The Future of Subjectivity: a systems perspective
Edward Miller
this group.
http://vimeo.com/4635803
Cheers
Nathan Cravens
It looks as if this service was unable to convert your file appropriately.
Tinker and try again.
Look forward to seeing you at the pulpit!
Nathan
Douglas Rushkoff
about pretty much all the subjects you wrote about in your initial
invitations.
It's called "Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to
take it back." But what it's really about is how the renaissance
served as a great turning point from bottom-up abundance model
economics and commerce to a highly controlled, monopolized, and
scarcity-model.
I spend some time on currency, but more on extraction of labor and
resources, and our corresponding disconnection from place, people, and
value.
I just released a short (9minute) film summarizing the book's thesis:
How do I play, too?
Moreover, is anyone interested in seeing the free PDF I have made of
the book before it's June 2 release as a real and artificially scarce
RandomHouse product?
Joseph Jackson
To answer your question; I'm just about ready to open calls for the
1st issue of the journal because I can now set aside 6-8 wks for
intense editing. The first topic is Defining Abundance.
Objectives include creating the first draft of a FAQ and
distinguishing Abundance from Scarcity based economics.
Approximately
3,000-10,000 words
For this issue, I especially hope for pieces from Michel, Roberto,
Paul, Eric Hunting, and Smari. With my piece, that gives us 6, aiming
for perhaps 10 depending on how many people want to contribute and how
intensive the production gets. The format I'd like to observe for
this first issue is for the author to share his/her autobiographical
experience with abundance/scarcity (how you happened to question the
accepted worldview) + present on some aspect of the history of
abundance thinking. Eg, I will focus on the work of Buckminster
Fuller.
After this, I am hoping to have some guest editors with particular
interest in topics take the lead to help start discussion of that
issue/handle some of the editing burden. Eg, perhaps Kevin Carson and
Pat Kane want to contribute to the issue on the Theory of Value.
Maybe you want to be active on the currency issue?
Paul D. Fernhout
Wow, that's a great video.
On joining the conversation, there are also some related discussions on the
"open manufacturing" list which ranges from theory to practice.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing
One recent comment I wrote to that list included something that amplifies on
your theme in the video of this crisis being an opportunity to reshape our
society in some ways: "So, there are no easy answers for most people who
want to make [free] digital things (including digital content about
manufacturing, like CAD files or how to articles), even though there are
right now niches for a few. Rather than address this issue, our society has
been built on increasing debt-based spending funded mostly by home equity
loans, or student loan, or consumer loans, rather than address the
fundamental Triple Revolution issue
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Hoc_Committee_on_the_Triple_Revolution
of the growing disconnect between productivity from job and having a right
to consume. Debt has patched over that issue in the USA over the past
decade, but as a society, that approach seems to have reached its limits.
One question is, how fast will our society as a whole realize this deeper
context? I've said before that I saw three converging trends, a real estate
asset bubble burst (and related derivatives issues), a US fiat-dollar
devaluation trend, and increased productivity via automation and better
design leading to widespread unemployment given limited demand for goods and
services (even with some rising expectations for quantity and quality, given
the best things in life are free or cheap). But, another trend is an
internet full of widespread information for "free", leaving the knowledge
economy economically unprofitable for most (even as we see some spectacular
successes like Google, whose business is essentially built on organizing
other people's freely accessible information). And, there is also the race
to the bottom with wages with globalization. By itself, that single wage
trend might eventually be self-correcting, as wages and standards rise in
other countries, but, from a US perspective, it also amplifies those other
trends right now. So, maybe five trends are converging. There are
counter-trends, of course (like rising expectations globally), but I'd
suggest the other trends dominate."
So, the crisis may be a lot bigger than most people imagine. I'm not sure if
you cover all these crises in your book?
As another Princeton University alum (as I see from here:)
http://rushkoff.com/bio/
you might be interested in the "Post-scarcity Princeton" essay/book I wrote
last year. Here is a link to the shorter version (and that page has a link
to the longer more personal and PU specific version at the top):
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible
horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have
remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational
products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip
of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading
our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development,
are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a
"post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social
institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social
institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will
they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice
like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?"
Essentially, I try to examine some aspects of Princeton University's core
values (and their shadows) of elitism (alienation), competition
(destructiveness), and excellence (perfectionism) in an age of increasing
abundance. Could still use a lot of good editing, obviously. :-)
It's too bad about the book licensing for your new book. (I'd like to read
the PDF anyway.) It is a difficult issue how to have one foot in the current
economy and one foot in the future economy. Or really, have one foot in the
back-to-the-future economy :-), given what you say about the renaissance and
what others like Marshall Sahlins say about hunter/gatherers as the Original
Affluent Society:
"The Original Affluent Society"
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other
group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent
society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's
material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is
therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to
bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a
tragedy of modern times. ... The world's most primitive people have few
possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of
goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a
relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the
invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an
invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary
relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural
catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
While in the video you talk about and graphically show the conversions of
meshworks to hierarchies, I find Manuel de Landa very insightful on this point:
"Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding
meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to
make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because,
as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real
life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot
be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation.
Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of
data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to
promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that
may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common
data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of
increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has
been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is
more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity
at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the
warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only
heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would
not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may
drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of
hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for
certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying
decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open
and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and
mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To
paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice
to save us."
The question is what balance of meshwork and hierarchy serves most people
well? Or, as I learned in Frank von Hippel's public policy graduate course
at Princeton, the big issue is, who pays the costs, and who gets the
benefits? And maybe, who gets a say in making that decision?
Anyway, glad to see more and more good work in this area! It's a fine
line to walk between saying something that moves things forward and saying
something that just alienates one's work from the mainstream. Post-Scarcity
Princeton probably steps over that line in too many ways to be really
effective; I can hope your book makes a more persuasive and influential case
for a better balance of meshwork & hierarchy for most people in an age of
abundance. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Nathan Cravens
I enjoy your work.
As Paul mentioned, we talk on "...principles that serve humanity instead of killing life." at the Open Manufacturing list. I hope you have time to play there.
This list presently serves as a calling card to direct folk to either the Open Manufacturing list or the Journal of Abundance.
Moreover, is anyone interested in seeing the free PDF I have made of
the book before it's June 2 release as a real and artificially scarce
RandomHouse product?
I will read it. Would you be deviant enough to post the PDF to this list?
Joseph:
Objectives include creating the first draft of a FAQ and
distinguishing Abundance from Scarcity based economics.
Approximately
3,000-10,000 words
For this issue, I especially hope for pieces from Michel, Roberto,
Paul, Eric Hunting, and Smari. With my piece, that gives us 6, aiming
for perhaps 10 depending on how many people want to contribute and how
intensive the production gets. The format I'd like to observe for
this first issue is for the author to share his/her autobiographical
experience with abundance/scarcity (how you happened to question the
accepted worldview) + present on some aspect of the history of
abundance thinking. Eg, I will focus on the work of Buckminster
Fuller.
After this, I am hoping to have some guest editors with particular
interest in topics take the lead to help start discussion of that
issue/handle some of the editing burden. Eg, perhaps Kevin Carson and
Pat Kane want to contribute to the issue on the Theory of Value.
Maybe you want to be active on the currency issue?
Would you expand on this in another post?
Nathan
Kevin Carson
>
> How do I get involved in all this Abundance talk? I just wrote a book
> about pretty much all the subjects you wrote about in your initial
> invitations.
Good to see you on the list, Douglas.
IMO a collateral principle of the corporate economy, alongside
artificial scarcity, is state-mandated artificially high levels of
overhead.
My own obsession along those lines, currently, concerns the ways in
which the state imposes overhead costs through regulation (a good
recent example is the CPSIA's mandates of expensive testing for each
separate clothing product line), which means that only large-batch
producers can afford to amortize the added overhead cost. It
essentially criminalizes small-batch production in household/informal
microenterprises, using spare capacity of capital goods most people
own.
What the counter-economy is really good at is intensively using inputs
that capitalism wastes (because extensive addition of inputs is
subsidized--e.g. intensive farming's more efficient use of soil),
squeezing the last ounce of use out of capacity that capitalism would
leave idle, and using the waste byproducts of capitalism. Put them
all together, and the counter-economy is the rats skulking in the
dinosaurs' nests. In a few decades, there won't be enough of the
corporate economy left to bury.
> Moreover, is anyone interested in seeing the free PDF I have made of
> the book before it's June 2 release as a real and artificially scarce
> RandomHouse product?
Most definitely!
--
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html