kidmercury

I've been working long and hard on the ActoNetwork business plan -- a plan aiming for nothing short of global conquest, so that a new empire, one custom built for the open source/attention economy, will emerge.

A section on competitors is considered a standard part of a business plan, and so I've spent a good amount of time asking: who are the competitors of the ActoNetwork?

In the broadest of terms, this means anyone who is seeking attention, which pretty much means that competitors include.....everyone.

Of course some competitors are more dangerous than others. And perhaps more importantly, some competitors are more evil than others -- and hence it is up to the ActoNetwork, an underdog in the game of capitalism, to rise above, commoditize businesses, restructure value chains, and restore justice to the marketplace.

From that perspective, one competitor comes close to trumping all others: Wikipedia.

I know what you are thinking: but Kid Mercury, Wikipedia gives me so much free information, it is so wonderful, it is the ultimate P2P project, it is all free, it will make the world a better place.....

You got it all wrong, buddy.

But, in the interests of being fair, let's give Wikipedia some credit: jumpstarting a global community that works for free has done a few important things:

1. It's proven that community building can, in a very real sense, help businesses reduce costs and develop new capabilities. This is no longer some random idea in some random business textbook; it's been proven out. I suppose you could say it's like 9/11 truth: you can deny it, but you can't debate its validity. I am probably a bit extreme about this issue given the nature of my work, but I do believe that every business needs to invest in customer co-creation, customer communities, blogs, forums...whatever you want to call it.

2. It's also been proven that community building, even with respect to customer communities, incorporates a value system that goes beyond the typical business-customer relationship. Communities need to reflect an ideal of their members; to put in astrological terms, communities may need to appeal the Neptunian longings of their members. Wikipedia, for instance, is clearly appealing to the ideals of free information and the ideal of egalitarianism. Such statements are hard if not impossible to accurately verify, although I think most people would intuitively agree that Wikipedia's success comes largely from the sense of satisfaction it gives its contributors by allowing them to reach their ideal.

That's the good stuff about Wikipedia. And make no mistake: they deserve a lot of credit for getting that done. I salute them for the advances they've made in helping to liberate mankind.

But let me tell you why I want to destroy Wikipedia.

I view Wikipedia as a law breaker. Not in the sense of copyright law, or the falsely named PATRIOT Act, but rather the poorly named law of conservation of attractive profits, which states that when a business is commoditized, value doesn't just disappear; it re-emerges in other value chains. But with Wikipedia, where is the value going? Yes, encyclopedias have been commoditized. But where did the money go?

The problem, of course, is that Wikipedia's value system -- a system which is essential to creating an engaged community, which in turn is essential to Wikipedia's successful commoditization of content production -- runs antithetical to profit opportunities. In other words, if profit opportunities were introduced, it is reasoned that contributors would stop contributing; profit is not compatible with the ideals used to engage the community and generate free content.

The solution to the problem that Wikipedia has created is to find a way that appeals to consumer ideals -- thus allowing for vibrant communities that engage their members to emerge -- without significantly compromising profits. In fact, I believe that there is a way for companies to appeal to consumer ideals and have the result be a community that is more engaged and more open to commercialization.

But for those who fear that Wikipedia may have gotten away with waging war on capitalism by violating the law of conservation of attractive profits, fear not: for the ActoNetwork, if nothing else, is a soldier in the war on capitalism -- a war waged from above by rethuglicans and dumbocrats aiming to expand government into a tool that undermines the fair market through corporate welfare, and one waged from below by the likes of Wikipedia and Craigslist, both of whom seem more interested in breaking the laws of capitalism rather than creating additional value for its members and profit opportunities for businesses. And as a soldier in this war on capitalism, the ActoNetwork is here to find the synthesis that will set us free: by remixing the profit-obsessed mindset of the corporations seeking to create an unfair playing field with the anti-profit mindset of Wikipedia and its clones, we will create a new business structure -- one that appeals to the ideals of its members, while also enabling a healthy and useful manifestation of commercialization.

With RSS as our weapon, the ActoNetwork will restore justice to the markets, creating new value capture opportunities on top of the free production communities Wikipedia has taught us to build. Wikipedia, let it be known: your time as the violators of capitalism is almost up. Justice is certain, and the only verdict is vengeance.