The Empowerment Ventures: ebay goes to war

ebay goes to war

Might be time to upgrade one of those bumper sticker adages we all love: "In ebay we trust; all others underbid."

Why not? From what I see ebay is becoming qualified as a full-fledged security tool for military quality, along with Everything Else it does. And what better place to share our valuable resources than on the bumper of gas-guzzling cars?

I got to thinking about this as I was reading a number of books about the future of interactive connectivity and the way that we are collectively growing to do "irrational" things in the name of always-on technology.

As various sociological experts and commentators are saying about our technological mindsets, there really is no logical reason why we trust people we don't know when we bid on things we can't even touch in anticipation that the market process will bid away our concerns regarding authenticity, quality and the distribution of our safety and security resources.

Yet we continue to assume that we keep looking to use this kind of system for exactly this reason since it seems to work so well when we are looking to buy other things we value.

Millions participate in ebay exchanges on a daily basis. Many even risk their entire livelihood and reputation on the general concept that what we do over the Net can't be too bad.

So if indeed such bets are good enough for the regular folks, why shouldn't they be good enough for our soldiers to determine their place on the battlefields of combat? 

Various people of military significance are seriously commenting on such ideas, confirming the interest of those within the Pentagon's E-Ring. (The latest commercialized conceptualization of the senior advisors who occupy the outer circle of offices). Market speculation seems like a reasonable way to direct the best-qualified soldiers into the most desirous combat posts.

The Donald Man himself  (no, Rumsfeld; you silly one!) has been speculating about this idea as he has been quietly seeking to infecting others with his confidence. Though this thinking didn't work when they tried to use policy-based commodity trading to predict when of if wars might be forthcoming (a Policy Analysis Market idea sort of like the Stock Exchange), these similarly minded folks are back for more speculation. (See Robin Hanson's site for an overview of this PR snafu for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, http://hanson.gmu.edu/policyanalysismarket.html.)

In his The Old Man In A Hurry in-depth bio on Rumsfeld, Thomas P. M. Barnett (http://www.realclearpolitics.com) presents this gem of understanding of the wizard behind the curtain:

"Now Rumsfeld is working the 'gearbox' issues, as he likes to call them. He's gotten way down into the guts of the Pentagon's machinery, making changes that will redefine how things are planned, how people are employed, how resources are acquired, and how America fights and wins both the wars that lie ahead and the inevitable nation building that must follow. And he aims to make those changes permanent, because 'you can get backsliding, but if you go down deep enough in this institution, where nobody notices and nobody sees it and nobody understands it and it's hard to figure out, and you get those things going right, they're going to go on for a long time. Once they're ingrained, they'll go on that way until somebody spends enough time, enough effort, to go in and readjust them down there. But you can't do it superficially along the top. It just doesn't happen.'"

On his critical commentary site (http://TheAdventuresofChester.com), Josh Manchester (a combat engineer actually deployed in Iraq until 2004), excerpts in "Market-states, Netwar and Ebay-style command systems" his concerns about this whole idea. In that review he comes up with this beauty from Newt Gingrich's Winning The Future (http://www.newt.org), expounding of the foundation of net-based planning:

"The information age makes it possible to develop citizen-centered models of access and information. …. The Weather Channel and Weather.com are a good example of this new approach. The Weather Channel gathers and analyzes the data but it is available to you when you want it and in the form you need. You do not have to access all the weather in the world to discover the weather for your neighborhood tomorrow. You do not have to get anyone's permission to access the system 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Google is another system of customer centric organization that is a model for government. You access Google when you want to and you ask it the question that interests you. Google may give you an answer that has over a million possibilities but you only have to use the one or two options that satiate your interest. Similarly Amazon.com and E-Bay are models of systems geared to your interests on your terms when you want to access them. Compare these systems with the current schoolroom, the courthouse which is open from 8 to 5, the appointment at the doctor's office on the doctor's terms, the college class only available when the professor deigns to show up. Government is still mired in the pre-computer, pre-communications age. A key component of Entrepreneurial Public Management is to ask every morning what can be done to use computers, the Internet, CDs, DVDs, teleconferencing, and other modern innovations to re-center the government on the citizen."

ebay is in the minds of these folks the ultimate way to interject an investment mentality into their decision-making ideologies. (Not to mention that it provides the military big wigs with cover if they bet on the wrong man to stand in front of the bullets. "We didn't choose the guy to take out those insurgents; the public market did!")

Skills-based trust, after all, can only go so far. The rest is up to the interplay of market assessments and having the most attractive public relations write-ups as part of your individual marketing portfolio. Finances are, after all, the heart of our national security. So what's wrong with using the methods of financial success to guide the positioning of the human resource aspects of our war games?

I do hope I meant that as a rhetorical question.

Don't loose all hope, however, if you like the idea and think we are trying to shot down the resurgence of their games for success. There is much more about the military's use of conventional technological connectivity that still lies in wait.

I am fascinated, for example, by the gaming technology the U.S. Army has apparently developed for using CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) to "place" wannabe soldiers into virtual real-life situations so they can get the feel of the bloodier aspects of war. Not much is known about this since it remains a classified project, but I can see the attraction if one is looking for young men (and a few good women too) who grew up shooting bad guys in their X-Box.

(No word about whether they have a companion game at least in development for teaching combat soldiers about the "Everything Else" aspects of hunting for the peace. What say Mr. Barnett?)

But even if all the government's resources turn toward building an infrastructure for betting on our security, there remains a semblance of hope. I for one believe there is potential for creating a Community Investment Market (CMI) idea were stock investors buy and sell elements of social factors that could lead to more homelessness, school failure, hopelessness, domestic violence, etc.

I can see this as giving us all the chance to bet on some of the uglier sides of life. And ebay seems well positioned to give us all the chance to bid our cents or even the public's billions.

What's your take? You willing to trust a bet on how our literal or justice soldiers do when their talents are up for auction?

Allan