[Strategy] Open A.I. Disagreements

In a world with responsive, predictive artificial intelligence, operating behind the veneer of the world in which humans operate, a philosophical question arises:

Will the very human tendency toward conflicts increase or decrease in a world where the frictions between us and the objects we have created is reduced?

From the Open A.I project to research being done at MIT, Google, and Facebook, the race is on to set the table for the technology of world of one hundred years from now.

As with all great advances in human development (and the development of artificial intelligence capabilities would rival going to the Moon) the applications of artificial intelligence at first will be bent towards satisfying our basest desires and human appetites and then move up the hierarchy of needs.

But a lot of this research and development is being done by scientists, developers, entrepreneurs, and others (technologists all) who—at least in their public pronouncements—seem to view people and our emotions, thoughts, feelings and tendencies toward irrationality and conflict, as a hindrance rather than as a partner.

Or, to put it in “computer speak”: In the brave new world of artificial intelligence research, humanity’s contributions–and decision making–is too often viewed as a bug, rather than as a feature.

However, design thinking demands that humans—and their messy irrational problems and conflicts—be placed at the center of such thinking rather than relegated to the boundaries and the edges. Even as humans create machines that can learn deeply, perform complex mathematics, created logical algorithms, and generate better solutions to complex future problems than the human who created the problems and conflicts in the first place.

Eventually, humans will create intelligence that will mimic our responses so closely that it will be hard to tell whether those responses are “live” or merely “Memorex.”

But until that day comes, mediators, arbitrators, litigators, social workers, therapists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, poets, and writers, need to get into the research rooms, the think tanks and onto the boards of the foundations and the stages at the conferences, with the technologists to remind them that there is more to the future than mere mathematics.

Or else, the implications for the consequences of future conflicts (human vs. human and even machine vs. human) could be staggering.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] The Gap Between Here and There

The decision is the thing.

It looks romantic from the outside, I’ll be honest. A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, but you can’t take the first step without the decision to make the first step in the first place.

The gap between being there and getting here and the gap between being here and getting there are only covered by two actions:

Making a decision without much reassurance from others…

And

Doing the work without much appreciation from others about how difficult it is.

What covers the first gap (the one between being there and getting here) is making a decision. Making a decision to take action is scary and uncertain; and there’s usually very little reassurance from others. It typically begins when you are motivated enough to actually make the decision in the first place, and you’ll either be motivated by internal factors or external circumstances. And only one of these do you have control over.

What covers the second gap (the one between being here and getting there) is doing “the work.” Many people believe that “the work” or work ethic, is fading in American life. I prefer to believe that as the nature of “the work” shifts (from blue collar to white collar to “no” collar) the nature of the work ethic changes as well. Have I put in less “work” when I type up a 500-word blog post than a person has, who codes an algorithm all day in a language that looks like Mandarin to me?

It looks romantic from the outside, I’ll be honest. But on the inside, I can tell you, the work is what people observing you building your business, your project, your idea, or your processes from the outside aren’t going to see. And by “the work,” what these outside observers are really looking for are the tangible results of your efforts, your arguments, your research and your time.

Because, for better or worse, American culture is still built on getting results, rather than the nature and efficacy of developing, managing and experiencing, the process. For the peace builder, thinking about how to start building their project right now, I encourage you to cover the gap, first by making a decision, and then by doing the work.

For the peace builder (or anyone else who ever built anything) the decision is “the work.”

-Peace Be With You All-

[Podcast] The Death of F2F Communication

Our personal assistants have names like Cloe, Clara, Julie, Luka and Amy.

Our devices have names like Alexa, Siri and Cortana.

We are getting the future we were promised, though not evenly distributed (as has been pointed out in the past), and not in the same areas simultaneously. Soon, HAL 9000 will be in our homes, not in a deep space vehicle.

We have FitBits, Jawbones, and Apple and Android Watches. We are slowly getting augmented reality, virtual reality and even electric, automated self-driving cars.

Voice data, movement data, and biometric data collection technologies lie at the “bleeding edge” of future machine-to-human communication technologies. We do not have laws or regulations to deal with the consequences of having these devices; which are always on, always recording, always collecting and always reporting to someone—somewhere.

We have given up our privacy for convenience, and whether or not you believe this is a Faustian bargain, the deal is in the process of being struck even as you are alive and watching it happen. And the people of the future will not lament the loss of face-to-face communication, any more than present generations lament the passing of the horse and buggy.

How should conflict professionals respond to the death of face-to-face communication and the rise of machine-to-human communication?

Get involved in the collection of data, the organizations that collect it, and even on the boards of organizations that make decisions and regulations about the use of it—peace builders have an obligation to no longer sit on the sidelines, hoping that none of this will happen. Getting involved in all parts of the process, from creation ot decision making, is the new obligation for peace builders.
Build businesses that act as intermediaries (mediators, if you will) between Alexa, Siri and whatever is next and the people who will seek to control what those devices reveal about people’s private lives—private conflict communications are about to go public. And peace builders have seen the devastating effects of such publicity on relationships, reputation and understanding through the first level of all of this—social media.
Prepare to address the stress that will be magnified through people curating their lives, tailoring their responses to what “should” be said, rather than what will actually be “true”—with the death of privacy through all of your devices in your house either recording you, tracking you, suggesting items to you, or even interacting with you, the line between what is truly felt, and what you actually say, will become even narrower. Peace builders should prepare through training to address this cognitive dissonance, because it will only take a few generations before more masking of previously transparent communication will occur.

As man and machine begin to merge at the first level with communication, peace builders should be engaging with the process proactively and aggressively, rather than waiting and being caught by surprise.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Decay of Power

Everyone “knows” what “it” is, but we often confuse the outcomes of “it” with the source of “it.”

Everyone “knows” that “it” is shifting geographically, technologically, morally, ethically, physically, mentally and spiritually, but no one “knows” why this shift is happening at this moment in our global historical consciousness.

Everyone “knows” that “it” is what makes “the world go around” but no one can really describe why “it” has so much ability to make things happen.

Everyone “agrees” that “something” must be “done” by people with more of “it” than themselves, but no one can successfully articulate why those with more of “it” would do “something” more with “it” than what they are already doing–or not doing.

Everyone “knows” that corporations, big businesses, governments, nonprofit organizations, parents, school systems, and even banks have too much of “it.”

Everyone also “knows” that the people who operate at the top of those organizational structures feel more and more under siege everyday as they look around and see “it” evaporating away from the siloes they’ve built to protect, use and exploit “it.”

Power is a curious thing. As it decays and moves, from one geographic or generational “space” to another, the fear of losing “it” (or the fear of gaining “it”) drives more conflicts than ever before.

Everyone (the royal “we”) “knows” what to do about that shift and how to resolve that fear, but, apart from talking in coffee shops, writing blog posts, or creating long form journalistic critiques of “it,” no one really has a clue about how—and why—this shift is happening.

But when a state of influence, such as power, which is so often confused with its outcomes (money is an outcome of power, not power itself), is seen to be decaying before everyone’s very eyes, the fear of loss—and the accompanying panic—generates a focus on escape and hiding.

Which is why, in conflict scenarios, whether between a husband and a wife or between a student loan holder and a bank lender, the energy that should be expended on getting to resolution, is instead expended on getting to escape, using power as a weapon, and/or hiding from the consequences of bad/poor behavior.

Which, of course, “everyone” can see…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Contributor] Glass Houses: Social Interactions for the Modern Age

Contributor – Alexander Gault
Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexanderBGault

As the popular adage goes “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

Essentially, this means that people who have certain weaknesses shouldn’t criticize others for those same issues. However, a new spin to this old saying can be used.

Now, people live in those glass houses by putting their information all over the internet, and throwing stones is just saying something that might be damaging to themselves or others.

Many people in the first world have a social media account of some kind.

Older generations tend to favor Facebook, the youth of today favor Twitter and Snapchat, and Instagram is used by anyone with a camera phone. With these social medias, we put our thoughts, feelings, and lives out into the world for almost everyone to see.

This is not without consequence.

Let’s start at a fairly low level of how this impacts our lives; our real life social interactions.

If you post something to your social media account that, for example, contains an anti-gay marriage quote, and you have any gay co-workers, friends, classmates, or acquaintances who follow you on that account, most likely they will, at the very least, ask you about it later, making a fairly uncomfortable conversation out of the topic. More often than not, however, they might not talk to you, consider you anti-gay and sever their ties, and in a more extreme case, band together with other pro-gay marriage individuals to shut you out of any group you may have been in with them.

The next level would be professional interactions, with businesses, employers, or contractors.

If you post something considered very out-of-line with the ideology of a potential employer, you could lose your chance of getting that job. This could include making political remarks, talking about various social deeds deemed less than respectable, talking about drinking, partying, breaking laws. While many people don’t consider their social media at all connected with their jobs and professional life, many businesses look at the internet personas of their potential employees, and even current employees, to ensure their business is being well-represented among its employee-base.

For younger people, colleges are another potential pit-fall when it comes to social media.

Many colleges look at prospective students social media accounts to see what the student puts on there. The college may look for posts about how the student feels about that particular school, the student’s personal life, and even the language used. One misplaced swear-word can end a student’s chances at a top-tier school before the Admissions department even sees their application.

Even high schools are getting on the train. Some districts employ full-time social media monitors to keep a watchful eye on the social media environ that surrounds the student body. They mainly keep an eye out for excessive online bullying, threats between or at students, potential inappropriate student-teacher interactions, and terror threats by students. These monitors can suggest disciplinary actions for any student they take issue with, from detention to expulsion, depending on the severity of the infraction. And many of these schools have no set code delineating how their social media monitors make these decisions, leaving it to the discretion of the district.

Social media accounts are a double-edged sword.

They create a dangerous ecosystem for people to destroy their own and others’ lives, sometimes unwittingly. They create a system where people can remove their own privacy, put their private lives on display for all levels of society and business, and subject themselves to immeasurable pain in the process. But social media also allows those who use it properly to grow, develop new connections, maintain old friendships, and keep themselves informed.

Social media is a dangerous weapon, and with all weapons, its users must understand the dangers before they can enjoy the benefits.

Alexander Gault-Plate is an aspiring journalist and writer, currently in the 12th grade. He has worked with his schools newspapers and maintained a blog for his previous school. In the future, he hopes to write for a new-media news company.

You can follow Alexander on Twitter here https://twitter.com/AlexanderBGault.

[Contributor] New Content: The Future of the Internet

Contributor – Alexander Plate
Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexanderBGault

It’s no surprise that the internet has drastically increased the amount of content, of any kind, that people with access to it consume.

In the past 2 years, 90% of the worlds’ content has been created and shared via Internet based platforms. That means that every book, movie, and television show from the nascence of humanity to 2013 accounts for only 10% of the worlds’ content today.

Who is taking in all of this content?

Where is all of this going?

There are many platforms, and nobody can really know what they all are. New platforms are created and revised almost daily, and so many come and go without a real following that they’re only a memory in someone’s server banks by the end of their first month.

Here, we will talk about 3 main platforms: YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Youtube is a Google-owned video sharing website, where people upload self-made videos to their “channel”, or profile, and gain “subscribers”, or people who will get updated on the videos posted. YouTube has proven to be one of the most important platform for internet content ever created, and this is shown by how much content is uploaded to it.

There are 300 hours of video content posted to YouTube, on average, per minute. That content comes in the form of vlogs (video blogs), original music, short films, and personality-driven videos and channels. YouTube has become, to the new generation, what television was to the older generations.

Now, instead of sitting down to one 45-minute show with four commercial breaks, people sit down to multiple 6-8 minute videos with only one ad per video. This actually has increased the visibility of advertisements to these watchers, as now, instead of only four or five commercial breaks where people lose their focus after the second ad, if that, now people are seeing a shorter, more interesting, advertisement, and there is only one per video, two or three for the longer 40-50 minute videos that sometimes appear.

YouTube’s gives viewers a sense of connection with the content creators, because in most circumstances, the video was written, filmed, edited, and advertised by the person performing in it. There are very few channels with multiple people, and those that do have multiple people generally have all of them in front of the camera lens as well, giving a sense of familiarity between the viewers and the creators.

The next big platform we’ll talk about is Twitter. Twitter is referred to as a micro-blogging platform, in which people create text or image based content and share it to an ecosystem of other people doing the same exact thing. Twitter has power by virtue of its simplicity. You don’t have to create and design a personalized homepage, there is only one design that everyone, from the most followed person on the platform to the newest person to make an account.

Twitter allows posts of at most 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation, so most posts, or “tweets” are somewhere between one and two short sentences. The image side is relatively similar, and the max amount of photos you can post is four. The platform has power as a connection agent between a creator and their audience, and is used by every popular YouTube creator with an active account. Presidential candidates have been using it since, in the US, the 2012 election, and individuals use it to connect with their friends, but strangers as well.

While the older generation likes Facebook for its long form capabilities, and its basis on connecting people to their already-existing circle of friends and family, the younger generations enjoy Twitters openness, as anyone can see an account and its tweets, unless that account owner has set their account settings to private, and its short-form simplicity.

Finally, there is Tumblr, known as a social blogging site. Tumblr functions similarly to both Twitter in that it is a blog platform where those that follow you are not necessarily people who know you. Twitter rounds out the group of content types we have listed here. YouTube functions for video, Twitter for short text, and Tumblr works very well for images and longer text. Through a system of tagging posts, where you give a searchable subject to a post that anyone can find, and reblogging, where one blog decides to post your content (appropriately sourced) on their own with the click of a button.

Tumblr is not as popular as Twitter or YouTube, however, and in some ways is exclusionary. Many blogs on the platform are very progressive-thinking, and more traditional individuals occasionally find themselves as the target of abuse on the platform for fitting into the “patriarchy” or being “cis-normative”, or unaccepting of those individuals that to not identify as either male of female only. Despite the faults of a relatively small, but very vocal part of its user group, (which exists on both YouTube and Twitter, but with far less success), Tumblr is a powerful way to connect to your niche groups, and appropriately tagged posts on the platform can reach millions of eyes.

The internet of today offers more ways that one can count to give and receive content. Individuals can use it to boost their own careers and build a brand, and companies can use it to revolutionize their methods of advertising and reach a whole new audience. But to effectively use these tools, you must recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each platform, and optimize accordingly.

You can follow Alexander on Twitter here https://twitter.com/AlexanderBGault.

[Advice] Content Commitment

The thing that destroys most content creation efforts is not lack of talent, ability, or innate skill.

The thing that destroys most content creation efforts is not lack of resources, lack of time or lack of money.

The thing that destroys most content creation efforts (from live streaming via Periscope and Meerkat all the way to writing a blog on a daily basis) is the lack of a will to consistently commit to a course of action.

Whether it works, or not.

Whether it attracts attention, or not.

Whether it scales, or not.

The lack of a will to commit to the process, regardless of outcome, seems foolish and pointless when stacked against economic metrics that have dominated content production for the last 100 years.

We still run into professionals who either own businesses, who have built projects, and who are accomplished at wringing a profit margin out of the world, who are shocked that we blog every day, or that we have a podcast with only one advertiser–at this point in its development.

Then they are even more shocked that we plan to do more things that do not produce revenue right away.

By doing things that do not produce revenue now, enable us to do all kinds of things that will produce revenues later on.

If more thinkers, builders and doers would adopt this mindset (by the way, it is the only mindset that works in the world of the digital, the automated and the algorithmic) the long tail would become fat, the economic value of consistency and commitment would experience exponential growth, and the level of the quality of content being created would increase.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Access to the Means of Production

There is a growing chorus from the progressive parts of the US economy, concerned that many historically marginalized race and class groups may not be benefiting from the fullness of the revolutions occurring in high technology, economics, and communications.

This chorus centers in the world of high technology startups of Silicon Valley and their media/opinion outlets. Ironically, this call is coming from a world that has historically been dominated by the mostly male, mostly white (or Asian) and the mostly highly educated.

The gender/sexual discrimination case of Ellen Pao and her plight as CEO of Reddit, has brought the issue of “women in technology” to the forefront of tech Twitter. Missing in this discussion (or maybe floating around the edges of it) is the fact that discussions around the core issues of class and racial advancement and economic development continue to employ the language of the past to define problems of the present; and, to frame discussions of the future. This framing (or storytelling, if you will) has to shift in three areas for there to be more participation from those currently existing exclusively in the space of the historically discriminated against:

Access to technology, content creation mechanisms, and the knowledge of how those systems work (and why) needs to be framed as a social justice issue, rather than as a technology/economic issue.

The challenging and uncomfortable question that no one asked (not the NYPD, not the Mayor of New York’s office, not the multiple variations of protestors, not the progressive pundits) about the entire Eric Garner incident is: “Why was Eric Garner on the sidewalk, selling “loosie” cigarettes, and having continuous issues, run-ins and arrests with the NYPD in the first place?”

Think about that question for a moment and then think about this, equally challenging question: “If Eric Garner had sufficient access to technology, content creation mechanisms, and the knowledge of how those systems work, would he have had to be on a sidewalk at all, or could he have fed his family, from his home, by using those mechanisms?”

These are two questions that need answers, advocacy and more noise behind them, because access to the means of production is the social justice issue of the 21^st century—regardless of race, culture, class or creed. And let’s not even get into dissecting the background of other lives and how they could have been positively impacted by a greater knowledge and access to technology that could bring them—at minimum—the beginnings of an income and a better life.

Creating (and co-creating) rather than constantly consuming as a means of understanding how new technological and economic systems will work in the future.

Even with 1.5 million pieces of blog content being created every day and 175 million blogs being out there (along with all the videos on Youtube, live streaming, podcasts and other image based content) there is still a dearth of quality, meaningful content. Particularly, content that reflects the lives that are lived by people other than a thin stratum of wealthy, North American and European peoples.

As the Internet expands globally, many young, African Americans run the risk of being left behind on a global web, full of aggressive, young focused content creators. Understanding the how and why of content production allows people to co-create their lives with others. This is an idea that’s an easy sell when a culture leapfrogs the desktop computer; less so when a subculture is historically marginalized and suffers from the results of educational disparities for a wide variety of reasons.

Changing mindsets around the possibility of owning and building something requires telling a different story about what risks matter—and which risks don’t matter.

As the risks that used to matter begin to matter less and less, appropriate preparation through role modeling and education is important for everybody in the US culture. However, for those people who will be left behind as the perceived security of employment becomes more and more a thing of the past (“In my experience as a black entrepreneur, I saw the majority of my family take the government job route, while I always had the itch to pursue a self-made career.”) there will be no gentle landings as circumstances change. Just sudden, violent bumps.

As the Singularity eventually arrives, the solution is not to ameliorate the impact of these bumps through the creation of Universal Basic Income systems, or micropayments and micro-lending schemes. These are band-aid solutions at worst, and recipes for negative social disruption at scale at best. Instead, the long-term solution is to begin to teach future generations what the real risks are. The mindset and attitude that causes success to have many fathers and failure to be but an orphan, still reigns in many sectors of this economy, but that shouldn’t prevent our society from investing in education about the risks that matter: emotional labor, collaboration, and building credibility and trust through the long tail, rather than relying on the short mass.

In the end, there are disruptions that have to happen in education, economics, finance, real estate, and other areas, not to level the playing field—this is an impossibility—but to create new fields, with new rules for new participants that may have been historically disenfranchised by the past.

Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime. But teach a man to build and sail a boat, and he’ll go to the furthest horizon and teach someone else. Isn’t it time for us to advance the access, technology and discrimination battles past the language of 20^th century battles, and frame them instead in the language of the 21^st century, that we’re already 15 years into?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Ok…So Ad Blocking is Here…

Ok…so ad blocking is here….

From browsers to mobile hardware, the drive is on (whether from the creators of ad blocking software or just from us all talking about it now) to empower consumers of content to block advertising they don’t want to see via software based means. This advertising, small and large web publishers argue, is part of a fundamental principle of mass media, going back at least a century. The principle comes down to a deal, which—like many deals—can be renegotiated and changed to reflect shifting values and principles:

We (web publishers) create content without charging you for the creation of that content, and in exchange you (the content consumer) give us attention and we charge a third party, the advertiser, to put ads in front of, and around, our content.

This same deal drove the development and growth of platforms, such as television, radio and newspapers, and the development and growth of content on those platforms, for the last 100 years.

But, the Internet was supposed to be a different content delivery platform.

Right?

Apparently not.

Now, consumers—instead of just choosing to ignore interruptive ads like they always have (and because measuring audience engagement is difficult (but not impossible) there are more intrusive, interruptive ads, not less)—content consumers are choosing to block everything.

Seth Godin wrote with hope fifteen years ago about permission marketing. Cory Doctorow writes with abandon about the anarchy of the web. But both of those writers and thinkers assume a fundamental point about most content, whether it’s on the internet, on the radio, on television, or in a magazine or newspaper, that must be written down and repeated out loud:

Most content on any platform isn’t good enough, interesting enough, relevant enough or entertaining enough, to act as the glue binding the audience of content consumers to the content creators in a “revenue for value” exchange based relationship.

This is why there are millions and millions of cat and baby videos on Youtube, but only a few breakout “stars.” This is why Vogue magazine (or Burberry on Instagram) will be fine with ¾ of their magazine content (or their social distribution feed) being ad space, but Mother Jones or The National Review might just wither and die with ad blockers. This is the reason there are 152 million blogs on the Internet, publishing 1.3 million pieces of content a day, but no blogger has risen to dominance on the web in 15 years.

Thus advertising.

There are a few ways out of this bind, but before we get to that, the question of “What kind of internet do we want to have?” must be answered. We (and we are including ourselves in this group as a content consumers) have not answered this question in any kind of meaningful way. Content consumers have to be a part of the conversation before the endpoint of plopping and advertisement in front of our eyes is reached. Content consumers (to build trust and get their permission) have to be engaged in the building, creating and disseminating of a product from start to finish—or not at all.

The first way out of this bind is by crowdsourcing content development. There are some sites on the web that do this well; there are many more that do it badly, or not at all. Crowdsourcing journalism, entertainment, and other forms of content may lead to less ad blocking—and higher revenue—rather than more by content consumers who feel emotionally invested in the product.

The second way out of this of this bind is by creating more subscription-based platforms. For subscriptions to work, there must be a consideration (and a careful one at that) by the web publisher about what kind of content is being created. Long tail philosophy should be ruling with brand-based content, but many are still stuck in the 1950’s. By the way, this is the only way that data gathering, analytics and implementation based on the data is useful as a tool for content creators and publishers, as well as the incorporation of micropayments via cryptocurrencies. Don’t believe me? Ok. What’s in your Netflix queue right now? And have you paid for a reSnap recently?

The third way out of this of this bind is by rethinking distribution systems. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Google and Apple are going to war with each other to decide who controls the ad space of the mobile phone screen and the app walled garden. This war has to be fought (I guess) but thinking of these platforms less as content delivery systems, and more as content broadcast systems, would free many creators from the false choice of “Do I or don’t I put an ad in front of my content?” Email and RSS feeds circumvent broadcast systems and go directly to the audience content creators want. This is also the reason that creators on Meerkat and Periscope who are live streaming events (and their lives) are going to have trouble monetizing their content if the platform ever has to respond to the vicissitudes of Wall Street shareholders.

The fourth way out of this bind is by rethinking all the assumptions underpinning the web. The Internet has moved over the last 25 to 30 years, from being a niche communication channel to a worldwide, glorified telecommunications delivery system. What if the Internet shifted from being a global mass bullhorn, to being an individualized, personalized content delivery system? Mobile phone, tablet and app development is pushing the Internet in the direction of this development, but frankly, not far enough. Which is where blockchain technology really comes to the forefront.

The fifth way out of this bind is for content creators to make conscious choices—and stick to them—about how and where to monetize their content with ads. We are not naïve enough to think that advertising will disappear; there were ads broadcasting the services of prostitutes painted on the walls of buildings in Pompeii and Ancient Rome. However, when everyone can publish (but not everyone will publish) everyone has the choice to run a Google ad (or not) in front of specific content, they produce. We run ads in front of The Earbud_U Podcast, but not on the HSCT #Communication Blog, for a reason.

Ad blocking will not be the end of Internet publishing, nor will it serve as the death knell for advertising on the Internet. By defaulting to the opposite of these five alternatives to advertising on the Internet, many content creators will wither away, and die, on the web.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Future] Unbundling Value 11: Micropayments for Macrovalue

The value add of emotional labor has never been fully quantified in the open market.

Think about it.

How often does American culture put a price tag on a mother’s hug? It can be argued that when a mother nurtures a child, rather than rejecting it, in aggregate, those positive interactions build over time and allow the child to experience all the glories that adulthood has to offer. In addition, it can be argued that nurturing a child encourages productivity and adds to the positive economic growth of the overall economy.

The opposite can also be argued. A mother’s rejection, in aggregate, over time, can lead to a loss of productivity in that individual when they reach adulthood, and a net negative on society and culture in the form of increased conflict, increased likelihood of incarceration and other social pathologies.

Oh, if it were only so cut and dry.

The fact of the matter is, mothers are people and sometimes they hit the mark, sometimes they miss the mark and sometimes the child becomes an adult and does whatever they want, independent of the particulars of their upbringing.

The trouble with monetizing all of those possible outcomes is that there is no clear line to guarentee surety of outcome. The kind of lines that economists, public policy researchers, and politicians like which are simple and make for good sound bites or quippy image quotes. The kind of lines that make for good stories on the nightly news of triumph and tragedy.

What if there were a way to monetize that emotional labor?

Micropayments, crowd funding, micro-lending and other ways of passing along money, whether in the form of a remittance, a direct payment, or through being involved romantically in a story, all allow the valuation of something that has never been valued (monetarily) before. The labor that matters—not the idea labor that James Altucher talks about or even the manufacturing labor that politicians talk about once in a while, or the digital labor that seems to be hot right now—is the labor of the heart. The micro interactions (positive and negative) that happen between people and lead to small, interpersonal conflicts that mean more than whatever is going on in whatever country “over there.”

Technologies that fund the unbundling of value from labor—such as blockchain—can serve to fundamentally reshape the value of the emotional labor that matters on the open market. This idea is harder to accept than universal basic income, or any other idea that seeks to unbundle work from being paid for that work.

Valuing emotional output has always been a struggle in a capitalistic, Protestant work ethic based culture that exists in America, but our technologies have brought us to the point where we can begin to build—and honor—that emotional output, rather than merely continuing to ignore it.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principle Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/