Column

Alvin Toffler, that amazing futurologist, predicted in the early 1980s about the emergence of a new economic creature. He called it the prosumer. A prosumer is essentially a consumer who’s morphing into a producer.

Perhaps the best example of prosumerism could be a gaming freak who decides to build his own high-end computer system instead of buying a readymade.

Last week, when I hooked up an Edifier 5.1 music system with a Philips DVD player, a Samsung TV, and a Logitech universal remote, wasting an entire Sunday in the process, I graduated to a prosumer.

By doing so, I displaced six people: an electrician, a sound specialist, and four after-sales boys. Four, because I connected four brands.

But that’s not the only economic displacement I triggered: I also hijacked the last step in maufaturing, assembly.

By cobbling together electronic sub-systems, and creating a home-theatre, I had turned Edifier, Samsung, Philips, and Logitech into suppliers. I had created my own brand by personalising a music system.

But prosumerism is slightly more complex than that. In his book, Revolutionary Wealth, Toffler examines how online transactions have made ordinary shoppers into holiday agents, brokers, tellers, content producers, and peddlers of ideas. In essence, companies are passing on activities to the customer, cutting costs and upping margins. Unfortunately, nobody’s paying you and me.

In a recent interview to Lawrence M Fisher, of Strategy + Business, Toffler said: “How do you lump finance, manufacturing, services and countless other activities under the term ‘economy’?

The link is that they are all monetised. The term ‘prosumer’ deals with activities that are not monetised. Although they are very different activities, they have a powerful aggregate impact on the money economy.

Our argument to economists is: Don’t underestimate it. Identify it; recognise its existence; recognise that it can take activities out of the market, the way Napster took music out of the money economy and transferred it into the non-money economy.”

Now just think of other activities that have been handed over to us conveniently. Take civic duties, for instance.

If you scan your neighbourhood, you’ll find green activists, area locality maintenance managers, social engineers, animal lovers, friends of the corporator, and good samaritans.

The city’s elected representatives and bureaucrats have outsourced their work to them. Welcome to a new breed of unpaid, determined citizens who are displacing bureaucrats in the non-money economy. They are the new civic prosumers.

When was the last time you saw a boss being a boss? As any boss will tell you, his secretaries have all converged into his PDA; his subordinates have turned him into a BPO by outsourcing their key projects; his line managers have upgraded him to a call centre by calling him 24/7 for market insights; and his deputies use him as an R&D centre for strategic planning. No wonder you have a growing tribe of corporate prosumers — bosses who double up as employees.

The oldest phenomenon in the non-money economy happened when parents turned into teachers, spending hours bringing kids up to speed.

Taking a cue, teachers set up private tutorials and got paid for what parents where doing.

That to-ing and fro-ing continues till date, the latest being home-schooling. But even that will collapse once parents realise they have too much on their plate. While parent prosumers are not new, their transformation indicates dissonance with the present education system.

What do all these trends foretell? As futurologists have been reminding us, technology is shifting roles, customers are getting more demanding and choosy, and economies are flushing out cost from their systems.

In short, roles are moving, or are being added, to key decision-makers like parents, CEOs and citizens. They know exactly what they want and why they want it. To put simply, savvy customers are reengineering and reassembling the economy.

So, next time you run into a Mithi messiah, a pothole prophet, or a vitaran vigilante, please remember: these Napsters are born everytime a bureaucrat is caught napping.

Email: vinaykamat@dnaindia.net