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Open Market Transparency and Online Dating

What do sound, monopoly-free open markets have to do with online dating?

I recently read my NAF colleague Barry Lynn‘s new piece in Harper’s, “Killing the Competition.” It was fascinating and depressing reading. The concept of “open markets” helped me better understand the role of good transparency in markets, and of markets in the economy. This role goes unfilled by the massive monopolies Barry studied, and the political rhetoric costuming them ruins our understanding of competition. He hinges on true transparency as a necessary feature for open markets to serve their regulatory purpose. If I can discern the true cost of a good or service, and the vendor reflects this price openly, the transaction is most likely to satisfy us both and promote a collective good value for the whole market and its participants. When the true cost of goods is hidden or not met, as by price fixing or investor overconfidence, then things won’t work out well – dotcom crash, housing crash, environmental ruin. Barry writes about open markets like environmentalists write about the wetlands – they represent immense value beyond dollars.

Right now we should all appreciate the problems with a lack of transparency in the financial and housing markets. “Free markets” don’t promote transparency; usually it is a cover term for monopolies that have already abused, and then suffocated, transparency in their own markets. I remember from high school the lesson of Standard Oil, which viciously undercut the price of oil and took a loss to starve their smaller opponents out of the market. A businessman sees a strategy lesson in this, but on a dull mathematical level, Standard Oil’s value imbalance produced an unsustainable market. The market ceased to be an effective regulatory feature on the retail level, so Standard grew into a monopoly and ceased involvement in a market at all. This is the stuff that fuels wealth inequality and an imbalance in the means of production – the math’s numerical results created painful consequences. If we can easily audit and verify both sides of all value equations, we have price transparency.

I thought about this in the context of relationships and dating. The internet, social media, and all of those algorithms and processing power and networks are a platform for a great broadening of information transparency to the online community. Dating site OK Cupid holds fame from crunching its users’ data and blogging about the statistical results. We used to rely on interpreting the nuance of social interaction, choosing what to show and what to hide, to gauge potential partners and present ourselves. Now, you can see how many times someone views your profile, as just one example. Applying information transparency principles suggests that your per-person profile view count is useful data that can help you make a better decision about pursuing, or avoiding, a person on the site. Yet the folks I know who use OK Cupid entreat me not to click “view profile” when they show me someone’s picture who viewed or messaged them on the service. They don’t want to appear as online stalkers or give away their interest, like shy wallflowers at a high school dance. Despite that data’s availability, they play the game as though it were still solely offline and lacked the datasets of the social media sphere.

This increased transparency will bear consequences, similar to the outcomes of the mathematics and environment of a healthy open market. To avoid clicking someone’s profile, even when you really want to, is like obscuring what you would truly pay for a service in an open market. A “price imbalance” grows more likely, and you both risk less satisfaction with the outcome of your “shopping.” If more people embrace transparency in online dating sites, then the matches will be better for more people – better relationships, perhaps even better than the average relationship of the past, will follow. They’ll teach their kids that transparency was key to how they met each other. Instilling a value of transparency in kids can solve some problems in the future. So, view profiles liberally.

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Repost: “Full Circle”

A few nights ago I was staying up way too late stumbling down the rabbit hole that is the Internet. On a whim I searched for a post I’d written at the beginning of 2009, just after AIESEC United States’ Winter National Conference 08-09, where my term as Local Committee President of AIESEC at Georgia Tech ended. Unfortunately the old AIESEC GT blog, where I’d written the post, was lost in Google’s scorching of all FTP blogs on Blogger. However, that particular post had been copied in full and re-posted on a range voting Yahoo! Group. Since I have just become online services director of AIESEC Life, the AIESEC US alumni association, I have decided to re-post that old bit of euphoric writing in full, for posterity. And maybe for the lulz too.

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On the night of December 29, 2008, I was in a Zen state.

My former teammate and one of the greatest people I have been blessed to know, Tiffany Curtiss, was elected Member Committee President of AIESEC United States in the first free and fair MCP elections in twelve years.

I haven’t cried in a long time, but I came pretty damn close as Missy poured the water on her head and everyone cheered for Tiffany. What was clear to me, though, is that as much as we were cheering for her, we were cheering for the process, for student ownership, for having a voice. For having come so far just shy of six months after the July 4 letter.

The only thought that had space in my head after the bucket fell was back to the weekend of May 12-14, 2006, when I was told “you have no future in AIESEC US” by the top leadership after trying to bring people together and think for themselves. Instead of doing whatever college students do on the weekend, Tiffany and my AIESEC mentor and former LCP of AIESEC LC Cornell, Arthur Maas, spent the entire weekend on the phone with the key players in New York, and when they were talking about “next steps,” Tiffany was talking about right and wrong. Tiffany, of course, was right, and despite being right, her hours and hours on the phone that weekend got me back into AIESEC US. How incredibly appropriate, how it fits in with the music of the Universe. How justice was served and how progress was lifted up!

I turned off my video camera and I walked up to my room, alone. I could barely even shut the door before the immensity of what had just happened washed over me like a tidal wave. I gripped the table and I put my head against the wall. I closed my eyes and let the reality of it flow through every bit of my being. How years and even months ago, this moment was an unthinkable fairy tale – regardless of the winner of the election. I felt like I have not felt in an incredibly long time, and to the powers that put the breath in my lungs, I let forth in an exhale, “thank you.”

Words cannot express the pride I feel that Tiffany was elected MCP.

And finally, mere hours before my term as LCP ended, I was able to participate as a proxy for Milwaukee (Amira taking the seat for GT) in our legislation, where we established our first compendium in twelve years – and I am proud that I was a key part of writing it. I skipped sessions and I stayed up late to work on the constitution and accountability with Jason, and I personally spent the entire day after the election tweaking and perfecting the range voting process, which was one of the final motions we passed – by acclamation. Though it was hard work and it kept me from hanging out nearly as much as I wanted to with the people who matter to me and friends I haven’t met yet, I realized at the end of the conference how much more valuable it was that we spent our time on things that mattered. We did work together, we built the foundations of a new AIESEC US together. That was far better than anything else I’ve experienced at a US conference before, and I hope for the future members that it only grows and does not stop.

While banging the table to close legislation, we heard loud sounds from above – and through the skylights we saw the fireworks heralding a new year. We did it! And the fireworks let everyone know it.

Poetry upon poetry, the formal New Years Eve dinner that night took place in the exact same room as the plenary of the last Winter Conference in St. Louis. My LCP term ended in the exact same room in which it began. A year ago in that room, as we finished singing “Auld Lang Syne,” I thought to myself: “This is either the year AIESEC US will save itself, or the year in which it will be lost forever.”

I could never have pictured us in that same room one year later, triumphant. The truth is stranger than fiction.

A sincere thanks to all of the people who are a part of the fabric that has been my AIESEC Experience thus far. There are many of you to name, and rest assured you will hear it from me soon. But other than Tiffany, the person I must thank most of all is Missy Shields, outgoing MCP and former LCP of AIESEC at Georgia Tech. Without her AIESEC US would not be here today, and I would not be the person I am, plain and simple. She deserves adulation for years and years, and she will be a golden legend for as long as the word “AIESEC” spurs the heartbeats of people looking for a better future.

To you both: because you have changed me, you have changed the world. Hold me to that.

— http://atlanta.nomadlife.org/2009/01/full-circle.aspx

Don’t Be Denied

The greatest things happen. You get back from the greatest conference, a newly fortified grand human being. Snatch about four hours of sleep back in Valencia before catching the six AM train down to Gandia to begin an amazing week of roadtripping (I invented the Spanish word via de calle) and camping through Andalucía, see faces old and new, return and begin the final crunch. You do and learn difficult things. Your amigo comes to visit. And you wake up on a Sunday afternoon, connect to the series of tubes and you get a message from a member of your fabulous TEAM from ITC with the subject line: Next Challenge – Chair for German Regional Conference?!?

And even though you promised yourself that after returning from Romania you would not leave Spain until you were back in the Land of the Free, even though there are so many great trips you could be taking in Spain, even though the plane tickets are a wallet-busting €50, you realize, by Dog, that’s a great opportunity, and you’re flattened and flattered that they would ask you do to it. So you say, “OK.”

And you chair the first offer that came to your box, which will just so happen to be, the best conference in the world, it was the best conference in the world.

That is how I’ll come to be the chair for Germany’s Wild West Region summer conference “Bonanza” from June 14-17.

The greatest things get even better. I was selected to be on the Marketing team as part of the Congress Committee of AIESEC International Congress 2007 in Istanbul, Turkey. This means 40 days of working on the most difficult and significant project I’ve ever been a part of. I am certain I’m going for the right reasons, and I’m going to put myself 100% into the work. I expect to cause a revolution. 40 days living with people from 50 countries in Istanbul and working harder than we’ve ever worked will do some kind of trick. Plus, I’ll get to reunite with one of the big characters of the great Story.

But nothing gold can stay, I know you’ve heard that story told. My love affair with Spain will be cut off on July 1, when I ride back into Atlanta on a white horse. There will be many meetings, and I’ll finally get to return to my own mecca-trough. Have you ever seen the Blue Ridge Mountains, boy? I’ll see them when I return to the steps of Lee Hall in Black Mountain, NC for the YMCA Youth & Government Council on National Affairs (CONA) 40th Anniversary Reunion. How I got there the first time is just the damnedest story, and the people who’ve affected me since – the future conqueror of Planet Earth and the person who, though too far away, still makes me believe in the music of life – will join together again. It’s my blue sky, my sunny day.

But before it all, I’ve got one test, hopefully a visit from a future nomad – my sister – followed by the Bonanza conference, and then to San Sebastián where I’ll encounter my Spanish amiga Alicia and take in quite the beach and pintxos scene.

And before I forget to write for a long time and lose that feeling, I have to say that the one thing I miss truly and forever and that never fails to bring me euphoria is playing music. It is a perpetual dolour to be around people with their drum circles and guitars and smaller instruments and only be able to clap, because everything I play is so large and not portable. Jealousy threatens me when I hear tell of my friends who go to the Capstone or UGA and they can play music all the time (and make a better living than I do at co-op), but it is nigh impossible to keep up at Georgia Tech. Lament of my life. I don’t need drugs. I get my seratonin high elsewhere, when I can.