Executive Summary

• The "half farmer, half X" model
• The "no middleman" model
• The "15% commission" model
• The key features of successful new community models

If you have not yet read The Rise of New Models of Community, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we discussed the potential for new models of collaboration and community enabled by the Web and social media. I proposed a simple metric for differentiating between simulacrum community and the real deal: a community is only a “real community” if the collective actions of its members push the envelope of the material world.

In Part 2, we’ll examine some models that have arisen as people either abandon or are cut out of the Central State/Corporate Consumerism Status Quo and must create new social and economic arrangements to earn a livelihood.  This requires structures that enable self-organizing, voluntary communities to endure and grow.

As Zeus noted in Part 1, The new price of entry is production, meaning that parasitic layers of middlemen have no role in these new arrangements. To participate, one must be productive. i.e. create or add value.

As I mentioned earlier, social media doesn’t change a system’s incentives/benefits and costs/disincentives; the Web is a powerful tool for community building, once the incentives for participating far outweigh the costs.

Let’s start our survey with an example from Japan, whose Status Quo economy and social character have stagnated in the “lost decades” since 1990.

Solve for X: "Half Farmer, Half X"

What is "half farmer, half X?" A growing number of young Japanese people, according to Junko Edahiro, whose 8-minute TEDx Tokyo talk on the "De" Generation describes a new lifestyle in Japan in which young people work half-time as farmers and spend the balance of their time pursuing X, where X is whatever else the person wants to do with their lives. 

This stands in stark contrast to the corporate “salaryman” script that has been the model for life in Japan since 1946: work inhuman hours in complete devotion to the corporation or institution, sacrificing one's own life and family in the process.