The Specter of Thought Stagflation

Wholesale goods are becoming more expensive at the same time that we encounter a job slump and the crisis in the housing industry becomes an “eighteen months from now” rather than “ending soon” phenomenon. For people who deal in things, there is a calculable impact on business from changes like a bump in wholesale goods. For those of us who undertake the heroic task of improving processes, teaching people, drafting contracts - in other words, those of us whose primary commodity is time, the attendant uncertainty around the cost of stuff is magnified by the eternal struggle to define what we do and assign value to it.

If anything, the marketplace of ideas is even more vulnerable to economic pressures within and without. The price of tea in China and its relation to our value as thinkers is one puzzle. The threat of thought stagflation, however, is dramatic; it is the dragon in the living room of the consulting worlds. Stagflation - and that still has to be one of my favorite terms - is the situation that the real life economy now faces; rising costs in the face of economic doldrums. Normally inflation is a problem associated with growth, particularly rapid growth. When it is associated with no or slow growth, we have the contradictory problem of not having as many pennies and needing to spend more of them to get the same stuff.

Thought stagflation is the same issue writ onto the marketplace of ideas. We’ve laid the groundwork here for the notion of an attention marketplace. If you’re sawing away at the same fiddle all the time, you run the (very real) risk of devaluing your personal (or organizational) currency at the same time that the cost per unit of attention is rising. Anyone familiar with the long tail can grasp that truism. But what does it mean as we seek to enter the social space, or blog, or tweet, or whatever? More than that, what happens when the cost per idea increases dramatically; when, say, the critical mass required to have an actual thriving community is growing? The magical - some would suggest mythical - volunteer creation of content that accompanies a vibrant and engaged digital entourage is worth its weight in gold, but whether or not it is worth the effort to create the conditions for such shenanigans is another question entirely. Plus, no one seems to know how to get there - our pennies decline in value. When we build it, they don’t come.

There have been a number of recent efforts to improve thought around entering the social media “market,” but my suspicion is that for every company that’s listening to those, there are others who still see it as just another media buy. That feels like mistake number one. Mistake number two is, one expects, insufficient attention paid to the ebb and flow of the thought economy. We’re at a place now where you need to add value cheap and dirty to be of any worth to anyone. This reflects the amount you can legitimately give away as well as the hypersaturated but largely immobile collection of communities which represent the best that web 2.0 has to offer.

I’m afraid that this might not actually make any sense - not a metaphor problem so much as an ability to tease it out - but my advice is the same as it was last time. Mean something the first time.