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(& what this has to do with micro-payments)

A curious convergence of ideas came to me today whilst, for reasons of length I’ll not explain, I was considering micropayments. These little creatures seem to have died a natural death in the late nineties (witness dead W3C activities) - but have they?

Such services still survive (e.g. BitPass), albeit probably on the current internet fringe, but it did, for me, kind of raise the question about the whole ‘middle man’ economy in which we live.

In a response essay to an essay by Clay Shirky, Scott McCloud argues that micropayments have a place. Artists (Do’ers), have tried the ‘give it away for free’ internet model and realised they are going to go hungry - so there, logically, needs to be a middle ground. If you are to remove the middle man (publisher) - bingo! micropayments.

This is all ‘well and good’ except our entire western economy seems to be structured to cater to a non-productive ‘middle man’ system.

In this system a large percentage of businesses do absolutely nothing but sell services which they subsequently contract out to a ‘Do’er’ or a ‘Think’er’. They are the archetypical middle man business - no real skills, thinking or doing, just a bunch of sales people gliding around on spreadsheets working out how they can make 300% on selling someone else’s skills. The IT contracting business, which generally takes a 10-25% cut of the hourly rate, is specific example which comes to mind.

Is this terribly tragic? Not really.. well yes, it will do your ‘head in’ if you think about it too long that way, and no, because that’s the way it is.

What is tragic in my view, is that do’ers and/or think’ers are generally arbitrated in some way by the ‘neithers’, or the ‘Others’. In my long experience, in a variety of publicly funded organisations, this is (the aspiring) middle management (analagous to take a 300% cut middle man in business, in my opinion), who don’t think very deeply, and certainly aren’t capable of do’ing the day to day, but seem to take a very large ‘cut’ of whatever is going.

Don’t get me wrong - there are middle management who really add value - by motivating, guiding etc (a real form of Do’ing) or by being strategic and wholistically clever (a real form of Think’ing). Sadly there are also middle management who don’t (add value).

The point in this case is - it is easy to respect the do’er, or the think’er, but very difficult to find any time for the ‘other’ (apologies for the far too obvious, to me, reference to Jethro Tull’s - Thick as a Brick).

And, of course, when any of us meet that person who is a ‘do’er’, who can also ‘think’, we are green with envy….