"Value Chains are the means by which originators get rich in a market economy — they are combinations of producers, distributors, middlepeople and retailers.

Value Chains have always been hard to forge, defend, manage and collect from, which is why they're so profitable. The Internet is poised to combine productive individuals into value chains which reward their participants as richly as traditional value chains."

"The Internet is a conversation.

And that Markets are conversations, as described by the folks at ClueTrain.

Work and its Reward is primarily a conversation about quality: money is just the punch line.

The quality of the work-reward conversation, not money, is the best benchmark for a 'New' Economy.

Internet protocols are the best model for a quality-based, more even-handed Economic Operating System.

Establishing a quality-based Economic OS requires no new laws, technical standards or protocols, so it needs nobody's permission..."

"Over the last two centuries, they argue, an increasingly efficient economy, coupled with a rise in democratic thinking and growing access to information, has opened up life's possibilities to increasing numbers of people. Because participation in the consumption-based economy is unavoidable, the general public looks to markets to provide 'deep support' in their quest for individualization, but 'are routinely punished for being complex psychological individuals in a world still fitted out for the old mass order.' This macroeconomic structure treats people as either employees or consumers and inevitably hurts their feelings. Zuboff and Maxmin would eliminate the 'little murders' of customer service interaction by replacing the current transaction-based model with a form of 'distributed capitalism' based on a customer-supplier relationship, so semi-anonymous customer service reps will be replaced by 'advocates' fully emotionally involved in their clients' needs."

"People no longer work for a living. They hold jobs for a living, which pays better.

• People have different norms. Some people feel they trust everybody unconditionally.
  
• Many people feel obliged to be reciprocal, even if they don't quite mean it.
  
• Some people try to have several virtual personalities, so they can give each other points.
  
• If there is a list of people's reputation ratings as numeric values, ordered in descending numeric order, people change their behavior and get competitive about getting better numbers.
  
• If I made the system, and I'm first on the list, people get suspicious.
  
• People who are very active get high ratings
  
• Some people end up hating reputation systems
  

"The State of Grace Document is a radical new way to see the world. It's a tool for those who are searching for a non-litigious way to resolve a difficult situation. Or in the cases where [we] would never resort to that, but the pain of a bad ending leaves us exhausted, it's a remarkable path to peace. It's a concept not yet in practice that will cause great change in the world when adopted because it addresses the potential for problems up front in a loving manner. As a society we avoid saying the marriage could end before the ceremony has begun, the job might not work out as planned, or the business partnership might not be the best route as we move forward. Reality says it's all possible, but it seems so distasteful to acknowledge it. With the State of Grace Document a new and very elegant approach has been created to address the possibilities, while keeping the love, honor and integrity intact."

"Something is self-organizing if, left to itself, it tends to become more organized. This is an unusual, indeed quite counter-intuitive property: we expect that, left to themselves, things get messy, and that when we encounter a very high degree of order, or an increase in order, something, someone, or at least some peculiar thing, is responsible. .. But we now know of many instances where this expectation is simply wrong, of things which can start in a highly random state and, without being shaped from the outside, become more and more organized. Thus self-organization, which I find to be one of the most interesting concepts in modern science --- if also one of the most nebulous, because the ideas of organization, pattern, order and so forth are, as used normally, quite vague."

"The idea that the dynamics of a system can tend, of themselves, to make it more orderly, is very old. The first statement of it (naturally, a clear and distinct one) that I can find is by Descartes, in the fifth part of his Discourse on Method, where he presents it hypothetically, as something God could have arranged to have happen, if He hadn't wanted to create everything Himself. Descartes elaborated on the idea at great length in a book called Le Monde, which he never published during his life, for obvious reasons."

"These people are definitely motivated to form teams to create change. However, they've got perhaps the hardest task of all as regards defining what they want and how they want to get there. What they want is initially imagined and often difficult to state precisely; stating how they want to get there must be build upon a difficult to obtain description of the messy real world."

The world we all live in has fundamentally changed for the better from the old organized model to today's unorganized one. In the orderly organized world, there was certainty and convention. In the global unorganized world there is freedom, diversity and instability.

Socialism was a response to inequality, whereas capitalism can cause it. Under capitalism, new economic opportunities tend to present themselves to members of institutions such as companies or to people who have already benefited from other opportunities. Individuals acting alone face either high entry barriers or are excluded altogether from taking advantage of those market opportunities. The rich get richer and poor people stay poor. Under technological capitalism, there are both the free market opportunities AND the opportunity for all individuals to benefit from those opportunities. Individuals can participate more easily in, and benefit more fully from free market economies. Talent determines future wealth, not current wealth: poor people can become rich.

"What really interests me is that when I tell people about co-intelligence, they usually look at me blankly. But then I ask them if they've ever seen co-stupidity -- and they start to chuckle! What a commentary on our culture, that people who have never heard either word can't imagine co-intelligence, but are already familiar with co-stupidity."

"How are new communities born?
How can we make it easier to form groups?"

What will on-line interactive communities be like? Â… they will consist of geographically separated members Â… communities not of common location, but of common interest. Â… The whole will constitute a labile network of networks-ever changing in both content and configuration. Â… the impact Â… will be very great-both on the individual and on society. Â… First, Â… because the people with whom one interacts will be selected more by commonality Â… than by accidents of proximity.