When we moved our lives and businesses online, we virtualized our activities and platformed our behaviors. One by one, segment by segment.
Each item we warehoused to sell, each social connection we wanted to broaden was in effect a mirroring of life as we knew it on the street.
This was a focused process of virtualizing interactions, socialization, supply chains, commerce and payments. It opened up an entire ecosystem of jobs built on creating and maintaining this meta reality.
The opposite is happening today.
This is not the second coming of the internet as many analogize, nor is it a mirroring of our world. It is a rewriting of it.
We are not as much adding efficiencies as rethinking the route. Not simply streamlining process as reconceptualizing both the why and how of what we do.
It is always the case that things we do become obsolete and vestigial over time.
But this is different.
It’s not about the uberizarion of transportation or work. Or unlocking the possibilities of restating the travel industry through the excess capacity of rooms in people’s homes.
It’s about innovation from the top down at the outset, starting with a game changing vision, rather than a bottoms up iteration of building a myriad of tiny businesses that aggregate towards larger change over time.
In some ways, this is what we all learned from Elon Musk. Where his vision of a changed electric grid preceded the model of how to finance it or even the technology that is needed to make it possible.
If everything is possible–which it is–we are in some ways vetting our vision with the belief that the rest, including the market and the business model will fall into place.
This is happening in a number of areas, starting to connect under a larger umbrella of innovation for change.
Urban transportation visionaries in autonomous transport are dreaming into existence a rewiring of the global urban grid. Changing the reality of what smart cities like NY could look like when the idea of transportation is not about a commute but simply part of our work day, creating a new block of personal time to be used as yet unforeseen ways.
Agricultural entrepreneurs are starting to prototype vertical farms with the overarching belief that organic food can be affordable to everyone. That there is a vertical footprint of farming that can support, in the city itself, the food needs of that population. Completely turning on its head the hub and spoke distribution model of today.
Scientists, technologists and marketers are joining together to take advances in Nutrigenomics and recreate an entirely new supplement industry. One that is personalized, allowing each of us to light up our genetic maps through what we eat, instantiating longer and more productive lives and by default, changing the age diversity and definition of the work force itself.
And the critical role that cryptocurrencies, the possibilities of redesigning connections on the blockchain and capitalization through ICOs will play.
I’m starting to think, based on some comments from my friend William Mougayar that the true power of the crypto world is as a fuel for innovation that will impact each and every area of change I’ve hinted at above.
As you navigate the many early crypto economies out there, and the first iterations of how these visionary changes will play out, it is clear that there is a different dynamics to the markets themselves.
Different in how community is at once closer to being the actual marketplace itself. Different in how the dynamics of rolling out products and brands, while certainly grounded in value and behavioral brand realities, has a very new twist.
Unlike the media models of the social nets today, I sense that the two-sided marketplace as a construct is becoming the norm, with shared ownership cross both sides.
This is easily imaginable for example in shared urban connectivity with a community of users around a mesh infrastructure. Or a reconceptualization of the food supply chain with a bank of vertical farms as something you earn ownership shares depending on the value you bring to it.
This feels like marketing hybridizing itself, a mash up of community dynamics, engagement, value and ownership.
Brand identity as well has the potential of externalizing itself to truly be what we all wanted it be aspirationally, the actualization of the individual’s views of their relationship to a product or service.
Surely, the core of buying and selling, the us and the them, intention and measuring are still real. Certainly there will always be those of us who make and create, and those of us who consume.
But something is shifting.
There is a democratization of the platforms, the workforce, the data, shared ownership and potentially capital itself. This could well spawn innovation in larger chunks for the common good in new ways cross a global community in an endless series of markets.
To me, this sounds less and less like a dream, and more like a shared story of possibilities than ever before.
