In my earlier comment today, I discussed Kevin Depew's commentary on Minyanville. (Specifically item 5 of his Five Things You Need to Know.)

The most provocative part of this comment is at the end, when he wonders aloud:

• The credit-fueled view of absence as deprivation shifts under this weight of material possessions, so that absence becomes its opposite, the presence of some thing conspicuous by its invisibility, and attractive by the difficulty of measurement at a glance, void of design, label, price tag, categorization.
• This is not anti-capitalist.
• It is capitalism evolved, pushed toward the commodification of the intangible, the priceless, involving the exchange of that which defies external measurement.
• In that view of capitalism what are the modes of production? What is being exchanged exactly? What is it that is being commoditized and valued per this invisible exchange mechanism?
• Think about it.

OK, I've got to admit it, I've been thinking about such things for a while.

The first, and most obvious thing to note is that "stuff" doesn't go away. We still need shelter, food transportation and energy. It is also human nature that we will want some form of entertainment or other diversions, though they may come in very different, much less conspicuous forms.

This actually fits nicely with Jeff Saut's theory (also often espoused on Minyanville) that "stuff" stocks will do well. We may not need all sorts of conspicuous consmption, but we sure will need "stuff," and particularly the basic stuff that sustains us.

But some of our other needs will change.

In keeping with Kevin's preference for lists of five things, I'll focus on the five things that Aristotle said nobody could have too much of:

Health will be one of the most valued possessions, as it has been since Aristotle first noted it as one of the five things nobody can have too much of. It will become the world's largest business. It is the ideal "nothing" business, because it's absence is far more notable than it's presence.

Knowledge, will be the key to success, far more than citizenship, physical location, material possession or any other physical attribute. Other than health, the "knowledge" business -- or more to the point, businesses that are based on unique knowledge -- will be another great place to be. Like other "nothing" businesses, it is not obvious, except to the owner and those with whom the owner chooses to share it. (And it's worth noting that in a world where the most important bit of knowledge is likely be contained your own DNA, "health" and "knowledge" are very much related, if not one and the same.)

The opposite side of knowledge will be privacy, or to put it otherwise, the ability to control and limit others' knowledge about you. I expect that today's crude "identify theft prevention" services will evolve into "personal information control" services. Privacy will be paid for and the permission to intrude will be a marketable commodity. Publicity will be easily achievable by anybody willing to do something outrageous enough in some easily-accessible and free medium. Being unknown will be hard and probably expensive. The field of "private information control and commercialization" will be born. Talk about a business in which success will be measured in terms of invisibility. My grandfather would probably approve.

Friends are the third item Aristotle noted. If I generalize this to "relationships" then Aristotle's thought aligns well with another of Jeff Saut's hypotheses about where we're going. I expect that relationships will become far more important as "currency" than they are even today. The monetization of all relationships is already happenning, as anybody who has tried to build a professional network, or who has looked for a date above the age of 40 already knows.

Monetization of relationships will become far less taboo and possibly routine for individuals. Just as marketplaces for physical and financial assets proliferated in the past decade, "marketplaces" for relationships and connections of all kinds will mushroom. Imagine a network in which the organization or individual that facilitates relationships takes a "cut" of the value created!

Love is one which I have a much harder time dealing with as a marketable commodity. Not that there aren't plenty of folks who claim to be in that business, but I suspect that Aristotle had something else in mind. (No, not this either!)

In an increasingly dispersed and virtually connected world, I think great relationships will be tougher and tougher to come by. Does this mean that there's a generation of services and value creators that go beyond the capabilities of current offerings like Match.com and eHarmony? Will helping people find and then manage those relationships over increasingly long lifetimes and complex geographies be a real business? Part matchmaker, part marriage counselor, part nanny, part Jewish mother-in-law...

Aristotle's fifth thing is self-esteem. I have a real tough time wrapping my mind around commercial possibilities tied to this one, particularly since self esteem would seem to be largely a derived commodity -- the product of the four above items and many, many more. This also suggests that whoever cracks this one probably will have something really powerful to sell. Ideas?

-btc