[P2P-F] Fwd: Brilliant short article

Wed Jan 6 14:54:58 CET 2016

]Dougllas Rushkoff  also sent the following article through his email list:

Digital and robotic technologies offer us both a bounty of productivity as
well as welcome relief from myriad repeatable tasks. Unfortunately, as our
economy is currently configured, both of these seeming miracles are also
big problems. How do we maintain market prices in a world with surplus
productivity? And, even more to the point, how do we employ people when
robots are taking all the jobs?

Back in the 1940’s, when computers were completing their very first cycles,
the father of “cybernetics,” Norbert Wiener, began to worry about what
these thinking technologies might mean for the human employees who would
someday have to compete with them. His concern for “the dignity and rights
of the worker” in a technologized marketplace were decried as communist
sympathizing, and he was shunned from most science and policy circles.

Although it may still sound like heresy today, Wiener realized that if we
didn’t change the underlying operating system of our economy – the very
nature and structure of employment and compensation – our technologies may
not serve our economic prosperity as positively as we might hope.

As we wrestle with the bounty of productivity as well as the displacement
of employees by digital technologies, we may consider the greater operating
system on which they’re all running. If we do, we may come to see that the
values of the industrial economy are not failing under the pressures of
digital technology. Rather, digital technology is expressing and amplifying
the embedded values of industrialism.

It’s time we have the conversation toward which Wiener was pushing us, and
challenge some of the underlying assumptions of human employment. The
current anxiety over the future of work may be inspired by the increasing
processing power of computers and networks, or even the platform monopolies
of Amazon and Uber. But it has its roots in mechanisms much older than
these technologies – mechanisms set in motion at the onset of
industrialism, in the 13th century.

Looked at in terms of human value creation, the industrial economy appears
to have been programmed to remove human beings from the value chain. Before
the Industrial Age, the former peasants of feudalism were enjoying a
terrific economic expansion. Yes, in spite of the way they’ve been
chronicled by Renaissance court historians, the very late Middle Ages were
actually a boom time. The Crusaders had just returned from their global
treks, having established trade routes through which the goods of many
lands could travel. They also returned with new technologies for
agriculture and trade, including the bazaar – a marketplace for the
exchange of crafts, crops, grain and meat, which used new financial
instruments such as grain receipts and market money.

But as the peasants got wealthy exchanging goods and services, the
aristocracy got relatively poorer. So they re-established control over the
economy by outlawing market moneys and chartering monopolies with dominion
over particular industries. So now, instead of making shoes himself, the
local cobbler had to get a job at the officially chartered monopoly
company. Thus what we think of as “employment” was born – less an
opportunity than a restriction on creating value.

[image: ThrowingRockscover]Instead of selling his shoes, the cobbler sold
his hours – a form of indenture previously known only to slaves. Worse, his
skills were not valued. The owners of proto-factories saw in industrial
processes a way to hire cheaper workers, with less leverage against them.
Why hire a skilled craftsman when you can break down the shoe-making into
tiny steps, each capable of being taught to a day laborer in 15 minutes?

Viewed in this light the Industrial Age may have had no more to do with
making products better or more efficiently than simply removing human
beings from the value equation, and monopolizing wealth at the top.
Automation reduced the economy’s dependence on the laboring classes. Those
few tasks that still required humans could go to the lowest bidder –
ideally in countries too far away for the human toll to be noticed by
potential customers.

The only business priority these companies understood was growth. That’s
largely because their own solvency was based on paying interest to nobles
chartering and later to the banks financing them. But today, growth has
become an end in itself—the engine of the economy—and humans have come to
be understood as impediments to its functioning. If only people and our
idiosyncratic demands could be eliminated, business would be free to reduce
costs, increase consumption, extract more value, and grow.

This is one of the primary legacies of the Industrial Age, when the
miraculous efficiency of machines appeared to offer us a path to infinite
growth—at least to the extent that human interference could be minimized.
Applying this ethos in a digital age means replacing the receptionist with
a computer, the factory worker with a robot, and the manager with an
algorithm. When digital companies disrupt an existing industry, they tend
to offer just one new job for every 10 they render obsolete.

If we want a digital economy that gets people back to work, we have to
program it for something very different. The word digital itself refers to
the digits—the 10 fingers – that we humans use to build, to count, and to
program computers in the first place. That we should now witness a
renaissance in makers, crafts and artisanal production is no coincidence.
The digital landscape encourages production from the periphery, lateral
trade, and the distribution of wealth. Instead of depending on centralized
institutions for sustenance, we begin to depend on one another.

Where the corporations of the past depended on government regulation to
maintain their monopolies, today’s digital companies do it through the
monopoly of the platforms themselves. Today’s digital behemoths are not
factories but networks whose embedded programming controls the landscape on
which interactions take place. In a sense, Uber is software designed to
extract labor and capital (in the form of automobiles) from drivers and
convert it into share price for its investors. It is not an opportunity to
exchange value so much as to do the R&D for a future network of robotic
cars, without even offering a share in the ownership.

Thankfully, the remedies are varied. Unlike the one-size-fits-all solutions
of the Industrial Age, distributed prosperity in a digital age won’t scale
infinitely. Rather, the solutions gain their traction and power by
reconnecting people and rewriting business plans from the perspective of
serving human stakeholders rather than abstracted share values.

Yes, on the surface most of them sound idealistic or even socialist, but
they are being tried by companies and communities around the world, and
with documented success. Among the many I explore in my upcoming book on
the subject are letting employees share in increased productivity by
reducing their workweek -- at the same rate of pay. Or contending with
overproduction by implementing a guaranteed minimum income. Or retrieving
the Papal concepts of “distributism” and “subsidiarity,” through which
workers are required to own the means of production, and companies grow
only as large as they need to in order to fulfill their purpose. Growth for
growth’s sake is discouraged.

Many companies today – from ridesharing app Lazooz to Walmart competitor
WinCo – are implementing worker-owned “platform cooperatives” to replace
platform monopolies, allowing those contributing land or labor to an
enterprise to earn an ownership share equal to those contributing just
capital.

Finally, distributing the spoils of distributed technologies means
accepting the good news: there may simply be fewer employment opportunities
for people. We must remember that employment may really just be an artifact
of an old system – the reactionary move of a bunch of nobles who were
afraid for people to create value for themselves.

Once we’re no longer conflating the idea of “work” with that of
“employment,” we are free to create value in ways unrecognized by the
current growth-based market economy. We can teach, farm, feed, care for and
even entertain one another. The work challenge is not a problem of scarcity
but a spoil of riches. It’s time we learn to deal with it that way.

On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 9:05 AM, Michael Lewis <Lewiscccr at shaw.ca> wrote:

> This article helped deepen the argument for one stream of the work of the
> commons movement, or so it seems to  me, a neophyte entering the world you
> are trying to create.  What do you think?
>
> http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-05/fork-the-economy
>   Mike

-- 
- Strategic developer P2P Foundation. Director of content
commonstransition.org

- Co-founder guerrillatranslation.org

-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

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