Group items tagged

Many animals use visual observations to decide whether to work with others.

humans are more cooperative when they sense they're being watched.

The feeling of being watched enhances cooperation, and so does the ability to watch others. To try to know what others are doing is a fundamental part of being human

Shame serves as a warning to adhere to group standards or be prepared for peer punishment. Many individualistic societies, however, have migrated away from peer punishment toward a third-party penal system

Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.

Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.

Guilt prevails in many social dilemmas

It is perhaps unsurprising that a set of tools has emerged to assuage this guilt

Guilt abounds in many situations where conservation is an issue.

The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.

The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.

Guilt is a valuable emotion, but it is felt by individuals and therefore motivates only individuals. Another drawback is that guilt is triggered by an existing value within an individual. If the value does not exist, there is no guilt and hence no action

Getting rid of shaming seems like a pretty good thing, especially in regulating individual behavior that does no harm to others. In eschewing public shaming, society has begun to rely more heavily on individual feelings of guilt to enhance cooperation.

five thousand years ago, there arose another tool: writing

Judges in various states issue shaming punishments,

shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.

What if government is not involved in the shaming?

Is this a fair use of shaming? Is it effective?

Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant

vertical agitation

Guilt cannot work at the institutional level, since it is evoked by individual scruples, which vary widely

But shame is not evoked by scruples alone; since it's a public sentiment, it also affects reputation, which is important to an institution.

corporate brand reputation outranked financial performance as the most important measure of success

shame and reputation interact

in our early evolution we could gauge cooperation only firsthand

Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?

why we learned to speak.1

Language

The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be

allowed for gossip, a vector of social information.

in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another's performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation.

Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players' perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information.

Human society today is so big that its dimensions have outgrown our brains.

What tool could help us gossip in a group this size?

We can use computers to simulate some of the intimacy of tribal life, but we need humans to evoke the shame that leads to cooperation. The emergence of new tools— language, writing, the Internet—cannot completely replace the eyes. Face-to-face interactions, such as those outside Trader Joe's stores, are still the most impressive form of dissent.

what is stopping shame from catalyzing social change? I see three main drawbacks:

Today's world is rife with ephemeral, or "one-off," interactions.

Research shows, however, that if people know they will interact again, cooperation improves

Shame works better if the potential for future interaction is high

In a world of one-off interactions, we can try to compensate for anonymity with an image score,

which sends a signal to the group about an individual's or institution's degree of cooperation.

Today's world allows for amorphous identities

It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring

Shaming's biggest drawback is its insufficiency.

Some people have no shame

shame does not always encourage cooperation from players who are least cooperative

a certain fraction of a given population will always behave shamelessly

if the payoff is high enough

There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame

shame is not enough to catalyze major social change

This is why punishment remains imperative.

Even if shaming were enough to bring the behavior of most people into line, governments need a system of punishment to protect the group from the least cooperative players.

Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life.

There’s an opportunity to disrupt how those organizations work. Intermediaries, though they do a good job, have a few problems — they’re centralized, which makes them vulnerable to attack or failure

They tax the system

They capture data

They exclude billions of people from the global economy

internet of value

With blockchain, we can go from redistributing wealth to distributing value and opportunity value fairly a priori, from cradle to grave.

creating a true sharing economy by replacing service aggregators like Uber with distributed applications on the blockchain

unleashing a new age of entrepreneurship

build accountable governments through transparency, smart contracts and revitalized models of democracy.

The virtual you is owned by large intermediaries

This virtual you knows more about you than you do sometimes

So there’s a strange phenomenon from the first generation of the Internet where the most important asset class that’s been created is data —and we don’t control it or own it.

individuals taking back their identity through your own personal avatar

The financial services industry

antiquated

a complicated machine that does a simple thing

settlement

an opportunity to profoundly change the nature of the entire industry. The Starbucks transaction should be instant.

At the heart of it, the financial services industry moves value.

so this is both an existential threat to the financial services industry and an historic opportunity.

Banks trade on trust

Within the decade, every single financial asset, which is really just a contract

will all move to a blockchain-based format

In the accounting world, a lot of firms rely on costly audits to drive their profits

With blockchain, you could have a third entry time-stamped in a distributed ledger that could be acceptable to any relevant stakeholders from regulators to shareholders, giving you a perfect record of the truth and thus the financial health of an organization.

Nobel-winning economist Ronald Coase argued that firms exist because transaction costs in an open market are greater than the cost of doing things inside the boundaries of the corporation.

four costs — of search, coordination, contracting and establishing trust

Blockchains will profoundly affect all of these.

you can now synthesize trust on an open platform and people who’ve never met can trust each other to do certain things. So this results in a whole number of new business models

It turns out the Internet of Everything needs a Ledger of Everything, because a lightbulb buying power from your neighbor’s solar panel definitely won’t use banks or the Visa network

Right now, governments take tax revenue from corporations, individuals, licenses and so on. All of that can change. We can first of all have transparency in a radical sense because sunlight is the best disinfectant. Secondly, we can open up governments in a different sense of sharing data.

governments can enable self-organization to occur in society where companies, civil society organizations, NGOs, academics, foundations, and government agencies and individual citizens ought to use this data to self-organize and create what we used to call services or forms of public value. The third one has to do with the relationship between citizens and their governments.

There are more opportunities to create government by the people for the people

Electronic voting won’t be delivered by traditional server technology because it won’t be trusted by citizens

people confuse collaboration with teamwork.

Teams are created when managers need to work closely together to achieve a joint outcome.

actions are interdependent

committed to a single result

joint decisions

cautious about taking unilateral action

someone with the authority to resolve disputes

Team members may dislike

each other

But with a good leader they can still perform.

Collaborators face a different challenge

they often also have competing goals

the shared goal is usually only a small part of their responsibilities

collaborators cannot rely on a leader to resolve differences

collaborators cannot walk away from each other, when they disagree.

a collaborative relationship

is a form of customer-supplier relationship in which the participants have all the difficulties of contracting with each other without the power to walk away if the other party is being unreasonable or insensitive.

my advice is to avoid relying on a collaborative relationship except in the rare cases when a company objective is important enough to warrant some collaborative action but not so important as to warrant a dedicated team.

collaboration requires emotional engagement

respect

creatively bargain

other over costs and benefits.

don't think of it as a permanent solution

collaborative relationship

transition to an easier form of interaction

allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation

a huge sociological shift

new life forms, social practices and human institutions

emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm

ethical revolution

openness

participation

inclusivity

cooperation

commons

the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP.

political expressions

the movement has two wings

constructive

building new tools and practices

resistance to neoliberalism

we are at a stage of emergence

difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system

At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other.

Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.

peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.

Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.

the horizontal meets the vertical

mostly hybrid ‘diagonal’ adaptations

For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.

Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas?

In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.

Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.

requires a clever adaptation

use for our own benefit

The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,

platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects

without network effects, there is no ‘there’ there, just an empty potential platform.

p2p activists should work on both fronts

using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.

The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.

So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.

One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.

we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.

No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.

the p2p dynamics

the new networked culture

the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.

the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs,  and ignore externalities.

we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.

abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets

open design community

will inherently design for sustainability

for inclusion

conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing

entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.

The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.

accelerated end of capitalism

Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!

I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.

find new ways of efficiency

arbitration between efficiency and care

a global thinking of the problem

Fighting the attention and desire resource shortage: stoping to use advertisement?

The question is rather here to think the moderation of the psychopower

empower transindividuation, i.e. to make sure that an economic activity creates more possibilities of individuation than it tend to destroy by attempting to capture attention and canalize motivation in a funnel. Empower transindividuation would imply to empowering actors of their own lifestyle, winning back the savoir-vivre prescribing production

Should marketing stop using psychopower?

marketing ethics guidelines

transactions are more likely to be morally defensible if both parties enter it freely and fully informed

the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace

putting freedom as a criteria of morality

the industrial use of pycho- and neuropower tend to fall under the category of barriers to freedom

neurotechniques – to capture the attention

psychotechniques – to attempt to create motivation

Most people think commercials are a small price to pay for these benefits

advertising

denying the schemes of addiction and the fact that we are becoming through the objects of attentions

right to avoid attention capture by advertising

progress made in cognitive sciences proving that

reward system being abnormally stimulated

Advertisements exploit

vulnerability and reinforce their overconsumption behaviors

“if food advertising on TV were banned, significant reductions in the prevalence of childhood obesity are possible.” (Veerman et al. 2009)

What is at stake falls to be much more complex than the sole Freedom of Speech invoked for the advertiser

liberty of non-reception

would mean to guaranty every citizen the right to choose where and when he wants to access the advertising information

Change in the industrial and commercial paradigm

Economy of contribution and peer production

An economy of contribution means that users of a service are contributing to the production of these services.

example

is open-source software that are contributively build by potentially hundreds of developers organized in communities

minimize the gap between the producer and consumer

blur the frontier between professionals and amateurs

The Copernican revolution of the Vendor Relationship Management paradigm

change in the commercial paradigm, described as an Intention Economy i.e. the opposite of the Attention Economy

consumers are charged to express and discuss their intention

with businesses rather than the usual paradigm in which businesses where fighting for a piece of canalized motivation

Implementing such a system would nevertheless imply that marketing departments dispose of a system in which they could value their supplies and where they could be easily found by customers. Doc Searls promotes his answer to this issue: the Vendor Relationship Management system.

the belief that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — to themselves, to vendors, and to the larger economy.

To be free

1. Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors.

2. Customers must be the points of integration for their own data.

3. Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.

4. Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.

5. Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.

This is a profoundly game-changing approach

big data that is the rush for consumers’ information potentially leading to the same dead-end of attention destruction and affective saturation than the former offline paradigm

VRM system working as a marketplace

the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace

less imperfect and less biased information in a cultural context overvaluing transparency, and a bigger atomicity due to the hereafter introduced trend for re-localized peer production.

3.2.2.3 VRM and externalization of the socialization process

Promoting the end of advertisement

means to find a new way to make the information circulate, what was the primary goal of advertisement

Until there is no alternative to massive advertisement campaign for the information circulation, it is indeed hard to ask entrepreneurs and managers to get rid of those successors of propaganda: such a transition process necessarily imply adaptation costs from the producer and the consumer side, and possible competitive disadvantage against competitors still maximizing profit through advertisement means

But the internet transformation of the general organology offers new way to think information circuits and potentially constitute an opportunity to externalize the socialization process of products that is to empower citizen-consumers organized in communities

Empowering groups of citizen doesn’t annihilate the risks of mis-use or counterproductive interest-taker behaviors but a well-designed system of trust between peers could minimize this risk by creating a dependency to what social capital other peers give you, as it is happening in the sharing economy: the credibility of a contributive peer would be guaranteed through what the P2P Foundation calls Feedback systems and peer-police

a strong structuration of products characteristics, allowing customers to personalize their choices according to their desire and constraints: such a “VRM+” system

Marketing would then be the art of being as high as possible in this ranking, as it is happening in SEO for search engines, but in this context of criteria explosion, marketing would then be the disciple of listening to customers’ wishes and aspiration needing an attention, in order to kick in the production or to adapt the following series.

3.2.2.4 Toward a possible equi-power

Such a system would tremendously re-configure the balance of power and tend toward a form of equi-power i.e. a social organization in which abuses of a “big” would be the potential object of a ranking sanction by the peers

self-regulative function

a form of economic Darwinism would let to conscious organization the right to curve their path toward a durable configuration in accordance with the social ecosystem.

the idea of equi-power is a form of homogenization of the social matter, in which the distortions in the balance of power would be compensated by the gathering of small forces sharing a common interest

Such a sanction systems, if successfully implemented, would make value-destructing businesses progressively decline and hopefully bankrupt,

long-term valuable strategic choice

long term satisfyingly high ranking

It would be utopic to think that the “being cool” marketing

would disappear, but marketers would have to make those two objectives compose together.

This social capital contagion is nevertheless a tool that would need to be controlled in its form of violence by extensive testings and iterations with forms of protections for the smallest peers, that is to say to keep this form of social violence to institutionalized, classic forms of businesses, clearly beyond the line of what should be acceptable in the global village.

the goal is here to create an artificial form of majority that is a self-censuring responsible behavior of corporations