Kevin Berrey, the Writer/Director/Filmmaker and principal of Screaming Panda, posted this question to Twitter this morning: What happens when you cross this Edelman study on trust (who trusts who) with the Dunbar number (how many friends can you really have)?

My answer is: Nothing, because generalities are irrelevant.

There’s no magic bullet to fixing the food system. A problem with so many distinct pieces needs just as many creative solutions. Luckily for us, the tide is turning – the last six years or so have given rise to a new kind of food activism.

There is no middle for fashion mags, “Fashion magazines should go up market, not down”: http://is.gd/6O5I7

A vital aspect of Totonno’s, beyond the deliciousness of the pies, is the way he chose to run the shop: it opened at 3pm, they made a certain amount of pizza dough for the day, and when it ran out they closed up shop, no matter how long the line of potential patrons remained. The business did not go out of business, nor did it balloon into a national brand (which seems to be the progression of most food enterprises these days). The place has remained a vibrant business for nearly 100 years, buzzing along merrily.

For small, entrepreneurial, creative and passionate business the marketplace has been hit hard to the point of evaporation. To succeed in the downturn many businesses have shifted focus, either through hyper-specialization, or by the opposite, seeking new and larger markets. It’s a repositioning of businesses to the polar edges of a marketplace scale.

We need new words to cover these intricacies. The historic “local” is defined by proximity. The associative local is defined by relationship. My reading of the undertone is that there is a greater shift towards the historical local which is burgeoning on the associative one. There seems to be new interest (and potential cash flows) in providing services/platforms for the historical local.

We are now entering the Lace Economy (exiting the Web + Bubble Economy). The Lace Economy is both a fine-tuning of our networks and relationships, and a demand for services and products that are well crafted, genuine, and trend towards supporting the local and regional…New networks are being amassed through a mix of web-based tools (Facebooks, LinkedIn) and traditional channels (networking, associations). These form into a tangled, limitless, and underproductive web. Though there is an intoxicating excitement in the chaos of tangled relationships, the ever-increasing girth of networks makes these connections fragile and meaningless.

Intelligence has a diminished bearing on economic prosperity. Employers are shedding workers by the price-tag regardless of merit, experience, or potential. If business revenues fall off a cliff the first instinct is survival, not productivity. This opens the door to a renewed emphasis on “Creativity,” which implies less investment in goods, and more emphasis on making something from nothing. Call it “Doing.” In our new economy either you do something that resonates, or you don’t.

The foundation for each has been affordable rent for both live and work, public transportation or ease-of-movement (foot, bike), decent schools, cheap yet good food, and easy access to transportation hubs to be accessible to, and to connect with, the greater area. These elements attract boot-strapping creative professionals who both live and work locally, and lead towards greater prosperity, not only for themselves, but for their overall neighborhood (increased property values, greater choice of services, more infrastructure attention, safer streets).

Google’s new FastFlip news “reading” tool is a giant robot sent to crush the “real” people, the peer-to-peer peeps, using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. to share news links. The people will prevail!