Participation in the Cooperation Economy requires only something with which individuals come pre-loaded: differentiation. Understand what you’re uniquely good at, how you want to play the Game, and then join forces with people with shared goals and complementary skills. (View Highlight)
On the internet, individuals have two key advantages over middlemen: we’re naturally differentiated and more of our revenue drops to the bottom line. We can operate in the niches, feasting on wins that would be too small for companies but can be life-changing for people. (View Highlight)
It shows that, online, value accrues to the Creators and Aggregators, and that the Publishers in the middle get crushed. That same curve can be used to describe almost any industry touched by the internet: the tails are better off, the middle is fucked. (View Highlight)
If that writer is a rich, colorful, 3D sphere, fans only get the 2D, Flatland version, and the writer only gets the opportunities that come with that sliver of themselves.
Historically, writers made that trade because the publisher provided all sorts of things that they needed and couldn’t afford or attain on their own: distribution, editors, a brand, legal, illustrators, benefits, and a steady income. New tools, from Twitter to Foster to Substack to Opolis, deliver those services at a fraction of the cost. The writer can go independent and keep nearly all of the revenue they produce; the publisher is stuck with an unsustainable cost structure. (View Highlight)
Player empowerment is a catchall for the fact that the league has done a terrible job of empowering teams. The players have all of the leverage in every situation. I think it’s the worst thing that ever happened to professional sports on all levels.
— Unnamed NBA General Manager, The New Yorker
That quote is unbelievable. It’s the purest distillation of established institutions’ inner feelings, rarely spoken aloud, towards power shifting to individuals.
This is happening everywhere in the economy — individual empowerment at the expense of employers. (View Highlight)
Liquid Super Teams allow each individual involved to bring their full powers to bear. They expose each person’s full surface area, rather than hiding away parts inside of a larger sphere. If you compare one big sphere that has the same volume as ten smaller ones combined, the ten smaller spheres have roughly twice as much surface area as the big one. (View Highlight)
the benefit of Liquid Super Teams: they increase talent density by lowering the commitment required of each participant. (View Highlight)
You want to bring as many people along as can add unique value, but it’s much easier for a Liquid Super Team to drop freeriders than it is to fire someone at a company. There are no Performance Improvement Plans.
If another investor introduces me to a company and I act badly towards that company, I won’t get the next introduction.
If I act against the interests of the DAO, they can “rage kick” me out.
If I don’t pull my weight on Maple, I can get booted, having earned no money and no equity.
Traditional employment provides a safety net for underperformers. The Cooperation Economy doesn’t. (View Highlight)
That’s the key here: the Cooperation Economy doesn’t suffer freeloaders. It’s powered by each individual bringing their full arsenal to bear. Each participant in the Cooperation Economy needs to provide their own differentiated value — that could be as small as providing the best possible feedback on a product or as big as coding the whole thing — and prove their worth on an ongoing basis. (View Highlight)
The Passion Economy makes it possible for anyone to start their own business online. Power to the Person means that those businesses, with just one full-time employee, can get really big. The Great Online Game means that everyone can play a meta-game that blurs work and life.
The Cooperation Economy lets us play the Great Online Game together, each bringing our own superpowers, and allows us to pursue opportunities together that none of us could tackle alone. (View Highlight)
