heathervescent

Payments and the Sharing Economy

Last week I was honored to give the keynote at Tomorrow's Transactions on Payments and the Sharing Economy. 

I spoke about my experiences as a Los Angeles AirBnB host, focusing on the emotional experience of the transaction and back end payment features. I shared my experience creating regulations allowing AirBnB style rentals in my Mojave Desert Community of 29 Palms. For 8 months, a team of 15 active citizens and members of the 29 Palms Planning Commission discussed and debated community concerns and crafted a set of regulations. ** Audio available on request (use contact email on contact page)

• How do payments and the Sharing economy interact?
• What is the difference between the sharing and utilization economy?
• Case Study: AirBnB Host Experience (payments, records, taxes)
• Case Study: Regulations for the Sharing Economy in 29 Palms, California 
• What can we expect in the future of the Sharing Economy?
• What are business opportunities?
• What can we expect for the future?

Thanks to Dave Birch and Gloria Benson for inviting me to keynote at Tomorrow's Transactions last week in London. 

Interested in more? I can help you

• Learn about the future, based on what's happening today.
• Bring your teams together to discover unusual solutions.
• Create your custom forecast with strategies to create your future.
• Build prototypes of your future ideas - and share the visions with the world (or keep them secret if you prefer)

Payments and the Sharing Economy from Heather Schlegel (aka heathervescent)

[Coverage] Dazed on the Global Now

Dazed has a nice piece on ten neurological advances - they close out their list with my concept of The Global Now.

THE RISE OF THE GLOBAL NOW

Futurist Heather Schlegel put forth the idea that technology is actually deepening the social and emotional ties between us, thanks to a sense of “geo-temporal awareness” that she calls “The Global Now.” Technology, she argues, has presented us with tools with which to curate and deepen specific parts of our lives with certain friends, thereby adding a “custom enhancement” feature to our relationships. This is a view we’d like to get behind, because it retains a healthy distance from the danger of fetishizing technology, and still places full responsibility on flesh-and-blood humans for how they choose to use said technology. The bottom line is, data-mining and spying and insidious surveillance aside, technology remains, at its very core, a tool – a tool that we can actively choose to learn, understand, and apply to our social interactions. It doesn’t have to diminish what it means to be human, unless we allow it to. Right?

Climate Change = Good?!

This is a quick blog post following up my tweet here. 

It might seem like a radical perspective, but what I'm really doing is challenging our traditional view. Before I turn the view upside down, what do I understand that traditional view to be?

• Global warming is BAD (for humans, the environment, life)
• That we (humans) caused it.
• There's a sense of guilt (the elephant in the room) around the topic of global warming and climate change.
• There's a sense of urgency, as if we don't do something immediately, all is lost.
• There's this (stupid red herring) argument about whether climate change is actually happening, whether scientists evidence is valid. 
• Values and beliefs are drug into this debate as well - it's science vs religion in the boxing ring.
• Global warming will kill the earth

For the record, I am comfortable with the scientific evidence showing a warming earth; but I really don't care.

Why?

Because I take a very long term view. (Longer than the Long Now Foundation.)

We see this problem only from a human/known life/so called earth/global view. 

I think it's a little audacious to think us puny humans are going to do something so dramatic as to KILL THE EARTH?!?! Now, what global warming may do is make the environment inhabitable for human and other current life as we know it.  (Past science shows our climate has not always been hospitable for the kind of life that exists today.)

But in the scheme of the universe - a universal timescale - maybe we puny humans are a mere blip. Who really cares whether we live or die? (Except us.) I don't have the kind of preciousness or urgency around this topic.

I don't have much love for the human species, even being part of it, so I frankly don't care whether we live or die.  When I bubble this thinking up to life in general, I take a stronger interest. I would be seriously bummed if all life went away, ceased to exist - but that's going to happen at some point anyway, so why cry about a certain possibility? (OK, you're right, it's not a certain possibility.) The bummer for me about all life as we know it ceasing - is that then life has to start over from scratch again to do whatever it's unfolding itself to do. But life has a lot of time to develop itself, so what do I know as a puny human blip.

In my mind, the only reason global warming is a potential problem is that it might wipe out all life. 

But I don't actually think that is a real possibility. 

It's because life is resilient. Sure, the environment might shift so that lots of living things die. Bummer for those things. But life will continue on, in some form. It will evolve. Who knows to what?! Maybe something more awesome-better-creative-cool-new.

So now that you know where I stand, I'll share my flipped view of global warming. 

I was reading/watching this article/video, sent to the WFSF (World Futures Studies Federation) listserv. It's going on and on about the very real problems of permafrost melting, glaciers melting and how this is a reinforcing feedback loop to increase warming. I totally get it. It's a big problem if you want the world to stay the same. 

Watching this, fresh in my mind is a presentation/paper I wrote about BIG PROBLEMS FACING HUMANITY. The usual suspects: global warming, resource limits. 

And all I could think watching that video was - AWESOME - more fresh water (solve your fresh water problem - lots of fresh pure melting ice caps!) and more land mass (manifest destiny Antarctica!). I could see, that rather than cold, white caps, verdant green fields of farms and towns. It's not that far-fetched! Forget about Mars, Antarctica is right here.

Hell, we might even find something crazy and mindboggling in the melting ice! Things revealed that we might never know if we hadn't turned on the global hairdryer. Where are the scientists and entrepreneurs to catch this fresh water melt off before it goes into the ocean? Opportunities!

Now, as I said in the first sentence, I know this is a radical perspective. I don't actually think anyone would back it up. And I'm not saying that we should stop doing anything to reduce our impact on the climate. But I am asking us to challenge our usual thinking.

We look at this situation as if we (humans) are separate from climate. We're two sides of the same coin. The (previous) climate contributed to the creation of us, just as we changed the climate. 

I'm saying, shake up your thinking! Get out of your usual paradigms of thinking.

The Global Now

The Global Now is a term I use to describe

• the mental awareness of the global world
• the various time zones - envisioning the dark, light, sunrise, sunset, noontime meal, midnight mysteries - of places around the world
• my colleagues, friends, family, dog, my beloved Queen of Angeles in their current timespace
• and the varied activities: working, play, sleeping, eating of above around the world

While being aware of my individual, personal, immediately direct experience. 

It's viewing my life from a global perspective while holding/experiencing my individual context.

Let me give you a few examples:

Early Morning Los Angeles

When I travel to Europe my workday is through the quiet hours of the California night. Right as my mind is waking up (even if my body has acclimated to the time zone), tuned to the rhythms of Los Angeles, I finish my European workday. Before closing down my laptop, collecting my electricity adapter and hailing my taxi to the hotel, one last check of twitter.... an early morning tweet from LAFD - Los Angeles Fire Department talking about a morning cup of coffee. Physically 5500+ miles away, in a instant my mind is right there, on Robertson or Santa Monica or Wilshire Blvd in the pre-dawn darkness. #theglobalnow

Innotribe Week: San Francisco, Singapore, London

A few weeks ago Innotribe hosted events in San Francisco, Singapore, Bangkok and London within a day of each other. I kicked off the week with our Future of Money panel with Yobie from Citi, Paul from Barclays, Shamir from Simple and Michael Michael from Burning Man. Tweets and Instagram pictures went out with the #innotribe tag. Just as we finished a celebratory conference dinner, the Singapore Startup Challenge kicked off with tweets from Matteo and Nektarios and my APAC colleagues. I raised a gin and tonic to them as the sun rode West, heading to bed before the winner was announced. Later, the sun rose on London and #innotribe represented at our business forum panel.

All around the globe, as time flowed, the world turned, I saw my colleagues and I - tiny moments on the crust of this earth, a globe hanging in the universe. Pinpricks of light, stars in the world. #theglobalnow

#FutrChat

Once a month, the Association of Professional Futurists holds a chat on twitter. It's about a specific topic: the future of ----. For that one hour, colleagues from the APF get on twitter: DC, Kansas City, Florida, Seattle, Texas, Sydney, Hawaii, London and beyond... a firehose of rapid fire conversation. Intimate, public. I imagine the usernames, my colleagues, collaborators, all over the world, with each tweet, at their computer or device tuning into our shared time-space on the internet - one hour - we come together in a timeless, locationless space. We are together in conversation. #theglobalnow

Foreign / Not Foreign

I had a strange realization just as my Virgin Atlantic flight took off from Los Angeles bound to London last week. I was listening to the directions - all in that lovely internationally sounding female British voice. I overheard my fellow passengers chatting - most in that British accent. Flight attendants also all in that British accent. Finally, the captain came on and welcomed everyone on the flight that would take them ... "home."

Home?!?! What shock then! Los Angeles is my home! From my perspective, this flight is taking me away from home!

That's when the epiphany came. _I_ was the one with the accent. I was the foreigner. 

--

As I've walked these London streets this past week. Managed my jetlag (brilliantly, I might add), met with people, had conversations, eat, go to the office, go to stores - all the normal everyday things I might do at home, I've been aware of my foreigner status. I've made no effort to try to blend in. I've made no effort to change my LA (recently strongly influenced by Texas) style. I'll bet, I'm the only person walking around the London Bank district in black cowboy boots. They're just my favorite pair of shoes at the moment and I couldn't bear to not bring them with me. 

What fun is it being a foreigner if the whole time I'm trying to fit in - trying to smooth over my standing-out? Squashing my California expression? Does a rock star change their style when they are traveling to fit into the local look? I don't think so.

The point of all this a awareness. The conscious choice to stay attuned to my culture, while in another culture. This goes for corporate culture too. 

--

When I send emails from my corporate account, the British English spellcheck always catches specific words, trying to convert them into their British spelling. This is a strange thing for me - because for some words, I already use the British spelling (thank you International Flight Attendant Mom). But for others, I use the "American" English and refuse to change the spelling. 

It was a cute thing at first... and it's certainly helping me learn differences between American and British English. But if I ever start saying/using "maths", will you please shoot me with my own gun?

--

When I was a teenager, "banished" to grow up in Iowa - the great plains - the MidWest - farm country; I used to entertain myself in the afternoons by driving the open roads. I'd spend hours exploring gravel roads, barely paved paths, of course at as high speeds as I could push my teenager-safe car to go - I would listen to new-wave rock and think about other places. Exotic, cultured, foreign places. Places like Europe, Africa, India, South America.

One day it hit me (after I had returned from six months in Brazil, so full of saudade I could explode) - this place I lived in - where I freely drove to Hell and back. Down to the Mississippi on a midnight lark. Racing trains, kicking up dust on gravel roads, triumphantly stopped on the bridge overpass, waving as the train passed under. Hiking old Indian paths in the forest, barely visible, picnics in old horse thief caves (long since collapsed). These "boring" "normal" "unexotic" places to me - were to someone else ... quite exotic. And these were grand adventures. 

--

It's about perspective. Where you stand when you look. Isn't that magic? That the same object, the same experience, the same thing... can be interpreted dramatically differently?

Who can say, which perspective is "right" or "correct" - rather than "is."

British Rule Best Practices by P. Denlinger

My twitter friend, @pdenlinger / Paul Denlinger, made an interesting comment in his tweet stream reminiscing about the British Rule of Hong Kong. I like following Paul because he's got an interesting, macro economic Asia emphasized but global focus. Asia is one place of the world I have not directly experienced, and I have always dreamed of going to Hong Kong. 

I asked him to enlighten me to the British Rule Best Practices, and he responded with these 6 items.

 1. Using minorities to rule such Chinese in SE Asia, Indians as police in HK, Shanghai

2. Ruling with very light hand

3. Letting brown people kill yellow people and vice versa so that Brits could avoid blame;

4. Not fighting directly

5. Allying with local businesses, biz community; building local relationships

6. Playing role of bestowing democracy

And, relying on use of force only as a very last resort, and then only reluctantly

These are very strategic (and brilliant) moves. 

As we enter another age of expansion (OuterSpace and further development of EarthSpace) it will be interesting to see the attitudes and strategies utilized - and which ones give the most success given our zeitgeist. 

Thanks for the Hong Kong/British Rule Perspective, Paul!