If there is one thing the sustainability movement appears to want ownership of, it is the word ‘economy'. A circular version has been doing the rounds for some time, but it could be under threat from a new kid on the block, equally as caring, but perhaps, well, more sharing.
A circular economy. Or a sharing economy. Which would you put your money on? The first would claim to have more gravitas as it involves a seismic shift in not only how business works, but how resources are utilised. It is also potentially worth big bucks to corporations – hundreds of billions within the EU alone, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Some would also argue that a true sharing economy could not exist unless a circular economy was already in place.
Anyone working in digital can somewhat relate to the overuse of loosely defined marketing words – think ‘big data’ or ‘cloud computing’ (bzzzz). Growth hacking seems to be just another one of them.
In colloquial terms, growth hacking is associated with the exploitation of loopholes and the use of illegal techniques online to grow business development. Of course, in some cases this has been reality. When PayPal was first used on eBay, it was actually breaching the retailer’s T&C’s. Similarly, when Airbnb first started they poached their customers from Craigslist by spamming listings and inviting users to join their directory instead.
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However, growth hacking can also simply be described as the ingenious use of tools, platforms and environments for business development, online AND offline – Google campus in East London, for example, is a good case of growth hacking taking place offline as start-ups use a shared working environment to maximise their potential. Online, growth hacking is the use of tracking and metric tools that teach us where our time is best spent; and the leveraging of platforms where target audiences and key players are.
‘Hacking’ does not necessarily equal to detrimental consequences for larger corporations either. Indeed, Paypal was then bought by eBay, and when Airbnb developed its interface it added the option to ‘post to Craigslist’.
Diversity – Zacqary Adam Green: The earth-shattering thing about bitcoin isn’t its fixed money supply. It’s not the carefully tuned algorithm that keeps its growth at a steady rate, or the inability of a political body to play with its value. What’s new and government-toppling about bitcoin is that it’s a framework for starting a new economy.
Gold and silver have coexisted with governments and nation-states for thousands of years. If the economic properties of bitcoin — its finite supply — were inherently state-smashing, we’d be living in a very different world before the computer were even invented. No, bitcoin’s revolution isn’t what the Bitcoin Foundation calls its “non-political economy.”
In fact, you could argue that “non-political economy” is an oxymoron. If we define “political” as only referring to the workings of a state, then sure, you can have a non-political economy. But in the colloquial way that people often talk about “politics” — the “internal politics” of a workplace or social club, for example — there’s no such thing as a non-political economy. Any kind of money — whether it’s gold, dollars, bitcoin, or licking things to claim them as your own — only has any value if everyone in the economy agrees that it does.
What about supply and demand?
You could say that this observation doesn’t challenge the neoclassical economic theory of money very much at all. For example, bitcoin has value because there’s a demand for it, plus it’s in short supply. This is like saying that general relativity is consistent with the Genesis story, because the Earth could have been created in six “relative” days. It’s not technically wrong, just not a very helpful way of looking at the world.
[Money] is not a “thing” at all. You can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can touch an hour or a cubic centimeter. Units of currency are merely abstract units of measurement…If money is just a yardstick, what then does it measure? The answer [is] simple: debt. A coin is, effectively, an IOU.
Perhaps we can tinker with the word ‘money’ itself. It’s a mass noun, like you’d use for some kind of tangible substance, and it makes money sound like a ‘thing-in-itself’. As a kind of mental discipline, I prefer to use a different word: COGAS. It stands for ‘claims on goods and services’, which is all money really is.
So money is just a way of measuring who owes what: you give me something or do something for me, and now I owe you something equally valuable in return. That’s a social relation. And if a big group of people get together to agree on how their social relations should work, it suddenly starts to look political. Even the decision to use bitcoin requires the initial political decision to not screw with its politics in the future.
But wait just a minute. You see what just happened? A group of people decided that instead of using a national currency, with properties they don’t like and can’t control, decided to instead use bitcoin. That’s your revolution.
Bitcoin’s real contribution to the world is its source code. The blockchain, the network protocol, the cryptographic verification — anyone can take this and build a currency with any economic properties their community needs. I’m not convinced that bitcoin’s Austrian School properties can sustain a global (or even local) economy, but you know what? That’s okay. If I ever feel the bitcoin economy has become too unequal, unbalanced, or stagnant, it’s now trivial for me to start my own damn currency.
A single bitcoin belongs is a measurement like a centimeter, but the bitcoin community is a social network. People use bitcoin because other people they trade with use bitcoin. If my town is running low on bitcoin but has a lot of resources to share internally, we can create our own local currency to free up bitcoin for importing and exporting. Or I could join an online network of artists who work on one another’s projects, and we’d create our own internal currency that plays by whatever rules we need it to.
There is no perfect monetary system for every situation. Bitcoin is not going to be the one world currency, and it doesn’t need to be. A lot of people compare Bitcoin to the Internet, but it’s more like CompuServe. It’s the first of many digital, non-state currencies to come, that will all interoperate with each other in ways we can’t even dream of yet.
More on currency diversity
Definitely read the whole Brett Scott article quoted above. It’s a great piece on the nature of money, and what inventing a bunch of different currencies could mean.
Recently The Economist released a feature report on how innovation in emerging markets may be eclipsing innovation in North America. The report, The world turned upside down (click “Buy PDF” for a complimentary copy courtesy of BASF) reinforces the fact that globalization and disruptive innovation is no longer something that is “driven by the West and imposed on the rest.” The notion that we in the West are the harbingers of all things new and advanced and that “developing” markets are cheap sources of labor and less mature audiences for low-cost, dumbed-down versions of our products and services is false. In response to the question, “Why are countries that were until recently associated with cheap hands now becoming leaders in innovation?” The Economist answers, “The most obvious reason is that the local companies are dreaming bigger dreams.” Of course, the real answer is far more complex.
In 2007, nGenera Insight began writing about what we call “hothouse innovators”—a new breed of global enterprises in Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe that are being built under fertile conditions for accelerated growth, including: A vast pool of low-cost, and increasingly highly-skilled labor; a rapidly growing group of wage-earning domestic customers with few preexisting expectations or brand loyalties; active government involvement in the private sector; and greenfield IT infrastructures that lack legacy complexities. By exploiting these conditions, global hothouse innovators are developing business models that allow them to move up the value chain, compete with firms in mature markets, and threaten the profit structure of incumbents in almost every industry.
The Economist article touches on all of these elements, but expands the argument by introducing additional factors worth discussing. Specifically:
I was invited to a potluck dinner on Wednesday to meet a bunch of strangers and discuss the importance of sharing. Well, kind of. Our hosts were looking to bolster the so-called sharing economy, which, depending on who you talk to, is either a lightweight form of socialism or an artisanal flavor of capitalism spawned by the Internet.
The event had clearly attracted people from both camps. It wasn’t long before one guest trumpeted a desire to “kick capitalism in the crotch,” while several others gently reminded people to sign a petition supporting Airbnb, the peer-to-peer apartment renting service. One man offered to sing a few songs. I spent much of the evening wondering why my red pepper hummus, which is always a hit at Super Bowl parties, wasn’t as popular as the vegan mac ‘n’ cheese. Plus whoever made the salad put in way too many red onions.
Standing in the cloudy center of all this was a group called Peers, which popped up over the summer with the goal of becoming a grassroots movement based on sharing. The potluck dinner—and about 130 other events taking place in 90 cities around the world on the same week—is its first big push to bring people to the cause.
There have been movements based on sharing before, as my aging hippie parents remind me with increasing regularity. But the brand-name version is relatively new. In the past few years, a series of startups have based their business models on creating online platforms where people can sell one another access to their homes (Airbnb), labor (Taskrabbit), or possessions (Lyft, Sidecar). These companies bathe in the spirit of cooperation—and it’s clearly to their benefit to frame themselves as facilitators of generosity—but they are also marketplaces looking for commissions.
This year’s World Disaster Report was just released this morning. I had the honor of authoring Chapter 3 on “Strengthening Humanitarian Information: The Role of Technology.” The chapter focuses on the rise of “Digital Humanitarians” and explains how “Next Generation Humanitarian Technology” is used to manage Big (Crisis) Data. The chapter complements the groundbreaking report “Humanitarianism in the Network Age” published by UN OCHA earlier this year.
The Sharing Economy is a topic that has been garnering a lot of attention lately — from startups embracing the collaborative model to consumers embracing the age old “sharing is caring” philosophy when it comes to vacation rentals, like AirBnB, or transportation solutions like NYC’s Citibike or Zipcar. We at sparks & honey have seen real value in the sharing economy trend as of late and recently partnered with global digital agency, Tribal Worldwide, to host the Collaborative Economy Summit, in which we set out to gather thought leaders in this space an answer one simple question — where is the Collaborative Economy heading and what value will it bring to business, brands and customers of the future?
