I’m going to start posting, as much as possible, about the variety of fantastic speakers and panels we’re having at Personal Democracy Forum this year, and I’m starting with one of the most unusual, our session with authors Doug Rushkoff and Tara Hunt on “Building the Social Economy: CraigBucks, NewMarks and Making Whuffie.”
Doug Rushkoff has been writing about all things cyber for longer than almost anyone, and the perspective he brings to the discussion this year may be the most radical that you’ve heard yet. He calls his new book, Life, Inc., his “life’s work” and even from this short video he’s made about it, you can see how the book ties together all of the major themes that he’s been working on for years: the rise of mass marketing, the fall of community, the artificial and yet completely all-encompassing reality of the modern economic system, the way new networking technologies may enable us to liberate ourselves, and why the current financial crisis is perhaps a life-saving opportunity, not just for us as individuals but also for the whole society.
Take a look:
At PdF, Doug is going to be speaking about local currencies, how the net could enable a new kind of alternative currency that could exist even though its users don’t live in the same locality, and how this could be a critical building block in shifting social and economic life away from its current anomized state to something more satisfying and sustainable. He’s going to be joined by an equally stimulating speaker who also has a new book coming out, Tara Hunt, who is the author of The Whuffie Factor. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says of Tara: “Tara Hunt knows what she’s talking about when it comes to community marketing. Her work with BarCamp and Coworking has not only shown that she walks the walk of a strong community catalyst, but these communities are excellent examples of the power of the kind of grass roots organizations that really represent the future of business.”
“Whuffie,” a term invented by sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, is social capital, or in Tara’s terms, reputation. She writes, “You lose or gain [whuffie] based on positive or negative actions, your contributions to the community, and what people think of you….In every online community I’ve been part of, whuffie is a core component of connection; in many cases it is more valuable than money.”
What will Doug and Tara have to say to each other? Well, I suspect that even though Doug is a fierce critic of capitalism and Tara has written a business-oriented book, there’s a common thread here, one that was articulated by the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, the ur-text of internet cultural theory. As Tara writes, “In the gift economy the more you give away, the more you give away, the more whuffie you gain, which is completely opposite from currency in the market economy, where when you give away money, it’s pretty much gone.” And Doug writes that the Internet, by allowing us to route around marketing, may help restore “connections to real people, places and values [making us] less likely to depend on the symbols and brands that have come to substitute for human relationships.” Remember, as the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto told us, we are all attracted to real human voices:
Compared to this kind of personal, intimate, knowledgeable and highly engaged voice…top-down corporate communications come across as stale and stentorian–the boring, authoritarian voice of command and control. The glaring difference between these styles is the strange attractor that has brought tens of millions flocking to the Internet. There’s new life passing along the wires. And it hasn’t been coming from corporations.
Most of the breakout sessions at PdF will probably not be as visionary as this one, but as we put the conference together we want to insure that there are always several really thought-provoking speakers that try to take us way past where we are now to where we may be going. So I’m really looking forward to hearing Doug and Tara at PdF2009, and I hope you are too.