Economic benefits of the Long Tail theory haven’t yet materialized in practice. Why? Because our distribution channels are still mostly mass channels, not micro channels.
The Hive will connect people as individual transmitters and receivers. You can’t get more “micro” than that.
So the Hive will grow and grow and grow as people connect. But, ironically, fractal growth comes from breaking. The word itself means “to break.” The Hive will break economies down into micro-economies. The increased efficiency of these economies will become a part of the then healthier, ever larger economies.
It’s what Obama called for when he pledged during the campaign that they would regrow the economy from “the bottom up.” The idea is that you strengthen the big by strengthening the individual building blocks.
In fact, you form the big by just putting the small together.
This is the “business model” of nature. It’s obviously the one that works.
So before we build up the economy, we first need to break it down. But how do we do that?
The key is social connection. For most of our 200 thousand years on Earth, until the last .05% of it!, social networks and economic networks were one in the same.
The Hive will be a social network AND an economic network – simultaneously!
For now, I’ll give one quick example. Say that Debbie makes the best chili in the world. She is unemployed and there are no jobs available. So she approaches local cafes to see if any of them would be willing to buy her chili, which she can make in a friend’s legally sanctioned kitchen.
Would any of these cafes be willing to do it? It’s doubtful. They have their own cooks.
But what if Debbie could say, “I have a social following and can bring you new customers”? Then, of course, her chance of getting adopters goes way up.
Now say that Debbie is in the Hive. As a person just starting out, she doesn’t have money to spend on advertising, but she has friends she believes will both buy and promote her chili for free, so she creates a video that shows her making her chili, talking about how her grandmother in Texas taught her and coyly saying sorry, but she can’t reveal the one secret ingredient that makes it so special.
Debbie uploads the video to the Hive’s open ad network, giving the locations of the two cafes where her chili can be found: one on the east side and the other on the west side.
Sure enough, the demand for “Debbie’s Chili” is strong and soon the cafes themselves start paying for the ads, so that the people who distribute them are now compensated by meal discounts and/or cash (more on this later).
Debbie’s skill at making chili earns money for her, increases revenue of the local farmers/merchants who supply her ingredients, increases the cafes’ clientele, which increases traffic to the surrounding businesses, which revitalizes the tax base, and so on.
Notice how people with all kinds of talents get more work from a setup like this: from creatives like videographers, writers and actors (who will create the ads) to more hands-on farmers, manufacturers and merchants.
Now multiply Debbie’s experience by millions. And millions. People get compensated by doing what they love to do and are best at. The benefits of that passion and skill flow up, strengthening everybody.
It’s getting the economy back to the individual level. It’s making entrepreneurs out of Debbie and thousands of soup makers like her. It’s giving her a channel to create her own viable business, instead of hoping against hope for a job on the production line at Campbells.
Too many corporations have grown way too big. We need to break capitalism back down into smaller, stronger pieces. Hey, let’s call it Fractal Capitalism. Why not? 
Only the Internet can make this reality. But the Web is incapable. It’s not structured conducibly and it’s “culture of free” is hostile. We need the “free plus compensated” Hive to create the economic micro channels that will make a new kind of capitalism possible the world over.
Tags: channels, Creating Channels, distribution channels, Fractal Capitalism, Fractal economy, fractals, the Long Tail
