Dial M for Murdoch, C for corruption, but who ya gonna call?

I found this image at the Wooster Collective – a great piece of visual satire. But the question is “who are you going to call?” And it may well be that the Ghostbusters might be our best option, because as Seamus Milne wrote,

But the real frenzy isn’t the exposure of the scandal – it’s the scale of corruption, collusion and cover-up between News International, politicians and police that the scandal has revealed. As the cast of hacking victims, blaggers and blackmailers has lengthened, and the details of the incestuous payments and job-swapping between News International, government and Scotland Yard become more complex, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture that is now emerging.

If it were not for the uncovering of this cesspit, the Cameron government would be preparing to nod through the outright takeover of BSkyB by News International, taking its dominance of Britain’s media and political world into Silvio Berlusconi territory. But what has been exposed now goes well beyond the hacking of murder victims and dead soldiers’ families – or even the media itself. The scandal has lifted the lid on how power is really exercised in 21st-century Britain – in which the unreformed City and its bankers play a central part.

What concerns Milne is the moral lassitude that seems to pervade all parts of the systems that are supposed to be edifices of British Life. Read: Barclays Bank The Real Indoor Pirates, or The Problem with Murdoch’s Media.

Is it time to truly Reboot Britain, which is different to playing lip service to it? A far too many people and organisations have done and are doing.  A people will only be free when they can control their own communications. And that fact has been drawn into sharp focus.

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Posted in: Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Politics, Ethics, Government & Politics, Media, Newspapers, No straight lines, Society

Are you going with me?

This is one of my most treasured songs and I found it whilst having a skype chat explaining “Dawn Music”. So Pat Metheny thank you!

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Posted in: Music

Creative Commons a bridge to the future

We have to get from content ownership to ideas and understanding of community.

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Posted in: Convergence, Culture, Engagement Civil Society, Ethics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Identity, Law, Media, Participation, Philosophy, Society

What should learning look like in the 21st Century?

From institutions to networks

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Posted in: Education, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Education, Engagement Research, Ethics, Gaming, Generation C, Government & Politics, Networks, No straight lines, Participation, Society

Grow venture community democratising start-up funding

Today GrowVC (for whom I work as Head of Vision), announces some interesting developments to their platform.

These are:

• New visual outlook and improved usability
• It is free to create and publish investor and start-up profile
• Members can invest 100% of the micro-investment membership fee, you can buy $100 membership and invest that $100
• Grow VC iPhone app.

Though I think there is a bigger story to share. And that is of the idea that GrowVC represents an evolution how start-ups are funded. There is a growing recognition of a dysfunctionality within our money supply system, and that applies as much to venture financing as it does to banking.

But money supply cannot be separated from the trilemma of our current age – which is, when faced with increasing complexity we face three interlinked questions, [1] organisational, [2] social [3] economic. How can we organise better? How can we make for a fairer world? What does economic production and commercial markets look like when faced with institutional failure? The fact is, when faced with this reality people are learning to get what they need from each other.

Communities of interest are a new organisational model

At GrowVC we asked ourselves the following questions, who has the right to invest? Who has the right to be an entrepreneur? Where does knowledge reside in what to invest in and what not? What is risk and what is not? We came to the view that the Human Operating System we are currently co-creating in which networked communications becomes the connective tissue by which we can re-organise and create and co-create in entirely different ways could equally be applied to investing. We believed that everyone could be and should be investing in start-ups. And why not?

The failure of free market ideology

Banks and banking seem very high risk to me at the moment, pension funds are unsustainable, yet we spend extraordinary sums of money persuading people to play the lottery every week, and tell the ordinary Joe and Josephine that investing is not for them? Why? If we reflect on the banking crisis that nearly was a global catastrophe of even more epic proportions, we understand the dysfunctional nature of banks and banking. In the light of some of the greatest austerity cuts in the UK it is clear that ‘too big to fail’ has failed. People’s livelihoods, retirement funds have been wiped out – yet the finance and banking industries are still consumed by their own mythology – a form of myopia which prevents its from comprehending its own excess. And of course it comes down to power – who has it and who does not. I am not saying “away with the banks”, but what I am saying there exists other highly viable models, which should become part of the financial eco-system.

People embrace what they create, we know that identity, belonging and accountability are forged when we participate in the creation and building of things. My belief is that the idea of democratising investing could offer real long term value for society. Better wealth distribution, an acceleration and increase in the number of companies funded, a different type of engagement with investors and shareholders that could become the checks and balances that our society so desperately needs (News of the World and News International or Lehman Brothers spring to mind). And a new organisational model – lighter, sustainable, adaptive. The default setting  is human, inclusive, participatory, open. Representative of a new moral economy. And, Maybe you are an investor, an entrepreneur and a worker all at the same time.

So my advice is become an entrepreneur, become an investor, seek alternative models which are relevant for the world we live in today. As the artist Wassily Kandinsky once said, “every work of art is a child of its time.” And GrowVC is a child of its time.

Further reading: Democratising Financial Capital, “Crowd-funding will never catch on” investment trainee aged 46.

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Posted in: Economics, Engagement Civil Society, Generation C, Government & Politics, No straight lines, Participation, Strategy, Uncategorized, Web/Tech

What happens when we want to disappear?

David Bond tries to fall off the face of our known world, but his data trail lingers, as once broken twigs, and a warm fire signify his movement through our world. How does data change our world?

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Posted in: Data, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Marketing, Ethics, Government & Politics, Identity, Society

I+we=why? people or machines?

A thought provoking film All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace is a three part BBC documentary series[1] by filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Trap and The Power of Nightmares.

Wikipedia writes

In this episode Curtis tracks the effects of Ayn Rand‘s ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence on Alan Greenspan. Ayn Rand was born in Russia and moved to America in 1928 and worked for Cecil B. DeMille, where she got some of the plot for what became The Fountainhead from this period. Later she moved to New York, and set up a reading group called The Collective where they considered her work. On advice from a friend, Greenspan (then a logical positivist) joined The Collective.

When published, although critically savaged, Rand’s Objectivist ideas were popular and came to heavily infiltrate California, particularly Silicon Valley. The computer utopian belief (Californian Ideology) that computer networks could measure, control and self-stabilise societies, without hierarchical political control, and that people could become ‘Randian heroes’, only working for their own happiness, became more widespread.

The programme concludes that, indeed the ideology has not led to people being Randian heroes but in fact trapped them into a rigid system of control from which they are unable to escape.

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Posted in: Culture, Economics, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Politics, Ethics, Film, Government & Politics, Media, Philosophy, Society

Assets & Access in the intention economy

My keynote that I gave at the Mobile Marketing Association conference this morning. Thank you Michael and Rebecca for [1] inviting me [2] looking after me so well.

The presentation dealt with this idea: That mobile communications does not have to be a tactical endeavor, it can be a deep strategic one enabling companies to run leaner, to reach audiences in new and novel ways, to redefine a company organizationally, and create new markets with new revenues. In ‘creating assets and access in the intention economy’ I challenged our thinking in how mobile communications plays the key role in this rapidly evolving story.

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Posted in: 7th Mass Media, Advertising, Alan Moore Speaking, Culture, Data, Distribution, Economics, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Mobile, Generation C, Link Economy, Marketing, Media, Mobile, No straight lines, Participation, Search Econmics, Social Marketing Intelligence, Social Networks, Strategy, Trends

Living, moving, visceral organisations

I came across this company Moving Brands today and thought – amazing. For the speakers of the American language, ‘awesome’

Moving Brands/ Moving World from Moving Brands on Vimeo.

And the presentation of an evolving idea around what a brand for London might look like, inspiring.

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Posted in: Engagement Marketing, Generation C, Marketing, Media, Participation

Maintaining human values in a time of growing complexity

It seems in a short time we have gone from a linear world (simple) to a non-linear world (complex), In the Techno-Human Condition Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz explore what it means to be human in an era of incomprehensible technological complexity and change. They argue that if we are to have any prospect of managing that complexity, we will need to escape the shackles of current assumptions about rationality, progress, and certainty, even as we maintain a commitment to fundamental human values.

This sounds like a fascinating proposition, and its interesting as there is no doubt in my mind that there is a dawning realisation now of that growing complexity, especially when we see whole systems strain under the pressure of a complex world. As they were designed and built for a different world that was less complex. For example this post (The democratisation of financial capital) explores the issues of what is happening to the financial system currently. There is also something we are developing which you might call a Human Operating System, where networked communication media is the ‘connective tissue’ of society. In fact non-linear networks offer us new ways to make and create things.

I am also interested in how we deal now with uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity, as we are going to need some sort of navigational guide to get us from here to there. How do we design for a complex world? Here is a brief introduction.

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Posted in: No straight lines, Philosophy, Trends