The theory
Foxtailor is a social business platform for distributed capitalism, made up of many cooperating profitable micro enterprises.
Contents
- 1 Distributed Capitalism
- 2 Capitalism
- 3 The Read-write Web
- 4 Social entrepreneurship
- 5 PSE
- 6 Patents
- 7 Changes in how business work
Distributed Capitalism
Capitalism is a book of many chapters—and we are beginning a new one. Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can’t meet. When a majority of people want things that remain priced at a premium under the old institutional regime—a condition I call the “premium puzzle”—the ground becomes extremely fertile for wholly new classes of competitors that can fulfill the new demands at an affordable price. A premium puzzle existed in the auto industry before Henry Ford and the Model T and in the music industry before Steve Jobs and the iPod.
"The new era will bring with it a reorganization of power relationships across every level of society. While the fossil fuel-based First and Second Industrial Revolutions scaled vertically and favored centralized, top-down organizational structures operating in markets, the Third Industrial Revolution is organized nodally, scales laterally, and favors distributed and collaborative business practices that work most effectively in networks. The "democratization of energy" has profound implications for how we orchestrate the entirety of human life in the coming century. We are entering the era of "Distributed Capitalism."
Distributed capitalism will come to look a lot like shareholders in companies – distributed, desires for “unique support” from vendors, and trustworthy relations among consumers (think Amazon.com’s comment function). This process of co-configuration – whereby producer and consumers configure one another at all times reciprocally – will disrupt supply chains and create “advocates” or “professional relationship workers” who “assemble temporary ‘federations’ of suppliers for each transaction or service. In effect, the layer between producer and consumer will have an individualized shim.
http://p2pfoundation.net/Distributed_Capitalism
Capitalism
The right to private property is a central tenet of capitalism. Citizens cannot accumulate capital if they are not allowed to own anything, nor can they buy or sell things. As long as the owner stays within the parameters of the law, which generally are broad in capitalist systems, he may do what he wants with the property he owns.
A private citizen may purchase property from another private citizen at a price that is mutually agreed upon and not dictated by a government. In a capitalist system, the free market forces of supply and demand, rather than a central governing body, set the prices at which property is bought and sold.
http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040715/what-are-most-important-aspects-capitalist-system.asp
https://hbr.org/2003/08/microcapitalism-and-the-megacorporation
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/capitalism-marxism-micro-anthony-watkins
Capitalism and Free market
Capitalism is an economic system based on ownership of the factors of production. Some key features of capitalism are competition between companies and owners, private ownership and motivation to generate a profit. The production and pricing of goods and services is determined by the free market, or the supply and demand.
A free market system is an economic system based solely on demand and supply, and there is little or no government regulation. In a free market system, a buyer and a seller transact freely only when they voluntarily agree on the price of a good or a service. For example, suppose a seller wants to sell a toy for $5 and a buyer wants to buy that toy for $3. A transaction will occur when the buyer and the seller agree on a price.
Capitalism is focused on the creation of wealth and ownership of capital and factors of production, whereas a free market system is focused on the exchange of wealth, or goods and services. A free market system is based solely on supply and demand and leads to free competition in the economy, without any intervention from outside forces. On the other hand, a private owner in a capitalist system can have a monopoly on the market and prevent free competition.
The Read-write Web
This concept of distributed capitalism is very similar to a concept called the read-write web that was promoted by Tim Brerners-Lee. "I think building a world where we can use data, where there are many valuable uses of information allowed, but there is some tracking to make sure it’s appropriate – there’s a world in which I voluntarily give"
http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/future-web-man-invented/1357956#
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4132752.stm
Social entrepreneurship
Successful social ventures leverage their small scale and intense customer focus to create products and distribution models that precisely match the needs and desires of the communities they serve. In this sense they are modeling a much broader economic trend. In a 2010 McKinsey Quarterly article, Shoshana Zuboff argued that the capitalist mode of production was going through a historic transition from mass consumption to the wants of individuals, a phenomenon that she called “distributed capitalism.” Obvious examples include various personalized shopping experiences enabled by interactive technology, also known as mass customization.
Co-operatives and social enterprise: are they a replacement for mainstream capitalism
2012 is the United Nations International Year of the Co-operative. There were criticism of the conventional business model and its perceived failings in the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Comparisons were made with co-operative and mutual businesses that had not suffered such appalling collapse.
Also discussed was the role of co-operatives as social businesses to lead change and offer a new way of doing business. For some delegates the co-operative and mutual business model offers a panacea to the many failings of mainstream economics and business. Rather than chasing profits and ever increasing growth, the co-operative was touted as offering a sustainable alternative that is not focused on the maximisation of profit.
Why social entrepreneurship has become a distraction: it’s mainstream capitalism that needs to change
Twenty years ago I fell in love with “social entrepreneurship”, its promise, and most of all, the stories of the champions that practiced this approach. They didn’t take “it can’t be done” as a deterrent – in fact, as one of them described to me, “’it’s impossible’ is our clarion call to action”.
PSE
The Personal Sentience Expander (PSE) is a co-processor for your mind that extends your capability to live a fulfilling life.
Unlike computer co-processors that are made from silicone, a PSE draws on the knowledge and capability of other minds to supplement your own. The technology that is in use has the sole purpose of connecting the minds together and performing routine tasks.
Why do I need a PSE?
You need a PSE because your mind is built to protect you as if you are living in the stone age. Your mind is not evolved to handle modern technology nor does it evolve to meet the new requirements as quickly as technology is changing. Your mind’s purpose is to protect you from things that can kill you and to keep you from being rejected by your social group, which would cause you to be killed by something if you were living in the stone age.
What does the PSE do for me?
The PSE is designed to elevate your mind above the limitations of its evolution, I call it assisted evolution. It builds on top of what you already have and make it more powerful and better adapted to the modern world. The PSE doesn’t interfere with your minds’ functionality in that your mind will still be able to protect you from being killed but the PSE will help you identify when your mind is over protective and it will help you navigate the complexities of the modern digital jungle.
If you read this and wonder what the PSE is, hold on I will be writing about that a bit later. First go read the book by Shawn T. Smith: "The User's Guide to the Human Mind: Why Our Brains Make Us Unhappy, Anxious, and Neurotic and What We Can Do about It"
The User's Guide to the Human Mind
Your mind is not built to make you happy; it’s built to help you survive. So far, it’s done a great job! But in the process, it may have developed some bad habits, like avoiding new experiences or scrounging around for problems where none exist. Is it any wonder that worry, bad moods, and self-critical thoughts so often get in the way of enjoying life?
The User’s Guide to the Human Mind is a road map to the puzzling inner workings of the human mind, replete with exercises for overriding the mind’s natural impulses toward worry, self-criticism, and fear, and helpful tips for acting in the service of your values and emotional well-being—even when your mind has other plans.
Find out how your mind tries to limit your behavior and your potential.
Discover how pessimism functions as your mind’s error management system.
Learn why you shouldn’t believe everything you think.
Overrule your thoughts and feelings and take charge of your mind and your life.
http://guidetothemind.com/about-the-users-guide-to-the-human-mind/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification
Patents
Patenting the Web
When Berners-Lee invented the web, did he apply for a patent on it, Doan asked.
“No,” said Berners-Lee.
“Why not?” asked Doan.
“The internet was already around. I was taking hypertext, and it was around a long time too. I was taking stuff we knew how to do…. All I was doing was putting together bits that had been around for years in a particular combination to meet the needs that I have.”
Doan: “And who owns the web?”
Berners-Lee: “We do.”
Doan: “The web we all own, is it ‘interactive’?”
“It is pretty interactive, yeah,” said Berners-Lee, smiling.
https://www.wired.com/2012/02/tim-berners-lee-patent/
Doyle took the patent and created a company he called "Eolas," the Irish word for knowledge. Eolas never made a marketable product, but it ultimately launched a patent war that made Doyle a rich man. In 1999, he filed a lawsuit saying that Microsoft's Internet Explorer violated his patent on "interactive" features on the web; the suit resulted in a $540 million jury verdict. Appeals ensued but were inconclusive; the case ultimately settled out for more than $100 million, with just over $30 million going to Eolas' co-plaintiff, the University of California.
TBL did write the initial proposal for the WWW and did create the first web browser that had any real relationship to what we have today (point-and-click). Not to belittle his contribution (as it was huge), but he assembled existing ideas and technologies into a coherent solution and made it available to anyone who wanted it. If he tried to patent or restrict the technology (web browser, HTTP, etc.) they would likely have died and been replaced by something similar, but open. All of the pieces were already out there, so once he showed how they could work together in a user-friendly way, others could have found ways to do the same thing using different technologies and protocols. You can patent technologies, but you can't patent concepts and it was the concept that was revolutionary. https://www.quora.com/Did-Tim-Berners-Lee-patent-the-Internet-If-not-who-patented-the-Internet
what happened is a result of a series of things. What would have happened otherwise might have given different results, but the results may have been better or worse than our current place. Perhaps instead of being stuck with the horrible restrictions of HTML, we might have used another sort of language to communicate data between systems. Maybe it would have been more interactive to start with, more graphical, etc.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110811/10245715476/what-if-tim-berners-lee-had-patented-web.shtml
Protection against patent trolls
How does a social enterprise developing the web for distributed capitalism protect itself against patent trolls? Not patenting leaves one open for attach years later, patenting is expensive and still leaves one open. Maybe creating a list of prior art from the start is what is needed. Maybe everyone who gets involved with this initiative can collect their prior art and publish it with the intention of protecting against patent wars years from now. If we have spare cash we could patent a few critical components and cede the patents to the public? How do we get people to work together to publish a record of prior art as they are creating it?
Changes in how business work
Historically it was all about the money
In 1970 Milton Friedman strongly opposed any social responsibility in business. Any business executives who pursued a goal other than making money were, “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.” They were guilty of “analytical looseness and lack of rigor.” They had even turned themselves into “unelected government officials” who were illegally taxing employers and customers.
Jack Welch in 2009 said: “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products. Managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal… Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/does-jack-welch-think-shareholder-value-is-a-dumb-idea/
Inversion of business
The old logic of wealth creation worked from the perspective of the organization and its requirements—for efficiency, cost reductions, revenues, growth, earnings per share (EPS), and returns on investment (ROI)—and pointed inward. The new logic starts with the individual end user. Instead of “What do we have and how can we sell it to you?” good business practices start by asking “Who are you?” “What do you need?” and “How can we help?” This inverted thinking makes it possible to identify the assets that represent real value for each individual. Cash flow and profitability are derived from those assets.
Constellation of micro enterprises around the consumer
Elder Power exemplifies four new strategies for pulling off radical mutations in arenas where real-world—not just digital—assets are integral to the individual experience. First, it’s a federation, by which I mean a branded constellation of enterprises drawn from many industry sectors that revolves around the individual—such as a local utility that gives EP members top priority in the monitoring and emergency maintenance of home electrical and heating systems. Second, EP identifies, uses, and remunerates underutilized community and network resources (services, spaces, people, capabilities, and goods) that are “hidden in plain sight,” such as the local high-school cafeteria, where elders dine weekly after the regular lunch period ends, or an extra bedroom in a member’s home that can be used for another elder to recuperate after a hospital stay.
I-space
The mass-production business model has come under assault during the past decade, perhaps most successfully by the combination of Apple’s iPod and its music service, iTunes. The iPod is a cool gadget, but (like the Model T) it is also a gateway product, one of the first to achieve both scale and commercial success while expressing a new mutation. The iPod and iTunes reinvented music consumption by starting with the listener’s individual space, which I call “I-space.” Apple rescued musical assets from a faltering business model—the compact disc—and bypassed the industry’s costly legacy systems and routes to market. It supported users in reconfiguring their music as they saw fit.
Federated payment
But creating effective federations is challenging. Apple, like Facebook, has struggled to define its relationship with application developers. Both companies began by regarding applications as simply hosted transactions—a manifestation of the old genome—but are evolving toward a recognition that applications are a seamless extension of their end users’ experience. And both are confronting the following challenge: how much control will they, as the coordinators of their respective federations, exercise, compared with other member enterprises and with end users? Amazon.com has exerted control by requiring companies that participate in its marketplace to comply with its customer standards and be subject to its methods of “engineered trust,” such as published customer evaluations. These kinds of relationships are the early building blocks of federated support networks.
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our- insights/creating-value-in-the-age-of-distributed-capitalism
Federated payment solution
There should be layers to the platform, the bottom layer is the foundation and it should set the least restrictions. Creators of value should choose on which layer they want to build their business.
Share some of the commission earned from sales to the people who helped to make the sale possible.
Monetising recommendations
Find ways to monetise likes, reviews, recommendations, dislikes, warnings, and any other way that people can help other people choose how to spend their money.
Monetising creativity
Help people to earn money from their creativity. A person may create a poem which is then made into a song by someone and then sung by someone else. All parties should be given some monetary pay without resorting to lengthy contracts. It should be loosely defined and loosely coupled. Creativity should flow in one way and money should flow in the other.
Value added sales
Profit must be made through supporting value adds and not of the platform itself.
https://www.brooksgroup.com/sales-resources/training-articles/concept-value-added-selling
http://tomreillytraining.com/writings-and-recordings/articles/the-value-added-sales-process/
Technology
Use open technology to give this initiative the best chance of being a global standard, even if the profitability is curtailed.
