I realize that with all this blabbering I’ve been doing about social organizations, and politics, particularly the post on Health Care Cooperatives, some of you may have read something into my thinking that I think is very much not there. I think this resonates with the way people people read a certain kind of libertarian streak in Cory Doctorow’s work, which is I think is an uncomfortable association, at least in my reading.

There are two parts of my thinking that I think are important:

First, I think there is a not particularly insignificant range of social and economic functions that fall into the broad category of the “public interest,” that I think would (and are) ill served by the private institutions which are their current guardians. This was the crux of the argument of my health care argument, but I think there are other things that fall under the public interest: education, banking, “utilities” (water, sewage, power, TCP/IP data,) health care, and infrastructure (roads, public transit, rail, power distribution, ), as well as some operations that benefit from centralized organization like aviation.

Second, I would assert that “Market Forces,” are not sufficiently understood to merit trust in their efficacy. Furthermore, the large-scale global markets that have ruled supreme in the recent past tend to sacrifice long-term authenticity, for short term gains at the expense of individuals. This is the problem with corporations that I’ve been harping on for a long time. The way, as far as I can tell to de-incentivize this kind of economic activity, is to focus economic development on more smaller ventures and to decrease the importance of initial capital outlay on business models.

And that’s simply not something you can regulate or deregulate around. To erase the impact of corporate-styled business models on the economy, you have to hack scarcity in some way. Corporation-sized ventures beat cooperative-sized ventures today, because in most areas economies of scale in the production of concrete material, doom cooperative-sized enterprises. One of the effects of the development of technology in the next {{few}}¹ years will be, I suspect, to decrease the advantages of economies of scale.

If nothing else it’s an interesting time to be alive.

This is I think part of a “phase two” of a series of articles I wrote a few months ago about political economies, about corporate structures, about “hacker centric” business models. In that vein of thought, I suppose this post was inevitable.

My argument, in “phase one” was that big “corporations” were poorly constituted to develop sustainable business models, to act in the public interest, and to further the best interests of their employees and customers. I made the argument that we needed structures in corporate law (and in culture at large) to recognize “co-operative” (coops) organizations that promoted organic self-organization, and more nimble institutions that could participate in “authentic economic exchange.”

I’ve been having a lot of conversations in the past few weeks that have revolved around the current progress of the health-care “reform” process in America, and I find that I keep coming to the same conclusion:

The rising costs of health care in the United States, is largely due to the overhead imposed by the insurance industry. Both in the increased bureaucracy that service providers have to endure (so service providers raise their fees to cover this cost,) and secondly in the form of the insurance companies' own profit margin.

As a result, I’ve become convinced that the problem with rising health care costs is the insurance companies themselves and that any scheme that sees legitimacy in attempting to address “the health care problem” by taking the interests of the insurance companies as being integral to the solution, rather than the root of the problem has already failed to address the problem at hand.

What I’ve been saying, is we need to work backwards through this problem. The prevailing logic seems to be to figure out how much procedures cost, how much we as “clients” need to pay, and how much our employer/the government can afford based on those projections, and then how much we have to pony up to cover the gap. I think it makes much more sense to figure out how much people (doctors, nurses, technicians, clinical providers, etc.) need, how much supplies cost (lab work, supplies, chemicals, physical plant things,) include some fringe expenses (e.g. educational expenses, preventative outlay, technological infrastructure), and then figure out how to pay for these costs: co-pays, tax funding, health care trusts. That’s at least a viable solution.

With the base expenses taken care of, providers are more free to organize in complementary groups, in co-operatives that provide various kinds of general purpose and centralized services. Alliances can be formed to distribute clerical and management responsibility, on smaller scales. Makes sense.

Good luck in seeing that happen.

As I mentioned in my link collection post, my thinking about co-operative economics has taken a brief foray into the area of leadership and governance, both on the small scale (eg “How do we organize our project, to acomplish our goals”) and on the larger scale (eg. “How do provide institutional support for the governance of our civilization”). Both are important and relevant questions, but it’s all complicated of course. Also, we should probably start of with a brief interlude of what an individuals labor/work activity might look like in a post-corporate economy, and then I’ll move into two interludes about leadership and government. Seat-belts fastened?

Post-Corporatism and Labor

We’re seeing some post-corporatism in the forum of an explosion of freelance and independent consultancies of various stripes and colors. Some key observations:

• Many if not most people working in this don’t work full time for one employer, splitting their time and energies between a number of projects.
• Freelance work allows people to develop flexible careers where growth isn’t dependent on moving into management careers.
• Traditional “benefits” of employment (eg. health insurance, office resources, data connectivity, etc.) are increasingly procured either through ad-hoc agreements: eg. Marriage for health insurance, Co-working spaces, “Freelancers' Unions” and so forth.

Leadership and Co-Operative Governance

The question that I think I’ve failed to really address in during all of this “co-op” conversation is If corporations are replaced by cooperative organizations, how are projects managed and where does leadership come from? Indeed one of the biggest benefits/strengths of the corporation (top-down) model, is that corporations are really (or at the least reasonably) well organized and constituted, so if we’re doing away with the corporation, how do we remain organized and productive.

I should, as an interlude, reiterate that I’ve advocated for cooperative organizations on the basis that they’re more effective at creating real and authentic value, than the American/multinational corporation as we now know it. Furthermore, I’m totally convinced in the necessity and utility of effective leadership and management, for our productivity. The post-corporate economy isn’t a world without management, but rather a world with a smarter, more distributed system for management.

Part of the distribution of management comes from the fact that labor itself is to be more distributed. Just as we bring on engineers, artists, manufacturing in an often ad hoc way, we might also bring on project management and other “logistical professionals” to promote productivity. (Remember that coops are organizations that are unlikely to involve the direct labor of more than 100 or 150 people at any given time.) Higher level administration and guidance can be provided by small elected/nominated executive councils (a la, the KDE project, the Squeak Project, or the Debian Project) or in the “benevolent dictator” model (eg. Linus' for Linux, Larry Wall for Perl, Guido for Python, Dries for Drupal, Matt Mullenweg for WordPress, Rasmus for PHP, etc.)

Another “inherent” solution for providing management derives from the fact that cooperatives have a more pervasive project-based and goal oriented focus. Cooperatives, then, like open source software development projects, work on making something of value, (or providing valuable services,) don’t need to expend resources maintaining solubility. When a co-op finishes it’s project, the members move on to other projects and co-ops.

I think creative thinking about leadership in new environments requires a few basic assumptions:

• Democracy is created by participation rather than by elections.
• Management/logistical overheads grow geometrically while operations grow arithmetically.
• Co-ops would exist to both create value, and serve the interests of its members. Corporations exist to serve the interests of the investors. The dissolution of a cooperative isn’t antithetical to the purpose of a cooperative in the way that it totally antithetical to the purpose of a corporation.

Land and the Problem of Government

I’m persistently convinced that the “State” (as in the United States) or province (in the Canadian/Australian sense) is probably a really ineffective way to organize and structure a government. A lot of the people who are object to the American government advocate for states-rights and taking power and authority from the federal government and handing it to the states (eg. Libertarians). This has always struck me as sort of foolish.

Not because I think local control is a bad thing, or I have any great love of the institutions of liberal democracy, but rather because States themselves fail to convey meaningful/practical/useful administrative or political units. A co-operative ethos would require (and need, though not--strictly speaking--depend upon,) a system where institutions and governance transpired along meaningful and practical political units.

Greater metropolitan areas make sense as administrative units (including those that straddle existing borders) in a way that states themselves don’t really. Gary Indiana and the City of Chicago have a lot more in common than Chicago and Carbondale Illinois. At the same time there’s a big problem with the city-state, as “the unit of government:” it fails to account for, integrate, capture, and empower people in less urban areas. Which is given the importance of food, is incredibly crucial.

I’m interested in thinking about how, particularly with new technologies, we might be able to conceptualize geographically based political units that integrate populations that fairly represents the interests/needs of people who live in areas with lower population densities.

I’ve had “write post about writing/read sexuality” on my todo list for too long and I wanted to make the general note before it got too stale. In a lot of way’s this is in response to Nora’s post on magic district and I think something else that I can’t trace down the reference to.

Basically I saw a couple of things where non-normative sexualities (more promiscuous, more casual, more queer) were underplayed or criticized fiction because of concerns (real or other wise) that the non-norm sexuality would be distracting or feel “Ham handed.”

And I sort of gawk. Not because I think that this is incorrect. Writing about queer sexualities in fictional contexts is distracting, and something of a big deal, relative to non-queer sexualities in fiction. I also think it’s a bit distracting in real life, that the discomfort/distracting experience that many people get isn’t the result of ham handed political message insertion into writing, but rather, a fairly reasonable depiction of what it’s like to have your embodied experience politicized, to be (nearly constantly) reminded of the cultural dissonance you have.

Sure, it’s possible to under-represent queer lives in fiction, it’s possible to write queerness inappropriately, or to over-normalize it. But if your readers are distracted, if they’re made uncomfortable, you probably did something right.

My grandmother watches the evening news, which isn’t particularly noteworthy except that it’s not something that I do unless I’m near someone who does. I tend to get my news via the radio, and the Internet, and while the visuals are instructive, it’s not something that I’ve had a lot of experience watching in recent years.

Which is why I was surprised by how bad they’ve gotten in the past few years. Not only is the news shorter, but there’s less variation in the coverage (all the networks/shows cover the same half dozen stories, with much the same slant.) And there’s this pervasive inline advertising thing which I swear is a new phenomena. It’s unsettling at the very least.

ps. I also correctly diagnosed a case of spasmodic disphonia in they junior senator from main on the television.

Before I started to write this article I heard two pieces of news. First, that the economy of Latvia had failed as part of the ongoing depression. Second, that the American Government was going to provide subsidies to hedge funds (!) to promote a revival of the financial services industry. The mind boggles, to very different degrees at both of these stories. Like this whole depression, it seems clear that the core issue is that economies based on inauthentic exchange of value are prone to failure: the act of moving money from hither to thither doesn’t create value, even though paper values rise. That’s a bubble.

There are a lot of these, of course, the bubble under my lens today is the advertising bubble.

It seems to me that advertising, is really minimally effective, or accidentally effective at any rate. Our world is submerged in advertising, and yet we spend a great deal of time ignoring it: we use DVRs to skip commercials, we install ad-blocking plug-ins on our web-browsers, we instinctively tune out advertisements and have grown so acclimated to the presence of advertising that we ignore ads. If advertising is effective it is only effective incidentally.

And yet, we’ve built (albeit faltering) economies around advertising. The first dot-com burst was due largely to the fact that advertising revenue couldn’t support dot-com business model. The Web-2.0 bubble hasn’t been entirely advertising driven, but that’s a huge part of the equation (eg. google), and particularly for content (rather than service) driven websites.

The thing is that advertising seems like a great way to support the content industry (such as it is): we have practices to separate it from editorial content, it provides a revenue stream, it’s easily integrated into our designs, we know how to buy and sell it. But because it doesn’t really work (at anything beyond generally raising the profile of a logo, possibly), and advertising money dries up when the economy dries up: so it’s not exactly a robust business model.

The problem, is that there’s not a lot of good models for content-based services to operate under. Subscriptions don’t often work because the threshold to commitment is high, and unless you already have an audience, it’s hard to convince people to pay subscription fees. Micropayments, and tip jars where you expect a lot of people to give a very little in support of your site, often suffer from the same problems as subscription models in practice.

The solution?

Well there isn’t one, exactly, so I’m really excited to see what happens in the next couple of years. My gut instinct is that the following two factors are important:

1. Content on the Internet should be a hook into some other revenue generating scheme. Consult, coach, be an academic, publish books, sell relevant stuff, and so forth. This works, it can certainly be overdone, or done poorly, but blogging is a great way to prove to the world (and yourself) that you know what you’re talking about, and that you’re an interesting, creative, and committed thinker and worker, worthy of their investment in other contexts.

2. There should be less content on the Internet. Part of the problem is that since everyone can have their own website, in most cases everyone does, and while this is great for the democracy of the web, it means that there’s way more competition (for eyeballs, for advertising money) than there needs to be. The end result is that audience is way too divided. The solution: group blogs and more curated content. It’s still possible for people to present individual streams of content, and use personal sites for profiles, but in the age of the niche and the post-advertising age, working in groups is the way. I’m convinced.

More thoughts on this, particularly the second point to follow, of course.

Onward and Outward!

September the 11th will always be remembered for the events in New York City in the year 2001, but our remembrances on this date shouldn’t be dedicated solely the crimes of 2001.

On September 11, 1973 a Chilean man by the name of Victor Jara was executed for writing and singing songs. After Pinochet and the other Generals came to power they started killing those people who they felt threatened by. Victor Jara was on the top of their list not only because of support of Allende and the Popular Unity party, but because his songs were political, and he had influence with the people.

They put him in prison where he began to sing to keep up the spirits of himself and his fellow inmates. The guards broke his hands with their rifle butts, but he continued to sing and write poems. On 9.11.73 Victor Jara was takenóalong with five thousand other men to the soccer stadium where he was tortured and eventually was murdered. There are reports that say he sang until the very end, and I can believe it.

The following poem was the last that he wrote, on the morning of his execution, in blood more or less, it was smuggled out of the stadium and the translation you see here comes to us through Pete Seeger.

Estadio Chile -Victor Jara

We are 5,000 ó here in this little part of the city We are 5,000 ó how many more will there be? In the whole city, and in the country 10,000 hands Which could seed the fields, make run the factories. How much humanity ó now with hunger, pain, panic and terror?

There are six of us ó lost in space among the stars, One dead, one beaten like I never believed a human could be so beaten. The other four wanting to leave all the terror, One leaping into space, other beating their heads against the wall All with gazes fixed on death.

The military carry out their plans with precision; Blood is medals for them, Slaughter is the badge of heroism. Oh my God, is this the world you created? Was it for this, the seven days, of amazement and toil?

The blood of companero Presidente is stronger than bombs Is stronger than machine guns. O you song, you come out so badly when I must sing o the terror! What I see I never saw. What I have felt, and what I feel must come out! “Hara brotar el momento! Hara brotar el momento!”

There are some things that we can never be allowed to forget, words that need to be said, and there are the songs of unsung hero’s must be sung.