When we talk about trouble with the economy, we’ve been overlooking an astounding opportunity. Something new is possible for the first time in thousands of years. If you care about the planet, if you care about your kids, if you care about other people, this is something to pay attention to.
The availability of cheap, networked, programmable devices is as big a deal for human economics as the invention of paper money and coins were. It gives us, for the first time, the opportunity to change the rules of the game, to tune the incentives, and to create much more flexible access to resources—including other people—all without creating the huge bureaucracies and informational inefficiencies associated with previous attempts.
Mobile phones. We already carry them everywhere, with our wallet and our keys. Because they’re present when we have opportunities for exchange, they can give us new, non-wallet, ways to pay for things, and new incentives to help other people or offer goods and services. They can also function like a second keychain, giving us access to resources we might be otherwise locked out of.
Successful endeavors in this space will combine a non-wallet or wallet-plus way of paying for something, with an incentive for some desirable behavior. For instance, couchsurfing.com offers vacation lodging in return for verified reviews of good cross-cultural and friendly behavior. Users in the system find themselves is an alternate economy which encourages local engagement and increasing intimacy, powered by a need and desire they had already.
While we continue to argue about capitalism and socialism, for the first time a third option is really possible. We can build a more sophisticated, dynamic, distributed approach to organizing labor and resources than has ever been attempted before.
Right now, we have an opportunity to make things more equitable, more sustainable, more intimate, and also more beautiful and fun. When incentives match up better with our deep, human desires, life becomes more enjoyable, adventurous, and fulfilling.
This is more important than any other social issue, because it includes all social issues. All of our global and national issues—from increasing poverty, to climate change, to education, to a declining quality of life—are economic in nature, and many of them share this solution. Using mobile phones in this way is our best chance to solve our global problems.
This is my life’s work, and I want you to help me with it. In fact, this opportunity is so important and so urgent that it is worth your time and your money to meet it. I’m devoting my whole life to this. I’m asking you to devote some of your resources to my life’s work too.
How You Can help
This project is bigger than any one company or endeavor. There are many places to discuss.
I’m leading one of these initiatives. Perhaps the most promising. We are on the lookout for business people—ideally with an MBA or tech entrepreneur experience—who might want to work on this project with us. Your assignment is to think hard about who you know that should read this manifesto, and to forward it along. We also need a good UI designer and investment.
Please also leave comments and encouragement below, join our group on facebook or the groundcrew-discuss google group, and feel free to reblog or digg this article.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Sasha Dichter for inspiring me to write a manifesto and showing me how to do it well. The last paragraph is also paraphrased from Dichter’s blog.