3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md

Data. Together. Let's read about it

About the Data Together Reading Group

Alternatives to Capitalist Structures (June 4, 2019)

🎬 Recorded Call

Intro

When we explore current centralized data models, many of our fears and challenges are driven by the power of capitalist incentives; the reduction of privacy, disproportionate influence by advertisers, and concentrated ownership of data by a few corporations are all seemingly justified by the capitalist imperative to deliver maximum value to shareholders.

If the levers of capitalism place it in opposition to just data practices, can we imagine an alternative? What systems are imagined or practiced outside of capitalism, what is their power, and what do they center?

Readings

1. Kathi Weeks (2011): The Problem with Work p5-8, 42-47, 51-57 Available at: libcom.org
2. Hanna Hurr (2016): Silvia Federici interviewed in Mask Magazine Available at: maskmagazine.com/the-control-issue/struggle/interview-silvia-federici
3. Cory Doctorow (2017): Walkaway (a novel) [Excerpt]. Available at: tor.com/2017/04/03/excerpts-cory-doctorow-walkaway-chapter-2/
4. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and E. Miller (2015): "Economy as Ecological Livelihood" Available at: communityeconomies.org/publications/chapters/economy-ecological-livelihood
5. Frase, Peter (2011): "Four Futures" Available at: jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/
6. Michael Johnson (2012): The Cooperative Principles, the Common Good, and Solidarity Available at: geo.coop/story/cooperative-principles-common-good-and-solidarity
7. Arturo Escobar (2018): Designs for the Pluriverse intro p7-21
8. Optional All of Doctorow's novel Walkaway
9. Optional Adrienne Maree Brown (2017): Emergent Strategy Resilience, Creating More Possibilities p77-98
10. Optional Nora Marks Dauenhauer (1990): Haa Tuwunáagu Yis on potlatch (jsoo.éex’) p75-109

Themes

Work as the source of meaning in a life

• Weeks: trend from direct exchange of money for a defined "job", to Protestant work ethic where work is an end in itself, to modern job hiring processes where you must display "passion" for the work in order to be hired
• Is it work if you don't get paid for it? Is "work" inherently important?
• Frase (4):

  ...decisions about work are already driven by non-material considerations, among those who are privileged enough to have the option: millions of people choose to go to graduate school, or become social workers, or start small organic farms, even when far more lucrative careers are open to them.

"Value" and money: "common sense" in modern business equates money and value– truisms like "what gets measured gets managed". When we use money to account for value, what are we failing to measure? What are we overvaluing?

• Wages for Housework movement (Federici, Weeks) to value traditionally undervalued roles
• Reframing of waged work
  • Walkaway: "threaten with starvation" if you don't work
• Money can be exchanged for almost anything– makes it useful but also creates absurdities (value of a life, exchange rates across borders, salary of a teacher vs a software engineer); value is a matter of perspective
  • Frase: "one can't use one kind of status to buy another" (status as "currency")
• Escobar: "...the basis of biological existence is the act of emotioning, and that social coexistence is based on love, prior to any mode of appropriation and conflict that might set in."

Class, heirarchy, and inequality as direct results of capitalism

• Waged labor as a power construct (Marx quoted & analyzed p6 of Weeks)

  "one consents to give the other his or her labor power for a limited period of time, and in return, the other agrees to pay the first a specific amount of money. But to see what happens after the employment contract is signed, the analysis must then move to a different location, the site where this special commodity will be 'consumed'..." 5, 6 "the activity of labor and the social relations that shape, direct, and manage it- will be revealed as the locus of capitalist valorization"

• "primitive accumulation": Marx's term, in Federici

  "the dispossession of millions of people from their means of subsistence ... something that is still taking place today, constantly. She proposes that this also includes and is made possible through the production of difference – hierarchies built upon gender, “race,” and age, that separate, divide people, domesticating some and marginalizing others in order to produce a continuous supply of new workers, enclose more land, and create ever-evolving forms of exploitation."

• Rentism & IP (Frase, 6)– enables creative class, enables class divide

Scarcity vs abundance

• Robots increasing efficiency reduces/eliminates "need" to manage labor in the absence of bosses
• Walkaway: concept that there is enough
  • Is it a part of the human condition to always want more, or more than?
  • Doctorow (Walkaway):

    It doesn’t work at all in theory. In theory, we’re selfish assholes who want more than our neighbors, can’t be happy with a lot if someone else has a lot more. In theory, someone will walk into this place when no one’s around and take everything. In theory, it’s bullshit. This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it’s a mess.

• Frase (5): "...within human societies, certain immaterial goods will always be inherently scarce: reputation, respect, esteem among one's peers."

Can we get there from here? Building new frameworks

• Žižek, in Frase: "It’s easy to imagine the end of the world, but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism."
• Cooperative principles:
  • Voluntary and Open Membership
  • Democratic Member Control
  • Member Economic Participation
  • Autonomy and Independence
  • Education, Training and Information
  • Co-operation among co-operatives
  • Concern for Community
• Escobar (9):

  ...society has to be reinstrumentalized to satisfy the twin goals of conviviality and efficiency within a postindustrial framework. This goal requires facing head-on the threats that accelerated growth and the uncontrollable expansion of tools pose to key aspects of the human experience...including the following: humans’ historical localization in place and nature; people’s autonomy for action; human creativity, truncated by instrumentalized education, information, and the media; people’s right to an open political process; and humans’ right to community, tradition, myth, and ritual—in short, the threats to place, autonomy, knowledge, political process, and community

• Gibson-Graham & Miller:

  The ecological entry point forces us to step back from the temporary centering operations of economics and ask how relations of livelihood creation and collective provisioning interact, conflict, co-constitute each other, and generate emergent properties.

• Brown: "What we put our attention on grows."
• Brown (Creating More Possibilities): idea that sometimes you can't work toward a small vision, only a big one that changes everything at once

Notes

• K: How do we get from one economic framing to another, and does this apply to our work?
  • DW: I think EDGI does a lot of this. I think EDGI takes the familiar and asks us to think "how did we get here"?
  • EP: Capitalist economies & it's positioning of work stood out to me. I work a lot in a reputation-based industry, and I found it interesting to see that the idea of work was different in these different processes
  • KB: It feels like one of the reasons people don't engage more as citizens is the way to be a good citizen is to do work. Driving the GDP is an all-consuming drive that at the end of the day makes you too tired to do anything else. I'm very interested to see what it looks like to have different versions of a life that you might care to live, compensated in different ways by the system that underpins it. I wanted you all to read Cory Doctorw's work, like the whole book.
  • EP: Totally. Reminds me of The Orville, where they don't have a concept of money, instead your value is determined by personal merit
  • RB: Doctorow's idea of walking away from posession and ownership
  • DW: I think the excerpt starts to think of the mecahnics of how post-scarcity might operate, re-mapping posession so you don't have posession, and generally being, but lots of them fall to gamification. I think this is interesting to think about in relation to decentralization. But I have a question for y'all: What did folks feel about <Frazee?>'s four futures. I'm particularly interested in the pragmatic/incremental futures vs. the more radical/transformative approaches.
  • B5: I'm a fan of Small change
  • KB: I'm excited about the green new deal because it changes everything.
  • DW: Song Lyric: "It's a small demand", "all we really wanted was everything. All we ever wanted was everyone". I think the scale of what needs to change is part of what gives me pause around incrementalism. An incremental model keeps you on a track. Or, there are ways which need to be addressed that cross boundaries. There are issues that if pursued as seperate things, won't be accomplished.
• KB: I want to return to DW's question of the four cutures: Hierarchicy, Egalaitarianism, Scarcity, Abundance. Coming back to rentism, Dawn pointed me to a book: New York 2140, very well researched science fiction. Rentism gets down to the idea of IP: In order to make sure the person who invented the thing is properly compensated, you need to build mechanisms to enforce that?
  • DW: exterminism, if we don't address power & hierarchy, we're in trouble. I think rentism/socialism outcomes are most plausible in the near future. Looking at recent occurances, The Economist has used the term Neo Liberal to describe themselves, which has been a long time coming. There is a way people are talking about changing work in society that have no interest in re-distributing power, which pushes us toward this rentier type society.
  • RB: I didn't get much from the 4 futures thing. The framing of looking at the four corners of how things can go is an interesting framing, but I've never been convinced by the major philosophical argument that everything comes down to Intellectual Property.
  • KB: I shocked myself by putting zero universal basic income readings on this list. In a book (that I missed) he comes to the conclusion that tech will eat the world, and we need UBI. So, what do we think about UBI?
  • DW: I think of UBI as a tool, a mechanism more than an outcome. My ask back: does it seem like there's some tension that goes into the folks that promote UBI. It brings together capitalists and activists.
  • KB: I went to a rally for Andrew Yang: "Trump got elected by identifying the problems correctly. What if we had a better way". Also, when I was looking into UBI, I found a reporter who was funded on UBI, up to a specific level, and that's enough. In classic capitalism, you're supposed to climb as high as you can go. Adknowledging the idea that you may already be in abundance
  • B5: ...
  • KB: ...
  • DW: Phillip K. Dick the idea that everything has been turned into a single microtransaction
  • DW: I think rentism is happening, and that we're actually now in this deep (decades deep) system that respects multinational corporations over soverignty. I think there is not a binary that you have to be either-radical-or-incremental about change. I think things are so complex & interwoven that it's hard to imagine how incremental change works in this context.
• KB: I want to turn to this notion of money as a thing that can be turned into anything else. The barter system isn't just invoncenient, it's very limiting. When you have money, things that really aren't comparable can be compared.
  • b5: ...
  • DW: I think that money isn't always an incentive. There's a point of view that money is good because it's one of the most efficent ways to communicate the value of a thing. I don't necessarily agree with that. I think it's important to think about what other levers you're working with when you're needing everything to go back to a currency. Many are starting with transactional systems. I'm not sure if markets are the way to address all of these problems
  • EP: This makes me think about net neutrality. Makes me think of Comcast being able to insert ads in your net traffic here in the US.and the way that there's often a "freemium" model of relating
  • KB: Do we have the language to talk about this?
  • DW: It reminds me of the work Take back our economy, which pulls together efforts to make things work in a different way. They work on trying to build examples that unpack assumptions like of course you need money. Maybe the commons article offers something as well. GEO: a worker co-op that's focused on catalyzing more coops.
  • EP: That cooperative article was very interesting. A large coop in Boston that had run for 25 years failed this year. They were pushed out by Whole Foods.
  • b5: ...
  • DW: I think its' very interesting that Sillicon Valley gives others a space to fail up. Michelle Murphy's work on the economization of life shows that it's a lot of work to keep capitalism going.
  • KB: With AirBnB Federici got there, and it turned out to just be late stage capitalism. When people start out in the gig economy, they don't think about it as a job. They think of it as extra cash. But if you do the math, it's a lot of work, and, why?
  • DW: This system sill hides the labour. Most of the people aren't managing in their own home, they're paying someone to manage their home. Even they are subdividing the labour & getting a slice. But I want to talk about how Vienna was re-architected to support collecting up work to group together
• KB: What do people think about in reaction to wages for house work?
  • KN: I would be supportive of it, but I have no idea how we'd go about it.
  • DW: I think part of what it does is point out the absurdities of how the system of production works. My thought is heck yeah but also think that to realize that we wouldn't live in a system of individualized labour. I wouldn't want to live in a world where everything is tracked & accounted for it
  • KB: I have a pretty strong negative reaction to getting paid for emotional labour. I think you should do things because you care.
  • EP: I also wonder if money is both motivation and an identifier. Knowing how much a person is making for the work they're doing. Maybe we should have value some other way
  • DW: ... By bringing all repoductive labour under the notion of work
  • RB: I want to tie that back the diachotiomes ... it takes me to my work in relation to EDGI
  • KB: (quote about moving to the site of consumtion). It goes from a conversation of bartering to a giving of power. It reminds me of the Protestant a very modern concept that your work should be your passion.
  • RB: The real world of technology by Ursula Franklin. It explores the idea of framing technologies as control oriented vs process oriented (might have got that wrong). ...
  • KB: This takes me to the question of the robots taking our jobs. Do we want people to do those jobs?
  • DW: There's been a shift in the thinking in Alberta, an understanding that many of the jobs that have been lost in Alberta are not coming back. There's now a situation of many men in their late 20s are now out of works. Work is bound up in so many things, identity, our role in society.

Transcript

KELSEY: Welcome to today's session on alternatives to capitalist structures! I don't know how this ended up on the topics list, honestly. I didn't put it there, but I was delighted to see it. There's so many directions we can go with this– pretty much infinite. And initially I was thinking, what are some– should we start with various other forms of government and governance? And I realized, I wanted to drill into the section on: how do you get to a state of transition between the kind of world that we're in now, towards a different kind of world and a different kind of government structure. Hopefully some of the reading spoke to that.

I know we had a lot of different readings, but not so many pages per reading. I was trying to look at different visions of not only what a future would be, but also what a transition state would be.

I think I want to open on the question of: given that we can go in so many different directions, what are ways that alternatives to capitalist structures, or any of these readings, feel connected to stuff that we actively work on?

DAWN: I think there are sort of two pieces that have always felt connected, to me, around this material and EDGI's work. Thank you for pulling, I think, a right slice [of material]. It's a great presentation of a lot of things.

The firs thing that comes to mind, in Federici and in JK Gibson-Graham's work, a re-opening of space for possibility. I think Federici frames her work as historical imagination. I think she focuses really carefully on that transition period to capitalism, to try to understand why maybe it wasn't inevitable, and there are other roots. I think JK Gibson-Graham do similar work with this concept of economy. So anyway, this is a thing that I think EDGI does too, it takes the familiar and asks us to think "how did we get here"? in order to think about ways to go somewhere else.

EBEN: Similar to Dawn, I was really fascinated by the variety of readings. The one that struck what I do a lot is the one about capitalist economies, and how work has sort of worked out, the history of that, and how it has sort of developed over time, the idea of market economies. It's laid out a specific way in the market, and also laid out differently in other economics, other functions of that, that are equal or more unequal. I work a lot in a reputation-based industry; who you know helps you define and get work. So it's interesting to read a lot of these things where the idea of work is different in these different societies and organizations. We're stepping away from that kind of process.

KELSEY: I think that one of the things that we– I told Dawn earlier, I spend a bunch of today turning our Civics discussion into a blog post, and so I've been thinking about this a lot. It feels like one of the reasons people don't participate or engage more as citizens, as people who define or question systems, or otherwise participate, is that it feels like, especially in the United States, the way to be a good citizen is to do work, to drive the GDP. It's an all-consuming drive that appears to be individualistic, that drives powers that we don't understand, (and it's not even really individualistic, right? You're working towards a goal, it's just not a goal that you necessarily understand or agree with), and then at the end of the day, you're too tired to do anything else.

For me, this is a really interesting topic, because I'm very interested to see what it looks like to have– even Federici's idea of wages for housework– different versions of a life that you might care about living, compensated in different ways by the system that underpins it. If not financially... ideally, you wouldn't need to be financially compensated for things that are important to do. You'd need to be in a system that appreciates them instead.

I wanted you all to read Cory Doctorw's Walkaway novel in its entirety if you have the chance; it has a lot of that feeling of people participating in a system, and then this idea that, if you just leave, maybe we already have abundance.

EBEN: Yeah. That was a really interesting excerpt, and I definitely want to read that book because of that idea. It's definitely– walkawayers are definitely walking out on society, but it was like, with a purpose, kind of, which was interesting to read about. I was also thinking, reading that, of other societies. There's this TV show called The Orville, which is a Star Trek takeoff, and they don't have this idea of money. You have this idea instead that your value in society is your merit. It's partly because they can mass produce everything, so materialism has gone away, but it's also interesting to think about that there's no monetary value in society. You're leaving that behind.

ROB: I thought it was interesting in Walkaway that the ethic was more, ultimately, walking away from the idea of posessing things. That was only a physical act only insofar as, if somebody wants to possess something, then you can't also be there. But otherwise it was really a metaphorical walking away, and it was a walking away specifically from possession and ownership.

DAWN: I think, in the excerpt, it looks like it starts to think about some of the mecahnics of how post-scarcity might operate, which is a really interesting thing to explore. In this idea of re-mapping posession so you don't have posessions, or things that you carry with you for a while, or maybe also things things that you're okay with if they disappear. Then there's this confrontation between the guy who wants to gamify everything, and then Popo and that idea– I think that this question, in a world without posessions, what are these forms of social cohesion? There's almost a way that her system of doing work, as opposed to the gamified one, is really predicated on re-centering toward relationships with people having to be very deep. And that provides the space to do that kind of work, which I think is so interesting in the idea of what we think decentralized technologies are doing, and particularly in relation to trust. This is always my wondering about blockchain stuff.

I have a thought that was a step back, and maybe this is something I'd like to y'all: I felt like there was two bits, two genres or groups of writing. The first one, in that Walkaway vein, is Frase, Four Futures. I'm curious what people thought about the different futures, or maybe drawing on other ones you've found in scifi that are dealing with some of these themes. The other genre is trying to think about structures right now that kind of speak to wanting there to be alternatives. I'm super curious in there what people think about these ones that are pragmatic or transition-oriented, versus these ones that are more transformational– so kind of, these incremental versus these more radical ideas around how to get from here to a different future. It's something I'm super stuck on.

As a first question, I'm super curious what people's thoughts were on what was put forward in the Frase one, or even just to say more about the world that is Walkaway.

BRENDAN: I haven't done the readings, but I do have an opinion on pragmatic small change versus revolution. I'm generally, sort of naively, of the school of thought that small change is definitely the category I fall into more, mainly because I worry too much about the implications of dramatic upheaval. I think that's one of the interesting things to keep in mind here. When we're talking about alternatives to capitalist structures, it's a phrase that– it's such a big thing. Capitalism underpins everything. It's such a– these kinds of conversations can fall into one of two buckets: you can be wildly imaginative and go in a completely different, direction, or you can say, oh my gosh, we're talking about reshaping society, and I feel that it has a very paralytic effect– like, who am I to be thinking on this level, or who are we? That tends to scare me very quickly into small change.

But I think that the older you get, the more you realize that all actions, including no action, is a massive risk. So maybe there really isn't a distinction between really, really, really big shifts and really small shifts.

KELSEY: I love that, Brendan; it actually relates directly to a piece I pulled out of Adrienne Maree Brown's "Emergent Strategy", in the part on Creating More Possibilities. She has this idea of, working towards small changes versus the idea that you can't always work towards a small change. Sometimes you have to change everything.

I was trying to explain in a living room conversation with my parents– the Green New Deal. They were like, why are they taking on, like, jobs, why the whole thing– zero for emissions...

Basically, I wouldn't be excited about it, and neither would anybody else, if it was anything less than everything. Is it right? Is it going to solve things? Is it going to do justice to the ideals? Probably not, but at least it changes everything.

DAWN: When you said "because it changes everything, I immediately thought of the International Noise Conspiracy, which has a song called "It's a Small Demand", which should be our theme song for this episode. I think their chorus is, "all we ever wanted was everything. All we ever needed was everyone".

Also, there's this whole idea of "just transition". That was the original language that was used in Canada around our equivalent of a Green New Deal. Or, with the popularity of the Green New Deal, they're talking about that in Canada now as well. I think the scale of what needs to change is part of what gives me pause about incrementalism. As an example in this context, in "just transition" in Canada, an incremental model means we're going to spend decades researching clean coal, and give provinces the option to do that, rather than stop having coal plants. That also is the model that allows the federal government to buy a pipeline, because it will be better run.

There are these ways that incrementalism keeps you on a track. Or at least, that is how it has played out at a policy/government level. I think that people who position themselves against that will point to that as not being enough. Or, there are ways in which these things need to be addressed at their intersection with another full set of issues. It can be hard to do that if those issues have not been historically linked. So by forcing a conversation about jobs and climate, I think that actually offers something new that might not come out otherwise, than if they were pursued as slightly distinct policy tracks.

BRENDAN: I could not agree more, and I could not be more terrified. It's a both/and to me. And I really love that approach, and I totally agree; there are so many things that are such wicked problems. I just finished a conversation the other day– some other project was building, like, Git, for data. And some other person was like, why? How are you different from this git for data thing? And I said, well, you have to go back; you have to redo the whole thing, because there are problems that are intrinsically connected. You have to do it all at once. Since we're talking about the Green New Deal– the New Deal, the original New Deal, you have to... there are many categories of problems for which the only justifiable, or the best course of action is to break a whole bunch of things and sort of start over. Maybe not start over. But I think that, nowadays, there's a real question about how we engage with that practically. Particularly in the U.S. and its very entrenched political system, but we can also look at that from a technological perspective. Gosh, I'm too off in the weeds in this conversation.

KELSEY: I want to bring this back around to Dawn's question about the "Four Futures". I'm going to read them out, just to re-center this. Essentially, he [Frase]– he didn't actually draw this diagram, which would have been super helpful, of four quadrants: Hierarchy and Egalaitarianism, Scarcity and Abundance. He named those quadrants: egalitarianism and abundance would be Communism; Hierarchy and Abundance is Rentism, which I'll come back to; Egalitarianism and Scarcity would be Socialism (I don't know I think I need a better personal definition of Socialism); and Hierarchy and Scarcity as Exterminism, which read to me as intentional 1%/99%-type divide.

Coming back to rentism– and this pops up in my mind as relevant to the "changing everything" problem– Dawn pointed me to a book which I didn't put on the reading list: New York 2140. If you've ever read Red Mars, it's the same author, who does extremely well-researched science fiction. New York 20140 is a book that eventually gets around to the idea of needing to stop having... Coming back to the reading's definition of rentism, essentially it was the concept of IP: you can make stuff, and it can be shared, and the ideas can go out to the cloud and such, but in order to make sure the person who invented the thing is properly compensated within the system, you have to build in the idea that any time the thing gets used, the person gets paid. Which seems like it's a good thing that rewards artists, creatives, inventors, except for when you get down to it, it sort of creates this weird classism.

Did anyone else have a reaction to this rentism concept and looking at IP as rentism?

BRENDAN: The book that I have read that most closely speaks to this is Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future?" which proposes a theory of how to do author attribution at scale. Basically, he says, we need two-way links. When I make a thing, everything that uses my thing can link to it and from it. And we need to re-terraform the Internet to accommodate attribution at an atomic level. He thinks that every time you have a thought, your one piece of DNA that you contributed would– if it leads to a genetic revolution, or some new drug, then you would be wildly compensated for that, because you own that thing.

I'm really not a fan. The more I think about it, the more I– personally, my relationship to making things– I don't do things for the sense of ownership. I think that if we get down to it, the reason that we make things, and the reason that we exist is some attempt to connect to each other, on a more emotional plane, personally. I just think building economies around that is overly convoluted.

DAWN: Addressing Four Futures. I kind of saw it as this walk of plausibility, which was like, personally, exterminism, that if we don't figure out equitable distribution of resources, and we in no way address power and hierarchy as our most likely future– if we stay on the current track we're on, I see it; I see it happening. And there was sort of this plausibility walk, which it felt like to me, do we somehow get to this socialism? We still, there's still scarcity, but maybe we have these egalitarian forms of society. That, and the rentierism, both feel in the space of next-possible outcomes. It's just attenuating down one axis or the other. Or, change really only addressing one. I would say that right now, looking things that have come out in the last while– that moment where The Economist called themselves Neoliberal, and I was like, whoa, a moment has arrived! We are now in this era where you have taken up the term that has been used to critique you! You have acknowledged the thing that you have been called by academics for decades.

There has been that as well as an acknowledgment around labor– but I think it's acknowledging it in a way that is not bringing us toward a better world. So there's people saying, maybe we need to transition to a 9-hour work week, and some people say that this will also address climate change, and you see these think tanks who also talk about it as being tied to economic growth but making space for automization. There's just this way people are talking about changing work in society who are the type of people who I would say have no interest in re-distributing power, and I think that pushes us toward this rentier type of future.

I feel like it takes off of some very recent patterns. It reminds me of Gibson's newest book, I can't remember the name of it, which I guess is becoming a new trilogy, also has this idea where, it thinks about, everyone gets 3D printers, and they become a place where you can go and pay someone to go and print off a design for you– which, by the way, there is a platform that currently does that work, of trying to connect on-demand production– yeah, The Peripheral!– it's like, hyper piecemeal. I don't want to spoil The Peripheral, if anyone wants to read it, so this is all I'll say about it, but it's a good read. I love William Gibson, so...

I am torn but thinking we have a better through-line to rentier capitalism. Marx had this model of rentier capitalism. I have a soft spot for full-blown luxury communism, but I find that really hard to imagine. He means a specific type of communism, and a specific type of socialism.

I just think rentierism is likely. I don't think it's good.

KELSEY: Rob, I feel like you've been making skeptical face through a lot of things, do you have anything you wanted to address, even if it's from a previous part of the conversation?

ROB: I have a lot of skeptical face, but I will confine my comments to the Four Futures thing for now. I didn't feel like I got a lot out of it. Maybe that's because I am unimaginative. Basically, I've had the book version; I didn't know there was a shortened article version. I have no interest in reading the book now, after reading that, because for me, the framing of looking at the four corners of how things can go given different assumptions is super useful and valuable, but I've never been convinced by the major modern techno-philosophical argument that everything ultimately reduces down to Intellectual Property.

That piece, it felt like, was entirely framed around that, and that has never grooved with me. So I felt like a lot of the core framing of that piece was.. ehh. For me.

BRENDAN: So if not IP, Rob, can you put your finger on something that you think is missing?

ROB: I don't have a particular other argument, either– just that it doesn't seem clear to me that really you can just reduce everything to the blueprint for a thing, and then everything else is ultimately just the blueprint for a thing, and there's nothing else worth possessing of it.

KELSEY: I shocked myself by putting zero universal basic income readings on this reading list (though I can recommend a few...). Actually, the one I would call out is "Raising the Floor" by Andy Stern, which is written by a labor organizer who has this revelation that the robots really are going to take the jobs, and what do we want to happen? It's really interesting, he explores a lot of the different ways that people are looking at changing work, including the reduced-hour work week, including making jobs; he lands on universal basic income as the correct way to go, whether or not you dispute his arguments for it. Personally, I think that UBI in general is a very interesting concept. I don't know if it falls into one of these defined futures very well– I guess the first one?

DAWN: I don't think it does. I think of UBI as a tool, a mechanism more than an outcome. This is a thing that comes up among people who think more from a transition space, versus transormation; a transition town movement, just transitions, there is an attention to the mechanisms. My response back to you is that it doesn't necessarily lead to one or the other. My ask back to you is: does it seem like there's some tension in the different motivations going into who promotes UBI? I think that the varying places people promote it from is very interesting– so, you talking about a labor organizer being one– I think the other model is the capitalists, the Peter Thiels of the world.

KELSEY: It's super interesting, right? Because you have the people who see UBI as a way to not have any kind of other safety net, and that is generally touted as the main way to get the funding for it. Another thing that's interesting– I went and saw a rally for Andrew Yang, who's running for president on a UBI platform. One of the things he said in his speech was, "Look, Trump got elected because he identified the problems correctly. But if we could figure out a system where people whose jobs have been taken away no longer are in such pain because of that, or have some kind of room to make a transition or shift or something, maybe that solves that problem and moves that voter base". It's an interesting take– although he's only looking at $1,000 a month, which is not like an income.

I also saw something really interesting when I was first looking into UBI. There's a reporter, I forget his name, who is funded on Patreon to write about UBI, and one of his things is that he is funded up to a specific level, and then he says, well, that's the metric that I'm fighting for, so once I hit that, then I'll put all of the overage into other people's UBI Patreons. What I loved about this is that he had this very specific "...and that will be enough." That's so counter to the capitalist structure. In classic capitalism, you're supposed to keep going for whatever you can get. You're supposed to raise yourself up as high as you can possibly go. Seeing that Patreon was like, huh, this guy says that's enough for him. If you look at adrienne maree brown's stuff, this idea of leaning back on people– acknowledging the idea that you might already be in abundance. Letting go creates this space that didn't exist.

BRENDAN: I find this so interesting. I hang around way more capitalists than most of you. I see UBI as this massive extension of capitalism. To me, it's– I really deeply agree with Dawn's assessment that it's a mechanism. And really, you look at consumption-based capitalism, and when you run out of people who can spend money, you run into real problems. So one of the best ways you can keep things going is to just give the people money, so they can spend on your stuff, and you can keep the growth curve going at the rate that it needs to. So I'm in no way surprised that Peter Thiel ends up on the UBI spectrum, because it's like, we're running out of people who can buy our stuff! We need more people to buy our stuff, so let's make the government pay for people to buy our stuff.

Kelsey, you said something really interesting there, which is, that relates back to Dawn's question, which asks whether the framing is large enough. This question of, "what is enough," that is a cultural definition– this cultural definition of ascertaining greatness by some means. I think if we were all competing for money, or if we were all competing for better cars, it doesn't really matter. It's a status symbol. It's there, and it's ingrained in our culture. I think that's an intrinsic problem, that UBI has very little to say about.

I'm not anti-UBI, because I honestly think that you could do it the right way, but I think it's a lot easier to have a conversation about taxes. And that, for me, is why the Green New Deal is really interesting, because you could just tax a lot more, and all of a sudden it's a lot easier to put a damper on the people who are outrunning the economy.

I think it's really interesting, because we can talk about alternatives to capitalist structures, but we can also talk about alternatives to the present capitalist structure, which is just wildly off track. There's the current incarnation– and I can feel myself slipping into that incrementalist framing again, so maybe I should broaden.

KELSEY: This is also incrementalist, but I was thinking about that renting IP thing, and the idea that the rights expire to a certain property after a certain point in time. What if it was after a certain point in money? Like, there's a lot of different ways to make things not a subscription service, if you just pick a different framing. There's just not really incentive to do that.

DAWN: What do you mean by, "a certain point in money"? I'm thinking of Phillip K. Dick, who wrote that short story, Ubik, where the guy has to pay to get out of his door. Everything has been turned into a single microtransaction. You know how Dick is uneven, but it's such a great conceit. Is that what you mean, Kelsey? I don't know what "run out of money" meant, exactly.

KELSEY: Oh, no! I meant, as the designer of a thing, maybe your intellectual property rights expire once you hit, like, ten million, would that be enough? Something like that.

DAWN: I said in the chat, why I think rentism is happening, or going to happen– I thinkg that we're actually now in this decades deep miasma, internal, intra-country legal structures and international regulatory regimes, that are actually predicated on respecting multinational corporations' intellectual property over even the legal rights, self-determination, and sovereignty of people in those countries. That's started to play out over environmental issues, but increasingly others. I think things were clunky for a while in the early oughts around DMCA stuff, but they're getting really good at it, and a lot of the takedowns and automated– there are enforcement systems in the digitally mediated space that are also getting very good. So I see a convergence of those. And I think that to change the direction of those is a major dismantlement. That is radica. Maybe I am slightly unsure about– I've reinforced this, so I should check myself: there is not a binary that you have to be either/or; I think there are people who different framings, like Donella Meadows on leverage points/ways to intervene in a system– most people who want radical change but still do the incremental things anyway. I don't think you can only be one or the other. I think that things are so complex & interwoven that it's hard for me even to imagine what the small steps in isolation would be that would have enough impact.

KELSEY: One thing that I wanted to make sure that we talked about, and this might be a bit of a transition, but: the idea of money as a thing that can be converted into anything else. For me, I think that's one of the foundational tenets of our system. You can logic it out to a certain extent: things that are valued, you should be rewarded for. And you should be rewarded for them in ways that don't control you; the barter system isn't just inconvenient, it's very limiting. So having money as this thing that can be converted into any other kind of money or any other kind of good, makes sense in a lot of ways, but also creates these totally absurd... for example, if I go to southeast Asia, I'm suddenly very much richer than I am at home. Or even the absurdity of buying a really nice dinner versus buying an airplane ticket, versus buying a smartphone, things that really do not convert to one another can suddenly be compared in a really quantitative way. I guess I was thinking about this partly in terms of, when I hosted our first decentralized web meetup here in Seattle, some of the people who showed up were working on Filecoin, and the whole idea was to incentivize decentralized file storage by rewarding you in coin, but it's funny because the decentralized web is this forming thing, and I have this worry that starting with incentives is maybe the wrong thing.

BRENDAN: I find it so interesting how some of these conversations collide. If you go deep into the Filecoin repo, there's an issue posted somewhere about, we should create this new feature that allows you to use IPFS, but then pay in Filecoin to speed up your access to files, and my brain just goes: two-tier healthcare system. In Canada, we've talked about this notion of, oh, we can just pay for better access to healthcare, and the implications of... and that debate is in no way settled, but there are just these dramatic implications, that now you have an incentive system that has to flow through a specific form of transaction, and I love the way, Kelsey, you were contrasting that with barter systems, which seem more limited, but also have a more broad definition of exchange, which I find, like, the definition of the alternative to a capitalist structure. I'm all for it.

DAWN: Yeah, maybe I'll just say– I think that money is not always an incentive. I think, Kelsey, you kind of brought up two points there. The first point that I was responding to is that I think there's actually been a ton of work pushing back on this idea of some of the work that money does when it moves in a market. So, the classical liberal formulation is von Mises and Hayek, but I think Weber is involved in it: why money is good is because prices are one of the most efficient ways to communicate information in a market model, which is part of what I was responding to. I don't know if I agree with that. And also it was also a way to take down more forms of planning, a more socialist model, and I think that came out of a different era, and we should not let that drive the conversation now.

I think that the idea of incentivization is so tied to it.

I think this is a point where you acknowledge the importance of that flexibility in some ways, but also at a structural level, think about what other levers there are, or what levers you're working with when you're needing everything to go back to a currency. I'm very unsure about the market mechanic model that a lot of technology projects are starting with. I don't know if markets are the right way to address all of these problems. My gut check, and I totally admit that this is a bias, is that they're probably not, for most of them.

KELSEY: We have some folks on the call who have been quiet– is there anything you'd like to add?

EBEN: Responding to Dawn's thing about markets and money– I'm with all of you guys who are like, bartering, especially when it comes to internet. What you were talking about, Brendan, with Filecoin, seems a lot like net neutrality, which is kind of scary. I know in the U.S. now Comcast and other ISPs can insert ads between you and your service provider, and it could easily bleed into paying for access and that kind of stuff. That's scary in the sense that you're creating pipelines that you pay to play, or pay to use it. But in the other sense, money is a good incentive for a lot of people at the moment. So I think identifying ways to make that work... in terms of software, there's a lot of companies that will do some stuff open source, and then pay the bills by providing support or higher-tiered acces, which is sort of like that two-tiered healthcare, but it also is a way to support this kind of market while still providing stuff for free.

KELSEY: Do we have the language to talk about what's wrong with that?

EBEN: That's a good question.

DAWN: I don't think this selection is the right one to do it, but some people who did try to think about giving ourselves these languages are JK Gibson-Graham. They wrote a book, I think before they wrote this section, called Take Back the Economy, which is doing a redefinition of what is understood about economy, or economic practices. They do talk about this strategy in one of the three strategies in that reading, of redefining the economy, and I think that was okay. I think their other one, "Take Back our Economy" was a little bit more practical. So what they did was profile all of these examples of ways that people have tried to make it work in a different way, which I think helps unpack some of the assumptions that are understood as, this is always a part of what we need when we have a way to support distinct people making their livelihoods at a distance, or far away from each other, all the reasons people are like, well of course money's the best for doing that, of course you want a free market. They were like, well, we're going to try building this example that's not those things, to help us unpack those assumptions. So maybe part of the tactic is to build that language together.

And also maybe the commons article offers something as well. That was GEO, writing along the seven co-operative principles, which were adopted in the mid-1800's, the Rochdale principles. GEO is a worker co-operative, but their whole goal is to catalyze more worker co-ops. And GEO is an acronym– it's such an overture.

EBEN: That cooperative article was very interesting. I think part of the reason why it was interesting is that a very large co-op in Cambridge (Boston) actually just failed this year after 25 years in business. It probably failed for a lot of reasons, but it seemed like, from their frantic emails trying to get people to shop there, that they got squeezed out by Whole Foods, that moved into the area. Rent was increasing, and they were competing with this national chain that a lot of people shopped at and that had a reputation. So it was interesting to read this article about these cooperative principles that this local institution had, and and had for a long time in this urban environment, with a lot of people that are passionate about this kind of thing, and seeing it sort of not work on the ground, unfortunately, due to markets and the economics of that stuff.

BRENDAN: I think that brings up a reall interesting point, Eben. On many levels, the criticism of alternatives to capitalist structures is, well, it has to be better than capitalism, and I think you have this, well, if it's not better out of the gates, then it's not truly an alternative. That conversation feels very faded. Whole Foods has this massive, massive corporation just juicing money into this operation, that you quite literally have no capacity to argue with. If that co-op poured all their resources in... Amazon has every incentive to just come in and put in whatever figure they've put in, plus some percentage. When we talk about alternatives, it can often be a very frustrating framing, where it very much feels like the electric car versus the combustion engine; it's a herculean lift to come up with something that performs at the efficiency of the current incumbent process. That can be really frustrating.

KELSEY: Brendan, why do you think that startups sometimes succeed where mega-companies fail in the same area?

BRENDAN: Do you want me to consume the rest of the call?

My favorite answer is by exploiting a strength and making it look like a weakness. Obviously, I sit at the table that was, the Red Hat version of this, which was like, Microsoft had a lock hold on the operating system. The only thing that Red Hat could offer you that Microsoft couldn't offer you was control. And so they published every line of source code, so you could change the bug, you didn't have to wait for someone at Microsoft to ship a fix. That, combined with what I believe is a barter economy, allows you to compete at scale, which I think is really interesting. But I think you need that magic combination of some departure, a paradigm shift that also maps onto a familiar metaphor, which is really, really difficult.

I'm also frustrated by the fact that in our startup world, we throw thousands of these companies at these problems, and they're mainly, as Dawn made an allusion to this– the inherent complexities of these systems, you're just so driven by timing, and luck, and all of these things.

DAWN: I think its' a really interesting that I think probably would be supported by– thinking of it that way would be something that I don't think that some of these people writing would disagree with. What I would ask, or what I would maybe probe, is, it almost seems like this idea of, you have to be so much better to succeed if you're not capitalist, pursuing an alternative... I mean, just thinking about what path alternatives exist right now to support certain types of experimentation, that ecosystem to allow this Silicon Valley bubble of entrepreneurship and failure, people who get to fail up into another company. I would love to be a CEO, I would love to fail that big, that many times, and keep getting more money every step along the way.

I think this a little bit what Federici does, and I think what JK Gibson-Graham does in some of their broader work: doing this, looking at... they're trying to reopen these things that have been naturalized, or been normalized, then asking us to start there instead of start at the point where we are working with all of the operating assumptions that make certain pathways possible. I think even Michelle Murphy's work on the economization of life, and I think a lot of other famous scholars (and not just feminists) have pointed to this way that, it's a lot of work to keep capitalism going. I think about that a lot, because I also am disheartened that it keeps going. So I'm like, why, if it takes so much work, does it keep going? And how do we think about coordinating otherwise?

BRENDAN: I want to point to a really obscure thing here as an alternative. In Canada we have this thing called FACTOR, standing grants to make a music video, which sounds ridiculous, but I want to contrast that briefly with the Silicon Valley chance to fail up, where you have this pool, and that's what VC money is, at the end of the day, handouts to go take a kick at making something successful. But the Canadian government actually gives up to $20k to new Canadian artists to produce Canadian content, because we have a cultural mandate in Canada to produce Canadian content. Out of that has shaken Drake, Justin Bieber, Celine Dion, Broken Social Scene, Arts & Crafts recording label, a Canadian music scene that I'm deeply proud of, but it's also– it is a very similar, government-mandated simulation of a place where it is okay to fail. The vast majority of those music videos that get made– I worked on a bunch of them, and they were really bad. But every now and then, somebody turns out something wonderful. I think in so many ways, that's not a capitalist system; it's culture production. We want a Canadian national identity, so they just fund it outright. So maybe it's just this opportunity to fail that's the thing that we really need to hone in on. It reminds me a lot of academia.

KELSEY: Yeah, I think that's really interesting, and it's kind of the opposite of a thing I was thinking about with Dawn bringing up wages for housework– I feel like, with AirBnB, Federici got there, but it turned out to be late-stage capitalism. This ties in so strongly, Brendan, with this idea you were talking about of startups hitting a niche where, like, think about, when people first started driving for Uber or Lyft, or when people open their houses as AirBnBs, they don't think about it as a job. Or they think of it as a job with extreme freedom, or they think of it as just some extra cash, versus– I've done a lot of AirBnB hosting, and, per hour, I am not making nearly enough to spend time changing that many sheets. That is not interesting work. It feels like you got a lot, at the end of the day, because you got a payoff, but it's not even just the changing of the sheets. It's the communication, it's the care, it's the vetting of people, it's making your house perfectly clean all the time, and if you have housemates, making them make it clean all the time. It's just, like, no, wait, apparently you can pay me to do that. But why?

DAWN: As a parallel example– so yeah, that's a moment where you'd see: here's a way that that type of labor gets paid, but it gets paid in this system that individualizes it and still hides the labor. It moves the site of production closer to you while still figuring out how to hide that as reproductive labor in some weird ways.

Maybe people figure it out eventually. But also, in Toronto, there's been a lot of Toronto Star reporting on it– and I don't know why they decided to coin their own term to talk about it, but most of the people aren't hosting in their own home. Most people are managing multiple listings and actually paying someone to do that labor. They have inserted themselves in that slice. So they don't even do the labor anyore, of the most popular ghost hotels in Toronto.

But my other example, and this is sort of a weird one, but it struck my mind, is that there was this brief moment around pre-WWI where Vienna was run by hardcore socialists. The period is called Red Vienna, and they built all these child creches, and they actually re-architected the city along a wages for housework line, because they wanted women to not have to do all this unpaid labor, so every apartment building would have a communal laundry and bath, and child creche areas, where people were paid to do that work. And they did that 100 years ago! I think that speaks to a collectivist example, as opposed to the individualist AirBnB one.

KELSEY: What do people think about as a gut reaction to wages for housework? Or, expanding from housework to the broader emotional labor type of stuff? How does that feel to you?

KEVIN: I would be supportive of it, I just have no idea how it would be implemented. I don't know enough about it. But it makes a lot of sense to me.

DAWN: I think part of what it does is point out some absurdities of how the system of production works. My thought about it is both, heck yeah, but also I would hope, and I kind of think this was the intent, that the act to realize that would require such a transformation of society that we wouldn't be in a system where there's this individualized wage labor. I don't know if I would want to live in a world where everyone had their own time tracking app, and they tracked everything that they did all day, and there's some way you got paid for reproductive labor and it was accounted for, you know? I could see dystopic implementations of it.

KELSEY: I have a pretty strong negative gut reaction to the idea of getting paid for emotional labor or housework. Care work– personally, I think you should do it because you care.

And that's complicated, because that is the other side of the argument right? But then, I'm in this position where I'd say, also the other work you do, you should do less because of money and more because you care. And we're not in that world, so it's kind of a– it doesn't make sense in our current framing.

BRENDAN: Kelsey, I feel like I hear you articulating for, there are things that should exist outside of the bounds of the economy. Like, we should be pushing things farther away from this more rigid system. Does that feel fair? Because I think there's a question of, what is the scope of capitalism? Can we just contain it a little bit and have things that exist outside of it?

KELSEY: I don't know, actually– I might be thinking of a completely money-free system where there's just abundance. I mean, it's interesting to have both me and Kevin on this call, because we both work for EDGI for money, and then also Kevin volunteers for EDGI and I don't, and my gut reaction to that would be, well, a person getting paid probably doesn't care about it as much, or comes to work for a different reason, but obviously that doesn't have to be true, it just often is true in the general workforce, I think.

EBEN: I often wonder too if sometimes money is, besides a motivation, an identifier. It makes people realize the value of something, ufortunately. So it's like, yeah, maybe it's not great that all these people are getting paid, like, a lot of money, or a little money, or whatever, but at least, if you see how much money they're making for the work they're doing, if that was somewhat more fair (and I don't know what fair is, if that's money, or if that's something else), I think that would help with the emotional labor thing. Maybe it's what Brendan says, where that's out of a capitalist economy. Maybe they're valued some other way besides a monetary return. But in the short term at least, money is a good, hey we recognize you're doing a hard job. Or at least, you're doing something of value.

DAWN: The motivation behind the campaign, as I understand it– there's two extra pieces which make me think it's really important. One is that this work is already getting done, and it's getting done by– I think she talks about transnational circuits of care, where women from Global South countries come and do care work in people's homes. In some ways that is remunerated as labor, but it's not treated as formal labor in the same way, so it can be exploited. By bringing all repoductive labor under the notion of work forces addressing that. So that's one thing, that there are types of already-paid care labor in exploitative work relations, and then the other one is where it doesn't even get considered work, but is actually totally necessary for people to do work. That's reproductive labor as being a requirement before there is productive labor. It's kind of like us saying, hey, this shit is actually a requirement for the world we're in to be operating. It's sort of like, let's not allow the system to externalize this, similar to environmental costs or something.

ROB: I want to tie that back to your point, Kelsey, about you and Kevin both getting paid but treating your involvement in very different ways, because it makes me think a lot about– and this is still very EDGI-specific– our trials and tribulations with attempting to pay for people to do work on Web Moitoring. And the interesting nuance between paying people to do work and compensating somebody who did work. Which, there's a whole lot in there, and the difference is both subtle and not. For example, we've tried– my idea, early on, we used the money to pay people to do work, to make sure that somebody was doing the work, and that mostly pretty much failed. And it's not that that was necessarily a failure as an idea, but it requires a certain kind of treatment and has a certain kind of result. So now there's this discussion around maybe trying to pay me, and the only way I can frame that in a way that doesn't feel bullshit for myself, is that I'm not being paid to do work for EDGI; I'm being compensated for the amount of time I'm putting in for EDGI anyway, which is a really different way to think about, and I think comes back around to that sense of– in what ways is the money, or the capital, sent a different way that's maybe less trade-based. Or is it really, if it is for trade but not quite... that set of thoughts and set of nuances have been spinning in my head for the last several weeks.

KELSEY: I think that's really interesting. I think there was a quote from Marx– and this is a much more negative take on that, but in the Weeks book, the quote is:

One consents to give the other his or her labor power for a limited period of time, and in return, the other agrees to pay the first a specific amount of money. But to see what happens after the employment contract is signed, the analysis must now move to a different location, the site where the special commodity will be 'consumed'. The activity of labor and the social relations that shape, direct, and manage it will be revealed as the locus of capitalist valorization.

I think that that's a really interesting– it goes from being a barter to a giving of power, sort of how indentured servitude is not the same as having paid with money. There's something in there that speaks this concept of doing work that you would not have done without incentive, the work that nobody wants to do. Except for, that is so directly at odds with– this is also from Weeks, this concept of: not just, the Protestant work ethic, but also this very modern concept that your work should be your passion. You should love what you do, and also get paid very well for it– and that's what success looks like.

ROB: Has anybody on here read "The Real World of Technology" by Ursula Franklin? It's super worthwhile; I regularly buy copies of it so that I have some to give away to people. It explores a lot about the idea of framing technologies as control-oriented versus work-oriented, or process-oriented versus holistic. Her Massey lectures. There's a lot in there that's interesting about, how do we frame technologies, whether they be money or other physical tools, around: is there use and value to direct people in doing things? And very often that can framed around, oh, this is a way to make sure that the drudgery gets done, versus, what would a world look like that we built or framed around being a tool for people to holistically do a process? The idea of, how can the tool help people do all parts of the thing and make the drudgery less, versus, how can we use the tool to control people to make sure they do the drudgery? I always think that's a super valuable and super interesting framing around this– and very worth reading, if you haven't.

KELSEY: I think this really goes toward the question of robots taking over our jobs. The question in the back of my mind says, wait, is that a bad thing, if you assume that the jobs aren't necessary and the people get taken care of by their society? Should we want people to want to do drudgery?

DAWN: In Alberta right now, I think there has been acknowledgement from conservative thinkers– I don't think any in particular– that all of the jobs that have been lost in the most recent economic downturn in the oil patch– most of them are not coming back. They have really changed how that work happens. Some of the office jobs might come back, especially the exploration side of stuff, because of all the production cuts that are put in place, and those companies not pursuing exploration opportunities because of the price of oil. There's now a situation of, mostly men from the age of 19 to 29, who didn't go to school and have been working in the oil patch are now out of a job– and maybe out of a job for a couple years now. It is a significant cut to the amount of people who are doing this work, and the jobs aren't coming back. All I would say is that it's not so straightforward an issue as– maybe we don't want people to do this dangerous, or drudgery work, because work is bound up in so many ideas, our identity, our role in society. Weber talks about this in the selection that you had from the Weeks book. I don't see anyone talking enough about that in the conversation around automation, so I'm just sort of scared, with rote automation and those other parts not being attended to.

Chat Log

14:33:14 From Kelsey Breseman : https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?both 14:43:29 From Brendan O'Brien : notes link? 14:43:35 From Brendan O'Brien : (ugh, sorry) 14:43:35 From Rob Brackett : https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?both 14:43:38 From Brendan O'Brien : TYTY 14:49:00 From Brendan O'Brien : Doctorow is very of the moment with all this antitrust talk :) 14:50:10 From Brendan O'Brien : Rob then Dawn? 14:56:23 From Brendan O'Brien : I’m familiar with her work more generally, and love it 14:58:44 From Brendan O'Brien : OVERTON WINDOW 14:58:56 From Eben : :) 15:01:00 From Dawn . : Our reading group theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHSBazgo9I0 15:02:41 From Dawn . : yeah would say that both communism and socialism (and a bit rentism, but that feels pretty classical marxist) are defined a little off lay assumptions 15:02:51 From Dawn . : I think more a view of luxury communism in this 15:04:05 From Kevin Nguyen : hi all 15:04:40 From Kelsey Breseman : “re-terraform the internet” ++ 15:05:52 From Brendan O'Brien : dawn, you read many books 15:08:54 From Rob Brackett : The Peripheral? 15:09:08 From Rob Brackett : It is good 15:09:22 From Rob Brackett : I don’t even like his books but it’s good 15:09:26 From Rob Brackett : :P 15:09:34 From Brendan O'Brien : Dawn do you think that’s a good thing? 15:09:38 From Brendan O'Brien : (rentierism) 15:10:22 From Dawn . : Man, I just re-read Count Zero last weekend, still feeling it 15:11:10 From Eben : Nice! gettting more choices for book club here 15:11:52 From Dawn . : I guess I see like the way that international trade agreements set that up -- as well as like layers of legal structures worldwide 15:12:58 From Dawn . : (sorry the above being about IP as a dominant organizing conceit) 15:15:02 From Dawn . : also: there are like 3 (!!!) blockchain UBI projects 15:17:19 From Kelsey Breseman : see also: why I no longer live in the Bay 15:17:21 From Eben : All your VC! 15:17:26 From Eben : haha 15:18:03 From Dawn . : keep those transactions flowing 15:20:16 From Rob Brackett : Such a Philip K Dick story 15:21:51 From Rob Brackett : That’s why Sierra Club was opposed to TPP, which made for strange bedfellows with Trump in late 2016 :P 15:22:29 From Kelsey Breseman : also y’all would enjoy Radicalized, Doctorow’s new book 15:23:09 From Dawn . : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik 15:24:10 From Brendan O'Brien : art! 15:24:16 From Brendan O'Brien : priced by the square foot 15:24:45 From Dawn . : is this sort of the hayek efficiency of makets argument that I'm not sure I agree with 15:25:28 From Rob Brackett : Maybe more specifically starting with extrinsic incentives 15:26:53 From Kelsey Breseman : which is also why they are a problem 15:26:55 From Kelsey Breseman : but so powerful! 15:28:07 From Kelsey Breseman : but so powerful!! 15:28:17 From Brendan O'Brien : DAWN I AGREE 15:32:53 From Dawn . : Oh no :( 15:32:56 From Kelsey Breseman : which one? 15:33:11 From Dawn . : A multistakeholder co-op failed here in Toronto recently -- West End Food Co-op 15:34:16 From Eben : :( 15:34:21 From Dawn . : :(((( 15:37:50 From Brendan O'Brien : can I jump on stack? 15:38:54 From Rob Brackett : I think it takes a lot to make almost any system keep going 15:39:24 From Dawn . : Yes, totally 15:39:43 From Kelsey Breseman : (it worked! You’re proud!) 15:42:05 From Eben : Yeah, I wonder if there's a bubble in the gig economy 15:42:18 From Eben : when people figure out the labor bit 15:42:34 From Kelsey Breseman : I even would still do it 15:50:24 From Brendan O'Brien : NYT had a ridiculous article on this topic re: women’s wages 15:54:47 From Dawn . : Her Massey lecture? 15:55:39 From Dawn . : She was a prof here. The Massey Lectures are generally great! https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1989-cbc-massey-lectures-the-real-world-of-technology-1.2946845 15:56:07 From Brendan O'Brien : data as exhaust, data as labour 15:57:15 From Rob Brackett : The AirBnB robot that makes it easy to find places to stay is great technology! (wholistic) The AirBnB economic system as a tool that convinces people to do a lot of work for very little return to host people is terrible! (process) 15:57:56 From Kelsey Breseman : unless you love meeting strangers! ^ 15:57:57 From Rob Brackett : ^ Hard to separate sometimes 15:58:10 From Brendan O'Brien : have you read hillbilly elegy? 15:58:56 From Eben : or strangers in a strange country 15:59:11 From Rob Brackett : Ah, no, heard it was good. 15:59:34 From Kelsey Breseman : hillbilly elegy on class indicators (fancy eating e.g.) was super interesting 15:59:51 From Brendan O'Brien : where r u going dcwalk? 16:00:56 From Brendan O'Brien : plz god not just data stewardship 16:01:44 From Brendan O'Brien : and so good to see you Eben 16:01:46 From Brendan O'Brien : !!!