The Future
Let us combine the ideas of network effects and Web3 tokens (NEWT, as I have termed the combo), and virtual worlds to solve the problems of Attention Recession in marketing and Voter Aggregation in politics. For this, let us extend our imagination to constructing two virtual worlds: µniverse (pronounced mu-universe) and Bharatverse (which probably needs a better name).
| Domain | Marketing | Politics |
| Network Entities | Brands and Customers | Voters and Candidates |
| Problem | Attention Recession | Voter Aggregation |
| Solution | Atomic Rewards | United Voters of India |
| Token | Mu | Bhim |
| Virtual World | µniverse | Bharatverse |
As I wrote at the start of this series, what I am doing here is sparking the imagination. For this, we need to create a vocabulary and give labels to what we are mentally constructing. This helps us bring these worlds to life in our mind’s eye.
Good science fiction does this very well. Apple TV brought Issac Asimov’s Foundation series to life. So does The Expanse, based on the books by James Corey (the joint pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), and available on Amazon Prime Video. For the few hours that we spend reading or watching, we are transported into a different world. In the modern world, some of the digital games that are available do much the same.
My purpose in imagining µniverse is to consider possibilities. What if brands could reward us for our actions? How would that change our behaviour? Brands have always focused on transactions, but not as much on the upstream of attention, engagement and habit formation. How could they do it? Just appealing to our emotions is not going to be enough. This is where the incentives come in – via Atomic Rewards. To make such a system work, it would need to be pan-brand. How can such a mechanism be created so that half the digital ad spending billion being wasted on reacquisition and wrong acquisition via Google and Facebook is channelised to prospects and customers to create a win-win relationship for both sides?
The purpose with Bharatverse is much bigger. The future of a billion Indians has been deeply damaged by our politicians. Freedom, the prerequisite for prosperity, is withering in India as successive governments keep increasing interventions in our personal and commercial lives. No political party is going to do anything different – they are all cut from the same cloth of maximising power of those at the top and their cronies. India’s politics needs a disruption and it is not going to come from within the political class. It needs a people’s revolution. The mobile phone can be the transformation agent. There is a need to educate people, change their minds and channel their votes. Only a Swatantra Lok Sabha can free India from the fetters imposed by politicians and put Indians on an irreversible path to prosperity. How can such a future be realised – not in a generation but with the next election?
Every future begins with an idea in a mind. µniverse and Bharatverse are two such ideas.
