a way of seeing.

Reading 'The Rebel Sell' was probably one of the major moments in shaping my view of human relations. The view espoused therein of commerce as an arms race has proven applicable to many, many things.

(The gist is, keeping up with the Joneses results in the Joneses trying to pull back ahead, and vice versa, until everyone is unnecessarily spending beyond their means. Heath and Potter (the authors) call it a Collective Action Problem, and invoke the prisoners dilemma to explain further. In the name of all that is holy, buy the book.)

For the last few days, I've been asking myself how do you win an arms race? I've also been refusing to accept the standard answer I would give, which is not to play.

So. How do you win an arms race?

Turn it into a ground war.

Much as guerilla warfare seems to continue to do well trumping ever increasing military budgets the world over, crowdsourcing seems to do the same thing to flush media outlets. I'll admit that crowdsourcing also happens to fit very easily into my ideals about the way media can and should, in some cases, be run. A similar point could be made about guerilla marketing, if we didn't live in a political climate where a lite brite could shut down a major urban centre.

There was a lot of input today that led to me scribbling this down into a moleskine, and I'll get to the related idea at some point in the near future.

Ground war. That is all.