormant but never forgotten Ideals espoused by the Inventors of the Internet assume their rightful place — at the summit of our Civilization — lighting the way ahead, pervading everything we do.

10. “Showing up” for “work” becomes an act of “faith”.

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You are here today because I believe DOTxXx to be an important fork in the road for us, yes a juncture. As a Knowledge Worker in 2005, I am experimenting with early forms of the methods I believe will be used by Companies and Workers in the not-terribly-distant future.

I want for us to answer this important question — to “FIGURE IT OUT” — together, with commitment to standards higher than profit (since anything less would hold us back), and with a thought to consequences beyond just our lifetime.

2HP

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*(Broken down thusly: 1. The physical attention of visitors (clicks), 2. claimed or residual behavior data, and 3. Brand Equity, as calculated in Re-Visit Potential)

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the future - internet - technology - culture - religion - philosophy - anthropology - civilization - economics - mardack - HEADTREPRENEUR

AN EARLY DRAFT

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005 at 5:10 am and is filed under DOTXXXTALK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.