Dachis Group Social Business Summit 2010 Preview; Doug Rushkoff on The People’s Business

Kicking off the day at the Dachis Group Social Business Summit 2010 will be Douglas Rushkoff, teacher, documentarian, and author of Life, Inc. He provided a preview of his talk, which will challenge your notions about the very fundamentals of economics.

For too long – over six hundred years, to be exact – business has depended on de-socializing people. The invention and forced implementation of central currency was designed to prevent peer-to-peer transactions, and refocus commerce on paying up to a treasury rather than paying out to people. The invention and legal enforcement of the chartered monopoly (what we now think of as the “corporation”), turned craftspeople and businesspeople into employees. Their skill sets were devalued, replaced with industrial processes that weren’t actually better or more efficient – except at removing people from the equation. Finally, branding and marketing arose to create a separate role and understanding of ourselves “consumers,” shielded from the reality of what might be happening at a company, and relating to mythologies instead of other people.

The economy – and business itself – became less about serving people’s needs than perpetuated a growth (or better, debt) -based economic scheme. This worked well enough, as long as people could be satisfied with stuff, and especially as long as the economy could keep growing at the rate of interest. Of course, the problem was that the economy couldn’t keep growing. Expansion is fine when you’re a European colonial power taking over new regions of the world, extracting resources, and selling them at prices fixed by law. It doesn’t work so well after those new regions have become nations of their own, and don’t want to play along anymore.

The net can fix this mess – but not for the reason that some people seem to think. It’s not that the net can perpetuate the economic system we had before. Try as they might, brand managers and online marketers can’t turn this essentially social medium into a pure selling platform. People start to talk, and the obscurity required for traditional branding just fails. People want to know more about the cookies than the story that they are baked by little elves in a hollow tree. And if the company doesn’t provide that information, people will provide it to one another.

What companies have to realize is that this communication network is real. It’s not TV. It’s real. So people are actually communicating with one another. That means they are no longer just consumers interacting about brand stories; they are people interacting about real life.

People interacting online are living simultaneously in their roles as consumers, producers, fans, informants, shareholders and even employees. Just like the old days – I’m talking the Late Middle Ages here – the social reality and the business reality are becoming one world. This is a good thing for business, not a bad thing. But in such an environment, you have to abandon a lot of the assumptions underlying the extractive, exploitation and manipulation based model of business – the one where you basically look to sell your business to become some kind of investor – and get back in the business of really doing something.