This rejection of established socio-commercial systems, like the idea that everyone needs to own their own car, is expanding.

People are owning less “stuff” and investing in experiences, instead.

Companies are treated as individuals, but are in fact aggregations of individuals.

This means that each person in a company can hide their actions behind a larger entity that has the financial and legal means, as well as an utter lack of moral imperative, to avoid paying the price for its actions.

Similarly, means of profit that used to be “normal” to organizations are becoming unacceptable to customers who are recognizing that the fees are no longer relevant.

Like banks that require five to seven days to change a single value in one database entry (bank account).

A recent study indicated that 40 percent of social networking accounts are spam – most of which are from bots being used to push products… Platforms line VirtuOz are launching automated chat agents on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter where they act like people who are in support of specific brands [VirtuOz was acquired by Nuance in 2013]

As individuals come to value intangibles – like trust, reputation, and relationships – that organizations cannot give them due to those values’ innately personal nature, those same companies are starting to resort to dirty tricks to continue to grow.

The result? A disconnect between individuals and the organizations.

Even Facebook, which pioneered so many of our now-standard social software norms, tends to be less legislative than older tech companies (like Microsoft, for example), who benefit more greatly from licensing fees than from third parties adding to their platforms and building their audience.

Again, it’s a different business model.

In the case of reputation, being transparent and available for collaboration or building on top of is a feature.

in case of “ownership” in the old sense of the word, that’s often a path to loss of profit.

In 2012, the Edelman Trust Barometer showed for the first time that trust and transparency are more important to corporate success than a company’s assets.

Computers are astoundingly good at a number of tasks, but anticipating human intuition isn’t one of them.

The barter is enormously intuitive: It relies directly on reputation. It’s also the oldest method of exchange known to mankind, and our brains have had thousands of years of adaptation to evolve to it.

In his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber describes the Tiv of West Africa, who believe that completing an economic transaction is immoral at its core, or at the very least rude, because it indicates that one party doesn’t want to engage with the other in the future.

The reason for the rise in dominance of representational, quantifiable currencies such as money was basically logistical restrictions.

The concepts behind reputation economics – trust, multiple currencies for exchange, the use of barter, trade and gifts, etc – are all already in play in the second-biggest economy on the planet.

The only reason you haven’t heard about it yet is that it’s almost entirely illegal.

Let me introduce you to hawala (حواله) which in Arabic means “transfer”. It is basically a parallel or alternative remittance system that exists or operates outside of, or parallel to traditional banking or financial channels.

The unnatural assumption that financial currencies (and their related banking, loan, credit, and other services) are the pinnacle of human commercial development, and not an artifact of a time before the internet.

… A more human form of regulation and currency: reputation.

The financial systems we relied on became unable to support these platforms [Facebook, Twitter, etc.], we started implementing workarounds for new kinds of exchanges of our own […]. eBay seller ratings to allow strangers to buy from strangers with confidence.

Welcome… to Reputation Economics […] They are exchanges that use more (or other) measures than just financial currency.

If you’ve given a birthday gift […] o hired a friend of friend, you’ve done it.

Money is a great idea […], but human beings aren’t reductionist enough to turn everything into cash value. After all, what’s you mom worth? That’s not a trick question, by the way.

Reputation is the closest thing we have for facilitating transactions […]. It’s inherently and relatively qualitative instead of quantitative.