There are four broad categories of campaigns on The Point: ultimatums, fundraisers, events, and social contracts. They share the same basic elements (a target, goal, tipping point, and action), but are used for substantially different purposes. This post on the social contract is the first in a series of posts highlighting the charms of the different campaign types.

A social contract is an agreement among campaign members. I’ll do something, but only if you and everyone else will cooperate. A social contract is a self-imposed law, like a cantilever bridge ¹, upheld only by the integrity of its internal parts.

Unlike laws, social contracts aren’t enforced by the threat of punishment. So why would anyone adhere to them? Consider this passage from Thomas Schelling’s 1978 masterpiece, “Micromotives and Macrobehavior:”

Shortly after Teddy Green of the Bruins took a hockey stick to his brain, *Newsweek* (October 6, 1969), commented:

Players will not adopt helmets by individual choice for several reasons. Chicago star Bobby Hull cites the simplest factor: “Vanity.” But many players honestly believe that helmets will cut their efficiency and put them at a disadvantage, and others fear ridicule of opponents. The use of helmets will spread only through fear caused by injuries like Green’s — or through a rule making them mandatory … One player summed up the feelings of many: “It’s foolish not to wear a helmet. But I don’t — because the other guys don’t. I know that’s silly, but most of the players feel the same way. If the league made us do it, though, we’d all wear them and nobody would mind.”

Prisoner’s Dilemma

In one way or another, social customs influence everyone’s behavior. If we want to fit in, we specifically conform to customs. If we want to be weird, we specifically don’t. Either way, social customs preempt normal rational decision making by making us answer the question, “how do I want to appear?, “instead of the more fundamental, “how do I want to behave?” Schelling illustrates this phenomenon with the following graph:

• L & R represents the two sides of a binary choice. In our example, L is, “I will not wear a helmet,” and R is “I will wear a helmet.”
• The x axis represents the total number of people (of n possible) choose R. So when x = 0, no one wears a helmet. When x = n, everyone wears a helmet.
• For every value of x, y represents the welfare of choosing L or R.

The state of highest welfare is at x = n, when everyone chooses to wear a helmet. But right now, we’re at x = 0, and L is the better choice. Moving to R makes you significantly worse off. Only if t people select R will it be the better choice.

So how do you get to t? Sadly, you don’t. Not usually. It’s why we do a lot of things that no one really likes doing, because no one can figure out how to get to t. This general situation has been coined the prisoner’s dillemma — when each person acting in their own immediate self interest makes everyone worse off.

One way to get to t is by passing laws, hence the hockey player longing for a league-imposed rule. But laws regulating personal decisions are rare; Americans are exceptionally sensitive to infringements on their freedom to choose ².

Jump the Hump

The Point’s tipping action model eliminates the prisoner’s dilemma of social contracts. People can express their preference for R — anonymously, if need be — without the consequences of actually choosing R until t people select it. No one has to traverse the hump from x = 0 to x = t — it’s simply bypassed. Had The Point been at his disposal, Bobby Hull might have started a campaign stating, “I will wear a helmet, but only if 200 other players agree to wear a helmet as well.”

Use social contracts to eliminate the fruitless vectors of competition. Reach the tipping point, and the strange and the status quo are flipped.

A few examples of how I’d like to use The Point’s social contract:

Clothing

Like most men, I don’t really care about my appearance. Why try to compete in an area where I have an innate disadvantage? But since it’s impossible to get dressed without engaging in choice to some degree, I’ve developed a system that guides my decisions: I wear whatever draws the least amount of attention to itself.

Completely neutralizing fashion is way more complex than it sounds. If I’m too sharp or too scruffy, it will make someone think something about me. I need to closely monitor trends and nimbly adapt to the narrow margin in between. It takes a lot of energy to go unnoticed.

So, I suggest we call the whole thing off with a social contract: I will wear nothing but t-shirts and jeans ³ if 100 million Americans will do it with me.

Toothpaste

I spend at least five minutes every time I buy toothpaste evaluating my choices. I am on a quest for The Perfect Toothpaste Experience, which I deeply believe exists, though it has coyly eluded me thus far (The worst part is, making fun of myself here won’t stop me from doing this again).

Toothpaste is the quintessential example of a market that has overestimated our need for choice. I have probably tried 100 different toothpastes, and can’t say that one of them was any better than any other one. They all rank exactly the same. So I propose a moratorium on the toothpaste wars — let the toothpaste manufacturers of the world form a social contract agreeing to stop inventing new kinds of toothpaste. Let’s agree to a one year disarmament plan that ends with an equitable division of the surviving properties: Crest gets peppermint, Aquafresh gets spearmint, and Colgate gets mint (which, according to their website, is neither peppermint nor spearmint).

Countless Examples

I have to stop myself now. I just deleted like 20 more examples from this post because apparently I can’t get though two of them without collapsing into a rant.

Over and over, you’ll find yourself in situations with others, behaving in a way that, deep down, you all find kind of pointless. As far as I know, The Point is the only model for solving problems like these.

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Today being boss’s day, I thought I would write a bit about the guys who “discovered” and funded The Point, Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell. They are my bosses, in the sense that they could at any time and for any reason throw me to the curb. At least I think that’s true — they’re kind enough or thoughtful enough not to dwell on such matters.

Eric and Brad, who are friends from college at the University of Michigan, are wildly successful serial entrepreneurs. Before we started The Point, they were already operating three rapidly growing companies: InnerWorkings, Echo, and MediaBank.

I met Eric when I joined InnerWorkings in 2006, for what was supposed to be a short career as a software developer before I entered public policy school that fall. I got to know Eric, and for some reason, he started letting me bounce my stupid ideas off of him. He was skeptical of my monkey rental service, Monkey for a Week. He completely dismissed “Understandimation,” my self-help philosophy franchise(and the accompanying Understandimator toolkit). He liked Policy Tree, but didn’t see a business model. I wasn’t really pitching him these things — he was involved in three companies and I never imagined he would start a fourth. I just enjoy talking to people who think big, and Eric fit the bill.

As planned, that fall I left InnerWorkings to start school. In December, when I had the idea that would become The Point, I tried to get in touch with Eric. He called a week later, catching me in between classes. I rambled through a scattered description of the idea, to which he responded by offering — to my great shock — to build a company around the idea (I found out later that he had already heard my pitch from a mutual friend, so his behavior wasn’t as impetuous as it seemed). Over the next week, in between studying for finals, I put together the outline of a business plan and we made a deal. After finals, I would leave school to start The Point.

Well-intentioned friends warned me to be careful about taking money. There are horror stories all over the Web of naive entrepreneurs accepting funding only to watch the investors lay waste to their vision. My experience with Eric and Brad has been the exact opposite. They let me pick the team I wanted. They gave us the support to build the product we wanted. They took care of all the things we didn’t want to deal with — money, administration, networking — and let us focus on our vision. They have been endlessly patient while I learn about business and management.

Most importantly, we share a vision about The Point. We were all literally compelled by the idea. None of us were looking for something to do with our lives, but we all felt that The Point demanded our attention.

I can’t make a sweeping recommendation as to whether entrepreneurs should always accept funding, but I can’t say enough good things about my experience.

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The Point began as a simple observation: — if the majority disagreed with a rule, and they all took action to change it, that rule would be impossible to enforce. The Point is the result of that observation being made post the social networking revolution, which laid the groundwork for this once fanciful notion to become reality.

Community being integral to The Point, we have all the interpersonal features you would expect: add contacts, keep track of what they’re up to, send them messages, customize your profile, etc. Something like The Point would have been inconceivable before social networking broke.

But we are different from traditional social networks. Community isn’t “the point” — rather, as the clear tool for solving problems that are too big to solve alone, it’s a means to an end.

Users of The Point may choose to waive the social experience completely. Simply join a campaign, wait for notice that it has tipped, and take action, knowing that the conditions exist for you to make a difference. It’s possible to derive value from The Point without interacting with other people at all. In this sense, community becomes a background process — an unremarkable assumption of the tipping action model — like an “invisible hand” channeling self-interest into coordinated, mutually beneficial action.

This speaks to the variety of ways we can engage The Point. Most will use it socially, but those who are skeptical of cyber-relations will still enjoy The Point without them.

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The Point has been live for about a week. Thanks for the great feedback — keep it coming!

We’ve made many improvements since launch, most notably to credit card transactions. Fundraiser campaigns require a credit card to join, although you aren’t actually charged until some time later when the campaign tips. We now have a secure system for acquiring and storing your billing information. Your credit card number is transmitted by SSL directly to an extremely safe electronic vault. At no time is your credit card information stored on our servers, so you can sleep well knowing that your private data is in good hands.

What’s next? Our primary focus is performance, a quality we no longer have the luxury to neglect. Expect a huge speed bump later this month.

As for new features: We’ve got a lot of ideas, but we’re trying to ignore them so we can focus on your feedback. At the very least, expect the following:

• A system for users to flag inappropriate content
• An “editor” role: Users with a few extra privileges to help keep The Point tidy
• Better tools for sorting and filtering campaigns, problems, and targets, including the ability to find local content

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A friend forwarded me this chain mail today:

When googling “Jew”, one of the first sites that comes up is JewWatch.com. an anti-semitic site. In order for Google to remove this, they would need a petition of over *500,000* requests…. so let’s make it 1,000,000! Current total signatures approx. 382,574, that’s me. Please help. Go to: http://www.petitiononline.com/rjw23/petition.html to sign the petition. VERY IMPORTANT !! Please pass this one on! It is a truly offensive site spreading lies and hate.

Take a look at the actual petition and you’ll notice a slight difference:

In order for google to remove this They would need a petition of over 50,000 requests….

As far as I can tell, both numbers are arbitrary. The petition isn’t exactly untruthful, but like the statement “I need over $100 to buy a personal jet,” it obfuscates reality.

Having that target number helped this petition become the most active item on the largest petition website. Why? In the parlance of The Point, 50(0),000 acts as a tipping point. Petitioners sign under the pretense that when it’s reached, the problem will “tip,” i.e. it will be solved. We act when we feel like it makes a difference. The petition is popular because it defines the endgame — 500,000 = no more JewWatch. Joining gives us satisfaction because the psuedo-tipping point makes our contribution tangible, however small it may be.

Rather than hoping that Google will listen, a campaign on The Point forces them to listen by coordinating a group action when the tipping point is reached, one that will make Google’s offensive policy cost them more than it’s worth. In this case, a tipping action might be for 1,000,000 people to stop using Google’s search engine.

Every campaign on The Point has what made this petition so popular: a clear path from words into decisive action.

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Admittedly it’s entirely populated with our own employees, but what do you expect on our second day?

We’ve been talking about getting an office Wii since the office started existing, but like many things that were non-critical (or in this case, a hindrance) to The Point’s launch, we never got around to it. It was a pain to figure out who would pitch in, how much each person should pay, and — if enough people ended up committing — collecting the money. Situations like this arise all the time. Everyone wants something, but not so much as to endure the hassle of making it happen.

With The Point, the task became trivial. I quickly created a campaign, invited everyone I thought would have a shred of interest, and waited for it to tip. Here are a few benefits of raising money for a group purchase using The Point:

My decision is independent from the decisions of others

My credit card isn’t charged unless the campaign tips. All I need to do is decide what the good would be worth to me, and pledge that amount. My behavior is no longer contingent on group consensus — I can commit the moment the issue arises without worrying about whether enough members of the group care to reach the total amount.

I know exactly how my money is being used

I’ll pitch in to buy a Wii for the office, but I would never contribute to a generic office “entertainment fund” because of the risk that the person deciding how to use the money defines entertainment differently. I’m much more likely to give money if I know how it will be spent.

My payment is a reflection of what the good is worth to me

In the case of our office, a Wii is a public good. It doesn’t matter who pays what for a public good, as long as there is enough to make the purchase. Why force everyone to pay the same price for something they will share if each of them value it differently? On The Point, what you pay is indicative of what the good and what money are worth to you. Most people decided it was worth $50 to have a Wii at the office. Dan decided it was worth $25, since he’ll probably only play it a couple of times.

Marginal contributions from marginal beneficiaries

Allowing people to pay whatever they want means you can cast a wider net in your search for contributors. Inviting people to your campaign who derive some marginal pleasure from the public good is a way of asking them a question: “We’re considering buying something, but we’re not sure if enough people care. How much would it be worth to you?” It will be worth it for many of these people along the periphery to throw in a couple bucks — and a lot of a little adds up to a lot.

The Point was envisioned as a tool for coordinating the actions of millions, but small groups suffer many of the same barriers to getting things done. Think about how you could use The Point to buy something with your friends or coworkers.

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