Tag: market

Conquering Time and Space with Facebook

It is obvious how Facebook allows conversations to take place regardless of the distance between participants. Conversational threads between multiple parties in locations spread across the globe happen with more ease and efficiency than any conference call. An element of this new conversational dynamic that is easy to overlook is the way Facebook conquers not just space, but time.

When you have a pint with someone and discuss matters of the day, sports, philosophy, or family, you’ve got the time allotted, and then you can mill it all over and process the implications of the conversation later. On the phone, you’ve got a a few seconds to reply to questions or to pose them. It would be awkward and disruptive to make your interlocutor wait for minutes or hours as you think over her comments before responding. Hanging up and calling back every few hours or days to complete the conversation in fragments is equally cumbersome. In many ways, time, rather than the flow of ideas, is in control of what gets covered. Facebook overcomes this constraint.

Online threads can begin anytime, and participants in the conversation can post immediately or hours, or days, or even weeks later. Everyone is notified, and everyone has the chance to let it sink in, go about the day’s business, and respond only when they have the time and their thoughts are clear. There are myriad conversation flowing at any given time, and you are free to enter and exit at will, around your schedule.

The ability to maintain relationships and social connections on your own schedule is incredibly freeing. It allows you to break your day into modules and specialize in particular activities when you are most capable of doing them well. I often lump all my social interactions for the day around lunchtime by browsing Facebook. I might be lying in bed that night when someone’s post pops into my head. I can post a comment immediately from my bedside smartphone, or wait until the next morning. The conversation’s not going anywhere.

The passive nature of Facebook, like email, is easy to manage and keep from being a disruption. But unlike email, Facebook has an open format where posts are directed at nobody in particular, so you can freely enter or exit the stream. It may seem like a recipe for shallow relationships and flighty social bonds, but I have not found this to be the case. Facebook is not replacing dinner with my family, or a phone call with my brother, or a funny text with a good friend; it is supplementing them. It opens entirely new groups of people to socialize and share ideas with; people who, if only phone or in-person meetings were available, I would realistically never have the ability to get to know. What’s really cool is that, if you so choose, you can form in-person relationships with these people at any time and much of the small talk is already out of the way. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve met fellow travelers at events and been completely unsure whether we’d ever met in the flesh before, because we know each other so well from Facebook.

Your social life is in your own hands like never before. You are no longer bound to friendships of happenstance – who happens to move in next store, or share an office – but can build various overlapping social circles based on your genuine and dynamic interests. Of course you’ll still talk to the neighbor. But if they happen to be crazy or uninteresting, that’s not your only option. You’re free from the constraints of proximity. Neither are your forced to get all your catching up done during those difficult to schedule windows when both parties are free. You’re free from the constraints of time.

This new way to interact might seem like a fun little perk for your personal pleasure, but does it really have transformational power over society? Consider the efficiencies in knowledge capture and transmission and the ease and individual control with which social capital can be built and maintained. The freedom from time and place in the social arena has staggering implications if you ponder and let it sink in.

Why Corporations Don’t Support Freedom

There is a common assumption that advocacy of free-market ideas is funded in large part by big corporations.  As much as I wish the many great organizations and projects that are educating in liberty received financial support from large corporations, almost none of them do, and when they do it is in very small amounts when compared to the other things such firms support.

But why?  Businesses are constantly hampered and harassed by government regulation, taxation, and the uncertainty of the legal landscape one day to the next.  Don’t they stand to gain from laissez faire?  Well, yes, businesses stand to gain tremendously from market freedom.  Entrepreneurs, owners, employees, consumers, and every other market participant stands to gain.  Businesses of all sizes stand to gain, provided they can produce what consumers demand.

Aye, there’s the rub.

You see, while business stands to gain from free exchange, nobody knows which specific businesses will be most successful in a competitive environment.  Consumers are a tough bunch to please.  It takes a lot of work, and there’s a lot of uncertainty.  The creative destruction of the market is a little daunting to a businessperson who dwells on it for long.  It’s easier, for those who can afford it, to cozy up to the state and ensure that it’s restrictions and interventions hurt you a little less than they harm your competitors.  If you have resources enough and play your cards right, you might even be able to get policies that make you more profitable or put your competitors out of business entirely.

The result?  Bigger businesses tend to support state intervention, because they have the lawyers and money and can hire the guns of government.  It is entirely possible that some of these very businesses would fare better under economic freedom, but they don’t know for sure, so they go the somewhat safer route of state cronyism.  Smaller businesses typically aren’t organized enough and lack the resources to manipulate policy in their favor.  Worse still, the unimaginable number of new ventures that would have been created were it not for government impediments have no voice at all; we don’t even know who would have created them.

In short, freedom is good for business, but scary to businesses.

Without Narrative, Vision, and Imagination, the People Perish

I had a friend who assured me sometime around 2000 that the internet wasn’t going anywhere.  He was a smart guy, and even worked in the tech world.  Still, he couldn’t foresee any way the internet could grow large and fast enough to accommodate demand, especially because there was no reliable revenue model.  He predicted it would skyrocket in cost and be used only by big players with a lot of cash.

Today free internet at speeds then unimaginable with content beyond the wildest dreams of that time is ubiquitous.  But he was not a fool.  He just lacked imagination.  It’s possible that the relatively high level of expertise he had with the technology actually made him less able to see beyond its current applications.

We can laugh at predictions like this, but how often do we have small imaginations about our own present and future?  We tend to overvalue the status quo because we cannot think of any other way.  The world is replete with examples if we open our eyes.

At the very time my friend was struggling to see a way companies could offer internet access for free broadcast television and radio were already doing it and had been for decades using advertising as a revenue source.  His focus on what was immediately before him prevented him seeing what was all around him.

We suffer not only from inadequately appreciating the present and the possibilities of the future, but blindness to the past as a clue to what is possible.  I listened to a recent discussion over whether a coercive government monopoly was needed to provide firefighting services.  For nearly twenty minutes there was back and forth as the discussants struggled to think up a viable business plan absent tax funding.  If left to decide roles for the state, this group may have concluded firefighting had to be one, as the free market just couldn’t do it.  The problem with this conclusion (like that of economists who claimed the same for lighthouses) is that for the majority of history firefighting was privately provided.

In order to make the world a freer, better place we need a combination of three things: narrative, vision, and imagination.

Narrative is our story about the past.  If we don’t have enough facts or we interpret them through an incorrect theoretical lens, our narrative about what was will be incorrect.  If, for example, we persists in the false assumption that firefighting and lighthouses have never been privately provided, or the American West was a violent and disorderly place before governments took hold, we will be incapable of accurately seeing present and future possibilities.

Vision is how we see the present.  Do we see harmony and assume that legislation is the only thing keeping mayhem at bay?  Or do we see the beautiful and complex workings of spontaneous order? Our vision will determine how comfortable we are with freedom.  Through state-colored lenses we will live in fear of the chaos around the corner and be reticent to allow our fellow man liberty to experiment, try, fail, succeed and progress.  If our vision expands and we begin to see the way individuals cooperate and coordinate for mutual benefit absent central direction we will welcome and embrace freedom.

Imagination is what we believe about the future.  It determines what we think possible.  If we zoom in too close to the problem at hand we get stuck and fail to allow for the unknown.  We don’t have to know what will be, or even what precisely is possible.  We just have to be humble enough and learn from the patterns of past and present that all our assumptions are going to be blown to smithereens by human creativity.  Don’t try to resist it.  Expect it.

Only when we have the right narrative about the past, the vision to see the beauty of the present, and imagination enough to allow for the wonders of the future will we have the freedom to create it.

Senseless Census Ads

I have a short article in the Freeman Online today about the stupid U.S. Census ads claiming they need data to make decisions about how many buses or hospital beds a community needs.  The two main points are:

1) In a market, you don’t need a census to tell you how many goods to provide.

2) Without a market, you won’t know how many goods to provide even with a census.  From the article,

“Has the grocer ever run ads claiming that without your household survey, he won’t know how much food to stock?”

And,

“They cannot know how many hospital beds or buses to provide without population data.  The dirty little secret is that they cannot know how many hospital beds or buses to provide with population data either.”

Read the rest here.