Re: [projectvrm] System D

[Katherine Warman Kern < >]

System D markets may have survived the megatization of business. 

But haven't we forgotten how legitimate businesses with integrity emerged and 
grew into mega, global corporations? They started in a local community of 
inventors, investors, sellers and buyers.   A local community is inherently 
transparent and individuals have the power to affect consequences when a 
customer is betrayed by a business - and vice versa.  Since "debrouillard" 
literally means to "de-fog" I think it is a descriptive label of the the 
transparency and natural market forces when doing business in a local 
community context.  

I don't know what political baggage is associated with it.  But I certainly 
agree we need to recognize that we failed to anticipate what happens when 
business expands to a global, virtual scale and dimension.  

Have you heard about the new book Locavesting?

K-

Katherine Warman Kern
203.918.2617

On Nov 6, 2011, at 7:45 AM, Doc Searls 
<
 >
 wrote:

> I should add, in answer to some off-list emails, that I'm not saying here 
> that the black market is a VRM model. 
> 
> Obviously System D, as described below (or as I read it) includes all 
> illicit market activity, including drugs and prostitution. But it also 
> includes, I would hope, some things we can learn from.
> 
> One accomplishment of the #Occupy movement has been to shine a light on the 
> failure of hierarchy in the very middle of the economy: with banking. Big 
> banks today no longer want to loan money. They don't want your savings, 
> except to play the financial casinos themselves. This is great news for 
> credit unions, but the dysfunction requires many work-arounds.
> 
> As we said in Cluetrain, "The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears, 
> or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets, or arenas. Not demographics, 
> eyeballs, or seats. Most of all, not consumers." 
> 
> What should markets be today? Surely not just Wall Street. Surely not 
> governed by federal and state institutions bought and paid for by 
> hierarchical interests in keeping Business As Usual.
> 
> Take another look at Geoffrey West's talk on cities:
> 
> <http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations.html>
> 
> His point: Cities scale in a super-linear way. Businesses scale in a 
> sub-linear way. So do all life forms, which is why their growth is 
> sigmoidal: It flattens out at the top, and they eventually fall over and 
> die. So do governments, for that matter. You can bomb a city, and it lives. 
> Look at Hiroshima and Dresden.
> 
> System D, seems to me, includes some lessons in how, at the street level, 
> cities are horizontal entities that do much that companies and governments 
> also try to to do vertically, or hierarchically -- for awhile, but not 
> forever. We need both, in symboisis. But sometimes that symbiosis gets out 
> of whack. We have that now. The hierarchies are failing. One helping the 
> other (as Washington helped Wall Street in '08 and since) is failing. VRM 
> isn't the answer to everything, but it's an answer that comes from the 
> street level.
> 
> Prudential and John Hancock built Boston's two highest skyscrapers. Both 
> maintain small offices there, but neither are the Great Companies they once 
> were. Hancock's name still graces what's now the 4th tallest building in 
> Chicago, but the tallest no longer bears the name Sears, which built it.
> 
> But big vertical things are interesting, whether they're buildings, 
> companies or governments. They get most of the attention. But they aren't 
> always the answer, except temporarily.
> 
> This is why the sports contest of Big Biz vs. Big Gov (how the Dems and the 
> Reps like to characterize each other in the U.S.) requires an astigmatic 
> view. It blurs to the vertical. Cities grow horizontally, while the big 
> institutions within grow vertically. We need both, but the more important 
> and vital context is the horizontal one.
> 
> Anyway, I think things are happening today at the street level -- P2P or 
> C2C -- that model in an ad hoc way some of what we'd like to see with VRM. 
> 
> Maybe System D is too full of illegal activity  to work as a model (if it 
> really exists as a "system" at all, which is debatable). But that shouldn't 
> stop us from looking at what happens in places where markets are still 
> markets.
> 
> Doc
> 
> On Nov 5, 2011, at 10:31 PM, Doc Searls wrote:
> 
>> Anybody ever heard of System D?
>> 
>> It's the underground economy. Off-grid. Big in places where commerce is 
>> personal and taxes are avoided. "Unlicensed bazaars," for example.
>> 
>> See here: <http://bit.ly/tEXJhL> An excerpt:
>> 
>>> System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the 
>>> Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe 
>>> particularly effective and motivated people. They call them 
>>> débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how 
>>> resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted 
>>> this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that 
>>> inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing 
>>> business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the 
>>> bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of 
>>> "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, 
>>> "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the 
>>> economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, 
>>> economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to 
>>> describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal 
>>> using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a 
>>> kitchen.
>> 
>> Sounds VRM friendly to me.
>> 
>> More:
>> 
>>> ...System D is on the rise. In the developing world, it's been increasing 
>>> every year since the 1990s, and in many countries it's growing faster 
>>> than the officially recognized gross domestic product (GDP). If you apply 
>>> his percentages (Schneider's most recent report, published in 2006, uses 
>>> economic data from 2003) to the World Bank's GDP estimates, it's possible 
>>> to make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the approximate value of 
>>> the billions of underground transactions around the world. And it comes 
>>> to this: The total value of System D as a global phenomenon is close to 
>>> $10 trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If System D 
>>> were an independent nation, united in a single political structure -- 
>>> call it the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, 
>>> Bazaaristan -- it would be an economic superpower, the second-largest 
>>> economy in the world (the United States, with a GDP of $14 trillion, is 
>>> numero uno). The gap is narrowing, though, and if the United States 
>>> doesn't snap out of its current funk, the USSR/Bazaaristan could 
>>> conceivably catch it sometime this century.
>>> 
>>> In other words, System D looks a lot like the future of the global 
>>> economy. All over the world -- from San Francisco to São Paulo, from New 
>>> York City to Lagos -- people engaged in street selling and other forms of 
>>> unlicensed trade told me that they could never have established their 
>>> businesses in the legal economy. "I'm totally off the grid," one 
>>> unlicensed jewelry designer told me. "It was never an option to do it any 
>>> other way. It never even crossed my mind. It was financially absolutely 
>>> impossible." The growth of System D opens the market to those who have 
>>> traditionally been shut out.
>>> 
>>> This alternative economic system also offers the opportunity for large 
>>> numbers of people to find work. No job-cutting or outsourcing is going on 
>>> here. Rather, a street market boasts dozens of entrepreneurs selling 
>>> similar products and scores of laborers doing essentially the same work. 
>>> An economist would likely deride all this duplicated work as inefficient. 
>>> But the level of competition on the street keeps huge numbers of people 
>>> employed. It liberates their entrepreneurial energy. And it offers them 
>>> the opportunity to move up in the world.
>> 
>> 
>> Thoughts?
>> 
>> Doc
>> 
>> 
> 
>