The high cost of gasoline has a logical reason an eight-year-old could understand. Presidential candidate Gingrich says he could bring the price of gas down to $2.50 per gallon. Obama’s press secretary says Gingrich doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Candidate Romney focuses on the economy, candidate Santorum on social issues. On a small fraction of the money Romney spends attacking his opponents, Santorum is giving Romney a run for his money. Maybe we intuit something more than the economy. Maybe it is dawning on us that the economy is not the bottom line. Something came up yesterday that got me thinking. This morning I have the answer—something you would not dream is connected with the economy.
The publisher of the book I’ve written, Creativespace, an Amazon company, had scheduled a telephone conference with me yesterday. They didn’t call. Their call was blocked. We block solicitation calls.
We’ve received calls from Creativespace that were not blocked. We have the telephone number from which the calls came. We checked our blocked telephone calls list. The number was not blocked. The blocked call came from another number. I have not spoken with Creativespace yet. They are on the east coast. We are on the west coast.
I’m aware of my opportunity, as a writer, to earn money at home writing for various businesses. I assume the same would apply to people who edit books. My manuscript was emailed to Creativespace. After a few weeks, I received my edited manuscript by email. In the right margin, were notes of advice. My punctuation and grammatical mistakes were corrected. I could either accept or reject the corrections. All of this was done at my home, and the same, obviously, with my editor, who, obviously, also solicited by telephone for a living—and had solicited us. Unknowing, we blocked that telephone number.
After I completed the revision of my manuscript, I emailed it to Creativespace. At that time, the telephone conference was scheduled. We have emailed Creativespace asking for the telephone number so we can unblock it.
This that I’ve described is a feature of the growing network economy. For example, a year ago I set up my own Web site, mymiraclemessage.com., and started blogging my philosophies. You didn’t have to join to respond. I didn’t expect much activity. I was elated. Within three months, I was receiving from ten to twenty very nice responses every day. The responses kept growing until they reached 200, to 300 every day. I was notified that for $35 a year I could have all the spammers removed. The responses dropped to almost zero. My responses were coming from entrepreneurs selling their wares on the Internet. They send complimentary responses to Web sites like mine hoping that I will advertise their sites with complimentary responses.
The network economy is a counteraction of oppressive, intrusive government in cahoots with grasping, corrupt corporations. Think about it. The first humans lived in caves. Their tools were stones. The process that led to the present was long in coming, but it is revving up. We’ve progressed more in the past century than in the previous 20 centuries, and all of it leaving us with greater purpose. It is the greater purpose that troubles the leadership’s control of us.
You might say that the growing network economy is a modern expression of our brother’s keeper. It favors those of us who look within for answers. It connects with the movements of the universe. I learn something new every day. Guess I’ll write another book.
By the way, I thought this Wired article by Kevin Kelly in the September 1997 issue was worth keeping. “New Rules for the New Economy: for thriving in a turbulent world.”
1 The Law of Connection: Embrace dumb power – The Network Economy is fed by the deep resonance of two stellar bangs: the collapsing microcosms of chips and the exploded telecosm of connections.
2 The Law of Plentitude – More gives more. Consider the first fax machine. It was worth zero.
3 The Law of Exponential Value: Success is nonlinear. The archetypical illustration of a success explosion in a Network Economy is the Internet itself.
4 The Law of Tipping Points: Significance precedes momentum. Success became infectious and spread pervasively to the extent that it became difficult for the uninfected to avoid succumbing.
5 The Law of Increasing Returns: Make virtuous circles. Them that’s got shall get. The Network Economy rewards schemes that allow decentralized creation and punishes those that don’t.
6. The Law of Inverse Pricing: Anticipate the cheap. The very best gets cheaper each year. This rule of thumb is so ingrained in our contemporary lifestyle that we bank on it without marveling at it.
7. The Law of Generosity: Follow the free. If services become more valuable the more plentiful they are (Law #2), and if they cost less the better and the more valuable they become (Law #6), then the extension of this logic says that the most valuable things of all should be those that are given away.
8. The Law of the Allegiance: Feed the web first. As consultant John Hagel argues, a company’s primary focus in a networked world shifts from maximizing the firm’s value to maximizing the value of the infrastructure whole. Standards strengthen a network; their constraints solidify a pathway, allowing innovation and evolution to accelerate.
9. The Law of Devolution: Let go at the top. The tightly linked nature of any economy, but especially the Network Economy’s ultraconnected constitution, makes it behave ecologically. The fate of the individual organization is not dependent entirely on its own merits, but also on the fate of its neighbors. One day you are the king of the mountain. The next day there is no mountain at all. Biologists describe the struggle of an organism to adapt is this biome as a long climb uphill, where uphill means greater adaptation. Organizations, like living beings, are hardwired to optimize what they know and not throw success away. Companies find devolving a) unthinkable and b) impossible. There is simply no room in the enterprise for the concept of letting go—let alone the skill to let go of something that is working, and trudge downhill toward chaos.
I suppose there will be many Americans “trudging downhill toward chaos,” those that depend on government, for example, Wall Street millionaires, General Electric and General Motors, but do you really think we will universally give ourselves to government to use as it wills? I think opportunity has never been greater for the ambitious and innovative.
God dwells in me as me. It is hard for me to believe, but it’s true. At age eighty-six, I’ve found that I was born to be a writer and musician. Bill Clinton was right. What is is. Too bad about Bill. My mate is in every way possible everything I could have asked for. Rick Santorum has a wife like mine. I trust that he and his wife are what this country needs.
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