Perry did, unburdening himself to his old pal, his roommate of ten
years, the guy he'd gone to war with and started businesses with and
collaborated with.
"You're restless, Perry," Lester said. He put nine golf-balls, a
ping-pong ball, and another nine golf balls in the machine's input
hopper. Two and a third seconds later, eighty one M&Ms dropped into
the output hopper. "You're just *bored*. You're a maker, and you're
running things instead of making things."
"No one cares about made things anymore, Les."
"That's sort of true," Lester said. "I'll allow you that. But it's
only sort of true. What you're missing is how much people care about
organizations still. That was the really important thing about the New
Work: the way we could all come together to execute, without a lot of
top-down management. The bangbanger arms dealers, the bio-terrorists
and fatkins suppliers -- they all run on social institutions that we
perfected back then. You've got something like that here with your
market, a fluid social institution that you couldn't have had ten or
fifteen years ago."
"If you say so," Perry said. The M&Ms were giving him heartburn. Cheap
chocolate didn't really agree with his stomach.
"I do. And so the answer is staring you right in the face: go invent
some social institutions. You've got one creeping up here in the
ride. There are little blogospheres of fans who coordinate what
they're going to bring down and where they're going to put it. Build
on that."
"No one's going to haul ass across the country to ride this ride,
Les. Get real."
"Course not." Lester beamed at him. "I've got one word for you, man:
franchise!"
"Franchise?"
"Build dupes of this thing. Print out anything that's a one of a kind,
run them as franchises."
"Won't work," Perry said. "Like you said, this thing works because of
the hardcore of volunteer curators who add their own stuff to it --
it's always different. Those franchises would all be static, or would
diverge... It'd just be boring compared to this."
"Why should they diverge? Why should they be static? You could network
them, dude! What happens in one, happens in all. The curators wouldn't
just be updating one exhibit, but all of them. Thousands of
them. Millions of them. A gigantic physical wiki. Oh, it'd be so very
very very cool, Perry. A cool *social institution.*"
"Why don't you do it?"
"I'm gonna. But I need someone to run the project. Someone who's good
at getting people all pointed in the same direction. You, pal. You're
my hero on this stuff."
"You're such a flatterer."
"You love it, baby," Lester said, and fluttered his long
eyelashes. "Like the lady said to the stamp collector, philately will
get you everywhere."
"Oy," Perry said. "You're fired."
"You can't fire me, I'm a volunteer!"
Lester dropped six golf-balls and a heavy medicine ball down the
hopper. The machine ground and chattered, then started dropping
hundred-loads of M&Ms -- 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700 -- then
some change.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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