Building a new creative economy on the Web, with voluntary rewards.
Hi! I'm Amit Lubling, co-founder of Momeant. This is the first of three posts from our founders introducing our new company. In this post, I’d like to introduce you to our mission, and tell you why this project really matters to us.
In a recent article in the Atlantic, Derek Thompson talks about the implications of a new deal between Square and Starbucks. In the comments section, an incisive reader makes the following point:
circa 1830 Mr. John Deere- You're missing the one thing and this is the most important aspect: 70% of our workers work on farms. Your invention of the cast steel plow will make most of those workers unnecessary. The implications of this for our employment numbers is enormous. Why, in 100 years, 80% of farmers could lose their jobs! What do we plan to do with all of those people!?
Thompson's response was:
"We are rapidly approaching a world in which checkout employees will no longer be necessary. Good point!”
I should note that in the example above, what happened to those farm workers is that the New Deal turned some of them into infrastructure workers, and then WWII turned most of them into soldiers and manufacturing industry workers. Now they are mostly in the Services industry, the question is, what's next? - and there is reason to believe that there is no easy answer, like "Software!"
Almost exactly one year ago, in a one hour interview on edge.org, Internet guru Jaron Lanier, followed by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff in a CNN piece titled followed "are jobs obsolete?", both made the following point. Lanier used the example of Google's driverless cars experiment. In essence, he said that while we don't know when, in 1 year, 5 years, or 20, we are confident that at some point driverless cars will become standardized. While people may still want the freedom to drive on their own, driving for commercial purposes: i.e. bus drivers, cab drivers, truck drivers, etc. will no longer be necessary. Companies that don't adopt the system will not be able to compete. In essence, as Martin Ford has pointed out, even outsourcing and offshoring are just precursors to automation and digitization. Lanier's question is, once that happens, what do we do with all of those people? Are these drivers supposed to go to school and become software engineers? Are there enough software jobs (in America) to even support all of them, along with everyone else whose job is being automated? With the economy still depressed from the financial crisis of 2008, lots of people have been thinking and writing about this issue. Clearly the agricultural sector is all but automated, the manufacturing industry is headed in the same way, and the Services sector, while robust, is both highly susceptible to automation (judging by the Square article above) and has now demonstrated that its incapable of supporting economic growth. So what's next? Lanier's suggestion is an inspiring one. As he says, we spend more of our time and energy producing, consuming, and exchanging on the Web, essentially economic activities, so why are they not monetized? Basically, why does content, the unit of currency of the Web, not merit financial compensation? Why do we spend all of our time, attention, and work, to do things that are clearly valuable, but don't generate wealth for us? And if the Web does not start generating wealth, given our unsustainable economic situation, is it not a "failed technology?" Many people have thought about the problem of how to get content paid online. But they have usually considered it from the perspective of creating revenues and profits for corporations like publishers, advertisers, newspapers and record labels. Only a few have thought about solving this problem by getting regular people who create content, paid for the work they do. Of those that have, we really appreciate their efforts, they paved the way, but their solutions were lacking. They turned paying content creators into a charitable activity, loose change for a creator's guitar case, making the act of content creation seem precisely to be something that is not valuable, which, by the amount of time and energy we spend creating and consuming content, we know to not be true. Inspired by these big issues, we wanted to go a step further, to help build a new creative digital economy on the Web, with cultural products, information products, creative products, at the center. We wanted to put content creators in the middle of a thriving economy in which anyone can make a living by providing something valuable to someone who finds it valuable. We also wanted to give anyone a reason, an incentive, and the motivation to reward those whose work they enjoy; to get recognized for doing so, to create their own value in valuing others, and to build lasting, meaningful connections with those whom they reward, connections that lead to more knowledge, creativity, opportunity, and give creators a chance to reward us in return. That's why we've created Momeant. We want to plant the seeds for the next thriving and sustainable economy, online. To create a model that allows people to generate wealth from what our modern generation spends its time doing and making. We want to allow wealth creation to happen from a valuable activity that is now primarily a vehicle of profit for corporations and advertisers, to be one for all of us. The model starts when we agree to join together, and participate in a system that lets us value the content that we love (only once we're comfortable saying we love it), and reward the people making it.
- Posted by Amit