Network Economy, Rising Tides, and Positive Vibes

Yesterday was a day of rest, relaxing, and recovery in Maui. I caught up with a few blog posts from friends while Michelle caught up on sleep. Here’s my response to what’s happening

Links to Posts Mentioned

Brett Slatkin thinks over Rising Tides

Louis Gray says no to negativity

Dewitt Clinton calls out spotty sources & the Houdini trick of guessing motivations

Spotty Sources & Motivation Guessing

There’s a great difference between estimating and presuming knowledge of motivation. Estimating motivation is a fascinating challenge. And testing hypothesized rationale by comparing them to actions, is a method of learning. Matching behavior to motivation is a great way to understand people. And like it or not, blogs are a great sounding board to test hypotheses and get rapid feedback from other folks that share interests. I don’t see motivational guessing going away anytime soon. But authors should certainly endeavor to make clear their estimated versus known motivations as a best practice.

Louis is Sick of Negative Nancies

Louis guzzles a flood of net info, and even with my much smaller draught I hit the negative wall fairly often. Whenever needed, I simply unplug from reading most sites for a few days and refresh my perspective. There’s only so much tearing down you can put up with before it starts affecting the way you think. Louis wants to know what’s happening without repeatedly running into buzzkills. See, I’m estimating Louis’ motivations already.

Rising Tides & Network Economies

After hundreds if not thousands of hours reading, brainstorming, writing and dreaming about wealth, value, and information connectivity I’m a little past amateur in the area of network economies. My thinking here is heavily influenced by Kevin Kelly’s New Rules for the New Economy. Businesses that foster and profit from increased network connectivity are poised to dominate the next several decades. The economy is certainly not a zero sum game. Competitive businesses that assume a zero sum economy artificially limit their potential to the ceiling of their presumed competitors. Winning business strategies will transcend short sighted ideologies, with massive benefits going to those who embrace and enrich their neighbors and master alignment with network growth.

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  • Leland

    I have to agree with your last point Mark. Companies who are in the business of controlling human virtual relationships, communication and communities are going to be the last bastion of wealth in our society as everything else increasingly becomes more automated and cheaper.

    The pace of technology means that everything that we can do with our hands is quickly being brought towards zero cost. So, by being in the business of what people do with their minds, we can position ourselves to be successful in the long term. :)

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    And there will likely be exceptions to the trend which stand out based
    on overwhelming service and quality. Some vertical businesses require
    human creativity and expertise.

  • http://twitter.com/emerigent/lists/memberships Emeri Gent [Em]

    I believe future marriage vows should include the internet a.k.a. “in sickness and health, in malware and virus free, for richer for poorer, in blogging and in magnetic storms” but joking aside, congratulations to you and Michelle in your matrimony.

    The one thing I have come to know about people is that I assume that I know them. In a networked world such assumptions turn the opportunity to discover into the same abject reality we have in meatspace where familiarity and security are the chief order of the day.

    Negativity is mostly a habit (unless it is a disease and life is generally a healthy condition for the majority) and it can become an enjoyable habit. If it wasn't professional comedians would erect a monument to Lenny Bruce to celebrate an era that is no more. That isn't going to happen, the first instinct of a child is to pull things apart rather than create a higher order of magnitude.

    Negativity supports the positive. If we have chosen to live in a culture of comparison, ambition and conclusion, then being positive is always going to be a challenge. If we don't examine the underlying forces we can't change the resulting outputs.

    We are not red state or blue state but a spectrum of cerebral and social diversity. What is construed as a new tilt at being positive is simply the old trying to be new again. This old is manners, morality and the recognition of the role virtue plays in our lives.

    Of course it is a pleasure to meet a sensitive soul, with depth of an old man's wisdom and who has an open minded approach to life – but that is the exception rather than the rule. When we try to turn these things into rules we are involving conditioning of thought rather than the liberation of the human spirit.

    We confuse negativity with the outcomes of an industrial age education. We are taught to make points, to WIN arguments. We are conditioned in our reactions to the new and we examine differences like animal who faces fire for the first time. It is time to step out of our animal skin and into our human one.

    Just as we are reaching a transition point, a coming of age (unlike 10,000 hours that Gladwell speaks of, this can be viewed as 21 Centuries from point zero). Of course the Jewish people will say “Heh! We are 57, not 21 like the gentiles”, so I am using the Gregorian calendar as an indicator of where we are as a human race, so this becomes a metaphor for “coming of age”.

    If we are to raise the bar on life it has to be with our own life regardless of the standards others have chosen for themselves. So now I look at people, I am reminded of Billy Joel

    Billy Joel – Just the Way You Are
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjCoBTzrN9E

    By learning to more accepting and learning not to judge (and boy do I judge or I have judged!) others, the positivity, negativity, the raising of the bar on quality of life becomes a genesis which starts from the very place we stand. Whether what others think we are doing is considered is intelligent is then their choice.

    When we think we should be role models then we send the wrong message out, a message of dependency, a message that leadership will save thoughtlessness. There is no message when a society comes of age, it matures because we don't treat people like helpless mutants or children who refuse to grow up.

    Will I ever abandon negativity? I recognize what the institution did to Lenny Bruce and I don't want to feel like I am a new form of police state, the self-policing state. If the old institution was about ham-handed control, what is the difference if the new institution is subtle and clever in its form of meme's and manipulation.

    When we focus on negative nancies we give them power and a legitimacy that they play a role in the social discourse. They are not Lenny Bruce but dinosaurs and we expend too much time trying to quell or change them, they exist because their legitimacy emanates from the nature and purpose of our response.

    To raise the bar requires the movement of a few. It is a bit like claiming a town back that has been taken over by drug lords. It is the little things that change into an accumulated transformation that becomes a big thing.

    Anyway I could contemplate for hours on this but I write this because change is a constancy and I am in charge of my own personal transformation. In the meantime, if you “Mark Essel” are reading this while Michelle is awake, I think I need to get on a flight to Mauri and read the riot act – this would not be negativity but in the words of mortal words of Nick Lowe

    Cruel to be Kind by Nick Lowe
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0l3QWUXVho

    Congratulations on your newly wedded life again and on this high note of positivity, I wish you best with the great Mark & Michelle Essel life journey ahead . . . come to think of it, I can't actually think of a better wedding present than the union of a smarter networked economy, and that always begins best with tying the knot.

    [Em]

  • Leland

    Any comment I make would be a disservice to the truly epic comment you just posted. I read it all but I can't say I fully understand it right now.

    Mark has become a social network with his wife… upgraded to dual core processing. Congrats to him I say. :)

  • http://twitter.com/Ovurmind Viktor Ovurmind

    Leland, the emergent nature of “Emeri Gent” is a pouring of my thoughts. When I write under “Viktor Ovurmind” it as another form of examination. Metacognition is the fancy word for thinking about one's thinking. What is true is as you see it, that the most important network is the bond of love that is between two people.

    [v.o.M.]

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Fortunately she's sleeping now. We have been running on a high state of activity for a week now. And although we both get broken sleep (no bed is like home for me), I can sneak by with a little less rest.

    Thank you for this comment, it brought a smile this AM. Glad to see another mode of your commenting under Viktor. It's time I wake Michelle for a morning beach walk.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Emeri's comments are worth rereading if you have time. If you're really curious and have time, you can find more of them with Disqus. Perhaps a topical search would be an excellent Disqus add-on?

  • http://twitter.com/emerigent/lists/memberships Emeri Gent [Em]

    Leland, putting on my Emeri Gent hat and taking off my Viktor Ovurmind hat just to add to Mark Essel's comment below; my principal learning in this emergent networked economy is the nature of information flow and how I relate to it.

    My journey online is all about thinking. The wearing of different hats has been documented in the past, the best one is “Six Thinking Hats” by Edward DeBono as a different but related view of thinking.

    Six Thinking Hats
    http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_bon…

    What De Bono has provided is a template for thinking about the way others think. What I engage is my own thinking and therefore this is an emergent process. I have no idea what is coming next, I am literally making it up as I go, but rest assured I am always “thinking” as I pour forth self-expression.

    What I do know is that Emeri Gent represents one wing and Viktor Ovurmind represents another. To fly in life we need both wings of imagination. Having a left wing view as opposed to a right wing view is far too mechanical. I want to personally fly without this division. The journey itself is not self-serving or narcissistic one, it is always trying to relate and feed off the given environment one thinks within.

    The onus for me isn't to dive right into growing ocean of information wealth because that is like wishing that we gain the Midas touch. I don't want to touch everything I engage into gold.

    If I am seeking something material out of this journey or to be somebody, it dissolves into a wasted effort that is worthless personally to me. Then it isn't emergent but calculating, deceptive and it is thoroughly based on the wrong motivation. That isn't my way online.

    No matter how scientific we become about our own life journey there is always the human need for art. I don't think we do justice for ourselves as looking at the artistic nature of our own lives. We think we don't have time but we do. We just flitter it away on stuff which we think is media that identifies our beliefs. We are tethered to our media instead of figuring out how media enables us to be free.

    There is a beauty in patience and breathing space – what the Greeks call “ruach”. To be thoughtful is a part of that beauty. When I write in an emergent way, which is what “Emeri Gent” is, some of that beauty is traded for speed. Not as a speed of rashness but because I have the ability to pour out what is a stream of consciousness. This is a dangerous approach because it is shoot thoughts out first and ask questions later.

    I call this expression rather than a comment because the value of asking questions later is the ability to re-read the words of the guide (here the guide is Mark Essel) and in my response to you your words serve as the guide.

    I then look at the words again in a new context because that new context is my own given life, it is the singular context that I know best. The stream of consciousness that I pour forth comes from within me but not as comparison but as observation.

    This is an exercise in refinement because the goal is determined by the emerging context (which is to do with my own life), the guide is a point of focus and the emergence is the third connecting thread. I have the ability to triangulate like this. Many people don't come to the world this way and it would be foolish of me to say that this is a new way of doing things. It is merely the way I am discovering that is best for myself.

    The joy of this journey isn't the emergence but the discovery of generous people. When I read your comment Leland I could see the surprise and joy in it. In everything that Mark Essel does, one cannot mistake his giving nature.

    Since the only given boundary on my online journey is the Disqus platform and where it can take me, I then must decide to navigate a careful pathway. Not every Disqus destination is appropriate. Some are too generic and without possibility, while some act as negative traps.

    This journey outwards means that I am not restricted by the boundary of a blog site. I am therefore a nomad and I can find new places. The most interesting recently was at Crimson Harvard where I came across a 1950 article blogged as if it was 1950 today:

    Sorokin Article by Frank M. Gilbert from March 17th, 1950
    http://crimson-ws1.hcs.harvard.edu/article/1950…

    I did not choose to go to the Crimson Harvard, instead the search I undertook was related to something else I was searching for that was applicable at that moment in time. These are accidental connections that equate with an emergent journey. So long as this journey is one about freedom and it isn't about identity or publicity – then I thoroughly enjoy the roving role of finding new destinations.

    Mark Essel represents an established hub of this journey because of his tremendous open minded nature. The irony here is that the more I explain of this journey I am undertaking the less emergent it becomes. Therefore I do find that the more I define it the less I learn. Yet whatever this journey becomes I have taken this opportunity to outline this not because you are from Korea and I really dig:

    OhMyNews
    http://english.ohmynews.com/

    but because you are also key guest of Mark Essel. After writing this note, I have to engage in a few grueling days in some work commitments but then on Friday, I will continue my online journey to whatever corner of the Internet it takes me.

    The fact that I don't get followed (or precisely don't want a following) is a blessing because that is not the nature of my own individual journey. I do however most whole heartedly welcome people coming to Mark Essel's site because he has built a home on the web and it is that much more beautiful when it has intelligent and zestful or joyful guests.

    Leland, as you can see I find it rather difficult to run out of words to express, so I think it is good for me to shut up at this given point and in a few days re-continue on my own particular online journey, in my own emergent and personally edifying manner :-)

    [Em]

  • Leland

    Wow Emeri… your words about needing to find the time for art and self-reflection struck a chord in me. Your ability to write is inspiring, to say the least. I hope you come back to join us in future discussions. :)

    It was interesting that you brought up “ohmynews”. I had the pleasure of meeting the editor-in-chief of that website face to face. Unfortunatly it was a very brief meeting and we didn't really discuss anything of note (I didn't know much about ohmynews before i met him) however. He was a very nice man. :)

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    You're too kind, thanks Emeri. I learn so much from the comments here. I'm glad it's a place you enjoy visiting and like a Bonzai tree I seek to cultivate a beautiful information sharing hub in the most important section of this blog, the comments. A space we share.