26
Commons Cause
Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.
—Daniel Libeskind1
Think of the Internet as a World Wide City, and you can see why it has scaled so well. It supports and embraces abundance and difference. Its value grows with each person, each device, each kind of work that connects to it.
The World Wide City is also a World Wide Commons. This is the vast new marketplace where connected companies live now. We need to keep it vast to take advantage of the opportunities it provides to connect and to produce because of those connections.
The networked marketplace is not reducible to the companies and governments that provide its wired and wireless infrastructure. The Net is a second world within and alongside the physical one that we’ve inhabited from the start, and yet the Net is still very young. We need to understand it, even as we continue to build it and build on it. Regardless of how our understanding grows, we should be clear that the Net is bigger and more essential than anything or anybody that would limit it.
Companies should be intentional about saving and growing the Net. Limiting the Net can only limit what can be done on it, and that would be bad for business.
Genius As a Resource
Ed McCabe, one of the best copywriters in the history of advertising (and a hero of mine when I was in that business), said, “I have no use for rules. They only rule out the possibility of brilliant exceptions.”2
Humanity is built for exceptions. The more than 3 billion DNA base pairs in the human genome are platforms for incalculable variety among individuals. The great schoolteacher John Taylor Gatto put it this way:
I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn’t want to accept that notion—far from it—my own training in two elite universities taught me that intelligence and talent distributed themselves economically over a bell curve … The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence—insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality—that I became confused … Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? … slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance … were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior …
I dropped the idea that I was an expert, whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself.3
Like the kids in Gatto’s classes, customers have been categorized, confined, segregated, surveilled, and denied their privacy by an industrial age value system that seeks to normalize at all costs. The highest of those costs is ignoring an essential fact of human life: that we are all different, that every human being is more than a “resource” and an “asset.” We are all sovereign sources of intelligence and advantage. Some of what we say and do is typical of others, but much more of it is not. This fact is more than a Good Thing. It is essential to the growth of civilization and to addressing its inevitable problems.
Human difference is one of the biggest reasons why cities thrive in ways that companies, especially as they become large, do not. The nature of cities is to welcome and embrace abundant differences: different companies, different arts, different cuisines, different schools, different forms of transportation, different faiths, different habitats, different public spaces, different forms of recreation—all occupied and sustained by different people, each with their own character, each with their own intentions.
Genius is also the ultimate hedge. If, as companies, we are forced to deal with a mass of difference, it should help to know that those differences are the first sources of innovation as well as disruption. With the help of our many different selves, we can make many more, and better, bets on what will work.
Taking and Giving
In economics, we like to speak of rational actors, rational choices, rational behavior. Yet not all commerce is impelled by rational intentions and actions. There are emotional ones as well. Both the rational and the emotional have moral dimensions.
Most formal moralities are modeled on bookkeeping. Consider the scales of justice and our belief that we should pay for our crimes. “Debt,” “owe,” and “repay” are a few among the many financial words in our moral lexicon. Christians, for example, believe that Christ died to pay for humanity’s sins.
But there is also a morality of generosity: of giving without expectation of exchange. Such, for example, is the love we give to our spouses and our kids. What we give is without price and without keeping records of it.
In The Gift, Lewis Hyde sorts these into logos and eros. He describes logos as “reason and logic in general” and says “a market economy is an emanation of logos.” He describes eros as “the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together.”4 He explains,
Not surprisingly, people live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. To begin with, unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. Furthermore, when gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.5
When we look at the successes we’ve discussed, for all their differences (and the virtues of difference itself), they share this combination of logos and eros, of rational exchange and emotional wealth creation that arises from giving outside the accounting system. It goes deeper than policy. It’s a reason for being. Trader Joe’s isn’t on Earth just to serve the German company that owns it. Nor do Apple and Zappos exist to serve stockholders. They are here for customers. Trader Joe’s does it with simple human contact. Apple does it by hiring obsessives, calling them “geniuses,” and providing customers with lots of hand-holding. Zappos does it by taking conversation-as-marketing to an extreme.
In each case, there is giving as well as taking. And the giving isn’t all in exchange. Some of it is pure eros.
Intent
To live is to move. That’s why we use the language of travel to talk about life. (For more on that, see chapter 9.) Much of our movement is unconscious, but the movement that matters isn’t. It is intentional. Our will looks for ways, all the time.
As customers, we don’t intend just to consume. We intend to use, to enjoy, to invest, to share, to care, to talk. We also intend for the companies we keep to stay in business. (Companies might like to kill each other, but customers prefer choices between companies that aren’t being killed.)
Thus, intent is the operative noun and intend the operative verb that together bring a marketplace to life. Whether our intentions are logos, eros, or some mix of the two, they move money in one direction, goods in the other, intelligence in both directions, and growth in the economy we all share.
For most of the industrial age, companies have been obsessed with getting the attention of prospects and customers. That obsession was born in a time when reaching and connecting with more than a handful of people was difficult and expensive. Reaching large markets required advertising in mass media and other forms of attention getting. This is no longer the case.