The company we need to build must be a monopoly. This isn’t a matter of centralization vs. decentralization. Well, that’s not true. This is a matter of centralization AND decentralization. More importantly, this a matter of distribution. There is no better word – none that I have thought of yet, anyway – than distribution to describe the purpose of organizations within scociety. The word distribution works at so many different levels. All businesses exist to distribute information between parties.
You may argue that manufacturing and production are not in the business of distribution. However, they do control how information is distributed into new information. Taking raw ingredients and baking a cake, for example, takes sugar, flower, milk, eggs from various vendors and mix them together to form a new presentation of the information in the form of what we call a cake. All of these elements can be boiled down into bits of information necessary for nature to reform nature.
We can see companies repeated through history formed as a new twist on a basic principality. Facebook is like a Phone Book, however to contact your neighbor or friend you are limited to one Channel on a seemingly infinite network of sites. This phone book is like the book for the phone that hadn’t been invented yet. The simple argument here is, Facebook has become that phone. Well…. Not really. In fact, it’s pretty apparent why Facebook has not become the phone: The book’s purpose is to find out information about its users and share them with others. Think about it. That’s literally what a phone book was. It was a listing of everyone’s contact information.
Now, to invent this new phone… There’s an issue. The Network Effect. It is necessary for everyone to use this new network. And for that to work, there is one more problem. Everyone needs to own their node on the network. Therefore it needs to me a game of monopoly, that everyone can play atop.
We are afraid of monopolies in this country. It is thought that a monopoly must be a utility that is governed by the government. Of course, the idea is that the monopoly in the case of a phone company cannot fix prices. However, we have never considered that the node itself is property. Each property is therefore valued based on the utility it provides to users. As shareholders of an institution, these property owners have voting rights and as the customers of the institution will vote on pricing.
Think of it this way. What if everyone who had a city garbage can was also the owner of the garbage service. When it is time to approve budgets, each customer has a say.
We’re talking a Democratic Company operating in a Democratic Economy should implement social good. This I would assume is what is meant by the concept of Social Capitalism. If capitalism were pure in its democratic nature, I would hope that its bias would be toward social good.
I don’t just hope that. I mean that I believe we can work collectively for social good if we – the poor – get together and realize that we are slaves to a corrupt system. I believe in democracy. A democratic system cannot exist if the individual serves the system. In a democratic system, the system must serve the individual. Does it feel like we live in such a system?
We have very large companies that should be utilities… Like… Google. But for some reason have remained as monopolies. The interesting thing about Google, is that it has geared itself to be more than a search tool. Google doesn’t just want to help you find what you’re looking for. It wants to know what you’re looking for before you do. Which is creepy. And, doesn’t feel very human. Actually, it wouldn’t be creepy if I were involved in the process of helping it understand what I truly want. Instead, Google has decided to spy on you and algorithmically guess what you want, statistically.
Google is like the library. A library that provides so much utility to visitors that the value is astronomical.
I’m trailing of my train of thought. TO be continued…
Author: Jeff Donnelly
Game Designer. In both business and life, the potential is limited by the number of transactions available. Life is like a game. Jeff designs games that allow people to realize their full potential.