Foreword

By Louis Rossetto

I was at a dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently with a dozen Harvard/MIT/Princeton faculty/researchers/directors. Very bright, very switched on people involved in important, even groundbreaking, work.

About dessert time, the discussion coalesced to the big question that inevitably haunts big thinkers: How do we solve the really big problems? Everyone was depressed that life on the planet was obviously getting worse. And they were frustrated, even angry, that the legacy players were failing. Why wasn’t Obama able to solve our problems? The UN? The World Bank? The Gates Foundation?

I wish Steven Overman had been at my side at that dinner, as he was during the early days at Wired in the ’90s. At Wired, we created a unique intelligence operation masquerading as a magazine that reported on the exploding Digital Revolution. Our specialty was roaming across the horizon of the future and bringing back fresh kill for our readers. We jokingly called it Revolution of the Month—so much of the world was being remade, from business to politics, from education to entertainment, from energy to health, from religion to sex—as the middlemen were disintermediated and power devolved as digital tools became more widespread and influential. We embraced this revolution with optimism: our motto was Change Is Good.

But we didn’t just report on the revolution, we helped make it happen. At Wired, we pioneered web media, creating the first website with original content and Fortune 500 advertising. We invented the banner ad, and then helped start an agency to sell and create those ads, because it didn’t exist yet. Wired Ones launched the first blog as we now know it, setting off the earthquake that traditional journalism never recovered from. We created the first website, the Netizen, that reported on a presidential election. Then we fought the government’s attempt to spy on citizens’ and businesses’ communications via the Clipper chip, and became named plaintiffs in the lawsuit that overturned the unconstitutional Communications Decency Act.

From Wired, Steven went on to spread the Digital Revolution across the planet, helping to build what was, at the time, the biggest, most innovative cell phone company in the world. So when he speaks of change, he speaks from a position of authority as one who has been in the trenches of the revolution from San Francisco to cyberspace, from Helsinki to Mumbai, from Beijing to Cape Town.

It’s little wonder I wish Steven had been at that dinner. He would have taken strong exception to the guests’ pessimism and told them, wait, in the first place, all metrics indicate that the world isn’t getting worse, it’s actually getting better, even if problems remain. And that yes, while the legacy players may be failing, a new paradigm is emerging that offers the possibility of making an even better world.

Then Steven would have raised the real question everyone should have been asking that night, which isn’t “How do we solve the really big problems?” but “Just who is this ‘we’?” For Steven, the “we” isn’t the government, the NGOs, or the supra-national institutions, which are becoming increasingly ineffectual and, dare we say it, obsolete. The “we” is, in fact, us.

Because in the twenty-first century, as Steven points out in his illuminating and provocative new book, “we”—each of us as individuals, family members, employees, entrepreneurs, managers, citizens, and consumers—are together not only assuming the responsibility for making a better world, we have acquired the power to do it directly. And the economy is reshaping itself around that reality. Steven calls it the Conscience Economy.

The signs, Steven points out, are all around us. Companies are reshaping themselves to be more responsible, value-driven, and transparent, proudly telling us how their product is made, that they are good custodians of the environment, that their relationships with all their stakeholders are ethical. In effect, they are internalizing conscience as an integral part of their business practices, and they are informing consumers about it in their advertising and marketing, and on the labels of the products they sell—and not because of government pressure, but because doing good is actually good business. Or as Steven puts it: “Goodness is the wellspring of profit.”

And it’s a good thing The Conscience Economy is so compelling because, as Steven argues, we absolutely need it. The networked planet forces us to know more about what’s going on everywhere than we ever did—we can’t avoid the truth. And one of truths we can’t avoid is that remote political and philanthropic institutions aren’t cutting it anymore. So if we want to make a better future for our children, we can’t outsource that responsibility the way we used to, we have to assume it ourselves, personally. Disintermediation reaches the civic space.

Though it is a stirring call to consciousness, The Conscience Economy is cool because most of it is a lively report from the future that is expressing itself in today’s business environment. Discover for yourself: crowdifying; why corporate social responsibility and marketing are both dead (Revolution of the Month, indeed), the 5Cs of marketing, and how CMO doesn’t mean chief marketing officer, but chief matchmaking officer—among countless other revelations and insights in Steven’s book.

Steven’s The Conscience Economy makes one other contribution. In a period suffused with entirely too much unjustified pessimism spread by legacy media that make money fostering mass anxiety, The Conscience Economy is a refreshing blast of unabashed optimism, complete with a scenario for a utopian future (which you, like I, will want to challenge in places, but that’s what a book like The Conscience Economy is supposed to do, provoke discussion).

Steven is optimistic not because optimism is nice, but because he knows, as we used to argue at Wired, that optimism is a strategy for living.

If you’re pessimistic about the future, you’re likely to embrace an après moi le déluge attitude and focus on short-term gratification. On the other hand, if you believe the future will be better, you will step up, take responsibility, and do the long-term thinking necessary to make that better world for you and your children. So, solving those big problems my dinner guests were obsessing about starts not with doom and gloom, but with optimism.

The Conscience Economy has arrived at precisely the right moment, and Steven Overman is its herald. Be optimistic like Steven. He has seen the future, and it works.

Louis Rossetto

Co-founder Wired, a disruptive media company

Co-founder TCHO, a disruptive chocolate company

Berkeley

2014.07.11