Change Happens

I began the week by promising four posts on the Intention Economy. Yesterday in Post 3 I touched on customer service, a golden rule of which is always deliver on an expectation once you’ve created it. But I have a problem – and one which arises from the  connected, communicative world  we’re part of. The nub of it is that the post I’d roughly sketched out  (on business models and tech development) re-read in the light of the feedback and conversations I’ve had this week – just doesn’t cut the mustard and I need to go away and re-think and re-research it – and doing that job properly is going to take some time.

So here’s a different, rapid post, tangentially connected to both Searls’ book and the events of yesterday evening, when I took part in this week’s Naked Book broadcast on Radio Litopia.  Subject for discussion: Amazon, spinning off Barney Jopson’s series of articles about Amazon in this week’s FT. Relevant given my VRM: The Amazon Example post earlier in the week. I was amused, and slightly appalled to look at the tweetstream o the Naked Book hashtag to discover that @vixhartly and @eionpurcell were agreed that my most significant contribution of the evening was the two words “change happens”. (Cue an inward groan – after all the words I’ve put put there this week it boils down to just that phrase.) If we have to be reductionist about it, I’d prefer to the condensed version to be as follows

Change happens; change has always happened; change will always happen. Change is getting faster; it is likely to continue to get faster. Change is happening in ways that are more obvious but less transparent to us than they were.

Or, to murder a lyric even more comprehensively than Bill Nighy did so unforgettably in Love Actually, Change is all around us…

The reason for this is that change is now four-dimensional. It isn’t just happening in our world, by which I mean our physical, human, economic, moral (amoral and immoral) world.  It’s happening in a parallel world – the Net – which is a world entirely created by humans, rather than one colonised by humankind. Our three-dimensional world plus the world we’ve created online has taken change to a new level. (Check out Moore’s Law for the theory behind the science).

A key challenge presented by the addition of this extra dimension is speed. the Net is both expanding at a pace unimaginable in the old three-dimensional economic world and enabling things to happen at speeds that were unthinkable a decade ago. Think of just-in-time inventory management taken to a new level by Amazon in the form of same day supply and you have a very simple illustration – not to mention the fact that you can read this anywhere in the world seconds after I’ve posted it.

During the discussion of Amazon last night there was a lot of skirting around the question of whether the way Amazon is run is morally and socially responsible. There is a view that their aim is to annihilate high-street retailing – despite, or blind to, the possibly very unpalatable social and economic consequences. I was thinking about this and wondered whether Jeff Bezos would state that as his aim. I suspect not. I think it is much more likely that his aim is to run the best, most profitable, most efficient business he can. I don’t think Hillary and Tenzing conquered Everest in order to blaze the trail for a tourist route to the summit, with all of the consequent detrimental effects to a pristine natural environment. They conquered Everest “because it was there” in the way that pioneers always have. My hunch is that Jeff Bezos does business the way he does “because he can”. And he can for three key reasons. (1) Technology exists that makes it possible (2) He can access funding that enables his company to continue to develop technology further and (3) Because we (by which I mean society) let him. If any of us have an issue with that I’m beginning to think that the way we should deal with that problem is to look at (2) and (3) on that list.

I don’t think item (1) can or should be tackled. It is part of the human condition to explore. We’ve covered much of the globe (if you leave aside the oceans and what remains of the rainforests); only a privileged few are going to explore space any time soon; but all of us can explore technology. (Which brings a whole new meaning to the phrase armchair explorer).

Maybe a useful parallel is biotech fields such as fertility, animal & human cloning and genetics all of which which prompt fierce debates in almost all countries and cultures. A view frequently put forward is that the scientists should be left alone to get on with the science. It’s then up to society to decide what can be done with the results they produce. Feelings run so strong about such issues that people are prepared to march on parliament and Congress, plant bombs under research scientists’ cars, organise petitions, and generally find ways (good and bad) of making their views heard and acted upon. I don’t see people out in the street protesting about Amazon (even if conditions for warehouse workers are purported to be so poor you might twice about putting a lab rat in them for fear of anti-vivisection activists).

What is so invigorating about the Intention Economy is that it’s a first salvo in a bid to generate support for systems that create more empowered online consumers. Reading the book I think that we also need to be fighting for ways in which we can become more educated consumers. Here I think the definition of consumers needs to be drawn very widely to include any individual or company who makes use of any service provided or purveyed on or off the Web. And the definition  of educated is similarly wide, in that I am referring to a social and cultural education that we took for granted in the majority of consumers in our old three-dimensional world. In the days when we shopped for food at the local market we had an innate understanding of the ways in which our choices affected those around us. In our four-dimensional world  it is infinitely more difficult to follow through the logic and consequences of one’s choices, and requires a grounding in the culture created by the Net’s architects, the systems of the internet, and the usage possibilities (good and bad) of the Net.

You may find this all quite whimsical. And it’s likely you’re right. But today re-reading the chapter Net Pains, I realised again how woefully ignorant I am of the technology and principles that have been used to create this space on which we have all become so dependent in such short order. And I’ll say more about these principles in a post next week.

Meanwhile I’m off to Venice in the morning. How lucky am I?