Group items tagged

Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat)

working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars

The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political

And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them

Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at

they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets

It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.)

plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school

Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist

I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?

(Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)

should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?

Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work

in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it

There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should b

You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people

It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems)

It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job

The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value

under certain structural conditions non-price-based production is extraordinarily robust

It just is not so easy to assume that because people behave productively in one framework (the social process of peer production that is Wikipedia, free and open source software, or Digg), that you can take the same exact behavior, with the same exact set of people, and harness them to your goals by attaching a price to what previously they were doing in a social process.

giving rewards to customers can actually undermine a company’s relationship with them

There is, in fact, a massive amount of research that supports the idea that when you pay people to do something for you, they stop enjoying it, and distrust their own motivations. The mysterious something that goes away, and that “Factor X” even has a name: intrinsic motivation.

Extrinsic rewards suggest that there is actually an instrumental relationship at work, that you do the activity in order to get something else

If you pay me for it, it must be work

It’s what we would call a robust effect. It shows up in many contexts. And there’s been considerable testing to try to find out exactly why it works. A major school of thought is that there is an “Overjustification Effect.” (http://kozinets.net/archives/133)

interesting examples of an effect called crowding

Offering financial rewards for contributions to online communities basically means mixing external and intrinsic motivation.

A good example is children who are paid by their parents for mowing the family lawn. Once they expect to receive money for that task, they are only willing to do it again if they indeed receive monetary compensation. The induced unwillingness to do anything for free may also extend to other household chores.

Once ‘gold-stars’ were introduced as a symbolic reward for a certain amount of time spent practicing the instrument, the girl lost all interest in trying new, difficult pieces. Instead of aiming at improving her skills, her goal shifted towards spending time playing well-learned, easy pieces in order to receive the award (Deci with Flaste 1995)

Suddenly, she managed to follow the prescription, as her own (intrinsic) motivation was recognized and thereby reinforced.

The introduction of a monetary fine transforms the relationship between parents and teachers from a non-monetary into a monetary one

"The effects of external interventions on intrinsic motivation have been attributed to two psychological processes: (a) Impaired self-determination. When individuals perceive an external intervention to reduce their self-determination, they substitute intrinsic motivation by extrinsic control. Following Rotter (1966), the locus of control shifts from the inside to the outside of the person affected. Individuals who are forced to behave in a specific way by outside intervention, feel overjustified if they maintained their intrinsic motivation. (b) Impaired self-esteem. When an intervention from outside carries the notion that the actor's motivation is not acknowledged, his or her intrinsic motivation is effectively rejected. The person affected feels that his or her involvement and competence is not appreciated which debases its value. An intrinsically motivated person is taken away the chance to display his or her own interest and involvement in an activity when someone else offers a reward, or commands, to undertake it. As a result of impaired self-esteem, individuals reduce effort.

External interventions crowd-out intrinsic motivation if the individuals affected perceive them to be controlling

External interventions crowd-in intrinsic motivation if the individuals concerned perceive it as supportive

In that case, self-esteem is fostered, and individuals feel that they are given more freedom to act, thus enlarging self-determination

cultural categories that oppose marketplace modes of behavior (or “market logics”) with the more family-like modes of behavior of caring and sharing that we observe in close-knit communities (”community logics”)

this is labor, this is work, just do it.

When communal logics are in effect, all sorts of norms of reciprocity, sacrifice, and gift-giving come into play: this is cool, this is right, this is fun

So think about paying a kid to clean up their room, paying parishioners to go to church, paying people in a neighborhood to attend a town hall meeting, paying people to come out and vote. All these examples seem a little strange or forced. Why? Because they mix and match the communal with the market-oriented.

Payment as disincentive. In his interesting book Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt describes some counterintuitive facts about payment. One of the most interesting is that charging people who do the wrong thing often causes them to do it more, and paying people to do the right thing causes them to do it less.

You direct people _away_ from any noble purpose you have, and instead towards grubbing for dollars

When people work for a noble purpose, they are told that their work is highly valued. When people work for $0.75/hour, they are told that their work is very low-valued

you're going to have to fight your way through labour laws and tax issues all the way to bankruptcy

Market economics. If you have open content, I can copy your content to another wiki, not pay people, and still make money. So by paying contributors, you're pricing yourself out of the market.

You don't have to pay people to do what they want to do anyways. The labour cost for leisure activities is $0. And nobody is going to work on a wiki doing things they don't want to do.

No fair system. There's simply no fair, automated and auditable way to divvy up the money

too complicated to do automatically. But if you have a subjective system -- have a human being evaluate contributions to an article and portion out payments -- it will be subject to constant challenges, endless debates, and a lot of community frustration.

Gaming the system. People are really smart. If there's money to be made, they'll figure out how to game your payment system to get more money than they actually deserve

They'll be trying to get as much money out of you as possible, and you'll be trying to give as little as you can to them

If you can't convince people that working on your project is worth their unpaid time, then there's probably something wrong with your project.

People are going to be able to sense that -- it's going to look like a cover-up, something sleazy

Donate.

Thank-you gifts

Pay bounties

How much we need to trust others depends on the context,

how much we trust ourselves,

our ability to understand the context we are in

When we trust, we re-allocate that energy and time to getting things done and making an impact

the more information and/or experience we have, the better we can decide whether or not to trust

Trust is a tool to assess and manage (reduce and/or increase) risk, depending on the situation.

Trusting someone implies making oneself more vulnerable

When we don’t trust, we exert a lot of energy to keep up our guard, to continually assess and verify.  This uses a lot of energy and time.

If the alternative is worse, we might opt for no trust

As we let ourselves be vulnerable, we also leave ourselves more open to new ideas, new ways of thinking which leads to empathy and innovation.

the more we can focus on the scope and achievement of our goals

trusting is efficient….and effective

Being vulnerable is a way to preserve energy

It lets us reallocate our resources to what matters and utilize our skills and those around us to increase effectiveness…impact.

If we are working together, we need to agree on the meaning of ‘done’.  When are we done, what does that look like?

“Control is for Beginners”

Strategic sloppiness is a way to preserve energy

Build on the same shared mental models

use the same language

As the ability to replicate something has become more of a commodity, we are increasingly seeing that complex interactions are the way to create ‘value from difference’ (as opposed to ‘value from sameness’).

allow for larger margins of error in our response and our acceptance of others

higher perfection slows down the tempo

We can’t minimize the need to be effective.

Efficient systems are great at dealing with complicated things – things that have many parts and sequences, but they fall flat dealing with complex systems, which is most of world today.

make sure we hear and see the same thing (reduce buffers around our response)

timing

intuition

judgment

experience

ability to look at things from many different perspective

to discover, uncover, understand and empathize is critical

focus on meaning and purpose for work (outcomes) instead of just money and profit (outputs)

When we have a common goal of WHY we want to do something, we are better able to trust

When we never do the same thing or have the same conversation twice, it becomes much more important to figure out why and what we do than how we do it (process, which is a given)

In a 3D printer today, what you can make is limited by the size of the machine. The geometry is external

is the Lego tower is more accurate than the child because the constraint of assembling the bricks lets you detect and correct errors

That's the exponential scaling for working reliably with unreliable parts

Because the parts have a discrete state, it means in joining them you can detect and correct errors

detect and correct state to correct errors to get an exponential reduction in error, which gives you an exponential increase in complexity

The next one is you can join Lego bricks made out of dissimilar materials.

The last one is when you're done with Lego you don't put it in the trash; you take it apart and reuse it because there's state in the materials. In a forest there's no trash; you die and your parts get disassembled and you're made into new stuff. When you make a 3D print or laser cut, when you're done there's recycling attempts but there's no real notion of reusing the parts

The metrology coming from the parts, detecting and correcting errors, joining dissimilar materials, disconnecting, reusing the components

On the very smallest scale, the most exciting work on digital fabrication is the creation of life from scratch. The cell does everything we're talking about. We've had a great collaboration with the Venter Institute on microfluidic machinery to load designer genomes into cells. One step up from that we're developing tabletop chip fab instead of a billion dollar fab, using discrete assembly of blocks of electronic materials to build things like integrated circuits in a tabletop process

a child can make a Lego structure bigger than themself

There's a series of books by David Gingery on how to make a machine shop starting with charcoal and iron ore.

There are twenty amino acids. With those twenty amino acids you make the motors in the molecular muscles in my arm, you make the light sensors in my eye, you make my neural synapses. The way that works is the twenty amino acids don't encode light sensors, or motors. They’re very basic properties like hydrophobic or hydrophilic. With those twenty properties you can make you. In the same sense, digitizing fabrication in the deep sense means that with about twenty building blocks—conducting, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic, dielectric—you can assemble them to create modern technology

By discretizing those three parts we can make all those 500,000 resistors, and with a few more parts everything else.

Now, there's a casual sense, which means a computer controls something to make something, and then there's the deep sense, which is coding the materials. Intellectually, that difference is everything but now I'm going to explain why it doesn't matter.

Then in turn, the next surprise was they weren't there for research, they weren't there for theses, they wanted to make stuff. I taught additive, subtractive, 2D, 3D, form, function, circuits, programming, all of these skills, not to do the research but just using the existing machines today

What they were answering was the killer app for digital fabrication is personal fabrication, meaning, not making what you can buy at Walmart, it’s making what you can't buy in Walmart, making things for a market of one person

The minicomputer industry completely misread PCs

the Altair was life changing for people like me. It was the first computer you could own as an individual. But it was almost useless

It was hard to use but it brought the cost from a million dollars to 100,000 and the size from a warehouse down to a room. What that meant is a workgroup could have one. When a workgroup can have one it meant Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs could invent UNIX—which all modern operating systems descend from—because they didn't have to get permission from a whole corporation to do it

At the PC stage what happened is graphics, storage, processing, IO, all of the subsystems got put in a box

To line that up with fabrication, MIT's 1952 NC Mill is similar to the million-dollar machines in my lab today. These are the mainframes of fab. You need a big organization to have them. The fab labs I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of minicomputers. The machines that make machines I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of the hobbyist computers. The research we're doing, which is leading up to the Star Trek Replicator, is what leads to the personal fabricator, which is the integrated unit that makes everything

conducting, resistive, insulating.

The fab lab is 2 tons, a $100,000 investment. It fills a few thousand square feet, 3D scanning and printing, precision machining, you can make circuit boards, molding and casting tooling, computer controlled cutting with a knife, with a laser, large format machining, composite layup, surface mount rework, sensors, actuators, embedded programming— technology to make technology.

Ten years you can just plot this doubling. Today, you can send a design to a fab lab and you need ten different machines to turn the data into something. Twenty years from now, all of that will be in one machine that fits in your pocket.

We've been living with this notion that making stuff is an illiberal art for commercial gain and it's not part of the means of expression. But, in fact, today, 3D printing, micromachining, and microcontroller programming are as expressive as painting paintings or writing sonnets but they're not means of expression from the Renaissance. We can finally fix that boundary between art and artisans

You don't go to a fab lab to get access to the machine; you go to the fab lab to make the machine.

Over the next maybe five years we'll be transitioning from buying machines to using machines to make machines. Self-reproducing machines

But they still have consumables like the motors, and they still cut or squirt. Then the interesting transition comes when we go from cutting or printing to assembling and disassembling, to moving to discretely assembled materials

because if anybody can make anything anywhere, it challenges everything

Now, the biggest surprise for me in this is I thought the research was hard. It's leading to how to make the Star Trek Replicator. The insight now is that's an exercise in embodied computation—computation in materials, programming their construction. Lots of work to come, but we know what to do

And that's when you do tabletop chip fab or make airplanes. That's when technical trash goes away because you can disassemble. 

irritated by the maker movement for the failure in mentoring

At something like a Maker Faire, there's hall after hall of repeated reinventions of bad 3D printers and there isn't an easy process to take people from easy to hard

We started a project out of desperation because we kept failing to succeed in working with existing schools, called the Fab Academy. Now, to understand how that works, MIT is based on scarcity. You assume books are scarce, so you have to go there for the library; you assume tools are scarce, so you have to go there for the machines; you assume people are scarce, so you have to go there to see them; and geography is scarce. It adds up to we can fit a few thousand people at a time. For those few thousand people it works really well. But the planet is a few billion people. We're off by six orders of magnitude. 

Next year we're starting a new class with George Church that we've called "How to Grow Almost Anything", which is using fab labs to make bio labs and then teach biotech in it. What we're doing is we're making a new global kind of university

Amusingly, I went to my friends at Educause about accrediting the Fab Academy and they said, "We love it. Where are you located?" And I said, "Yes" and they said, "No." Meaning, "We're all over the earth." And they said, "We have no mechanism. We're not allowed to do that. There's no notion of global accreditation."

Then they said something really helpful: "Pretend."

Once you have a basic set of tools, you can make all the rest of the tools

The way the Fab Academy works, in computing terms, it's like the Internet. Students have peers in workgroups, with mentors, surrounded by machines in labs locally. Then we connect them globally by video and content sharing and all of that. It's an educational network. There are these critical masses of groups locally and then we connect them globally

You still have Microsoft or IBM now but, with all respect to colleagues there, arguably that's the least interesting part of software

To understand the economic and social implications, look at software and look at music to understand what's happening now for fabrication

There's a core set of skills a place like MIT can do but it alone doesn't scale to a billion people. This is taking the social engineering—the character of MIT—but now doing it on this global scale.

Mainframes didn't go away but what opened up is all these tiers of software development that weren't economically viable

If you look at music development, the most interesting stuff in music isn't the big labels, it's all the tiers of music that weren't viable before

You can make music for yourself, for one, ten, 100, 1,000, a million. If you look at the tracks on your device, music is now in tiers that weren't economically viable before. In that example it's a string of data and it becomes a sound. Now in digital fab, it's a string of data and it becomes a thing.

What is work? For the average person—not the people who write for Edge, but just an average person working—you leave home to go to a place you'd rather not be, doing a repetitive operation you'd rather not do, making something designed by somebody you don't know for somebody you'll never see, to get money to then go home and buy something. But what if you could skip that and just make the thing?

It took about ten years for the dot com industry to realize pretty much across the board you don't directly sell the thing. You sell the benefits of the thing

2016 it's in Shenzhen because they're pivoting from mass manufacturing to enabling personal fabrication. We've set Shenzhen as the goal in 2016 for Fab Lab 2.0, which is fab labs making fab labs

To rewind now, you can send something to Shenzhen and mass manufacture it. There's a more interesting thing you can do, which is you go to market by shipping data and you produce it on demand locally, and so you produce it all around the world.

But their point was a lot of printers producing beautiful pages slowly scales if all the pages are different

In the same sense it scales to fabricate globally by doing it locally, not by shipping the products but shipping the data.

It doesn't replace mass manufacturing but mass manufacturing becomes the least interesting stuff where everybody needs the same thing. Instead, what you open up is all these tiers that weren't viable before

There, they consider IKEA the enemy because IKEA defines your taste. Far away they make furniture and flat pack it and send it to a big box store. Great design sense in Barcelona, but 50 percent youth unemployment. A whole generation can't work. Limited jobs. But ships come in from the harbor, you buy stuff in a big box store. And then after a while, trucks go off to a trash dump. They describe it as products in, trash out. Ships come in with products, trash goes out

The bits come and go, globally connected for knowledge, but the atoms stay in the city.

instead of working to get money to buy products made somewhere else, you can make them locally

The biggest tool is a ShotBot 4'x8'x1' NC mill, and you can make beautiful furniture with it. That's what furniture shops use

Anything IKEA makes you can make in a fab lab

it means you can make many of the things you consume directly rather than this very odd remote economic loop

the most interesting part of the DIY phone projects is if you're making a do-it-yourself phone, you can also start to make the things that the phones talk to. You can start to build your own telco providers where the users provide the network rather than spending lots of money on AT&T or whoever

Traditional manufacturing is exactly replaying the script of the computer companies saying, "That's a toy," and it's shining a light to say this creates entirely new economic activity. The new jobs don't come back to the old factories. The ability to make stuff on demand is creating entirely new jobs

To keep playing that forward, when I was in Barcelona for the meeting of all these labs hosted by the city architect and the city, the mayor, Xavier Trias, pushed a button that started a forty-year countdown to self-sufficiency. Not protectionism

I need high-torque efficient motors with integrated lead screws at low cost, custom-produced on demand. All sorts of the building blocks that let us do what I'm doing currently rest on a global supply chain including China's manufacturing agility

The short-term answer is you can't get rid of them because we need them in the supply chain. But the long-term answer is Shenzhen sees the future isn't mass producing for everybody. That's a transitional stage to producing locally

My description of MIT's core competence is it's a safe place for strange people

The real thing ultimately that's driving the fab labs ... the vacuum we filled is a technical one. The means to make stuff. Nobody was providing that. But in turn, the spaces become magnets. Everybody talks about innovation or knowledge economy, but then most things that label that strangle it. The labs become vehicles for bright inventive people who don't fit locally. You can think about the culture of MIT but on this global scale

My allegiance isn't to any one border, it's to the brainpower of the planet and this is building the infrastructure to scale to that brainpower

If you zoom from transistors to microcode to object code to a program, they don't look like each other. But if we take this room and go from city, state, country, it's hierarchical but you preserve geometry

Computation violates geometry unlike most anything else we do

The reason that's so important for the digital fabrication piece is once we build molecular assemblers to build arbitrary systems, you don't want to then paste a few lines of code in it. You need to overlay computation with geometry. It's leading to this complete do-over of computer science

If you take digital fab, plus the real sense of Internet of Things—not the garbled sense—plus the real future of computing aligning hardware and software, it all adds up to this ability to program reality

I run a giant video infrastructure and I have collaborators all over the world that I see more than many of my colleagues at MIT because we're all too busy on campus. The next Silicon Valley is a network, it's not a place. Invention happens in these networks.

When Edwin Land was kicked out of Polaroid, he made the Rowland Institute, which was making an ideal research institute with the best facilities and the best people and they could do whatever they want. But almost nothing came from it because there was no turnover of the gene pool, there was no evolutionary pressure.  

the wrong way to do research, which is to believe there's a privileged set of people that know more than anybody else and to create a barrier that inhibits communication from the inside to the outside

you need evolutionary pressure, you need traffic, you need to be forced to deal with people you don't think you need to encounter, and you need to recognize that to be disruptive it helps to know what people know

For me the hardest thing isn't the research. That's humming along nicely. It's that we're finding we have to build a completely new kind of social order and that social entrepreneurship—figuring out how you live, learn, work, play—is hard and there's a very small set of people who can do that kind of organizational creation.

We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right

A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge

We cannot create our own livelihood within that sphere

instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons.

The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production

then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops

But it hasn’t had much of a direct connection to this emerging commons movement, which shares so many of the values and  principles of the traditional cooperative movement.

There’s also a lot of peer-to-peer work going on, but it’s not very well versed around issues like cooperative organization, formal or legal forms of ownership, which are based on reciprocity and cooperation, and how to interpret the commons vision with a structure, an organizational structure and a legal structure that actually gives it economic power, market influence, and a means of connecting it to organizational forms that have durability over the long-term.

The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups

They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take

Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money

Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system

we don’t have what Marx used to call social reproduction

I would like John to talk about the solidarity co-ops, and how that integrates the notion of the commons or the common good in the very structure of the co-op

They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge

Cooperatives, which are basically a democratic and collective form of enterprise where members have control rights and democratically direct the operations of the co-op, have been the primary stakeholders in any given co-op – whether it’s a consumer co-op, or a credit union, or a worker co-op.

Primarily, the co-op is in the service of its immediate members

What was really fascinating about the social co-ops was that, although they had members, their mission was not only to serve the members but also to provide service to the broader community

In the city of Bologna, for example, over 87% of the social services provided in that city are provided through contract with social co-ops

democratically run

much more participatory, and a much more engaged model

The difference, however, is that the structure of social co-ops is still very much around control rights, in other words, members have rights of control and decision-making within how that organization operates

And it is an incorporated legal structure that has formal recognition by the legislation of government of the state, and it has the power, through this incorporated power, to negotiate with and contract with government for the provision of these public services

In Québec they’re called Solidarity co-ops

So, the social economy, meaning organizations that have a mutual aim in their purpose, based on the principles of reciprocity, collective benefit, social benefit, is emerging as an important player for the design and delivery of public services

This, too, is in reaction to the failure of the public market for provision of services like affordable housing or health care or education services

This is a crisis in the role of the state as a provider of public services. So the question has emerged: what happens when the state fails to provide or fulfill its mandate as a provider or steward of public goods and services, and what’s the role of civil society and the social economy in response?

we have commonses of knowledge, code and design. They’re more easily created, because as a knowledge worker, if you have access to the network and some means, however meager, of subsistence, through effort and connection you can actually create knowledge. However, this is not the case if you move to direct physical production, like the open hardware movement

I originally encountered Michel after seeing some talks by Benkler and Lessig at the Wizard of OS 4, in 2006, and I wrote an essay criticizing that from a materialist perspective, it was called “The creative anti-commons and the poverty of networks”, playing on the terms that both those people used.

In hardware, we don’t see that, because you need to buy material, machines, plastic, metal.

Some people have called the open hardware community a “candy” economy, because if you’re not part of these open hardware startups, you’re basically not getting anything for your efforts

democratic foundations like the Apache foundation

They conceive of peer production, especially Benkler, as being something inherently immaterial, a form of production that can only exist in the production of immaterial wealth

From my materialist point of view, that’s not a mode of production, because a mode of production must, in the first place, reproduce its productive inputs, its capital, its labor, and whatever natural wealth it consumes

From a materialist point of view, it becomes  obvious that the entire exchange value produced in these immaterial forms would be captured by the same old owners of materialist wealth

different definition of peer production

independent producers collectively sharing a commons of productive assets

I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods

share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.

One was the Georgist idea of using rent, economic rent, as a fundamental mutualizing source of wealth

Mutualizing unearned income

So, the unearned income, the portion of income derived from ownership of productive assets is evenly distributed

This protocol would seek to normalize that, but in a way that doesn’t require administration

typical statist communist reaction to the cooperative movement is saying that cooperatives can exclude and exploit one another

But then, as we’ve seen in history, there’s something that develops called an administrative class,  which governs over the collective of cooperatives or the socialist state, and can become just as counterproductive and often exploitive as capitalist class

So, how do we create cooperation among cooperatives, and distribution of wealth among cooperatives, without creating this administrative class?

This is why I borrowed from the work of Henry George and Silvio Gesell in created this idea of rent sharing.

This is not done administratively, this is simply done as a protocol

The idea is that if a cooperative wants an asset, like, an example is if one of the communes would like to have a tractor, then essentially the central commune is like a bond market. They float a bond, they say I want a tractor, I am willing to pay $200 a month for this tractor in rent, and other members of the cooperative can say, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea,we think that’s a really good allocation of these productive assets, so we are going to buy these bonds. The bond sale clears, the person gets the tractor, the money from the rent of the tractor goes back to clear the bonds, and  after that, whatever further money is collected through the rent on this tractor – and I don’t only mean tractors, same would be applied to buildings, to land, to any other productive assets – all this rent that’s collected is then distributed equally among all of the workers.

The idea is that people earn income not only by producing things, but by owning the means of production, owning productive assets, and our society is unequal because the distribution of productive assets is unequal

This means that if you use your exact per capita share of property, no more no less than what you pay in rent and what you received in social dividend, will be equal

But if you’re not working at that time, because you’re old, or otherwise unemployed, then obviously the the productive assets that you will be using will be much less than the mean and the median, so what you’ll receive as dividend will be much more than what you pay in rent, essentially providing a basic income

venture communism doesn’t seek to control the product of the cooperatives

It doesn’t seek to limit, control, or even tell them how they should distribute it, or under what means; what they produce is entirely theirs, it’s only the collective management of the commons of productive assets

On paper this would seem to work, but the problem is that this assumes that we have capital to allocate in this way, and that is not the case for most of the world workers

how do we get to that stage?

other two being counter politics and insurrectionary finance

do we express our activism through the state, or do we try to achieve our goals by creating the alternative society outside

pre-figurative politics, versus statist politics

My materialist background tells me that when you sell your labor on the market, you have nothing more than your subsistence costs at the end of it, so where is this wealth meant to come from

I believe that the only reason that we have any extra wealth beyond subsistence is because of organized social political struggle; because we have organized in labor movements, in the co-op movement, and in other social forms

To create the space for prefiguring presupposes engagement with the state, and struggle within parliaments, and struggle within the public social forum

Instead, we should think that no, we must engage in the state in order to protect our ability to have alternative societies

We can only get rid of the state in these areas once we have alternative, distributed, cooperative means to provide those same functions

We can only eliminate the state from these areas once they actually exist, which means we actually have to build them

What I mean by insurrectionary finance is that we have to acknowledge that it’s not only forming capital and distributing capital, it’s also important how intensively we use capital

I’m not proposing that the cooperative movement needs to engage in the kind of derivative speculative madness that led to the financial crisis, but at the same time we can’t… it can’t be earn a dollar, spend a dollar

We have to find ways to create liquidity

to deal with economic cycles

they did things the organized left hasn’t been able to do, which is takeover industrial means of production

if they can take over these industrial facilities, just in order to shut them down and asset strip them, why can’t we take them over and mutualize them?

more ironic once you understand that the source of investment that Milken and his colleagues were working with were largely workers pension funds

idea of venture communism

pooling, based on the capture of unearned income

in Québec, there is a particular form of co-op that’s been developed that allows small or medium producers to pool their capital to purchase machinery and to use it jointly

The other idea I liked was trying to minimize a management class

much more lean and accountable because they are accountable to boards of directors that represent the interests of the members

I’ve run into this repeatedly among social change activists who immediately recoil at the notion of thinking about markets and capital, as part of their change agenda

I had thought previously, like so many, that economics is basically a bought discipline, and that it serves the interests of existing elites. I really had a kind of reaction against that

complete rethinking of economics

recapture the initiative around vocabulary, and vision, with respect to economics

reimagining and reinterpreting, for a popular and common good, the notion of market and capital

advocating for a vision of social change that isn’t just about politics, and isn’t just about protest, it has to be around how do we reimagine and reclaim economics

markets actually belong to communities and people

capital wasn’t just an accumulated wealth for the rich

I think what we’re potentially  talking about here is to make the social economy hyper-productive, hyper-competitive, hyper-cooperative

The paradox is that capital already knows this. Capital is investing in these peer production projects

Part of the proposal of the FLOK society project in Ecuador will be to get that strategic reorganization to make the social economy strategic