We continue the pre-publication of Adam Arvidsson’s second chapter of The Ethical Economy.

In this excerpt, Adam discusses the concept of the General Intellect, which he also defines here.

Excerpt:

Indeed, the main productive advance of capitalism, for Marx, and for Adam Smith before him, was that it makes possible new forms of productive cooperation. In the Grundrisse and later in Capital it is clear that the concentration of capital in machinery and large factory systems makes possible new more complex forms of social organization in which the productive energies of the multitude are organized in new and more efficient ways. The contribution of machinery is thus both material and immaterial. Indeed, in the Grundrisse it seems that this reorganization of social cooperation constitutes the main productive contribution of machinery and hence the chief source of what Marx called relative surplus-value. […..] This immaterial productive contribution of machinery is what Marx calls General Intellect. General Intellect consists in a number of competences that are inscribed in the social environment organized by capitalist machinery, and hence available freely to its participants, by virtue of their existence as ‘social individuals’. These competences can be cognitive, as in technical or scientific knowledge, but they are also social and affective, as in knowledge about how to organize the production process or how to interact and function in the factory. The point to stress at this point is that General Intellect is the outcome of the re-mediation of social interaction performed by capitalist machinery in the factory. But it is by no means controlled by capital. On the contrary, the free availability of General Intellect in the social environment of the factory means that capital cannot exercise a monopoly over this productive resource. It can be employed for autonomous or even subversive purposes. General Intellect thus contains the potential for an overcoming of the forms of discipline from which this phenomenon originally emerged.

Many have argued that it was this potential autonomy at the heart of the system of advanced capitalism that drove the intensification of capitalist discipline, which marked the Fordist regime. The aim of Fordist social engineering was to reduce the potential for autonomous appropriation of general intellect and to collapse this resource coincide with the medium by which it had been made possible. The aim of Taylorist scientific management was to render productive cooperation on the shop-floor entirely directed by the machine-system by means of which it had been organized. The aim of Fordist marketing was to ensure that consumer needs and habits were predictably dictated by advertising and, latter, television. Within this order value-producing labour was defined as those practices that repeated the tasks set forth by this over-coding of General Intellect: the repetition of an isolated number of tasks in the factory, with no spontaneous interaction or communication permitted; the enactment of the structure of needs transmitted by television advertisements (as in Dallas Smythe’s ultra-Fordist theory of the ‘audience commodity’); the meticulous execution of bureaucratic tasks that saved Eichmann from any ethical responsibility for the crimes he helped to perpetrate.

For a painless and anecdotal introduction to P2P Business and how it is changing the world, listen to Don Tapscott, co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, on Talk of the Nation, in this excellent NPR interview.

Then, mosey on over to our Bookstore and check out the hard copy of this and related P2P Business books!

I was about to post the video on Web 2.0 by Michael Wesch, Assistant Cultural Anthropology Professor at Kansas State University. – when I realised that James Burke had posted it earlier this month here. Other than my personal interests in Web 2.0 and the applications that come with it, I am interested about its implications for cultural institutions such as libraries. Here are some quick thoughts:

• Library 2.0, a vision that libraries are working towards, must look out of the library for guidelines to actions
• It’s not about getting people through the door
• There are the purposeful user, and the ‘purpose-less’ wanderer
• Users are also your most valuable contributers
• Librarians should start playing with library users – it’s all about trust and dialogues
• Expect spaces to be transformed. Both physical and digital

And here’s a librarian’s manifesto: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZblrRs3fkSU

We continue the pre-publication of Adam Arvidsson’s second chapter of The Ethical Economy.

Today, Adam discusses Ethics and capital

‘Ethics’ derives form the Greek which can mean both ‘habit’ (from etomai to use to ..) and ‘character’ mood or, affective state (as in o miaron eton kai gynaikos ysteron- the terrible character that rests in a woman). Ethos relates to that which is shaped in and concerns the interaction between people, whether this be social habits and institutions or subjective moods. Furthermore, for the Greeks, Ethics applied to the interaction between free men, and not to the interaction between men and animals or slaves. Thus the space of ethics was also a space of freedom, where interaction was not predetermined by rigid hierarchies ultimately sanctioned by overwhelming power, but subject to some degree of contingency and openness. It is thus clear that already from the Greeks, ethics, or the ethical problematic, has been concerned with more or less autonomous processes of interaction in which forms of sociality and subjectivity, or, in other worlds, a common social world are shaped. This connection of ethics to the common as a space for autonomy has a long tradition in European continental philosophy, from Hegel to Arendt. Indeed, for Hannah Arendt the fundamentally ethical nature of human nature, and thus the status of human beings as zoon politicon, was based on their capacity to construct a common social world through interaction and communication. Human beings distinguish themselves by their ability to produce what Maurizio Lazzarato has called an ‘ethical surplus’ a more or less table and enduring thing in common: a social relation, an affective experience or a value judgement, that was not there before.

That very same tradition has consistently understood forms of social relations imposed by capital in its ongoing subsumtion of the social as directly antithetical to the fundamentally ethical nature of human nature. To Arendt, the overall discipline that resulted from this process (what she called ‘socialization’) simply deprived human beings of their ethical nature and reduced them to rule-bound creatures, enacting the objective laws of the market or of bureaucratic rationality. Consequently the rise of ‘society’ in the shape of a state managed capitalist administration of the social also deprived human existence of its ethical, and by extension also its political dimension. Habermas argues along similar lines in his thesis of the colonization of the lifeworld.

It is true that Fordist managerial discipline aimed at a neutralization of the ethical or affective aspects of work. The aim of Taylorism was to reduce the worker to an appendage to the machine and to minimize the margin of error and insecurity in his interaction with his fellows as well as with the machine environment. Similarly, early 20th century marketing was conceived as a ‘programming of consumption’ in which spontaneous, ‘irrational’ consumer desires and forms of consumer sociality were to be replaced by programmed desires for a particular range of goods together with the pre-constituted forms of sociality that they implied, like, principally, the nuclear family. As in the logic of the ISAs analysed by Althusser, the goal was the pre-constitution of subjectivity and social relations and hence the reduction to a minimum of the space for ethics. Viewed with recent developments in mind however, this ‘unethical’ nature of capitalism seems to have been more like a passing phase in a more general development. Capital, I would suggest, does not so much obliterate, as much as it re-mediates the ethical.

The following is a long quote from an excellent essay by Steven Shapiro, which starts as a review of the new book by Julian Dibbel, Play Money, in which he combines an analysis of gaming economics with extensive real life experiences in the various game metaverses. Shapiro’s essay draws on Dibbel and adds a fascinating discussion of the scarcity dynamics in virtual worlds. He asks the question: why do we seem to want it, since such games are more popular than the ones based on simple abundance?

We remind our readers that we have a section on Gaming at our wiki. Julian Dibbel’s own work is available here.

Steven Shapiro:

” 18. Any market economy, mercantile or capitalist, presupposes an underlying condition of scarcity. In a society as vast and interconnected — and yet as privatized and atomized — as ours, markets crop up at the slightest hint that any resource, or possible object of desire, is less than immediately accessible. As Dibbell (2006) puts it, “markets will seep like gas through any boundary that gives them the slightest opening” (43). Conversely, markets are killed off by abundance. People stop buying CDs when it is easy to download music for free. You can’t charge for resources that are plentiful, and that it costs almost nothing to produce. This is as much the case in virtual, simulated economies as it is in fully material, physical ones.

19. Why, then, should scarcity be a problem in online virtual worlds? After all, bits and bytes of digital data, like ideas, and unlike physical artifacts, are inherently non-rivalrous goods. They are plenteous, and endlessly replicable — aside from the artificial scarcity introduced by copyright laws and the like. Information, as the saying goes, wants to be free; once the network is in place, the marginal cost of generating, reproducing, and disseminating it is vanishingly small. There is always a certain cost for hardware, of course. LambdaMOO, a decade ago, ran on a single server: hard drive space was therefore at a premium. Dibbell devotes a chapter of My Tiny Life to the economics of LambdaMOO, recounting how this scarcity was man- aged bureaucratically rather than through a market (161-185). But MMOs today suffer from no such limitations. They run on vast arrays of servers; once such a system is online, the marginal cost of adding additional storage space and processing power is, again, extremely low.

20. Economic scarcity in virtual worlds is therefore not inevitable. In Ultima Online and other MMOs, it exists only because it has been deliberately programmed in. Scarcity is not a bug, but a feature. And people find it compelling, even fascinating. Players spend untold hours negotiating the frustrating economic constraints of all these worlds. They turn their play into a kind of work, both menial and entrepreneurial. They perform the dig- ital equivalent of hard labor. Dibbell’s account of his obsessive immersion in Ultima Online’s economic system is what makes Play Money such a compelling read. He tells us about profitable coups he made, about deals that went awry at the last minute, about the times he got ripped off, and about insider manipulation of the Ultima gold market. As Dibbell gets more involved in his economic pursuits, he increasingly loses interest in the social, community, and networking aspects of life in Ultima Online, and indeed in the Dungeons-and-Dragons-like gaming aspects as well. “As I invested myself more and more in the economy of UO players,” he writes, “I could feel myself drifting further and further from their community.” Dibbell is no longer interested in the chatting, socializing, and emotional soap operas that had once preoccupied him on LambdaMOO. Nor does he pay attention to “the dungeon quests, the crafting trades, the big houses and the little chunks of fame that came with owning one.” The overt features of life on Ultima Online have ceased to engage him. All he cares about is the money (149).

21. There have been many attempts at building online virtual worlds in which resources are abundant, and life is free and easy. But none of these worlds has been anywhere near as successful as the scarcity-driven MMOs like Ultima Online and Everquest (Dibbell 2006, 41; Castronova 2001, 16-17). Dibbell and Castronova both puzzle over why this should be so. Castronova takes what I think of as the Captain Kirk approach. Again and again, the Enterprise comes upon what seems to be a utopian world, a world of effortless play. But Kirk always ends up destroying these worlds — in direct violation of the Prime Directive — ostensibly for the inhabitants’ own good. For they need obstacles, they need something to strive for; otherwise life is not worth living. Castronova similarly argues that the difficult challenges of MMOs stave off boredom, and promote intense emotional involvement. “Scarcity is fun,” he writes; “the process of developing avatar capital seems to invoke exactly the same risk and reward structures in the brain that are invoked by personal development in real life” (14-16).

22. Dibbell offers a more sinister, Burroughsian explanation. He suggests that, in our postindustrial, increasingly virtualized world, we have become habituated — addicted, even — to scarcity. “In an atmosphere of oxygen, our bodies learned to breathe; in a world of scarcity, the soul might just as likely learn to need the universal obstacle to its desires” (43). Scarcity is a bit like heroin, in the way it stimulates, and satiates, those risk and reward structures in our brains. The craving for scarcity, and thereby for the market, means the death of the utopian — or at least heterotopian — impulses that used to animate places like LambdaMOO. For the market is voracious; it absorbs everything that it encounters, and translates all values, and all desires, into its own monetary equivalents.

23. There is still, however, a puzzle here. The appeal of scarcity would seem, not only to negate all those old-fashioned utopian longings, but also to violate the entirely non-utopian grounding assumption of neoclassical economics: the idea that people always seek to maximize their “utility.” How, then, could they ever choose to make things hard on themselves? As Castronova says, from an economic point of view it is “shocking. . . to suggest that utility and well-being are not the same thing. Utility always rises when constraints are relaxed, yet people seem to prefer a world with constraints to a world without them” (16-17). On this account, even hedonistic consumerism — the one utopian ideal still available to us today — is belied by the experience of MMOs.

24. I think, however, that this seeming aberration is nonetheless in full accord with what I can only call, following Weber, the “spirit of capitalism.” Free- market economists tend to abominate abundance, because it is inefficient. It subverts “the discipline of the market,” undermines the price system, re- moves the motivation to compete, and seduces people into sheer waste and unremunerative play. Free-market economists thus value the actual process of the market mechanism — the way that it assigns a price to everything, and subjects “man,” as F. A. Hayek (1991) puts it, to “the bitter necessity of submitting himself to rules he does not like in order to maintain himself against competing groups” (76) — far more than they do the prosperity that is supposed to result from the market’s smooth functioning. And today, after Reagan and Thatcher and the worldwide triumph of neoliberalism, we all implicitly feel this way. We cannot help it. We believe in the Market more than we do in anything else. Indeed, the Market is probably the only thing that we really, truly believe in. Even in virtual reality, we prefer scarcity to abundance, for the same reason that we prefer Euclidean geometry and Cartesian coordinates to any other way of organizing space. In both cases, the former is the only arrangement that feels “natural” and “realistic” to us. We are disoriented by abundance, just as we are by a relativistic spacetime that is curved and filled with wormholes.

25. I prefer scarcity to abundance, in other words, because it gives me a reason to go shopping, and because it allows me to dream of making a killing as a merchant or entrepreneur. And this is the case in Second Life, as much as it is the case in my “first life.” Scarcity is a barrier to fulfillment, but for that very reason it enables fantasy. And doubtless Zizek (1989) is right to assert that “ideological fantasy structures reality itself” (44). The fantasy of the market, grounded in the constraint of scarcity, is what gives our lives consistency today. Gameworlds are not opposed to the “real” everyday world, in the way that fantasy is supposed to be opposed to reality. Rather, in the virtual worlds of MMOs, we seek out precisely those fantasies that sustain us in everyday life. Now, it is widely accepted that every game needs some sort of constraint. Constraints (or rules) work to focus and enrich play, to make it feel worthwhile and meaningful. But what happens when the game is a world, and the world is a game? Dibbell suggests, not just that games need rules, but more generally that, “all else being equal. . . people will choose the world that constrains them over the one that sets them free” (41). I fear that this observation is all too accurate. It reminds me of Spinoza’s (1998) remark (often cited by Deleuze) that people “will fight for their servitude as if for salvation” (3).

26. The real question, then, is not why we choose virtual worlds grounded in scarcity over ones that offer us abundance; but rather, why we value and evaluate these worlds in economic, utilitarian terms in the first place. Dibbell addresses this question by tracing the history of work and play under capitalism (58-64). Capitalism, as Weber shows, is grounded in the distinction between work and play — a distinction that many pre-capitalist societies did not even recognize. Capitalism traditionally exalts work as salvation, and stigmatizes play as diabolical. In the twentieth century, theorists like Huizinga, Caillois, and the Situationists sought to invert this binary, celebrating play as a subversive alternative to the Protestant Ethic and capitalist rationality. But today, the entire work/play binary has collapsed. MMOs offer us the possibility of “productive play”: something that neither the Puritan inventors of capitalism, nor its Situationist critics, could ever have understood (64). Dibbell finally suggests that we are entering an era of ludocapitalism: ” a curious new industrial revolution, driven by play as the first was driven by steam” (297). When work and play merge, Weber’s ” ‘iron cage’ of meaningless hyperefficiency” gives way to an economy based on “contriving meaningful activity. . . through the mechanisms of play” (298-299).

27. Ludocapitalism is by no means just confined to the MMOs Dibbell writes about. From a global perspective, the entrepreneurs who make money from the commercial activities surrounding Everquest, Ultima Online, and Second Life are small potatoes. But the entire world economy today is dominated by ludic, virtual wealth. For the trade in financial derivatives exceeds by many times over the buying and selling of actual commodities. Indeed, the value of currently held derivatives is far greater than that of the world’s entire physical economic production (LiPuma and Lee, 2004). The prices of these financial instruments are calculated by means of complex differential equations, involving rules that are so arcane and abstract, so inaccessible to intuitive grasp, and so detached from any ordinary considerations, that I can only think of them as as being like the rules of some incomprehensible game. And although derivatives were originally invented as hedges against risk, the trade in them today is almost entirely speculative: what Susan Strange (cited by Dibbell, 24) calls “casino capitalism.” The wealth embodied in derivatives is entirely virtual; it only exists in the form of bits. It cannot be used to purchase physical goods, or to invest in physical production; there is just too much of it. Yet the trade in derivatives has powerful effects on “real” economic conditions, as it can crash whole national economies, and relegate millions of people to very real misery, merely through a series of nearly instantaneous computer-generated transactions.

28. Dibbell finally suggests that, under the reign of ludocapitalism, with work turning into play, it is no longer necessary to “find a way out of the grind, an escape from modernity’s productive regime”; for “the grind [i]s already escaping from itself,” emerging into the realm of play (299). A similar point is made by Nigel Thrift (2005), who remarks that, today, “for quite a few people, capitalism is not just hard graft. It is also fun. . . Capitalism has a kind of crazy vitality. It doesn’t just line its pockets. It also appeals to gut feelings” (1). And indeed, who can disagree with such assessments? The world today approaches the condition of gamespace, as McKenzie Wark (2006) has taught us to understand: “Games are no longer a past time, out- side or alongside of life. They are now the very form of life, and death, and time, itself” (5). How can anyone be so surly, and indeed Puritanical, as to object?

29. Nonetheless, I am inclined, in curmudgeonly, Adornoesque fashion, to see the situation as one in which even leisure and play have become hard work, and work has been transmuted into play only in order to get us to do more of it. I am thinking, not only of those gaming factories Dibbell mentions, but also of phenomena like “word of mouth marketing,” in which people volunteer to create “buzz” for new products, by hyping them in casual conversation (Walker, 2004), and “crowdsourcing” (Howe, 2006) — as practiced by many companies online, including virtual worlds like Second Life (Llewelyn, 2006) — in which individual “creativity” is promoted and encouraged, precisely as a way for corporations to get their customers to do their R&D work for them, for free. None of this seems the least bit liberating — which is, of course, precisely the point. I began this essay by recanting the naive utopian hopes I once invested in LambdaMOO; now I end it, rather inconsistently, by lamenting the absence of such hopes from Ultima Online or Second Life. You can’t really have things both ways, I guess — even if the promise and lure of play has always been that, somehow, you can. Ludo- capitalism is just the latest instance of the Market’s astonishing ability to subsume, denature, and profit from whatever threatens to contest it — and perhaps I had better leave it at that.”

This is the second chapter of Adam Arvidsson’s new book draft on the Ethical Economy, a follow-up on our earlier publication of the first chapter.

We strongly recommend it as Adam has a thorough understanding of both peer production and the market.

Introduction

For quite some time now there has been a strongly developing interest in ethics, and a multiplication of the points of view that lend themselves to an ethical perspective. Perhaps this ‘ethical turn’ began in the 1980s, when thinkers like Levinas, Buber and, following them, Bauman, argued that ethics was to become the central concern of the philosophy of ‘post-modern’ times. Since then we have seen the explosion in business or corporate ethics, ethical consumerism, various policies that aim at micro managing the ethics of everyday life, like smoking bans or sexual harassment policies, and, most recently, a renewed popularity of the conceptions of the ‘ethical state’ whether of religious (Bush) or secular (Berlusconi, Thaksin) inspiration.

In these more recent developments ‘ethics’ is not simply a ‘philosophy of the good’, but a technology of management. Corporate, or business ethics is no longer simply about benevolent positioning and PR. It is about the rational management of investments in initiatives that aim to shape patterns of behaviour and affect in order to reap what management theory now speak of a ‘Return on Values’ (RoV). Indeed a recent McKinsey report states that … Here then investment in corporate ethics, is clearly productive. Its productive contribution comes from its ability to fine-tune the behavioural and affective patterns that underpin the complex network of cooperation at work in modern corporation. The productivity of ethics thus resides in its biopolitical function, its ability to fine-tune the formation of subjectivity and sociality. Similarly, as Clive Barnett (et al. 2005) have argued, ‘ethical consumerism involves both a governing of consumption and a governing of the consuming self’, reaching far into and configuring the way people relate not just to commodities, but to other people by means of commodities (cf. Miller. …). Here as well as in the case of brand management more generally (Arvidsson, 2006), the ability to mobilize a consistent affective pattern from the multitude of such micro-configurations that arise out of ordinary practices of consumption can be the source of substantial monetary values. As in the case of corporate ethics, this would be a case of ‘advanced liberal government’ (Rose,.Dean..) put to work directly for the valorization of capital.

The directly productive role that ethics has acquired as a branch of management suggests that the general upsurge of ethics as a branch of advanced liberal governance might be connected to an overall reconfiguration of the relations of production. The novelty, as suggested by a wide range of recent business phenomena, from ‘crowdsourcing’ to ‘web 2.0’ would be that of the directly productive role of autonomous forms of social interaction. The rise of ethics, thus conceived, would be a reaction to the new productive power of the social, what Paolo Virno (2004) has called ‘mass intellectuality’. In this paper I shall attempt to outline the contours of that relationship.

I find the proposals of the Pirate Party, to be eminently reasonable and worth supporting.

Thanks for reading them carefully!

Proposal 1: Reform of copyright law

The official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance between the interests of publishers and consumers, in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost, to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote. The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation.

All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.

The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today’s copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today’s world. If you haven’t made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.

We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict the consumers’ legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws.

An abolished patent system

Pharmaceutical patents kill people in third world countries every day. They hamper possibly life saving research by forcing scientists to lock up their findings pending patent application, instead of sharing them with the rest of the scientific community. The latest example of this is the bird flu virus, where not even the threat of a global pandemic can make research institutions forgo their chance to make a killing on patents.

The Pirate Party has a constructive and reasoned proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. It would not only solve these problems, but also give more money to pharmaceutical research, while still cutting public spending on medicines in half. This is something we would like to discuss on a European level.

Patents in other areas range from the morally repulsive (like patents on living organisms) through the seriously harmful (patents on software and business methods) to the merely pointless (patents in the mature manufacturing industries).

Europe has all to gain and nothing to lose by abolishing patents outright. If we lead, the rest of the world will eventually follow.

Respect for the right to privacy

Following the 9/11 event in the US, Europe has allowed itself to be swept along in a panic reaction to try to end all evil by increasing the level of surveillance and control over the entire population. We Europeans should know better. It is not twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there are plenty of other horrific examples of surveillance-gone-wrong in Europe’s modern history.

The arguments for each step on the road to the surveillance state may sound ever so convincing. But we Europeans know from experience where that road leads, and it is not somewhere we want to go.

We must pull the emergency brake on the runaway train towards a society we do not want. Terrorists may attack the open society, but only governments can abolish it. The Pirate Party wants to prevent that from happening.

Slashdot reports on an overview article in The UK-based Independent newspaper, which lists a number of important cases where internet-enabled consumers undertook disruptive and winning actions against what they saw as corporate abuse.

Slashdot writes: ‘Consumer militancy’ is becoming ever more common, as individuals join forces on the internet to fight back against the state and big business. Businesses from banks to soccer clubs have been the target of these groups, in each case facing the fury of consumers who feel they have been wronged. For example, ‘A mass revolt has left the high street banks facing thousands of claims from customers seeking to claw back some of the £4.75bn levied annually on charges for overdrafts and bounced cheques. More than one million forms demanding refunds have been downloaded from a number of consumer websites. The banks are settling out of court, often paying £1,000 a time.’

Case studies from the Independent:

Utilities

While average gas and electricity bills approached £1,000 last year, a record 4 million householders have dumped their supplier after an internet-led consumer campaign. British Gas admitted yesterday it lost 1.1m customers in just 12 months, and two weeks ago slashed gas bills by 17 per cent and electricity bills by 11 per cent. Other big suppliers, Powergen and npower, are expected to follow suit.

Road pricing

Plans for road pricing have faced massive public opposition spearheaded by an internet campaign. In just three months 1.8 million people have signed an online petition, linked to a new section of the Downing Street website, launched by a disgruntled motorist from Telford.

Supermarkets

From Devon to Inverness, planning applications for superstores are being thwarted by residents’ campaigns orchestrated on the internet. Tesco scrapped a superstore plan in Darlington last year following opposition and this week residents sank a Tesco plan for a £130m retail development in Tolworth, Surrey. Friends of the Earth is co-ordinating the protests across the country.

[via OpenBusinessModels WikiHive blog]

Intro

Open Business.cc blog reports about a Time Magazine article titled “Getting Rich Off Those Who Work For Free”.

The Time article is about the GiftEconomy:

• People who are creating OpenSource Software on a volunteer basis
• People who are creating content for OpenContent publications, like Wikipedia
• People who’s activity is the business model in for-profit ventures, like YoutTube?, MySpace, etc

An earlier oct 2006 Open Business.cc blog post also discussed the open quesitons surrounding this:

“What are the principles for relying on users to build a money-generating business? Or, in more provocative terms, when does user-generated content – at $90 per screen name – become a new form of exploitation? Alternatively, one could argue that users are compensated with a good; a “free” service in return for their data and attention.

“What are the necessary tenets of this new class of software and software company? What is the difference between “open”, “free”, and “commercial” – and how do they interact?”

Trying to fit the emerging future into the structure of the past

Let’s face it, it’s hard to see through the fog of the future, and “predict” what direction OpenSource, UserGeneratedContent?, and OpenContent activities will go in.

Dear Economists trying to figure out what is happening online…

…Welcome to the wonderful worlds of the ForesightPrinciple, and MediaEcology!

A big reason why it is hard to see how the “GiftEconomy” is going to play out, is that we humans often use the past as a model for the future. When new technologies, mediums and systems emerge, we usually immediately try to adapt them to the ways in which we are already doing things. (see: MarshallMcLuhan).

Wikipedia:Richard_A._Slaughter took the quote from MarshallMcLuhan that “We look at the present through a rear view mirror” and applied the metaphor to Wikipedia:Futures_studies

image source

NeilPostman? had FiveIdeas about technology. Idea number 3 was that “every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.”

NeilPostman? means with idea number 3 that “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

We want to look at the emerging network cultures through the lenses of the production-based economies of the past 100+ years, and their Hierarchically-organized social structures. This is why we even bother calling them a GiftEconomy at all. (LionKimbro already made this point in RethinkingCredit in CommunityWiki). But, these socio-cultural emergences are not really a “GiftEconomy” at all.

Instead, if they are any kind of “economy” at all, they are more likely what my friend HowardRheingold calls a “SharingEconomy”.

People Voluntarily Sharing. But why? Because they are reciprocated some kind of value.

Now, sometimes people think thety are “voluntarily sharing”, but really they are being exploited, and that is what NeilPostman? talked about with his Idea number 2:”(in technological change) there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners.”

Now, it doesn’t have to happen that way, but it often does. Which brings us to…

Embracing The Future For What It Is Becoming

So, if we try to understand that people are voluntarily sharing for perceived reciprocated value, then we can start to think about the direction this is really going in:

People will share and trust more, when they are reciprocated with more real value

If you try to go the route of Neil’s Idea number 2, you’ll get busted eventually, and people will start moving away from you, and towards where the perceived real reciprocated value is. The scams are going to get harder to pull as control shifts more towards the users, away from the providers/enablers. So, in the SharingEconomy, share the value with people sharing with you, because they don’t have to share with you. Share the revenue, the control. It is time to see that even feedback and input can be considered as valuable voluntary sharing, and should be reciprocated with a reward of listening to the feedback and incorporating it into the system. These voluntary sharers can increasingly exercise their RightToLeave.

The future of the SharingEconomy is…

…Sharing.

Multi-way sharing, between all of the parties involved.

of course, no future is guaranteed. We can easily get locked into a culture dominated by centuries-long ruts of walled-off economies, if people continue to design to try and take advantage of Idea number 2 and make a quick buck at the expense of long-term quality.

However, I don’t personally think people are going to be fooled so easily. And, I think that the “market” will eventually drive people towards creators and providers and facilitators who really start to think about “How can I reciprocate back real value to these people who are sharing with me?”

‘Placemaking‘ brings back life to urban centers, removing cars, and creating cultural capital, preserving memories and places for people to meet each other. The Project for Public Spaces operate using a bottom-up consultative approach. An example might be, find an under-performing city center, go talk to all the locals, capture visions and ideas for how the center ‘could be’. Having everyone on-board means funding comes easily from local businesses and government. Invest in the place and revitalize it.

What PPS has accomplished over the past 30 years–and what we have grown to become as an organization–is remarkably more complex and interesting than anything we imagined possible in 1975.

We didn’t realize at that time how enormous the task before us really was. Our core belief was simple: When you focus on Place, you do everything differently. This means when you look first at local communities’ assets and aspirations, you create public spaces that will nurture people’s health, happiness, and wellbeing. We quickly discovered, however, that this approach ran against the deeply ingrained habits of most design professionals, traffic engineers, developers, and public policymakers.

By the mid-1990s PPS had acquired a long record of accomplishments and a national reputation, but our original goal of revolutionizing the design and management of public spaces remained largely unfulfilled. But it was around this time that we began to notice some remarkable changes–small at first, but steadily building into a shift of historic proportions: Institutions with enormous influence over shaping the built environment were coming around to our way of thinking.

Departments of Transportation in several states wanted PPS to teach them how to design streets as places that balanced the needs of people, transit, and cars. The General Services Administration, the branch of the U.S. government in charge of federal buildings, enlisted us to transform public properties into vital places throughout the country. The Federal Highway Administration tapped us to create on online resource center to boost the adoption of Context Sensitive Solutions, which take communities into account in transportation planning, for all 50 states. Without compromising our values, we had found a new and receptive audience for the ideas of Placemaking among key decision-makers.

Today, even as obstacles that once seemed insurmountable begin to fall, unexpected challenges arise and old struggles persist. Thirty years ago, for instance, we could never have foreseen the havoc that big-box retailers would wreak on downtowns and local economies. And we still have a long way to go before our nation’s parks, streets, and public buildings are designed and managed as places that actually serve the public. As we embark on our next thirty years by tackling the challenges before us, we know from our past work that nothing is out of reach. Casey Stengel said it best: “I always heard it couldn’t be done, but sometimes that don’t work out.