Real social commerce is on display at Silver Spring Farm in Canada in July 2013. The farm is run by volunteers for persons with developmental disabilities.

If you are looking, say, for fresh garlic scapes, you drive onto the farm, down a dirt road, turn right until you find them on a table along with a blue bucket and the above sign. Next you put your $5 in the bucket and take two bags home.

There is no one there but you and their money and their produce.

Anyway, it reminded me of a scene I wrote in Book 1 of Quantum Entity Trilogy where young physicist Damien Bell is sitting in Frans (an all-night coffee shop) in TO talking to Ellen Books, a marcom girl from Elmira (in upstate New York). The year is around 2047 or 2048. They are talking about an aging Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and a guy who ran a doughnut shop in Santa Cruz years ago–

st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) }

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) }

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

“Zuckerberg wasn’t the first guy who was totally focused on building insanely great products instead of going after the money.”

“Who was?”

“It wasn’t Jobs either.”

“Who is Jobs?” Ellen asked sacrilegiously.

“Steve Jobs. He was one of two guys who started Apple in a Cupertino garage in the 1970s. You know, the people whose phones we hack?”

“Oops.”

“He was like some kind of alien—he revolutionized about half a dozen industries, maybe more than anyone else ever has.”

“Uh, huh,” said Ellen. She hated disappointing Damien, and so, said the minimum now—she didn’t want to put her foot in it again.

“Computers, GUI, UI, animation, mobile communications, music, tablets, publishing, film, and—either just before or just after his passing—TV. You must have studied some of his revolutionary business models, Ellen?” added a now chagrined Damien.

“Actually we did, but I just didn’t place the name. The original iPhone is still probably the greatest single profit-generating tech product ever. At the time,” Ellen continued, wanting to show Damien that he hadn’t hired a complete dunderhead to work with him at QCC, “it was the most complex business ecosystem ever created with a highly variegated utility to its users and multiple revenue channels including a share of carrier monthly subscriber revenues, iTunes downloads, app sales, app revenues, and advertising revenues in addition to the sale of the gadget in the first place. Oh, it had search fees too. They even had sponsors for the thing and revenues from selling product rights (that’s where people pay for the right to be part of an iPhone launch or its product menu and home screen). Their ROI on the thing was something like an incredible, maybe never matched, 288% per annum.” Ellen was breathless when she finished her dissertation, but Damien was not really paying attention.

“But it wasn’t Jobs that was the first guy to be ‘other directed’ in business either,” he said.

“I liked Mark’s comment: ‘The thing I ask myself almost every day is—am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’ Steve probably asked himself that question every day too,” Ellen added.

“I’m not talking about Mark or Steve, Ellen.”

“Uh-huh. Then who?”

“It was a guy who ran an all-night coffee and donut shop in Santa Cruz. Pops told me about him.

“Pops went to UCSC in the late 1960s, and he and his girl used to go to this place in downtown Santa Cruz at like two in the morning. They were either pulling all-nighters, finishing assignments, studying for exams, or stoned—or maybe all four.” Damien always got this trance-like look on his face when he talked about his grandfather. It fascinated Ellen. She liked their stories and, although she had never met Pops, she would like to.

He must be incredibly old by now. Damien had told her how, as late as the early part of the 21^st century, there were still “kids” around who could say that their daddies had fought in the Civil War between the states. Ellen, an American, couldn’t see how this was possible. Apparently it was.

If a guy who was, say, 16, Damien told her, fought in the last year of that war (1865) and married at 70 (as some of them did) a much younger woman (which they also often did), they could have had a kid as late as, say, (his) age 80, which would make the year 1929. So, by 2001, that kid would be only 72. So Pops was old but still around and still a big part of Damien’s life.

“Anyway, the guy who owned the shop was in the back—making donuts, I guess—when Pops and his girlfriend came in for coffee and something to eat. There were always mountain men in the shop at that time of night, finishing their run into town and having a coffee before shoving off back home. Those guys brought kilos of California weed into town to dry in natural gas ovens and then sell. It was heavy, wet marijuana but organic and less powerful than modern plants.

“What Pops liked about the place was that after you helped yourself to a coffee and donut (there were no servers), you could go behind the counter, open his cash drawer, figure out what you owed, put your paper money or coins in the drawer, take out the correct change, and, with a wave to the owner, you would leave.”

“Hah, try that today,” said Ellen. She got another disapproving look from Damien and froze from the inside.

“But isn’t that exactly what you guys in marcom talk about—things like ‘freemium’ models or ‘pay-what-you-can-afford’ business methods?”

Ellen looked down and said nothing.

“Anywho,” Damien continued, “Pops was quite sure he had seen a young, teenage Jobs in that shop in 1969, and what he saw there probably influenced Apple, and, two generations later, it allowed Gen Y to seize control of the world economy from a narcissistic baby-boomer generation and a whiny, ill-prepared, and tech-phobic Gen X.

“The donut shop guy just wanted to focus on making insanely great food and coffee for his clients, not on making change for customers. Pops said they were the best donuts he had ever tasted, but that mighta been because his taste buds were as young as he was at the time, and he was probably wasted too.”

Ellen stared at her boss and colleague and asked herself, ‘How does he know all this stuff at age 23?’ Damien had just turned 23.

@ProfBruce

@QuantumEntity