On Disrupting Wall Street

Chris has a good point early in his post on the topic: current “disruptive” innovation amounts to nothing more than a new UI for Wall Street – Mint, Square, Paypal, etc.

The rest of his post, however, assumes that individuals/groups who want to break out of the Wall Street system (read: corrupt plutocratic, isolated system), will still participate in that system… just without the gaming. That’s precisely the wrong play. (Simply put: You don’t want to piss off a parasite and then sit around where it can get you.)

Instead, you need to address the core problems with the gamed system, in this case, scale. (Scale is a function of complexity.) Bring it down, to the almost informal level, where financial services are exactly that rather than products, and you’ve addressed most problems.

There’s a lot of precedence for this kind of thing in the developing world in the form of cooperatives – much of which has tragically been hijacked by economic hitmen.



-Shlok
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24. January 2010 by Shlok Vaidya
Categories: Thinking | Tags: , | 2 comments

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