On Jun 7, 2014, at 2:44 PM, Kaliya Identity Woman <
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On Jun 6, 2014, at 6:00 PM, Doc Searls <
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- Kaliya
Uber doesn't just "extract" value. It als creates value, employs people, and disrupts a business category (taxi/livery) that had long been stuck in the past.
I never said it JUST extracted value. But it is primarily based on that model and frame of capitalism. This message explains what I mean - it has extensive linking and quoting.
I'm missing the context here. Which message? If it's the Techcrunch one, I don't find you in the comments, but maybe I'm not looking in the right place. If you read what I say and like it - please agree on the list - and if you are "afraid" to do that feel free to give me a thumbs up in a back channel.
Uber clearly provides a service and people get value from it and are willing to pay for it.
It is on path to destroy the jobs of literally MILLIONS of people who currently work driving people and things around.
And if we were to forbid everything that destroyed jobs we'd have nothing to talk about.
FWIW, I used Uber for the first time when I arrived in Santa Barbara a few weeks back, and the driver told me there isn't one less cabbie with a job, even though there are now fifteen Uber drivers in town. This guy loved his work as well.
BTW, taxis in Santa Barbara, like those in most of the U.S., have always been both expensive and sucky. I believe there are some places, e.g. London, where the taxi business works well and is staffed by people who are good at what they do. But many others, such as New York, are remarkably lousy. Yes, there are a lot of cabs, and they do employ a lot of people, but one senses corruption and protectionism at all costs.
When they finally began to take credit cards, the default choices on the screens were something like 20%, 30% and 50%. And many of them are "broken" much of the time. That kind of passive aggression does not make me fond of the system.
We also have robotics progressing to do the same thing for other things. We have AI algorithms using the work of people to then "make computers know things" which is a hack - fake intelligence - it is based on human reasoning and a certain set of humans reasoning (those who's words were sucked into the algorithms - which is skewed to first world computer users).
I read much (but not all) of it after it came out. Agreed with some things, not with others. I'll look at it again. I don't want it to be those with the biggest servers - but unless we do something about this REALLY at a fundamental architectural level of the information we produce and use and share collectively in society we will ALL be feudal surfs on their estates.
We already are: < https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.html> I do NOT want to be a feudal serf in a world of Google owned and driven cars - that pushes everyone (people) and every other competitor off the market.
Me either. Please do some scenario thinking and consideration - before blindly getting behind and cheering Uber (or any other So called sharing economy startup) on…
I'm not blind, and I'm not cheering. I'm just saying what I'm seeing. There is a difference. The economic "frame" the system of doing business and how money is flowing to Uber and the reason it is doing so is because it is squarely with EXPLOITIVE, EXTRACTIVE, CAPITALISM that is destructive to the planet, communities and people.
I think we only disagree here in matters of particulars and degrees, and it's not worth going into those. First of all it is anchored in a Fiat money system.
To a degree, but not entirely. If you want to understand how this mental model of money works and what it is I recomend several places to start.
I've listened to it. In fact I listen to many Planet Money podcasts. They're terrific.
Will check those out too.
Other good ones are —
Lets get clear about the basis of the dominant economic model - the frame of the system of modern globalized capitalism - it is deeply exploitive and its roots MATTER to our thinking about how we "get out" of it with new tools and systems.
The emergence of capitalism in Europe and America could happen for several reasons:
Social Reproduction in Europe was re-organized by the church's persecution of women as witches because of their control over their own bodies that reduced their fertility. In the middle ages the population was decimated several times by disease. People - peasants were living on villages with a commons around them - they lived off the land. Women were managing their fertility AND the population was NOT growing. There was not excess labor … people were not leaving their villages to go to cities (Besides cities were a death trap - see 1,000 years of NonLinear History). The merchitial class aligned with the CATHOLIC church and began to systemically attack non-catholics (heritics) and specifically going after women and women's folk wisdom traditions - calling them Witches and persecuting them. This lead to population growth - and tada - you have excess labor to exploit - to us to run machines - to extract value from. The place to learn more about this time and what happened is Caliban and the Witch - http://libcom.org/library/caliban-witch-silvia-federiciCaliban and the Witch is a history of the body in the transition to
capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to
the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici
investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She
shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between
body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor
power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social
organization.
Abstract Representation of Value & The System of Law we have based on that. I read this in 2005 just as we were all starting to blog about identity in the Identity Gang and part of what we are doing is figuring out how to abstractly represent people - and help them be the ones who are at the CENTER of doing this - not renters of phone numbers in a global phone system. But OWNERS of our own data empowered with the abstraction and able to use if for our own INDIVIDUAL benefit and perhaps even more importantly our own COLLECTIVE benefit.
The Disconnect from our own Bodies, Nature and Living Systems.
When Europeans undertook their campaigns of conquest and exploration in
what seemed to them “new” worlds, they found the natives engaged in many
strange and lurid activities….Equally jarring to European sensibilities was the almost ubiquitous
practice of ecstatic ritual, in which the natives would gather to dance,
sing, or chant to a state of exhaustion and, beyond that, sometimes
trance. Everywhere they went — among the hunter-gatherers of Australia,
the horticulturists of Polynesia, the village peoples of India — white
men and occasionally women witnessed these electrifying rites so
frequently that there seemed to them to be, among “the present societies
of savage men . . . an extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much local
variation, in ritual and mythology.”1 The European idea of
the “savage” came to focus on the image of painted and bizarrely
costumed bodies, drumming and dancing with wild abandon by the light of a
fire…..
It was this description that fed into the great French sociologist
Emile Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence: the ritually
induced passion or ecstasy that cements social bonds and, he proposed,
forms the ultimate basis of religion.
Through the institution of slavery, European Americans had the
opportunity to observe their own captive “natives” at close range, and
they too reported varying and contradictory responses to the ecstatic
rituals of the transplanted Africans. Many whites of the slave-owning
class saw such practices as “noisy, crude, impious, and, simply,
dissolute,”6 and took strong measures to suppress them…..
Several men moved their feet alternately, in strange syncopation. A
rhythm was born, almost without reference to the words of the preacher.
It seemed to take place almost visibly, and grow. I was gripped with the
feeling of a mass-intelligence, a self-conscious entity, gradually
informing the crowd and taking possession of every mind there, including
my own . . . I felt as if some conscious plan or purpose were carrying
us along, call it mob-mind, communal composition, or what you will.10
On the whole, though, white observers regarded the ecstatic rituals of
darker-skinned peoples with horror and revulsion. Grotesque is one word
that appears again and again in European accounts of such events;
hideous is another. So when the phenomenon of collective ecstasy entered the colonialist
European mind, it was stained with feelings of hostility, contempt, and
fear. Group ecstasy was something “others” experienced — savages or
lower-class Europeans. In fact, the capacity for abandonment, for
self-loss in the rhythms and emotions of the group, was a defining
feature of “savagery” or otherness generally, signaling some fatal
weakness of mind. As horrified witnesses of ecstatic ritual, Europeans
may have learned very little about the peoples they visited (and often
destroyed in the process) — their deities and traditions, their cultures
and worldview. But they did learn, or imaginatively construct,
something centrally important about themselves: that the essence of the
Western mind, and particularly the Western male, upper-class mind, was
its ability to resist the contagious rhythm of the drums, to wall itself
up in a fortress of ego and rationality against the seductive wildness
of the world….. Everyone is vaguely aware of the decline of community human societies
have endured in the last few centuries, a development many social
scientists have analyzed in depth. Here we are looking at a much
sharper, more intense form of pleasure than anything implied by the word
community, with its evocations of coziness and small-town sociability.
The loss of ecstatic pleasure, of the kind once routinely generated by
rituals involving dancing, music, and so on, deserves the same attention
accorded to community, and to be equally mourned.
At IIW 18 in the closing circle I gave Doc a book - by an Architect - Christopher Alexander - The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A struggle between two world Systems. (I hope you had a chance to read it Doc)
I have. And I agree with his case for System A over System B. With a few caveats that are probably also not worth bringing up here. (BTW, what Alexander calls Direct Management is pretty much what we did with the last three houses we built.)
That is what we are in right now - System B - the dominant one we have now (Focused on image, efficiency, speed, power, control and money) that has beaten down and suppressed system A - the one we have had for all of human existence on the planet that is tuned into the human feelings and the quality of being.
This is another angle on what I mean by industry "winning" the Industrial Revolution. We lost much, and forgot much, in the time since. If VRM tools and technologies can't help us re-connect to each other and our communities - why bother.
Well, I hope that's what we get. But I see ProjectVRM as a big tent at this stage. It's too early to get particular about what is and what isn't VRM. Here is what i wrote for this list but never posted last September just after I read the book and just before the week I met Ali from Protonet and William Dyson. [Dean Landsman kindly did an edit at the time and this is the version I post below]
Yesterday, afternoon I stopped by Black Oak books in Berkeley. I browsed bit an found some good books, then just as I was about to check out I saw Christopher Alexanders's latest book The Battle for the Life and Beauty of Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systemshttp://www.amazon.com/Battle-Life-Beauty-Earth-World-Systems/product-reviews/0199898073/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending. I started flipping through and reading bits of it and decided to buy it. I went home and started reading from the beginning. I kept reading and reading. I read the whole book—almost 500 pages. I didn't stop until 11pm. What was so compelling that I couldn't stop reading? What struck me so deeply about what he articulates about physical architectures and the difference between the life enhancing holistic way of system-A and the dominant ways of system-B is that this is also true for the development of the ttechnical architectures of the our digital-social networks. I believe those of us in PDEC,, those of us coming to IIW year after year, and many others want to see the systems we are building be in alignment with the way of system-A. We are trying to build companies and businesses that are values based that respect the life and dignity of people and strive to make them better and our communities better. The preface opens:… We intend to show that architecture can bring life to a community --- indeed, that it is necessary in order to help the community come to life. Thus we mean to show how the physical fabric of the building plays a necessary and unavoidable role in the success of the community. The purpose of all architecture, the the purpose of its spacial geometric organization, is to provide opportunities for life giving situations. The central issue of architecture, and its central purpose, is to create those configurations and social situations, which provide encouragement and support for life-giving comfort and profound satisfaction --- sometimes excitement --- so that one experiences life as worth living. When this purpose is forgotten or abandoned, then indeed, there is no architecture to speak of.
We face a fundamental challenge today: what type of internet and web do we want?
We get to make tools and help to shape it.
We get to decide what we want the protocols of our projects and products to enable.
We get to adopt the tools that use them and help us connect in more convivial ways. We do not need to simply accept the architectures and systems built by system-B. We can choose to make, shape and nurture technical systems that follow the ways of system-A. In fact the architectures of the internet and early web succeeded so wildly because they resonate with system-A. So what are these two systems? This is how Alexander outlines them in the Preface: Each of these two "ways" may be regarded in turn as a production system, a system of thinking, a system of how to plan and build, how to organize labor and craft, how to take care of land and money and how the people who live and work in the environment may nourish their relationship of belonging to the land itself. System-A is concerned with the well-being of the land, its integrity and the well-being of the people and plants and animals who inhabit the land. System-B is concerned with efficiency, with money, with power and control. System-A places emphasis on subtleties, finesse on the structure of adaptation that makes each tiny part fit into the larger context. System-B places emphasis on more gross aspects of size, speed, profit, efficiency, and numerical productivity. System-B has become the dominant production system for the environment, largely to the exclusion of system-A. The "business as usual" production system— system-B—is incapable of creating the kind of environment that is genuinely able to support the emotional, whole-making side of human life. The creativity of society, and the creativity of the environment and the way we build it, are not minor issues. They are fundamental. They go to the health and freedom of society, and to the capacity for society and environment to bring a valued and enhancing life to its inhabitants. Places give us a coherent picture of the world, from which we obtain nourishment, spiritual and material. We must build a civilization in which individuals are able to like themselves, to heal themselves and to love one another in generosity.
After reading the book I am left wondering what it means for how we—the personal data ecosystem community—should actually proceed to succeed? What does it mean to proactively continue the build the internet/web as has evolved based on system-A? How do we support those who are seeking to build it? To network the collaboration together? To work on driving adoption? And sustain it over time? If we don't actually engage the questions I put forward soon, some of those who are working at the core of this movement will burn out and not be able to continue to serve in the roles they have filled. Those who are new to find the tribe and aspire to make a living building core aspects of this system won't be able to sustain themselves. We have built an amazing thing with IIW that operates with system-A principles. How do we get it to grow and scale and be bigger than IIW—to be a real ecosystem? I am feeling inspired to share this deeper level of thought and issues with you because Christopher Alexander in his book names something that is often pushed aside in system-B—feeling.
I have worked hard on getting IIW going and building relationships across the community and connecting because I have had big dreams and—yes—feelings about what we could do together. System-B all too often undermines the possibility of doing things that people have dreams about. Alexander says that a new approach to architecture "can only be successfully defined by constant emphasis on the real feelings of human beings." We tend to overlook the violation of peoples feelings because it happens every day, and we have become accustomed to it. When true feelings are forced into hiding in system-B, it has created a fictional universe in which these things are portrayed as unimportant or downright impossible. Damage is done. Those feelings are deeply true…when they are trampled, disregarded, and discouraged, people are made to feel small and ridiculous for ever having such feelings. He talks about the building environment we have today: "In most recent decades newly built buildings and neighborhoods the value of life has been dramatically and decisively diminished." I think the same is true of the web we have today vs the internet and early web that were created by people for other people. Here at the personal data ecosystem, we are a community born of feeling—of love for our fellow beings. We come together at IIW and work together because we are deeply inspired by the vision and with each other. What I am saying is backed up by Clay Shirky and his talk on Love and Pearl and Zitrain's talk about the internet (mistakenly labeled as "random acts of kindness"). I think it is proactive, intentional acts of kindness that keeps the web –and or efforts- going. I think we should seriously consider building a social movement (or tapping into existing networks around various issues) that wants a personal data and social web fabric resonant with system-A. This is the thing that we have dreams about—and others do, too. We need to find the people who share this dream with us and proactively work to support their emergence. We need to re-think how we structure the organizations and businesses we are building and the money we are raising to be creative in how we work together—so we can have good lives while we work on these efforts. We have to, as a community, talk about money and resources, about business models and our deeper visions, feelings, dreams—both for our work and for the world. We need to consider how we support core aspects of an ecosystem that don't themselves take in money but are important to the over-all holistic picture. I think we have enough trust and vision and heart to do that in this community. I urge us to start think about this leading up to the next IIW and to tackle the subject in depth at IIW itself.
And finally I draw your attention to the closing keynote that Clay Shirky made yesterday at the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC yesterday.
It was about Changing the pace of Change. One of the highlights was his talking about Occupy Wall St and the 2 occupations - one of the square - the other in the park - the library, first aid tent, kitchen, dispute resolution etc. All the things that made up the society within the park - people caring for each other in mutual aid. Then when Sandy happened who was most able to organize to provide aid - those folks and thus became Occupy Sandy - the mutual aid organization/network that was THE MOST effective in providing real sustained long term relief after the hurricane (it was also attacked by the powers that bebe with an arson attack on the church they were using to organize relief efforts - http://occupyutica.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/occupy-sandy-relief-rebuilding-resistance-and-the-arson-of-a-church/)
CLAY highlights that in today's age of technology the RADICAL act is CARING for each other - it is BEING HUMAN and alive in embodied bodies.
We should build tools using this technology infrastructure to help us individually and collectively connect and share and transact and cultivate more alive communities of happy people.
We shouldn't be aiming to help feed system B, exploitive capitalism.
It's interesting what each of us take from these talks. Clay did make those points, but what sticks with me is his framing of "time signatures:" long-scale ones and short ones. He said "Short term is good for surprises but bad for continuity, while long term is good for continuity but bad for surprises." And that we need to embrace both.
I agree. With ProjectVRM, now going on eight years young, I have been trying to do exactly that.
Doc
It is, however, a silo.
And, fwiw, "classic" or ideal intentcasting would include more than one company responding to an intentcast.
Doc On Jun 6, 2014, at 3:54 PM, Nathan Schor <
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