In this mini-series, we're going to talk about the events of November 22, 1963 -- the day John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated. We're going to talk about how the CIA used edge competencies -- the ability to create new value by leveraging value created outside of your company, a key concept in web 2.0 -- to kill John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States.

Let's start by establishing some facts. But remember: do not trust me, a self-proclaimed tin foil hat kook, on any of these matters; you're welcome -- or better yet, encouraged! -- to become a hero by initiating yourself in a quest to learn the truth about the Kennedy assassination to see how democracy was subverted, how the ruling class killed a hero who sought to help his people achieve greater freedom and independence. For those reading this living in the United States, understanding this event can help you understand why your federal taxes are a lot higher than they need to be, why current US domestic policy is approaching a police state, and why current US foreign policy is based out of fear of a man in a cave.

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On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated in public.

Below is a video of the event. (Note to my fellow tin foil hat kooks: I'm aware of the theory that the footage below, known as the Zapruder film, has been doctored. I'm not sure if that's true; I've heard credible people argue both sides of the issue (on another note, the amount of disinformation related to the Kennedy assassination is astounding). In any event, the point here is only to establish that Kennedy was assassinated in broad daylight).

The first official investigation into the assassination, known as the Warren Commission, is that a "lone nut" shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of a building behind the car that Kennedy was in.

Kooks, and even many mainstream people who typically blindly accept whatever ludicrous lie their authority figures tell them (folks affectionately referred to by kooks as "sheeple" for their tendency to behave like unquestioning sheep), did not accept this, for even the most cursory of investigations essentially established that a single bullet from coming behind Kennedy could not have caused the damage the Warren Commission was claiming it did.

As evidence of a conspiracy grew, a reinvestigation was opened by the United States Congress. The conclusion, issued in 1979, was that there was a second gunman involved in the assassination -- thus making it a conspiracy. The second gunman was not identified, and thus the myth surrounding John F. Kennedy's death was born.

Kooks were not particularly accepting of any "official" explanation, and many independent investigations have been launched by heroes seeking to liberate their people with the gift of truth. One of the most visible heroes in the Kooks for Kennedy movement was Jim Garrison, a district attorney in the city of New Orleans who prosecuted the only case in which a defendent was charged with involvement in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. While Garrison lost the case, he convinced much of the public that individuals within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a department within the executive branch of the United States government, were involved in coordinating the hit on Kennedy. In 1992, acclaimed American film director Oliver Stone created the movie JFK, which was about Garrison's trial and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The movie helped to establish mass public acceptance in the United States of a CIA-related conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

In the next few posts, we'll look at how the CIA leveraged the edge -- the Inverse Universe, the world of value outside of their organization -- to pull off the hit on Kennedy. The posts will be as follows:

Using the Edge to Build Capabilities. In this post we'll look at the diverse and skilled team of assassins the CIA assembled to kill Kennedy, and will look at how web 2.0 entrepreneurs can think about using the edge to quickly develop superior capabilities.

Cost Cutting and the Edge. The CIA attempted to cover all tracks of its involvement, a concept known as "plausible deniability." We'll look at how this concept can be employed by web 2.0 entrepreneurs to keep costs down.

Understanding the Ecosystem. Why did the CIA kill Kennedy? Understanding this question can help web 2.0 entrepreneurs understand the motivations of edge-centric organizations.

Lastly, we'll conclude with some resources for further exploring the Kennedy assassination and the edge-based capabilities the CIA used to pull it off.

NOTE: I use the term CIA in the interests of brevity; a more accurate term would be "elements within the CIA." If you want to get really specific about it, we can say key individuals in the CIA operating out of the JM/WAVE station and involved in the Executive Action program were closely involved in orchestrating the hit on Kennedy. If you want to name names, David Morales is probably one of the first names you can mention. So I'm talking about those folks in the CIA, which is a small minority of the CIA, and does not include more heroic individuals like John Stockwell, Ray McGovern, and Robert Steele.

Last time, I asked if Yahoo Pipes was a web 2.0 hero's weapon -- a tool that could be used to reconstruct the web in a way that increases returns on investments of attention.

I tested it out.

There are two problems:

1. It's not brain-dead simple enough. I have to think too much to use it.

2. I'm beginning to think that the RSS reconstruction tool that will truly change the web (in the O'Reilly sense) will need to be a part of the CMS used to manage the site. In other words, I need to be able to grab feeds and remix them with data from my own databases (which would include customer data as well as my uniquely processed openly available data), and spit out new feeds. In addition I need to be able to grab RSS feeds, process them using an RSS reconstruction tool, and then map the RSS feeds into my database, which can then be used as an intelligence advantage (the only real advantage in web 2.0).

An open source CMS is going to be a big step in the 2.0 revolution, and may even be the big disruptor. See our previous article on content management systems in web 2.0.

In our article on the new rules of publishing 2.0 I mentioned that an enormous opportunity existed for a firm to create an RSS reconstruction tool -- a tool that essentially would facilitate the reconstruction of the web.

Yahoo seems to realize the value of reconstruction tools in an attention economy, and has thus released Yahoo! Pipes, a media reconstruction tool.

Conceptually, this idea is brilliant. We can say this because we know that in an attention economy, the best investments are those that help users maximize the ROI on their attention. Search is currently the leading example of this -- although the disruptor to search will be reconstruction (see our previous article, The Future of Search is Human).

So does Pipes put Yahoo! back in charge of leading the way to the 2.0 revolution?

It could. In order for Yahoo to come from behind and dethrone Google, it's going to really need to leverage its biggest edge asset: their userbase of Del.icio.us, Flickr, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo! Groups, and MyBlogLog kids that are all about social media. These properties need to be woven together into a single web app that individual members can use to create their own reconstruction-based communities. As we discussed in the mythology of web 2.0, the big winner of web 2.0 will be reconstruction-based communities for bloggers. Such communities are at the heart of branding 2.0, and will enable publishers in publishing 2.0 to enjoy a fair and just market where quality publishing gets rewarded accordingly -- while also enabling advertisers to escape the tyranny of waste that Google imposes via AdSense and AdWords. And judging by their recently launched Brand Universe initiative, Yahoo does seem to understand this on a conceptual level.

But alas, in the grand scheme of things, there is a problem: Yahoo is still Yahoo; it is a corporation, bound by structures and legalities of the corporate world and of corporate finances. In web 2.0, the hero's curse -- his poverty, his inability to compete financially with the forces of corporate finance -- is actually his gift: for when 1.0 corporate finance collapses, the organizations (or should I say, the networks) that ascend to top of the market won't just leverage peer-production; they'll be peer-production, and as such will be able to achieve greater edge competencies, cost savings, and innovation capabilities than any 1.0 corporation can even imagine.

It is, as always, inevitable.

YouTube's decision to share revenue with video creators, was, of course, inevitable.

And rest assured, it will be a game changer.

Here's why:

1. It represents a move towards the edge owning the core. Think back to our article on the intersection of management 2.0 and publishing 2.0, where we noted that the management structure would involve the edge owning the core. (In other words, the creatives that create the content own the portal that allocates attention to the content). While the proposed YouTube deal does not involve the edge explicitly owning the core, sharing money is a huge step in that direction, and certainly embodies that idea.

2. More importantly, though, is that this is the first step towards video ads going viral. Once the video creators are getting paid, the video publishers -- meaning sites that republish YouTube videos -- will get a piece of the ad revenue as well. Revver is already doing this. Since the content is packaged with the ads, this helps correct the dysfunctional ad market; quality videos are most likely to get syndicated, and hence creators of quality content will get the most attention and ad revenue. This moves publishing on the web to be more and more of a syndication game, and as such, creates a new, legitimate opportunity for media reconstructors. This in accordance with what we stated would be the new rules for publishing 2.0.

This all assumes, though, that YouTube will be able to overcome its copyright battles. As we learned in the mythology of web 2.0, the battle of the myth of web 2.0 will involve web 2.0 heroes challenging those who profit from the 1.0 property rights economy for the same piece of the profits. The battle will, of course, be won by web 2.0 heroes -- that much is, as the prophecy has told us, inevitable. The only question is whether YouTube will win this battle, or if we will need to wait a few more years before 2.0 really wins.

I think YouTube's going to make it.

Okay, I admit it: maybe the image below is just wishful thinking.

But let me try to convince you why it may be true.

Previously in this mini-series, we discussed the pending collapse of the nation-state as well as the demise of conventional financing systems.

That is essentially about the collapse of authority 1.0: authority granted from the top down, in a hierarchical, bureaucratic, command and control fashion. When authority collapses and is re-built from the bottom up, there's going to be an absence of systems of control.

The new institutions that arise -- the institutions that will have to grow without external capital financing (due to the rising cost of financing an economic collapse would create). The way to grow without external capital financing is through peer production. Think Wikipedia, YouTube, forums, etc.

Organizations committed to harnessing peer production are going to have very different managerial styles; there will be some elements of command and control, but these organizations rely far more on individual choice and contributions given freely.

When individuals participate in an organization based on choice rather than on force, the psychology of the group is characterized by group consciousness as opposed to of mass consciousness. Liz Greene explains the difference in her book Saturn when she writes: "Group consciousness is not mass consciousness for with the former the contribution is voluntary and the worth of the individual is not lost."

In other words, mass consciousness -- the psychology of hierarchical organizations -- is about creating the herd mentality; it is about individuals sacrificing their individuality for the sake of the group. In peer-produced organizations, we see group consciousness; in other words, we see the value of the group being determined by the uniqueness of each individual member's identity and contribution.

Management in web 2.0 is about helping each individual to become a kook, and to weave together the kookiness of all participants into a single cohesive network.

Yes, I'm joking. But when you think about how Wikipedia works, the poster child for the peer produced organization, the truth of the joke may become may apparent.

It is about creating an ecosystem. Ecosystems thrive on diversity and the voluntary contribution of its participants.

To create these kinds of peer-produced organizations -- the kinds of organizations that will be cost-effective enough to escape the need for external financing as well as the dependence upon established social systems that are set to collapse -- command and control methodologies, methodologies that essentially create the herd mentality and the very idea of conformity and the "mainstream," are not going to work. Instead, the organization must be designed to primarily to serve the individual.

In this way, the very idea of conformity and the mainstream will collapse. Culturally, the winning organizations in 2.0 will be peer-produced systems that encourage kookiness and use the kookiness of its members to create wholly unique offerings for public consumption. In this way, 2.0 will help humans escape the shackles of conformity and the herd mentality, thus leaving each one of us free to heighten our individual consciousness and become the unique hero that each one of us is destined to be.

If you're just joining us, you can check out the start page of this mini-series here.

Hello, I call myself Kid Mercury. I am a songwriter, writer, astrologer, and entrepreneur.

This is blog is dedicated towards discussing business strategies for web 2.0. It's also a journal of my experiences with my project, ActoGuitar.

Please feel free to email me at any time at kmercury@gmail.com.

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