heathervescent

A Prayer for my Great Aunt

It's a trip I know was coming. I got the text. Then made the call. The timing is uncanny. Five years ago, about this time, I flew back to the midwest to say goodbye to my grandmother - the most important person in my life at that time. To say good-bye. For the last time. 

This time I'm driving. Freeways I've traveled for decades. Feeling bruises from long ago slug-bug games with my brother. We loved our California summers, not just because we'd trade the Iowa mosquitoes for SoCal's beaches, but it was great for our slugbug scores. 1000 points for the converted slug-bug truck. You'd never see one of those in Iowa.

I'm remembering these slug bug games on this very bit of freeway. I'm passing the McDonalds where my brother sprayed ketchup packets on the wall. But I'm not seeing grammy today. I'm 25 years older, driving my own car, the top down, sun burning the tops of my shoulders where I missed the SPF 70.

I smell the ocean. I see the Pacific Coast Highway exit. Dana Point. And I remember the last time I was down here. A sea funeral for my grandfather - the brother of my great aunt. The person I go to see today.

Aunt Ruth.

I'm mentally prepared for what I see, but it's never enough. The room is dim, light coming through the curtains, but no lights on. My throat catches, I hold back tears. I distract myself showing her the fragrant flowers I've brought. Deep purple stock and bright yellow sunflowers. I picked stock because I know it's very fragrant. I wonder if these stocks come from the field in Half Moon Bay.

I bring them to her face and she smells. A great big smile breaks across her face. I pull one from the bouquet and lay it on her chest, the rest go into a vase. 

It is such a short time I spend with her. Talking is difficult, but she's all there - cracking jokes and smart alec comments. But she's tired. Oh so tired. She's had a long life. She just wants to be done. She wants to see her husband, decades long gone. I give her messages from family that can not be here. I sit with her. And then she wants to sleep. And I say my goodbyes.

I wish you well on your travels Ruth. You've been the best great aunt. Inspired me more than you probably know.

Protopian Futures

I'm coining a new word: the Protopian.

Tired of the dystopian/negative futures and well aware of the naive polly-anna limitations of Utopias, I hearby name the protopian: a positive portrayal of the future. 

Protopians differ from utopias in that they deal with difficult problems without succumbing (and limiting themselves) to negative portrayals. Protopians are fundamentally a positive portrayal of the future with both style and substance. Protopians are both stories and people who think positively about the future. Problem solvers who don't shy from big problems, nor limit themselves to solving problems with existing tools, mindsets and paradigms. 

ps. After writing this post, I did a little research on this term and found that KevinKelly recently wrote a post on it. I swear I did not see this until after I wrote to above. Excerpted:

I think our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia nor status quo, but protopia. Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict.

I would be more radical about my definition of a protopia and not limit the definition to being just a little bit better than the present.

pps. I got my inspiration for this post in composing a tweet about an upcoming future project.

Beatnik Dodge

I admired your black classic Dodge. It must have been from the 60's or early 70's as you pulled behind me in the gas station. I don't see guys like you in LA. I don't even know how to categorize you. Beatnik? Richard Brautigan style? That high whiny voice. But soft, gentle. Counter-culture, when there was just one culture.

You were pissed, and rightly so. The traffic was a clusterfuck. The gas pump was out of order. I had to back my turbo in wrong-way to reach pumpside. I heard you cursing. I'm just one of the young-ones. Ruining the memories of the past, I think, as I start speaking. Telling you I was almost finished, that I can back out, that you can have my pump in a moment.

At least this gas station has invested in the super fast pumps. A few more miles of my magical elixir are transferred into my exobody. I wave off the others trying to block me in. Lying. You and your black Dodge are a picture. I skim my eyes over it, lest to stare. But it's like water to a sponge. Those few moments, I can't forget.

And then I'm gone. A final glimpse of you pulling forward, as I back out and onto 19th Ave traffic. The shiny black and chrome. From another era. 

San Francisco Reflections

I knew it would be true. San Francisco_is_ a great city to come back to. But her streets, although burned in my neural pathways, are faint, forgotten except for muscle memory. My car, as extension of this muscle memory, surfs the pavement, my body leans in the curves, even as I strain to read the street signs. My objective, the ocean. Revisiting a place. A lookout. A memory. The divergence of life from ordinary to extraordinary.

I sit on these high stones. It's a gorgeous day. A cool breeze comes off the ocean. I watch the waves in their green and grey. White effervescence paints uneven horizontal lines on the sand and in the sea. I remember this same place, dark one night. I was cold after riding Lady Knight through the fog, chasing something ephemeral through the streets. A glimpse of something unknown. I caught it here. (Or perhaps, it lead me here to be caught.) In this space, I stood facing it. Facing my fear. Opening the crack, stepping through, and into a different world. A world of my own making.

Sometimes I reminisce of that world. The one I left behind. All around me, untouchable, unlivable. It was the choice I made. A choice to choose. Never undone, as much as I might forget or deny. I had forgotten. But the memory is fresh now, in my mind.

Why Alt Currency Economies are good for the Traditional Economy

It's no surprise that the traditional economy doesn't like these new economy (alt currency) upstarts. They are a potential threat. But not really.

The traditional economy is broken. If the traditional economy was fixed, well then, the competition by these alternate currency economies would be reduced dramatically. We didn't see much innovation or development of alternate currencies back in the boom years. It's because people had enough money to get their needs met through the traditional economy. But now, no more. But people won't go without, so they are getting creative. We shouldn't be surprised by this. Human creativity should be expected.

So if you're a company or government that doesn't like these alternate currency economies or feels threatened by the development of them - there's a really simple answer: fix the damn traditional economy. But if you can't, it's no big deal, there are plenty of people/companies that are going to try. You just won't have a piece of that pie.

Evolution of Currency

I don't write about my research enough on the blog, mostly because I have so much to say on it - where to start? But today I want to share an analogy of how I think about the evolution of "currency." 

I've started explaining these thoughts with an analogy. Start by thinking back to a plot or story line of a movie made in the 70s (or TV show). Most of those stories had very simple to follow plot lines: a single developing plot lines. Contrasted that with films and TV shows today which are filled with multiple main characters and complicated weaving story lines. Steven Johnson makes the point in his book "Everything bad is good for you," that these more complicated stories have made us smarter. 

I think these complicated story lines have developed our attention as well. It's no longer difficult to follow multiple streams of content - asynchronously. It's not just challenging, but fun to follow multiple storylines in the same story. We expect it. We've trained ourselves to do it. And it's not just film/TV. It's with the internet, tabbed browsing and multiple apps. Multi-tasking and ADD/ADHD. We context switching and following these streams more than ever. And by increasing our participation in these activities, we're training our attention, we're changing the way we use our brain.

My research found five major trends impacting the Future of Transactions

1. Mobile Transaction Technology is exploding. This not surprising to anyone following this industry. But we're watching the explosion of the hype-curve.
2. Alternate Currencies (including gaming currencies like WoW Gold, corporate currencies like frequent flyer miles and social capital "currencies" like reputation and wuffie) are being used in their own niche communities. And some of these niche communities have very high transaction rates.
3. Communities are being created around transactions. Whether this is in these niche communities with an alternate currency, within forums or craigslist for traditional economy transactions or non-financial transactions; communities are being/have been formed around transactions. The couch-surfing community is one example. Craigslist is another.
4. Non-Financial Transactions create stronger bonds. When you have a community that is formed around non-financial transactions (like time-banks or swap/barter/pay it forward) the transactors create stronger bonds than if the transaction was only a financial transaction. Take the couch surfing example. You're more likely to become friends with someone you're staying with (whether they started out as a stranger, weak-link friend or strong-link friend) than not. If you're already friends, your friendship, most likely, gets stronger. I've watched this happen with me, personally; as well as found this theme run through my 1:1 interviews.
5. We want to communicate more information with each transaction. We're rating our restaurant experiences on Yelp. Writing recommendations on LinkedIn. Giving feedback about people on Honestly. And the technology products for more fine grained  communication about each transaction is getting developed. We want to share more information about each transactions we have - regardless of the kind of transaction. 

This last trend is very important - and one of the most subtle. It goes back to the point I made earlier. It's the key understanding in the second half of my analogy. 

We have our 70's plot line of making transactions. It's the money transaction, whether we make it in cash, credit, paypal, etc. But we've got this extra mental bandwidth available, bandwidth that we've been increasing in ourselves because we use it in other parts of our lives. We're no longer satisfied with the binary transaction (money flowing one way or the other), what I call the 70s single plot line of transactions. We want to share more information about these transactions - AND 1) we have the mental bandwidth (which we've trained on other activities I mentioned above) to pay attention to it and 2) we have the technology that enables us to somewhat track some of these things.

Those with extra bandwidth (more attention streams) have the desire to collect, cultivate, track and use these additional "currencies." 

These currencies will not and do not replace the existing traditional economy/transaction mechanism. I do not believe the old model will be replaced by any of these new models. Instead, these additional currencies, embrace and extend meaning and value of the transactions.

I can't cash out my LinkedIn recommendations to pay my rent. But, those recommendations do/will/might influence my traditional economy cash flow (e.g. how much I get paid, the number of jobs I get, increase or decrease opportunities, etc.). Those recommendations are a piece of the transaction-data. Some transaction-data can't be cashed out in the traditional sense. Others might and do.

The key points to get here are

1. Transaction data is an additional layer of information of the "financial" transaction.
2. There is a strong desire to share/create transaction-data (it's all user generated content).
3. This desire seems to come from both our increased mental bandwidth and shifting cultural values (let me get all spiral dynamics on you next time).

Add a crummy economy after a boom time, where people are creatively looking for ways to get their needs met and you have a perfect storm for creative currencies. What we're watching happen here is the evolution of currency. But it's not evolving in one direction and there are other things influencing this space. This is just the first of many growing pains as these concepts grow, mature, fracture, devolve and just maybe evolve into something that currenly doesn't exist.

NOTE: I would like to thank Art Brock, Stan Stalnacker, Tara Hunt, Micki Krimmel, Anna Metcalf, Eric Harris-Braun, Danger Ranger and Autumn Rooney for their contribution to my research. Conversations with each of these people have significantly influenced my thoughts in this area.