Manifesto of the New Economy: Institutions and Business Models of the Digital Society
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A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Dolgin, Aleksandr Book — Published Version Manifesto of the New Economy: Institutions and Business Models of the Digital Society Provided in Cooperation with: SpringerOpen Suggested Citation: Dolgin, Aleksandr (2012) : Manifesto of the New Economy: Institutions and Business Models of the Digital Society, ISBN 978-3-642-21277-2, Springer, Heidelberg, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21277-2 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/182343 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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Alexander Dolgin Manifesto of the New Economy Institutions and Business Models of the Digital Society Professor Alexander Dolgin Moscow State School of Economics Bolshaya Akademicheskaya Str. 5 Moscow Russia [email protected] Translated by Arch Tait ISBN 978-3-642-21276-5 e-ISBN 978-3-642-21277-2 DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-21277-2 Springer Heidelberg Dordrecht London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011933467 # The Author(s) 2012. The book is published with open access at SpringerLink.com. Open Access. This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. 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Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Contents 1 Introduction ................................................................ 1 2 The Second Invisible Hand of the Market ............................... 5 2.1 What is the New Economy? ........................................... 5 2.2 Consumption as Language or, Why Does Society Need Diversity? ...................................................... 10 2.2.1 The Ethics of Consumer Society .............................. 11 2.3 The Imperative of Conspicuous Consumption ....................... 14 2.4 Personal Thoughts .................................................... 15 2.5 Evolution of the Second Invisible Hand ............................. 21 2.6 The Economic Sense of Collaborative Filtering: Division of Labour in the Testing of Experience Goods ............ 23 2.7 New Technologies, New Institutions ................................ 24 2.7.1 Web 3.0 ........................................................ 25 2.7.2 Smart Introductions, Meaningful Messages ................... 27 2.8 The Gratuity Economy: Retrospective Payment and Group Motivation ................................................ 28 2.8.1 Insuring Cultural Goods ....................................... 33 2.8.2 A New Business Model for the Electronic Media: Customised Trust Advertising ................................. 34 2.8.3 Prospects for Monetising Social Networks .................... 38 2.8.4 An Explanation of Demand and Unmediated Distribution ... 40 2.8.5 The Alternative to Copyright .................................. 42 2.9 The Topology of Taste ............................................... 46 2.9.1 Group Recommendations and the Love of Reading .......... 46 2.9.2 Encouraging Good Taste ...................................... 48 2.10 The New Economy is an Economy of Clubs ........................ 49 v vi Contents 3 The Symbolic Economics Approach to the Humanities and Humanitarian Practices ............................................. 51 3.1 Prospects for Humanities Research into Third-Generation Networks ............................................................... 51 3.1.1 Measuring Symbolic Exchange ................................. 51 3.1.2 Studying Dissemination of Information ........................ 55 3.1.3 Modelling Group and Network Effects . ........................ 59 3.2 (Un)Happiness Economics ............................................ 60 3.3 Measuring Happiness .................................................. 67 3.3.1 Measuring Subjective Time .................................... 69 3.3.2 Research into Emotional Dynamics ............................ 75 3.4 The Measure of Symbolic Exchange: Second Money ................ 77 3.4.1 Multifunctionality of Second Money ... ........................ 84 3.4.2 Monetising User Activity in Third-Generation Networks ..... 85 3.4.3 Symbolic Capital and Symbolic Values ........................ 87 3.4.4 Symbolic Capital and the Reputation System .................. 89 3.5 The Mechanism of Social Revolutions ................................ 91 3.5.1 Three Mechanisms for Social Innovation ...................... 91 3.5.2 The Art of “Talk” in Contemporary Art ....................... 95 3.5.3 “Cheap Talk” as a Signal to Diverge? . ........................ 96 3.5.4 Social Imprinting ............................................... 97 3.5.5 An Illustration From Science of Phase Transformations in the Community .............................................. 104 3.6 Collaborative Filtering and the Prospects for Democracy ........... 106 4 Conclusion ................................................................ 113 Appendices .................................................................... 117 Empirical Data Extracted from a Collaborative System ................. 117 Appendix 1: The Law of Conservation of Happiness: Empirical Data .... 118 Appendix 2: Consumer Typology of Movies ............................. 125 Appendix 3: Statistics for Russian Movies ............................... 133 Appendix 4: Analysis of associations ..................................... 136 About the Author ............................................................ 145 Chapter 1 Introduction A spectre is haunting the globe – the spectre of the New Economy, a phenomenon for which a definitive name has yet to be found and which for now is hidden behind an uninformative signboard. We are going to take a look at it, to see which human practices, already established or still in the making, characterise it, and which of its tools and institutions hold out most promise. Many have little enthusiasm for the lifestyle the New Economy has visited upon us. They see it in terms of the deficiencies of mass culture, as emphasising inequalities between people even as it levels down and eradicates the uniqueness of cultures all over the planet. This is difficult to counter. The New Economy brings much that is of value, but even if this is conceded the value it brings is considered shallow and trivial. There is general agreement that the pluses are far from compensating for the minuses. But before deciding whether to condone or condemn the changes it brings, let us take a closer look at its arrangements and give more thought to its ethical dimension. Let us start by seeing what traditional economic science has to say about it. Much of life is linked to markets, which is why our everyday reality is more accessible to economists than to other social scientists. There is much to be learned from prices and the volume of goods being produced. With the assistance of money the sheer variety of life can be turned into numbers, to enter the jurisdiction of mathematics, and thence proceed to the planners to be administered. Where economic modelling proves successful we can derive a summary vector, the overall resultant of social forces, the thing that turns the millstones of history on the grand (and on a more intimate) scale. Often, however, we are dealing with a complex, motile, incalculable system of forces which derive