Decentralizing the economic discussion
This morning, I spent a few moments chatting with a colleague over a cup of coffee about the risks and potentials of both centralized and decentralized media. He was saying how he would like to be able to directly support podcasts he listens to, but he listens to so many that it is economically nonviable for him to do so, which is essentially why the advertising model has the world by the balls.
Once a platform has their monetization hooks into a contributor, there is very little that person can do as to lose the support of the platform means to lose access to the audience they have developed over time, through a lot of effort. It isn't easy to just pack up and leave to another place.
But, while I was explaining the way it could be handled through decentralized communities like Hive, inflation pools and interfaces targeted to niche communities like podcasters, we extended into the economics of it and how the centralized platforms themselves are starting to opt into the new economy - Square, Google, Microstrategies etc - the list is going to grow rapidly.
What was interesting was that while going through this discussion that he and I have been having for several years, his eyes started to click into focus and see what I have been talking about. Recently, he started using Twitter for his news feed and reading some of the conversations - quickly identifying how the social dynamics are in play and the risks involved, where people are leveraged and polarized to create the discussion. He also has been paying attention to the risks for those that step "out of line" and how they are punished socially and economically for indiscretions, which these days means saying something the masses don't want to hear.
As I was explaining how the shift in economic leaning from the old to the new will create instability in the old and growing stability in the new with a consistent upward trend, he said, "Okay, how do I buy some Bitcoin now?"*
I am always wary when it comes to the buy-in part, but I know this person well enough and I will step him through the process. What he does lament, is not getting more interested when I created his still unused Steem account three years ago, as he realized that now he has a lot of learning to do, a lot of catching up.
And this is what I have said to him and others about the future - start learning. Don't come to Hive because of the potential for rewards, don't come to Hive expecting it to immediately replace all of your other digital social activity, don't come to Hive for the best content on the internet - because it isn't going to satisfactorily meet those needs, as the "free internet" is matured, it is built by professionals that have effectively trained the world to consume in the way that they dictate and the gateways of their choosing.
The reason to come to Hive is that it is where the world is going to be in the future, five years or a decade from now - it is to learn about the framework of that future and potentially take part in building it, or influencing the way it is built. As I keep saying, if the world is going to change, the way we consume has to change and that requires giving up some portion of convenience and quality in order to support the replacements. This is the way econonmies rise and fall - through usage, through consumption, through belief.
And this last part, the belief in the current economy is faltering so heavily that those massive corporations that have made their wealth by leveraging it, are losing their faith in the future of it and they are all about profits. They do not care about ideologies, they do not care about the betterment of the world, they do not care about your well-being and mental health - everything they do is to churn another dollar - or very soon, another satoshi.
If they are getting in on Bitcoin, block producing and blockchain verification processes - it isn't a calculated risk - because they already have the channels required to market it to the masses, they already have all the data, granular market segmentation and social influencing processes in place to garner the support they need to mainstream it, because they have a mainline to the digital world.
While this might not be great in some ways, disruption always creates opportunity and when that disruption is at the global economic level, the cracks are going to open a great many foot and hand holds for people to get a hold and start to both tear apart the old and fill the gaps for the new.
Right now, people are suffering, people are looking for a better way and even at the consumption level, people are realizing that the model they use daily is unsustainable, that the costs that they are incurring are growing to a point where they now have to make decisions on what they are consuming, they are feeling the *opportunity cost of content on the internet and, they don't like it.
As I said to my colleague, the way to change this is to decentralize the platforms and that is through ownership of the platforms themselves, as that allows for broader distribution of the wealth they generate, back into the community that consumes from them. This is what Hive is already doing of course, and while imperfect in many ways, is slowly building a more robust and value-adding model of the new economies - niche economies that interact with each other across the world without having to pass through all of those "managed" gateways.
People favor convenience and clean beauty over the difficult and messy, but no matter how one looks at it now, the world is more complicated than we enjoy and we are starting to feel the effects of having outsourced so much of our lives to corporations who only have their bottomline in their algorithmic mind.
It is these discussions that start to turn the tide and currently there is no better time than right now to start putting more wedges into people's narrative of their world and opening up some gaps for new information to be considered. The discussion is ongoing and doesn't end - but we can take a part in its course and evolution, by decentralizing the conversation.
Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]
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