 This journey into the relationship economy started with the word consumer with realizing that the word consumer meant to destroy often wastefully as in consumed by fire and that when we were being treated as consumers we were being treated certainly as less than whole humans I call that as gullets with wallets and eyeballs but rather just as things to sell to that as humans who should buy more stuff there's plenty of good words customer and client are lovely words time honored they mean the exchange of value for goods or services member citizen participant person individual household patient audience some people don't like user because they think it means drug user or being used I like it because it means usefulness when you're putting things to use you're a user but I respect people who don't like it my favorite these days actually is ally I think being an ally means you're pulling on the rope in the same direction that's really really important but there's more than this we're not just customers now we have superpowers between the connectivity and the tools the cost of doing things things that companies used to only be able to do we can now do for each other with each other so we can recommend coach mentor be watchdogs writers amateurs and amateurs means a whole bunch of different things amateur historians amateur archaeologist amateur scientists all different sorts of things we can test share repair direct we are all over the place it's really quite impressive which leads us to one more step which is what if these people formerly known as consumers don't actually need companies what if they can teach each other using unschooling what if they can share software they've written using open source which companies participate in as well in a big way these days what if they can open science what if they can change their towns what if they can share goods rather than buying goods all the time what if they can fund one another's efforts using crowdfunding this really is an open question right now because all the things that I'm listing here exist today these are not wish list items these exist today so if companies want to engage these consumers these formerly known as consumer people they're going to need to engage in a language shift the old language that surrounds consumer is the language of profit maximization of maximizing shareholder value you launch campaigns against target demographics it's the language of war it's the language of ownership market share sustainable competitive advantage control broadcast that that's the world we've been coming from that's the world that's been active for for almost a century that language is shifting slowly but it's shifting to words that had no room in the boardroom or executive meeting room before like meaning and purpose and thriving and emergence and commons and gifting that are now really important so companies are understanding that they need to act as peers in the arena and to be seen as trustworthy they need to act in a vulnerable way they need to think of membership not ownership transparency not proprietary stuff and this is a big deal so our language shift is metaphors of war and cattle herding and profit maximization to maybe metaphors of community and relationship gardening cultivation the language around these sorts of activities is the right language that puts your brain in the frame of treating people as whole humans as treating people with respect and that's the goal so partly i realized in the mid 90s that the word consumer was part of our problem a gigantic part of our current problem and that if we focus on that and change the language we can actually get somewhere much more productive and we can start tweeting each other as whole humans again with respect i'm jerry mikulski thank you for watching this rec cast there's a lot more at the links on this page thanks for watching and subscribe if you like this