<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:georgia,serif">]Dougllas Rushkoff also sent the following article through his email list:<br><br><p>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?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><img src="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/ThrowingRockscover.jpg" alt="ThrowingRockscover" height="450" width="298">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 <span><span>in 15 minutes</span></span>?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><br><br><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div><div class="h5"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 9:05 AM, Michael Lewis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Lewiscccr@shaw.ca" target="_blank">Lewiscccr@shaw.ca</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">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?<br>
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<a href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-05/fork-the-economy" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-05/fork-the-economy</a><br>
Mike</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br></div></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">-- <br><div><div dir="ltr"><div>- Strategic developer P2P Foundation. Director of content <a href="http://commonstransition.org" target="_blank">commonstransition.org</a><br><br></div>- Co-founder <a href="http://guerrillatranslation.org" target="_blank">guerrillatranslation.org</a><br><div><br><br></div></div></div>
</font></span></div>
</div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: <a href="http://commonstransition.org" target="_blank">http://commonstransition.org</a> </div><div><br></div>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br><br><a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank"></a>Updates: <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br><br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div></div></div></div>
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