A Symbionomics Media Experience

Part of what Jay and I hope to accomplish in the long run with the Symbionomics project is making a feature length film. However, we believe the experience the audience has with the film is just as important as the content of the film itself. Today, the options for experiencing a feature length film are somewhat limited, so it may be time for a big redesign.

To get a lay of the land, let’s start with the current popular ways films are experienced. DVDs are totally unsocial. You sit there and you watch the film with no idea of who else has watched it or what they thought about it. You also have no way to contribute your own thoughts or enter into any kind of dialog other than with those who are physically present in the screening room. That seems a little last century to me.

Also, since DVDs are physical objects, once they are burned they do not change. While the extras on DVDs do make an attempt to provide additional context (such as commentary tracks), this material is just as unchanging as the film itself. This means that as new information and perspectives come to light, eventually the DVD becomes a historical artifact as opposed to a living document.

The rise of web video services such as YouTube or Vimeo has done much to address these fundamental shortcomings. However, while YouTube and Vimeo are awesome for short videos, you can only comment on the video as a whole. That may be fine if there are only a few ideas in the video, but for longer format films this limitation means only the shallowest of conversations can arise.

Netflix’s streaming service has certainly grown more robust over the last year, yet it still has only a few social elements. The viewing process itself still feels more like a lecture than a seminar. I watch a film, I give it a rating, and maybe I write a review if I am highly motivated.

Jay and I have been playing with how to take a quantum leap forward in audience participation. Think Soundcloud for video. Soundcloud is my favorite music platform by far. I majored in music composition in undergrad, and one of my favorite parts of that experience was getting and giving critiques. In a good composition class, your fellow students help you reach your highest potential by offering support, camaraderie, and constructive criticism. Soundcloud does this very effectively by allowing users to make comments at specific points in the timeline. In other words, if I, as a musician, decide to add a drum beat at 2:23, folks can make comments that appear precisely at that time. The result is a highly focused critique of the composition, which in turn leads to a supportive community of musicians who learn and grow together.

We want our audience to have the same kind of experience with the Symbionomics film. Imagine watching a finished film where any frame in the timeline can be commented on. If some expert in the film makes an interesting point, and you have a burning desire to respond, just add a video comment to that frame. These comments could be threaded to allow for dialog between different commentators. Comments could also include links to relevant external media sources, such as someone’s TED talk.

By allowing an ongoing dialog to emerge in specific response to moments in the film, we create the possibility for a living document. If new perspectives come to light on a given topic, people can add links to the latest and best web talks. The result is a collaboratively created way to drill into specific topics and ideas presented in the timeline of the film.

We want to hear your thoughts. What would make you want to participate in this kind of dialog? What features would you want to see?

Symbionomics Themes

What follows is a synopsis of the major themes we are exploring with the Symbionomics project (see kickstarter link on the right). Obviously, this is just a starting point. We are open to these concepts growing and evolving as this process unfolds.

With each theme, we are seeding an online video discussion (as linked to in the titles). Ultimately, we will have video forums for each theme.

1. New Media: In the last twenty years, a wave of new tools has transformed the way we communicate. As Clay Shirky points out in his seminal book Here Comes Everybody, 20th century media tools took the form of one-to-many. Today, with the advent of social media, we can, for the first time, communicate on a large scale in a many-to-many pattern. What’s more, this new ability has profoundly affected how the economy is organized. We will explore how tools like blogs, social media, and Wikipedia have transformed the way people live and work.
2. Networks: These new forms of communication have enabled the geometry of our organizations to evolve from pyramidal to networked. In the past we needed top-down hierarchical organizations to organize on any scale larger than a village. Today, we are seeing organizations become more effective as they have embraced networked culture. We will explore how living in a networked world changes the incentives for economic interaction.
3. Letting Go of Control: As we have transformed into a networked culture, we have developed new ways of deriving value from our work. We used to depend on capturing value through the ownership of assets and the control of production. Now that access to information is only ever a few connections away, many people are loosening control over their property in favor of sharing amongst their networks. We will explore how new social contracts of ownership and control have gained traction in an age of hyper-connectivity.
4. Open Production: As individuals and organizations have loosened their grasp on their products, an entirely new form of production has emerged. In contrast to the industrial production models of the 20th century, today, open source software, Wikipedia, and Creative Commons have proven that open production is both viable and effective. We will explore the success and future possibilities of this new mode of production.
5. Motivation: With new modes of production come new motivations for participation and value creation. Since both monetary reward and power over others are largely non-existent in the open production model, motivation has shifted from extrinsic to intrinsic. What’s more, as Daniel Pink points out in his book Drive, intrinsic motivation is far more successful at educing creative problem solving in individuals. We will explore this new motivational landscape and find out exactly why people do contribute at such large scales to Wikipedia and other such projects.
6. Post-Scarcity Economics: In the old economy, the surest way to profit was to be controlling a scarce resource. However, many of the products of the digital age are virtually free to reproduce and distribute. Industries such as newspapers and music have been slow to embrace this new reality, and have fallen into decline. We will explore the economic logic of a world where the primary driver of the economy is no longer scarce.
7. The Future Work: Our new communications tools have also changed the way we organize at the workplace. The rise of co-working environments such as The Hub has brought into question whether the 20th century conception of employment is still a necessary foundation to the economy. Agile developer teams that spontaneously arise to build open source software have proven that successful teamwork no longer depends on an employer. We will explore this shifting landscape around how we organize ourselves into effective teams.
8. Social Gaming: The recent explosion of smart phone technology has also seen an unprecedented integration of gaming into everyday life. Services such as Foursquare, SCVNGR, and CheckPoints, have provided new ways of coordinating economic activity, supporting local businesses in the process. What’s more, thought leaders such as Jane McGonigal and Jessie Schell have emphasized using game dynamics for social benefit. We will explore the power and potential of social gaming.
9. Collaborative Consumption: In addition to new modes of production emerging in the economy, we are also seeing the rise of new forms of consumption. Rachel Botsman in her recent book, What’s Mine Is Yours, has documented a massive surge in services such as Zip Car, CouchSurfing, and NeighborGoods which use information technology to make more efficient use of physical resources. We will explore how this new trend in consumption is affecting the broader economic landscape.
10. Making and Growing: New economic patterns of the information age are no longer limited to the Internet as the rise of maker communities and DIY demonstrates. The rise of 3D printing has made decentralized manufacturing a real possibility, with designs shared in a global knowledge commons. On the agricultural side, gardening has surged in popularity as the economy continues to languish. We will explore how we can use the same patterns Wikipedia has proved so successful in the broader economy.
11. The Future of Currency: As our economy transforms, conventional forms of money may no longer be serving our needs. In many cases, online reputation systems have reduced people’s dependency on money to facilitate transactions. Much of the new economy is outside of the market entirely, which begs the question, what will replace money as an economic coordinating system? We will explore how 21st century information systems are beginning to reduce the need for conventional money to get things done.
12. Collective Intelligence: As our civilization goes through this massive transformation, we are also seeing the intelligence of organizations rising to meet 21st century challenges. Where the 20th century was about smart individuals, the 21st century will be about creating smart organizations on all scales. We will explore the power and future possibilities of collective organization.

Asymmetric Accounting & Adaptive Networks

In this recent post, Gregory Rader explores the implications of asymmetric accounting. For those who need a quick catch up, asymmetric accounting is when two parties in a transaction account for the transaction differently. This process is a little different than we are accustomed to, as the concept of "price" generally ensures there is a symmetry in accounting between buyer and seller. Here are a few additional thoughts for your consideration.

Let's consider an adaptive neural network. The basic rule in any adaptive network is: try a bunch of different configurations, and strengthen those connections that lead to a preferred result. While our brains are one example of an adaptive network, this pattern also manifests in the evolution of ecosystems and even our social systems. In fact, our economy as a whole could be thought of as an adaptive network that reinforces configurations (innovations) that add value, and eliminates those that don't.

So what does this have to do with asymmetric accounting? If we were to consciously design an algorithm for the economy's adaptive network to function by, I would argue that insisting on symmetric accounting is a big mistake. Let's assume that our goal is to encourage lots of innovation / experimentation and provide reinforcement for the production of goods / services that add value to people's lives. By this logic we would want to measure the value-add of any good or service provided. However, you will notice that the price is agreed upon before any value is added to the economy. Consider for a moment how much distortion this causes. As a buyer, I might be suckered in by advertising that promises some great value-add for my life, only to discover that the product in question causes me nothing but grief.

Also consider that the buyer has every incentive to understate the amount of value they expect to receive, as this expression takes the form of them parting with their hard-earned money.

In order to overcome these two major barriers to a well-functioning adaptive network, I propose the following. First, we eliminate the concept of expected value as expressed through "price" entirely, and shift to a model where we are measuring the real value of the good or service received. There are, of course, many ways we could accomplish this, ranging from hard data derived from sensors to subjective reviews and ratings systems. The second would be remove any incentive for either buyer or seller to express anything other than their authentic experience around the transaction. And we all know that experiences can be asymmetrical.

Taken together, the picture this paints of the economy is quite different. In the interests of not rambling on for too much longer, I would assert that this algorithm would likely enable the kind of economy I described in this blog post from August.

Scarcity Is an Illusion, no really

Some would say that while non-rival goods like information are not inherently scarce, rival goods like oil are. I disagree. There is the amount of oil that there is. It is neither abundant nor scarce. It just is. What makes us perceive oil as scarce are the humsn systems we have built that create a context for it.

Consider a violin. A violin is a system defined by the interaction of various elements (wood, string, bow). The violin system enables a certain kind of music to be created. If you wanted to use a violin to make percussion, it probably wouldn't work too well. Does that mean the music that's possible to make with the violin is scarce? Clearly not. It just means that the system within which you make such music defines certain parameters. What's more, there isn't anything scarce about the music that's possible with a drum either; it simply enables artistry within a different set of parameters.

Some would say that parameters on systems are what enable creativity in the first place. A person has to be a real artist to get any instrument to perform at the height of its potential. Artistry is only possible because there is a system within which it has meaning.

To continue the analogy in the economic domain, in the broadest sense, our instrument is the Earth. And the Earth has certain parameters. This doesn't make anything herein scarce. Quite the opposite. It simply gives us a system within which we have a chance to be artists. If we are experiencing scarcity, it is only because we are trying to play the wrong kind of music. There is no question in my mind that the new music we will learn to play together will be much better suited to our instrument.

The Core of MetaCurrency

For all the talk those of us at The MetaCurrency Project have gotten into about the meaning of open, the meaning of currency, and various subtleties therein, the core of The MetaCurrency Project is actually very simple. IMHO, it boils down to the following question: What would it take to make the role of 3rd party record keeping irrelevant?

For those of you who need a quick overview, 3rd party record keeping is what a bank does. It is also what a commercial barter organization does and even a timebank. When the records are denominated in terms of dollars, it is an official IRS designation. For those of us comfortable including things likes 5-star ratings in the definition of currency, 3rd party record keeping also refers to Yelp!, Ebay, etc, since they keep the records people make about fellow users.

The ability to record stuff that happened in the real world, and derive useful information from those records (such as account balances, or average user ratings) is obviously very powerful. Just being in the business of 3rd party record keeping can concentrate massive amounts of wealth (just look at the banking industry). What's more, as the failure of many local currencies has shown us, this architecture can be highly fragile, subject to the petty personal politics that so often run rampant in activist circles.

What if we had a way to perform all the same functions, but without the middle man? What if our records could be distributed in such a way that they couldn't be tampered with, and privacy was still protected? We believe this shift would open up vast new possibilities for how we organize ourselves economically, as well as offer a resilience to our economy heretofore unrealized. In essence, that has been what The MetaCurrency Project has been trying to figure out how to do for the last few years. And, this is a more difficult challenge than you may think....

However, I for one would be delighted if someone out there figured it out no matter who it was.

Job's Economy

That's Job as in The Book of Job. Yes, it's time to get Biblical. The Book of Job may be one of the oldest books in the Bible, but it actually contains some interesting wisdom pertaining to the new economy.

The basic story is very simple. Job is an upstanding guy who does everything G_d tells him to. Despite this, lots of bad things start happening to him. Job gets pretty upset and challenges G_d saying, "Hey, I did all this great stuff, and look what you gave me!" To which, G_d replies, "What the hell is wrong with you? The universe doesn't work like that. It's way cooler." Then, when Job finally accepts that the universe doesn't owe him anything, he regains all his former wealth.

At the core, this is a story about Quid-Pro-Quo a.k.a. something for something. Job expects the universe to work based on a quid-pro-quo agreement. He does some good, he gets some good. His sense of fair play is deeply offended when it turns out the universe doesn't work like this at all. What's more, we sympathize with Job. We feel his pain because we too often feel as though the universe isn't being fair.

The interesting part is, we've built our whole economy around this faulty notion of how the universe works. Money is the very essence of a quid-pro-quo agreement. I do something for you. I get something back from society. In fact, society actually owes me to the tune of however much money I have. What's more, we believe this core agreement to be at the heart of wealth production. It's nearly impossible for us to imagine how we could have an economy without this tit-for-tat way of doing business.

We forget that this is not actually how wealth is built in Nature. Nature is a complex system that exhibits emergent properties. The type of emergence that underlies true wealth production has almost nothing to do with quid-pro-quo. In many cases, the coming together of seemingly unrelated elements produces wealth far in excess of the sum of the parts. How would you describe that in terms of quid-pro-quo?

G_d says something like this to Job (albeit it not explicitly spelled out with these concepts). What's more, when Job finally "gets it" that being a good human being isn't about extrinsic rewards, his happiness returns.

Here is my strong intuition. If we lessened the degree to which we base our economy on quid-pro-quo we would create a lot more space for the emergence of new types of wealth. Wikipedia, Creative Commons, etc. are examples of this new kind of wealth emerging as we speak. And Lord knows the Old Testament was all for Wikipedia... :)

21st Century Property Rights

The question of property is not as easy as it first sounds. William Blackstone, a judge circa 18th century England, defined property rights as "sole and despotic dominion." It's no accident that this formulation coincided with the Industrial Age, which has been largely founded on the premise that control over nature / other is a worthy goal. Our conception of property, while certainly becoming more sophisticated over the last 250 years, has not really shifted from this basic notion.

One of the ways property rights have evolved is that today there are limits to "sole and despotic dominion". In many neighborhoods, I could not paint my house with green polka dots, as this would violate code. So, The State (as a proxy for the community at large) places restrictions on what I may do with my property if I want it to remain mine.

However, I would assert that The State may not be the most effective or efficient arbiter in property rights. Consider the following: the bank can own a completely unused house (appropriately painted), acquired through foreclosure. I doubt many people would claim if pressed, that the unused yet appropriately painted house was more beneficial to the community than my lived-in green polka dot house next door. Clearly something is amiss with the way we assign property rights today.

One thing is clear. Property rights are derived the perceived benefit to the community (or at least non-harm) from one person or group's stewardship of what is owned. I will lose my car if I use it to run people over. I will lose my house if I use it to refine crack cocaine. So, given the rise of online tools that can instantly reflect public sentiment, perhaps it is possible to disintermediate The State as the sole authority in this matter. What if we were to look towards the proverbial wisdom of the crowds as a way of determining property rights? The state has proven itself clunky at best in mitigating modern society. Perhaps there is a way of moving this function of defining property rights out of the state's hands and into a more dynamic, adaptable, and democratic framework.

Imagine a world where property is owned because it is being well stewarded rather than ownership being a priori to stewardship. Much of the worst behavior we see in the economy would be impossible, because the second any firm stopped stewarding their properties for the benefit of the larger community, they would no longer own their properties (intellectual or otherwise). In this world ownership is derived from good stewardship, rather than the other way around.

Thoughts?