Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working at jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” – Rachel Botman

Le Web’s London’s opening presentation, with its theme of the Collaborative Economy, should be a wake up call to corporations, brands, and everyone in the advertising ecosystem. Your lives are about to change. the market has once again spoken, and if you think you’ve already been disrupted by social media, think again. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Loic LeMeur, Le Web’s cofounder, opened this year’s event with a starling presentation on the Collaborative Economy, a new movement in which consumers, especially the highly coveted and targeted millennials, have decided to share and rent rather than own things in a dramatic reversal of 50-year trends.

A number of factors have come together to influence this trend; the availability of excess capacity with high idle times, the worldwide recession, the growth of trust networks generated by social media, and a growing need for community. During my own lifetime, I’ve seen feelings of isolation grow, and the statistics are that the number of people dining and living alone has doubled in the past forty years. So it’s not just a feeling.

During my lifetime, I have actually witnessed the sense of community vanish, and with it, happiness. It was brought home to me in Uganda and Rwanda, where people have less but their communities are stronger, and joy is palpable.

But it’s an ill wind, as they say, and out of this isolation has come AirBNB, now used by 40,000 people a day in 30 cities; Lending Club, the alternative source of funding using friends and investors, and of course Kickstarter, where $320million has been pledged by 2.2m people for thousands of projects, including the 25,000 fans who donated $1.2 million for Amanda Palmer’s new album. Lyft, a modern-day revision of hitch hiking, just raised $60 million, and shared car services like ZipCar have replaced car ownership for young people.

Only government regulations hold back the even faster spread of peer-to-peer trends, and governments are going to have to adapt, as they have to music and movie sharing via Netflix and Spotify. we domt have to own music and movies anymore, nor cars, nor even our meals. Cookening, a startup. uses people to cook for each other.

In the past year, 52% of Americans have rented, borrowed or shared things they used to own, and 83% of people are willing to do it, despite the $22 billion self-storage industry and homes that have doubled in size (and disillusioned their owners when equity evaporated).

The new generations, committed to sustainability and social purpose, have learned from us that choice
and income don’t bring happiness, but community, trust and purpose might. It’s a new consumer mindset that values transparency, participation, and collaboration. In this atmosphere, the new brand is no brand, and intrusive branding and advertising had better stay out of the way.

Every once in a while, I am reminded that I’m not the indestructible girl I used to be. I hate those moments.

This morning I went to a Pilates Studio in Chiswick and walked into an intermediate class. Now, I’ve done a fair amount of Pilates, but not at THIS studio, and not for the past year. Lo and behold. The 30-year-old Asian dancer looking types in the class outshone me easily. The instructor actually had to modify things for my diminished upper body strength. I was furious with myself, but at the end of the class I told her my age and she was impressed, although she told me to go back to beginners.

By the time I walked home, I’d gotten over it. But then I headed off my meet a friend of a friend for lunch in Kensington.

I got off at West Kensington, followed Google Maps, and realized I was walking in the wrong direction. So I retraced my steps and headed off again in the other direction. I kept on walking through some dodgy neighborhoods, and I knew I was on the wrong track when after 45 minutes I still hadn’t passed a Starbucks. I then compounded my error by turning right on the street I should have turned left on, and walking west instead of east. Map reading skills were never my strong point.

By this time I had used up the hour grace period I was planning to spend at Starbucks, and summoned Uber. Brian explained all my errors and dropped me at Riccardos, a tony Tuscan restaurant that actually had…a vegan, gluten free me menu.

Ecstasy. But it gets better. And worse.

I had a great lunch with a very British investment banker to whom Tery Spataro introduced me.  He raises money for tech companies and has some startups in familiar spaces– broadcast technology and low-cost tablets for emerging markets. I was actually able to lend some expertise, because he hadn’t heard of kickstarter, indigo-go or Angel.co. We left on a high note, promising to help each other.

And then, marching with determination toward South Kensington, the station I should have gotten off at,  to go meet my daughter in Central London, I hit a crack in the flagstone sidewalk and pitched forward. 

Fortunately my hands broke my fall. I haven’t fallen in several years, but I skinned both knees and destroyed my hose. Two young men picked me up and asked me if I was okay. All of a sudden, I was revealed as a Senior. They didn’t ask about my dignity. I felt like one of those old ladies I never want to be.

In this moment of extreme vulnerability, what to do next? 

I stopped at Boot’s and bought some opaque hose. Then I took myself to the “South Ken” Starbucks, which I knew would have wifi and a ladies’ room. I restored my GUI with the new tights. Now, I’m back in full drag. Can’t be identified as a fallen woman.

Just for curiosity’s sake, I synced my JawboneUp and learned I had already walked 4.5 miles. And taken a too-difficult Pilates class. So I had no wish to move. I ordered a soy latte–in the afternoon. This is tantamount to drinking at lunch.

I texted my daughter: “Happy to have everyone meet me here, but I’m not moving!!! I feel old and battered.”
And my son-in-law wrote back: “I will carry you home on my shoulders.”

Family. The people who will carry you on their shoulders.

On to dinner.

I’m finished with Facebook, and believe me, i’m not alone. Everyone I know hates the strange stuff in their Facebook streams, partly from “friends” we don’t remember or care about, or from brands who want a relationship with us.

Problem is, I am also somewhat bored by all the alternatives. I hardly visit Twitter, except to scan it for breaking news and people’s obituaries, just like older people scan the daily paper. Of course I also dutifully visit LinkedIn and Google+ once a day, but they don’t excite me either. The former is full of people marketing themselves, and the latter is noisy no matter how much I try to tune the filters. I used to spend hours on all of them. Now, not so much. And last semester, my ASU students admitted they were over Facebook,too.

In reality, I feel social networked out. My community of social media friends, too, has scattered. We were the early adopters. Now things have settled out, and the journalists have gone to Twitter, the VCs to their own blogs, the social business people to G+, and of course my distant cousins and my brother remain on Facebook. I’ve tried Path, which many people like, but most of my family will not try anything new, and many people on it never post content.

So when I heard on The Gillmor Gang that Keith Teare, who has been watching the web since it’s beginning and who was part of the UK’s first Internet cafe and Europe’s first ISP, launched a new social network, I was less than thrilled. What could be left to do?

Nevertheless, I dutifully downloaded the early version of the app, because what would life be without new toys?

After about a week, I have decided there was indeed something left to do: aggregate everything and tune out the noise. Just.me allows you to share publicly, by email, to Twitter, FB and Tumblr, or privately. It also allows you to upload any form of content: photo, video, voice, text. So it’s very flexible. It hasn’t even launched yet, but I bet it will have Google+ and LI sharing, too, after a while.

As of now, almost no one is on it, so I read the river, which allows me to see gorgeous photos that express the countries and cultures of Just.me’s early adopters, who are global. When I am on the app, I don’t feel as if I have to share, but I do post photos. I have the same sense of discovery and delight that I had when Twitter and Facebook and G+ were all new and I could meet new people and see new sights — without ads.

Of course Keith will monetize it eventually, and it will “scale,” — meaning self-destruct with the entrance of the marketers. But for now, Just.me is like finding a quiet room to have a conversation in the middle of a huge noisy party.

Something profound is happening in American culture. Bored and disgusted with forty years of non-stop consuming, Americans have gone back to the future by way of the Maker movement. Bay Area Maker Faire outgrew its former location, and after this year will probably have outgrown the San Mateo County Event center as well. Rumor has it that 130,000 people went. i swear I saw them all.

Maker Faire swarmed with people both days, young families with kids, teen age geeks, and hippie grandmas like me who remember the last time there was a Maker movement: the ’60s, with their Whole Earth catalogues, geodesic domes, and recycled materials.

The weekend reminded me of some pursuits I dearly love: knitting, sewing, growing vegetables, and living in a one-of-a-kind house built from a geodesic dome kit. Damn, I even made my own clothes. I’ve never lost the ability to do any of those things–i just stopped doing them. They cycled out of style, although at the time I didn’t know it was a cycle.

Now the era of buying things, of outsourcing life, of sacrificing individuality to convenience, may be over. I will start making things again, only I will be 3D printing or building my own robot. Why? For the same reason I write. It’s a way to express myself. I probably won’t be selling what I make. I’ll be using it.

But other people will be selling things. Many other people.  Especially things made with 3-D printers. 3-D printing is the most empowering tool to come along since the personal computer. If you have a child and can afford one, get one. I have my eye on the PrintrBot, because it is upgradable. I imagine myself 3-D printing my own new parts for it.

Yet 3-D printing won’t really revolutionize manufacturing in the way radicals think. Everyone will not  be joining the maker movement.  Rather, it will be like social media: 20% of the people will produce 80% of the content. The rest will buy what the 20% produce.

However, 3-D printing will finally bring about mass customization, and that will disrupt mass markets the way digital media disrupted mass media. The people formerly known as the audience will be the people formerly known as the mass market. I may not want to make my own shoes, but I would love them to fit, and someone with a 3-D printer who is expert in shoes will scan my foot and make me a pair. No more shoes from brands– shoes that approximate a fit, but just imperfectly. And I may make him a robot. Or even a vegan dinner. It’s the sharing economy.

We are headed back where we came: to individualized products and a sharing community. Historians looking back on the 20th century will realize that like broadcasting, mass production was just a moment in time.

There is still a digital divide, and it may be growing wider.

Four brilliant, privileged and geeky friends of mine, Katherine Barr, Josh Elman, Robert Scoble, and Randi Zuckerberg, appeared recently on a panel at the First Ever MamaBear Conference hosted by 500 Startups. (Yes, they’re also friends of mine.) The topic was how their children interact with technology. Their kids are toddlers. I watched because 1)I love these people and 2)I’ve got grandkids.

Most of the discussion revolved around how their toddlers relate to  iPads and iPhones, and how naturally technological literacy comes to them. Josh’s daughter tried to swipe a TV set in a hotel room. Some of these parents were concerned about how much time their children spent with devices as babysitters, or how their kids picked up on the parents’ habits of multi-tasking and not giving their kids their full attention. While they were proud their children could operate every device from age two on, I thought it was an inevitability, knowing them.

And then there are the children I see. My foster daughter just had a baby, and has a child almost five. Her 5-year-old was recently tested for kindergarten and found to be behind in certain areas. My daughter cried, thinking she was a failure after she had tried so hard to keep him with her as much as possible. She herself dropped out of school in 8th grade, and probably reads at the fifth grade level.  When he was little, both he and she were briefly homeless, living in her car. At other times, she has worked full time. While she says she reads to him, she also has difficulty keeping his attention.

My foster son and his wife have a 2-year-old. This child, who can exit from anything you strap him into like Harry Houdini,  figured out how doors and windows work as soon as he was tall enough to reach knobs, and has been an escape artist since he discovered my dog door soon after he began to crawl. He’s smart as a whip, but without a device he will never sit still to learn to read. Both of his parents work full time and attend college full time. He is often at day care, where there are is no technology.

My response to these circumstances is to buy each child a device of his own. While I love my foster daughter dearly, not only does she have a significant other and a newborn, she also doesn’t have much technological competency of her own to pass on. She can use Facebook, but that’s where it ends. When she was with me, I taught her how to use computers, but she didn’t have the day-to-day access that children of means take for granted. My son and daughter-in-law are more advanced, because they attend a community college. But they’re using their phones themselves.

Any discussion of whether too much interaction with technology will harm these children, which is a discussion many more privileged parents have with each other, is moot.

I worry they’re not getting enough interaction with it. Although they do things children with more structured lives don’t have time to do, like play outside with other kids on the block, they don’t do the things that will help them up the ladder higher up in the middle class their parents struggled to enter. In order for these kids to avoid the tribulations their parents had, they are going to have to develop the same habits Randi’s and Robert’s and Josh’s and Katherine’s kids have.

The iPad and its Android relatives aren’t just things that take kids away from human relationships. In the case of my foster grandchildren, they are problem-solving tutors, teaching them skills they will need to succeed in a world where their parents still struggle to compete.

Yoga is the place I go to disconnect. Admittedly I have been known to check my phone for messages if I leave the yoga room for any reason, but in the room I never do.  I’m not one of the people whose phone rings randomly in mid-pose because I forgot to put it on vibrate.

Lately I’ve been wearing fitness monitors, however, and I seldom take them off during class because I always want to know if yoga gives me fuel points, or steps, or whatever I happen to be monitoring this week. My monitoring addiction began with the Fitbit, which was sent to me to try when it was introduced into the market. The Fitbit monitors steps, and sleep effectiveness, and calorie intake if you tell it what you ate.

I took off the Fitbit after I realized I knew exactly how I slept, what I ate, and how much I walked — but so what? Nevertheless, I’m a gadget geek, so when the Jawbone Up came out, I bought one. When it fell apart, I switched to the Nike Fuel Band. I liked that okay, despite not knowing what “fuel points” are.  But then I heard about the Basis watch, which also took your heart rate, and I ordered one of those. And then I bought the second, more durable Jawbone. Mind you, I haven’t really learned anything new about myself in two years, and every single one of these devices is ugly by female standards. Clearly they were designed by male engineers. But I am now addicted to things on my wrist that tell me things I no longer need to know. Wearable computers.

Somewhere in the middle of all this fitness hysteria, I backed a project on Kickstarter called the Pebble Watch. Enough other people backed it to raise Pebble $10 million, and the founders retired to China to figure out how to manufacture a smart watch.

The Pebble Watch isn’t really a monitor like the others. It only monitors what’s happening on your smart phone, and communicates notifications to you through the watch face. It’s more like the overhyped Google Glass. The Pebble  can remind you of appointments, tell you who is calling, and send your text messages. Think of it as a Dick Tracy wrist radio. Like the others, it’s pretty ugly, and like the others, it has been designed by and for boys.

But it only arrived yesterday, and I was wearing it and learning it when I went into yoga this morning.

We were laying on the floor toward the end of a yin class heavy in Chinese traditional medicine lore, concentrating on opening our Meridiens and freeing our chi. Completely in the right brain.  Never mind what all this means. Just know that it’s serious, and the room is silent.

I must have pressed a button that activated something (I don’t know, because my eyes were closed), because all of a sudden my watch began reading aloud from “The Signal and the Noise,” a book by the totally left brain statistician Nate Silver about economic forecasting and why both it and earthquake forecasting are so often wrong. (The mistake is called “over fitting.”) The actual application, Audible, that reads books to me is on my iPhone, and my phone was paired with Pebble. Somehow, the watch opened Audible.

Unfortunately, the yoga teacher had just asked us all what we had learned about ourselves during the class. What had I learned? I had learned that I didn’t  know all the capabilities of my Pebble Watch, and that I had therefore caused two usually very separate worlds to collide. I also learned that it’s impossible to explain to people who are not geeks and wouldn’t know a Basis from a Pebble from a potato chip what had just happened. To them, it was perfectly random.

Namaste.

Related articles

• Robert Scoble: “I’m never going to live another day without a wearable computer on my face”

I mentor at least once a month at Gangplank, and often elsewhere.  There’s never a day when I don’t feel gratified to be able to help, but today was an extraordinary day.

My first appointment was a man from Flagstaff. He is a flight nurse, and had developed an API for transferring patients from hospital to hospital–which is now done by fax and phone call. Without experience as an entrepreneur and without investment, he had found a technical co-founder, developed a solution that integrates with major EHRs, sold it to several rural hospitals, and was now on the verge of deploying his first large urban hospital system. He told me I was the first person he had been able to talk to who understood the industry and could help him go further. In a long conversation, we discussed the drawbacks and merits of bootstrapping vs. taking investors.  I admire him.

My next appointment was a woman who was studying nutrition and was quitting her job to become a personal coach. She came to ask me several questions about how to start a business, but she already knew the answers to all of them, because her background was in finance. We had another long conversation — this one about how to eat, how to treat the body naturally, and how to engage in “permission marketing” — a term I never used with her, but which seemed intuitive to her. She will market in a way that aligns with her values.

Next up? A 23-year-old serial entrepreneur who had already tried investment banking, received a grant from Apple, had one of his technologies acquired by another company, and was developing a retrofit for manual wheelchairs. He came to ask me how I got where I am, but he has already gone so far, just out of college, that I know he’ll eclipse me. We ended up talking about the special traits of entrepreneurs, about getting married too early, and about disappointing your parents. It turned out that his father, too, is an entrepreneur; he emigrated to the US and opened a Chinese restaurant. It’s the one I eat in all the time, and whose take-out food I always have delivered. What are the odds…? We ended up laughing about our commonalities.

And last, a young man who is part of a robotics startup, which will make it easy to program industrial robots, and lower their cost. He taught me a term for robotic hands: end effectors. The robots who have end effectors and can change their environments  are the expensive ones. Here’s the definition in case you want to learn something today: n robotics, an end effector is a device or tool that’s connected to the end of a robot arm where the hand would be. The end effector is the part of the robot that interacts with the environment. The structure of an end effector and the nature of the programming and hardware that drives it depend on the task the robot will be performing.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s cool to learn new things, and today I learned so much from the people I mentored that I forgot I was the person who was supposed to know something.

This is a pathetic story of the TSA and  Southwest Airlines baggage handling, neither of whom has any concern for the customer. But I am not one of those polite senior citizens who takes everything lying down. Rather, I’m an expert in customer service and marketing, and I know what SHOULD have been done.

A month ago, I bought my son-in-law a new laptop. I had it sent to my home in Phoenix, because I knew he was coming to visit me to paint my house. Today he left to go back home, after making my house look beautiful and being away from my daughter for three weeks. It was a labor of love for which a new laptop was small compensation.

He packed the laptop into his laptop case. In the case he also put several other breakable items: two jars of hummus spice from the local Middle Eastern bakery that my daughter begged us to get for her, and a jar of organic peanut butter.

He checked his two other bags, and carried the laptop on. Or at least he tried to. When he got to TSA, they told him that because the jars looked like a powdery substance (garlic, lemon juice, salt, etc), he couldn’t carry it on. They suggested he check his laptop case. Obediently, he went back down to the ticket counter, where they charged him $75.00 to check the case, because it was a third bag.

When he boarded, he watched the baggage being loaded, and saw that the baggage handlers had opened the flap of his laptop case — the one with his new machine in it. He worried. He even told the flight attendant what he had seen, and she assured him that everything would be fine.

But when he arrived, he looked in the case, and the laptop screen was shattered.

He spoke to the people at Southwest baggage claim, who sneered and told him they had been doing this for nineteen years, it was written in their policies that they were not responsible for electronic devices, and that maybe if he called central baggage claim he could get his $75 back.

Heartsick, I tried to call them and plead our case. They were closed, and the message said to call back during “normal business hours.”

This behavior toward travelers is unconscionable. We pay for the ticket and get treated like shit. It’s time for this to stop.

Please help me by forwarding to anyone at Southwest you know.

UPDATE: Someone named @southwestVerity saw my tweet and alerted Southwest management. They have refunded my son-in-lsw’s ticket and baggage fees, which gives us the money to replace his laptop. Thank you, Southwest; I knew I fly you all the time for a reason! You’re the only airline that seems to care.