Hello, my friends. My apologies for the delay since my last post. I’ve been on holiday—took a visit to Aoraki/Mt. Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak. If you are ever in this part of the world, it’s worth a visit. Incredible hikes, glacier skiing, and the Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Centre: what more could you want?

Anyhoo, I’m back now, and noticing an uptick in the number of articles mentioning the word ‘bubble’ or sneaking around its edges. Take for example Adam Lashinsky’s piece in Fortune, describing his sense of deja-vu during his visit to the Twitter offices:

Facebook and YouTube have yet to gush profits - a fact that is the talk of Silicon Valley. Yet here I am again, in July 2008, listening to yet another boyish entrepreneur discuss a quirky, compelling - and nearly revenue-less - startup… Only in the tech business are companies born with neither a clear reason for being nor a clue as to how they’ll produce profits.

When it comes to economic activity, be it real estate, stock markets, or venture capitalism, there’s a universal tension between the “fear of losing” and the “fear of not winning”. Nobody wants to be in the market when it crashes, but nobody wants to be out of the market if it keeps going up.

These two fears do battle as markets rise and fall, transitioning through what I’m going to call the Five Stages of Twitter. And, if you’ll indulge my flight of fancy, I’d like to take a look at them through the eyes of a potential shareholder, in a parallel universe where Twitter’s already had its IPO.

Stage 1: Denial
The first few indicators begin to amass that a market is ready for a slowdown, but you are having so much fun on Twitter, you’re absolutely certain they’ll be able to monetize it somehow. They can’t provide a service this important to this many people without finding a way to extract value. When they do, you know it’ll be huge—and you’ve got a big fear of not winning. You buy more stock.

Stage 2: Anger
You get the Fail Whale for the fifth day in a row. “They can’t get away with this!” you fume. You start the Twitter, Fix Your Servers! group on Facebook, and garner 42,376 supporters in three days. The passionate cries of the Twitterers show you how much grassroots support the company has—and you don’t want to miss out on that kind of movement. You buy more stock.

Stage 3: Bargaining
You read that Twitter not only has no revenue model, they actually think it would be a mistake to come up with one. The Twitter CEO says they’ll monetize “when the time is right.” Somewhere else, a man tells his girlfriend he’ll leave his wife “when the time is right.” You decide that you’ll only keep your shares if the company gets support from the venture community. They get $15 million. You buy more stock.

Stage 4: Depression
Your tweets get shorter and shorter as your tenuous grasp on the English language slips away. Where once 140 characters seemed like an impossible restriction, now you struggle to fill the space. You realize that the more time you spend Twittering, the less you have to tweet about. To feed your gaping spiritual void, you buy more stock.

Stage 5: Acceptance
Twitter has yet to realize any revenue. Ebay writes off $900 million of its purchase of Skype, a figure Google seems destined to outdo with YouTube. Facebook downgrades its valuation from $15 billion to $3.75 billion.

You sell your Twitter stock, and buy shares in Plurk instead.

The above commentary is intended to be a bit of a giggle, and does not constitute investment advice. Follow me on http://twitter.com/kcolbin.

As without, so within.

This lesson is repeated infinitely, in DNA and in fractals, in the way our emotions wreak havoc with our physical appearance, and in the way our individual beliefs and values generate our societal behavior.

We are in a constant state of expressing who we are. Our bodies, our homes, our partners, and our governments are all reflections of us, and each one of us is an integral contributor to the whole of humanity’s experience.

But the connection isn’t always visible. I’ve been corresponding recently with the Belgian philosopher Michel Bauwens, who started the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. He stumbled on my Internet Hierarchy of Needs, and compared it to Steven Vedro’s work on the evolution of teleconsciousness. Steven correlates our technological developments with Hindu chakras; in his sixth level, he touches on this idea that the whole of creation is contained within each particle:

On an inner spiritual level, Buddhism calls the sixth-level realm of perception Dharmadhatu, where “to see one object is, therefore, to see all objects.” In poet William Blake’s words: ‘to see a World in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.’

Our exchange got me thinking about the connection between our human development and our technological development, and I emailed Steven and Michel with the following:

…one of the parallels I’m seeing between the digital universe and the human quest for enlightenment is a growing appreciation that the individual is only a tiny part of an interconnected whole.

This is true in the physical world, but the illusion of disconnection is powerful. Online, people involved in Wikipedia and other crowd-sourcing efforts have the very real experience of being a tiny yet vital component of a larger organism. Increased connectivity drives this awareness further, as the great ocean of information heaving around us becomes more visible.

Twitter is a tangible example of what I’m describing here. Hugh MacLeod describes Twitter as “a river you live beside. You don?t have to see every passing boat or catch every fish to live beside it.” I’ll build on that: if you use Twitter, you are a fish and you are a boat and you are a person sitting on the bank. You’re the weeds and the bullrushes and the crabs and the crocodiles. You are the river.

This is easy to see on Twitter. It’s easy to grasp that the steady stream of Tweet consciousness is created by all of us who participate. And this is the parallel I’m drawing with human consciousness. The world of Twitter is the collective creation of the people of Twitter; the physical world is the collective creation not just of the people of the world, but of all of its life forms.

In a piece on Reality Sandwich called The Next Buddha Will Be a Collective, Michel says:

In this way, a new collective body of spiritual experiences is created, which is continuously co-created by the inquiring spiritual communities and individuals. The outcome of that process will be a co-created reality that is unpredictable and will create new, as yet unpredictable spiritual formats.

The crowdsourcing model?Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube?makes it so easy to see online, but the spiritual advancement comes from understanding that our physical world is also crowdsourced and decentralized, that we are all pieces of a whole, and that, really, there is no difference between you and me.

Feedback welcome.

Photo courtesy John Suler.