here comes the p2p economy

Stan Stalnaker

Radical change is silently transforming our world. Can you feel it?

There is a rush of energy enveloping the world, a static electricity that is easy to find disconcerting. For many, there is a feeling that the pace of change is accelerating right before our very eyes, and a niggling feeling that the assumptions that make up companies and targets and the bedrocks of the entire economy are nothing more than a finger in a rapidly shifting wind. Markets are volatile. Numbers are fluid. Competitors shape-shift. Change is sudden, yet slow, and it takes a lot of mind-space to think about the big picture in our life, our company, or our industry, let alone the entire economy and future state of nations. The good news is that change usually equates to progress, and that's good, especially if you can anticipate it. Thus a very wide view is useful — it helps us put things into context and take a breath, finding intention before action.

The Media is a Canary

The media industry, both in terms of advertisers, agencies and media owners, is in many ways lucky because it has been hit hard by a transformation that will soon transform most areas of the economy: the rise of collective, peer-to-peer systems. It can be hard to see because it is probably a forty to fifty year process, but the rise of the internet is proving fundamental in the most deeply structural way. The internet is made of nodes (you, computers, mobile phones, and eventually most physical objects) and links (the connections between those nodes), and it brings these two things together in an unprecedented single ecosystem. This single system is rapidly evolving toward features of an organic state, and in so doing draws us out of the Mechanical Age and into an Information Society.  

The first industry to be truly transformed by this ecosystem has been closest to the media industry: communication. Power has shifted from a top-down, linear model of one-to-many, to a flat, circular model of many-to-many.  Let’s face it... all brands are media owners. All people are realizing they are a brand. There is no longer a difference between a brand, a media owner, and a person (or group of people). They are defined only by their chosen identity, their messaging and the size of their... network. This is why social networks from MySpace to Facebook are so critically important to understand. They not only represent a new form of socialization, but the evolution of communications media to a circular collective state, or hub. 

But media is just the first and smallest industry to be affected by this, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. The coming wave of change will soon transform two other areas, finance and energy, in much the same way.

What is peer-to-peer money?

In 1976, future nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus changed the course of history with $27.00, which he lent to a group of poor craftsmen in the Indian city of Jobra, near where he lived, by guaranteeing a larger sum with a credit bank, he set in motion a phenomenon that later became known as the Grameen bank, a system of word of mouth localized lending that has enabled many thousands of people to better their life. Combine the power of Yunus with the power of a global digital network, and the future shape of money begins to take shape.

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