Shared Economy and Globalization

It seems the protectionism is in forming recently, which has been viewed as an action against globalization and world unity. However, the development may not stop the connections in a more organic manner, which is enabled by virtual space connections. Digital revolution and shared economy is the trend in current stage of economy, and the world is connected with or without human bureaucracy and mechanical organizations. The world is growing to be a unity in its own way with reduced middle layers between product producers and product consumers.

Shared economy and world unity are not necessarily measured by man-made structure and organizations; rather it can be accomplished by underneath organic growth and connections. The looser the human imposed control the easier for the organic growth of the underneath connections; although we should balance governance with organic growth to maintain the order in this world.

The digital economy enabled connections are evolving to connect the end points and eliminate the middle layers for efficiency and cost effectiveness (e.g. world is becoming flat), which are enabled by Internet connections, service oriented infrastructures (cloud computing is an enabler), Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and many other technology advancements. This shared economy built on top of digital connections is irreversible, and is parallel to man-made connections via politics and bureaucratic organizations, though we need both.

Also, capital is live blood for economy that flows through the vessels via digital connections, it likes water in nature, will flow to places where costs are low and have better potential for investment gains. Internet provides the pipes that enable the flow and make the flow easier across the world.

The competition landscape is moving to suit more constructive and “win-win” approaches, due to the complex inter-connections we are experiencing that beyond human recognition. The biggest enemy for us will be the limitation in understanding the complexities brought by the digital connections in this unified world, which is far beyond the challenges from business competitors.

Data Management and Data Analytics

Information and data management is getting more challenging these days, with the velocity of data we are producing and the tendency of increased data production. Actually, the key for the solution is beyond information and data management. It is about how and what data should be collected.

I still remembered the data collection from web sites for data preservation. The amount of data growing makes me wonder even we can store them, how we can catch up in processing them to make them meaningful, e.g. to transform the data into information, let alone transform information into useful knowledge, or perform data analytics. If data processing speeds continue lagging behind data collection speeds, the data collected will not be useful, but add burden to the slow process. If more meaningless data involved, it’ll add more burden to the process. Therefore, we need to improve the data collection machanism, to collect the data with purpose, e.g. use a Service Oriented Data Collection and Management mechanism, and collect the data cleanly, or have a data cleansing process in place.

Digital Age and Current Economy

Any man-made systems are bearing their limitations, due to the limitations of human. Therefore, these systems will run down eventually just a matter of time. The evidence can be found in the stream of human civilizations, let alone the man-made computer systems. This includes the man-made social systems and structures. To survive, we need continuous evolution and revolution. The current revolution towards Digital Age can be considered as a case in line.

Our current economic, financial, and social structures are mostly established to suit Industrial Age, which are distorting in Digital Age. For example, the stock markets were established to connect investors with businesses for their investments to business growth, and to benefit from such activities. However, the stock trading becomes the major business of its own since the online-trading was born in 90s, and the trading techniques and tools are improving continuously with Internet and digital technology advancement. We can see that the trading volumes dramatically increased since 90s, and began to decrease after 2009 recession. However, the financial engineering stayed in its milestone scales, due to government rescue. Gradually, the economic scale in financial engineering surpassed the one in Main Street productions, which caused and worsened wealth divide, since the rich people have more spare money to participate in financial engineering. In our capitalism system, people are chasing capital gains naturally, doesn’t matter it’s from Main Street or Wall Street.

This trend has to be broken for the society to be productive again. The current trend of connected digital world with shared economies, shared infrastructures, shared resources, and shared knowledge is shining the light for making this to happen. We may have to go through a dark period of time before dawning, such as in current stagnated world economy. The important thing is that we should know the direction we are heading to, and to build into it.

We need visionary leaders in this world!

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