Venessa Miemis on The Social Revolution

Venessa doesn’t use the term ‘social revolution’, but she is talking about it, which is why she is going to be so good to have at the upcoming Social Business Edge event in NYC, 19 April 2010. She recently had a big epiphany about the subversive and uniting power of the social web, and it has led to a really large outpouring of ideas about the connections between us, how we value what is important, and the transformative power of the post-everything economy:

via How to Spark a Snowcrash, & What the Web Really Does

2. Share yourself.

This is the part where mindfulness comes in, and where you really have to start exploring the depths of personal Identity.

That’s a lot to ask, and you may not have even asked yourself that question in a while. That’s the point. If you were really going to live in a trust-based society – what would that look like? Who would you be?

There’s a big path of self-discovery and self-reflection that goes on, there’s a lot of confronting your beliefs and your ego, and it’s painful sometimes.

For me, that is kind of the beauty of the web. It can help you to help yourself, if you choose to use it to that end.

And the way that “it” helps you, is that PEOPLE help you. It’s the people. It’s always been about the people.

Why has our society become so jaded, so selfish, so afraid, so arrogant, so egotistical, and so greedy?

I think it’s because our society doesn’t give us many chances to share ourselves with each other. To really let our guards down and just be authentic, good people, who are not out for gain, who are not out to exploit each other in order to get ahead, but who just want to be able to freely exchange gifts and collaborate because it makes us feel good.

Society doesn’t want this. You want to know why?

Because these things are free.

What does society reward? Cheating. Stealing. Exploitation. Fame. Big houses. Fancy cars. Executive titles. Material stuff. All these things are attached to something else. Something has to be sacrificed to get these things. And they often don’t make you happy in the end. They’re not who you really are, or what you really care about, but you do them because that’s how it’s set up, and we’re just operating within the framework that exists.

But, there’s this other way.

In this experimental society in which you can participate, if you want – people are a little more “real.” People will give you advice, pass along a link they think might interest you, offer to collaborate on a real project, or exchange some information with you, for no other reason besides that it’s “how THIS system works.”

The precondition is trust. You can’t buy trust. You can’t force trust.

You earn trust.

You earn it by sharing your gifts. I don’t know how to tell you what yours is. It took me years of exploration to find mine, but I can say from my firsthand experience on the web, that my trust network pulled me forward into the realm where I made the discovery. The search for self-identity that I’ve been on my life was actually aided by real people around the planet who I’ve never actually met.

The process of self-discovery is of course completely personal. I can only tell you that for me, starting this blog was one of my greatest tools. Writing my thoughts was a powerful way for me to practice thinking about what I think, and critically evaluate myself. The even better part is when other people started leaving comments on my posts, challenging the way I think, offering their perspectives, and making me rethink what I thought I knew. These conversations have been evolving for months, but each blog post resulted in people leaving comments that challenged my thinking further and further. Sometimes people disagreed with me, and sometimes I wanted to lash out and defend my thinking.

But instead, I tried to understand that other person’s perspective, see where they’re coming from, and imagine why they might think what they think. I tried to learn empathy. I think empathy is a critical emotion to develop in a trust society, and also a necessary one to help bring about ‘the shift.’

The learning process that takes place during this self-discovery isn’t just a discovery of self, but the discovery of self in relation to others. The thinking process becomes one that can encompass the idea of interdependence. I don’t know how to explain this, but I can only say this “new way of thinking” involves a transcendence of ego. It is a mental model that assumes that problems cannot be solved alone, and that collaboration is not just desirable, but is actually a display of higher intelligence.

Her explosion of insight is so similar to what has happened to me in past years. Blogging is certainly the most important single activity in my life, as a connection building device, and it has led to the same insights about the development of self-identity based on affiliation with others of like mind. “I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections,” I have said countless times.  And our primary motivations here are extra-market: we are not principally motivated by naked economics in our social intertactions here: our goals are more diffused, and social.

I do not mean to sound patronizing when I say that it is giving me great joy to watch Venessa take these insights and inflame a community of others based on her own burning need to explain it to herself.

It is through others that we are, ourselves, made human; made more. Venessa is grounding me in that, once again, and I honor her for it.