We gave you our highly unscientific quiz for figuring out what percent you are. But the eggheaded calculator jockeys at the Wall Street Journal did it for real. Just go here enter in your household income. More »

It’s no coincidence that the rise of the American chain restaurant coincides pretty neatly with the automobile’s shift from an aristocratic toy to a mass means of transportation.  As society grew more mobile, a novel problem arose: As you found yourself routinely passing through areas you didn’t know intimately, how could you know where to grab a decent bite? Standardized franchise restaurants—by adapting the assembly line methods of Henry Ford, appropriately enough—provided the answer. What they might lack in quality, they made up for in consistency: Anywhere the internal combustion engine might take you, you could Look for the Golden Arches (or some other easily recognizable logo) and know exactly what you were going to find. The chain was unlikely to be the best casual dining in town, but you at least knew you weren’t going to be surprised with something epically awful. That was a particular risk for roadside restaurants catering primarily to travelers rather than locals: If you don’t expect to do much repeat business, there’s not much percentage in spending time and effort raising the quality of your food much above the level of “palatable.” The national chain, by contrast, had an incentive to ensure that local managers didn’t injure the reputation of the overall brand. A customer might not ever set foot in a particular McDonalds a second time, but a chain has to be concerned with whether her experience makes it likely she’ll visit any McDonalds again.

Now,  Brad Plumer reports, there’s research suggesting that online review sites like Yelp are cutting into chains’ bottom line by providing an alternative solution to the information problem. The combination of peer-produced online reviews (which cover local diners along with the big-city restaurants) and mobile, location-aware Internet devices has made it incredibly easy  to figure out where you can find the nearest restaurants with good reputations, wherever you might be. Under conditions of uncertainty, the chain represents a rational maximin strategy. As ubiquitous connectivity and peer-production of information reduce that uncertainty, the chain becomes an unnecessary hedge.

Yet it’s not just chain restaurants that have thrived by using standardization and branding to solve a consumer information problem: Branding and marketing generally often serve much the same function. Frequently, generic or store-branded products (soda, cereal, ibuprofen) are literally chemically identical to the more recognizable name-brand product, and only cheaper because they haven’t been saddled with the overhead of a costly marketing campaign designed to signal quality. (Think of the traditional argument for the evolution of peacock feathers: To survive while paying the high overhead cost of such a gaudy display signals genetic fitness.)

Imagine, then, what effect it might have if, five or ten years hence, augmented reality using sophisticated image recognition were as ubiquitous as Internet-enabled phones are becoming in the developed world. Imagine that, for nearly any product consumers encountered, some kind of aggregate rating—based on whatever criteria the individual has determined are most important—would simply appear, with minimal effort. Simply looking at an aisle of products—or even passing shops on the street—I might effortlessly learn which were deemed most satisfactory by people with tastes similar to mine. My incentive to take the time to rank products would be provided by my desire to give the system a basis for determining which other user’s rankings were most likely to be relevant for me. (Think here of Netflix recommendations or other type of social filtering, where contributing ratings enables the system to make better predictions about what I am likely to enjoy.)
With such information more directly available, marketing would become far less relevant to the buyer—and a far less worthwhile investment for the producer. Products, of course, would still need to be distinguished in some way, but a seller with a superior product would be far better able to compete without investing in a costly national marketing campaign. Advertising might be initially important in raising awareness about a new product and building an initial pool of reviews, but its salience would rapidly diminish.
That’s one way things might go, at least. The picture is a bit complicated because today we often “consume” the brand, and not just the product itself. That is a company like Nike might invest a great deal in slick marketing partly in order to create a series of public associations with their logo, so that part of what I’m buying when I purchase their sneakers is what (I hope) the Swoosh signals about the sort of person I am—or how I see myself, at any rate. But this seems like a major consideration in a relatively limited number of product areas, such as clothing (precisely because it’s displayed on the person). If that’s right, the “Yelp Effect” in world where augmented reality technology has been widely adopted could dramatically diminish the broader cultural prominence of corporate logos and brands.

For most of the last decade, Israeli soldiers have been making the transition back to civilian life after their compulsory military service  by going on a drug-dazed recovery trip to India, where an invisible stream of modern global culture runs from the beaches of Goa to the mountains of Himachal Pradesh in the north.  While most of the Israelis eventually return home after a year or so, many have stayed as permanent expat stewards of the stream. The Israeli military stream is changing course these days, and starting to flow through Thailand, where the same pattern of drug-use and conflict with the locals is being repeated.

This pattern of movement among young Israelis is an example of what I’ve started calling a stream. A stream is not a migration pattern, travel in the usual sense, or a consequence of specific kinds of work that require travel (such as seafaring or diplomacy). It is a sort of slow, life-long communal nomadism, enabled by globalization and a sense of shared transnational social identity within a small population.

I’ve been getting increasingly curious about such streams. I have come to believe that though small in terms of absolute numbers (my estimate is between 20-25 million worldwide), the stream citizenry of the world shapes the course of globalization. In fact, it would not be unreasonable to say that streams provide the indirect staffing for the processes of modern technology-driven globalization. They are therefore a distinctly modern phenomenon, not to be confused with earlier mobile populations they may partly resemble.

Stream Citizenship

Stream citizens are not global citizens (a vacuous high-modernist concept that is as culturally anemic as the UN). Their social identities are far narrower and richer. They are (undeclared) stream citizens, whose identities derive from their slow journey across the world.

But the individualist, existential notion of nomadism that I wrote about in On Being an Illegible Person does not apply. In particular, stream citizens are not necessarily nomadic in literal ways (such as living out of cars, boats or mobile homes). They may buy or rent property, accumulate material possessions, and so forth.

Streams are highly sociable collectives, not individuals. The stream itself may be illegible on a map of nation-states, but individuals within it are fairly legible at least to fellow citizens within the same stream. In this sense, streams are like David Hackett Fischer’s folkways. Unlike folkways, streams use geographic movement to structure themselves internally. You could also apply the John Hagel model in The Power of Pull and think of traditional folkways as “stock” folkways and streams as “flow” folkways. The running example in the book (global surfer culture) is not quite a stream, however.

The argument for a distinct new construct, the stream, is not based on a single clear criterion that separates it from other kinds of population movements. Instead, we have a distinctive pattern of deviations from other kinds of population movements.

I have a few examples in mind (such as the Israeli one), but to avoid the dangers of over-fitting, I’ll characterize the idea of the stream via a dozen abstract features, and follow it up with a very primitive and sketchy “world stream map,” without trying to describe specific streams in these abstract terms.

Distinct social identity: Streams possess a unique and distinct social identity, unlike more inchoate movements that may share some of the features of streams.  Unlike rite-of-passage travel patterns though (such as “karma-trekkers”), they tend not to have named, brand-like identities. Instead, they have unmistakeable, but implicit identities.
Partial subsumption: Streams subsume the lives of their citizens more strongly than more diffuse population movements, but less strongly than focused intentional communities like the global surfing community. There is a great deal more variety and individual variation. In particular, there is no solidarity around grand ideologies in the sense of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.  In this, streams differ from nation-states, even though they provide something of an alternative organizational scheme. Not only is the subsumption at about a middling level at any given point in time, it varies in intensity throughout life, being particularly weak early and late in life.
Voluntary slowness: a stream is a pattern of movement where individual movements take place over years or decades, spanning entire development life stages. Unlike a decade-long limbo state imposed by (say) waiting for an American green card, which has individuals impatient to get the process over with and “settle down” in either a new home, or return to an old one, stream citizens don’t experience their state as a limbo state. They are always “home.” Being a relatively new phenomenon, there are no streams that are life-encompassing as yet. But I believe those will emerge — distinctive cradle-t0-grave geographic journeys.
Exclusionary communality: streams provide a great deal of social support to those who are eligible to join and choose to do so, but are highly exclusionary with respect to very traditional variables like race, ethnicity and gender. The exclusionary nature of streams is not self-adopted, but a consequence of the fact that streams pass through multiple host cultures.  A shared social identity in one host culture may splinter in another, while distinct ones may be conflated in unwanted ways.  So only relatively tightly-circumscribed social identities can survive these forces intact. I am really tempted to illustrate this particular point with examples, but I’ll leave it as an abstraction.
Distinct economic identity: unlike commercial travel that is part of broader economic activity (such as sea-faring), or non-commercial travel (such as tourism), streams tend to be at least partially self-sustaining within every host culture that they pass through. This partial self-sustainability often involves patterns of global commercial activity that lends money a different meaning within the stream. So even though streams don’t issue currencies, and merely borrow the economic apparatus of their host cultures, the money behaves in very different ways while it is circulating within the stream.
Non-tribal: Streams are not completely self-sufficient though, in the sense of segmentary tribes.  This is a crucial distinction from nomads or barbarians in the classical sense. They do not seek to form bonds of mechanical solidarity with other streams. Instead they seek to form fairly strong bonds of organic solidarity (mutual interdependence) with host cultures.
Vorticity: Streams contain higher-tempo patterns of travel among the waypoints, especially to old “home” bases, due to obligations and attachments inherited from pre-stream home cultures.
Partial self-absorption: stream citizens are not very interested in the host cultures they pass through except to the extent of maintaining economic and practical relationships. There is no sense of being on the periphery, looking on with longing at the action at the center. There is no oppressive sense of being trapped in a diaspora-ghetto.
Relative poverty: unlike the global jet-setting (think Davos) elite, streams are generally impoverished. In fact a great deal of the motivation for living in a stream is to leverage limited means. But this does not mean we are only talking about lifestyle-designing Internet marketers in Bali. We are also talking about migrant labor from Asia to the Middle East that starts with a “let me save money working in construction in Dubai for a few years” motivation, but ends up extending to a whole lifetime.
High adaptability: Unlike nomads who carry their lives around with them, creating tiny shells of reassuring familiarity around themselves, stream citizens behave more like hermit crabs. They cobble together the necessities of life — shelter, income, patterns of diet and exercise — from whatever is around them. Stream citizens eat Chinese food in China and Thai food in Thailand, not because they are particularly curious about local cuisines, but because the sustainability of the stream lifestyle is based in part on such adaptation. Nostalgia is weak for stream citizens, as is the faraway-home/near-exotic sense of alienation from surrounding. Stream citizens are both home and abroad at the same time.
Direct connection to globalization: In a sense, the notion of “stream” I am trying to construct is a generalization of the Internet-enabled lifestyle designer, which I think is much too narrow. But streams are definitely a modern phenomenon, and owe their capacity for stable existence to some connection with the infrastructure of globalization. The Internet is the major one for the creative class, but anything from container shipping to the Chimerica manufacturing trade to the globalized high-rise construciton industry qualifies.

Lack of an arrival dynamic: this is perhaps the most important feature. There is no sense of anticipation of an “arrival” event  such as getting an American green card, after which “real” life can begin. There is a wherever you go, there you are indifference to rootedness. This psychological shift is the central individual act. By abandoning arrival-based frames, stream citizens free themselves from yearning for geographically rooted forms of social identity.

The Scale and Impact of Streams

In terms of sheer numbers, global migration does not seem to be a very powerful force. In World 3.0, Pankaj Ghemawat notes that only about 3% of the world’s population comprises first-generation immigrants. Over 90% of the world’s population will never leave their home country.

As a small subset of global migration and travel, the total population of stream citizenry is unlikely to exceed about 0.3% of the world population by my estimate[…]

Trulia's Q1 2011 Rent vs. Buy Index provides guidance to help you make a smart decision on whether it is better to rent or buy in each of America's 50 largest cities by population. The Rent:Buy Ratio is calculated by using the median list price compared with the median rent on two-bedroom apartments, condos and townhomes listed on Trulia.com.

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The mother of all loop-holes.

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