(image from wikipedia)
I have had something of an epiphanette as a result of a discussion in the comment section of a post entitled The Politics and Spirit of a User Created Polity at GiftHub.org. Less of a revelation than a sudden satisfying fitting together of previously disparate elements. I don’t know yet what to make of it.
Phil: ”Maybe we who are Subjects need a War of Independence, only a peaceable one, where we withdraw our time and attention and our user created content from systems in which we do not have a say in governance, management, and ownership via a User Created Constitution. The value of user created content should accrue to the creators, within a Social Compact to which they have freely assented, after being duly informed. As more just Commonweals come on line, I hope Facebook becomes a ghost town.”
Jeff: ”I kind of suspect that the interest of non-professional content creators may simply be incompatible with the interests of any for-profit platform or aggregator. ... Maybe what we need is something closer to a boilerplate GPL-style contract that we all, as content contributors, insist upon as a pre-condition to contributing any content to anything. The problem is, if we are not to pay the piper, then we are tacitly accepting (if not insisting) that the platform provider generate revenues using our content to support the business – at which point we have welcomed the wolf into the barn. (Because lets face it, there is no such thing as a ‘double bottom line’.)”
The value of any kind of publishing venture is inseparable, not just from the actively contributed content, but also from the value of the circulation or readership. In traditional publishing ventures, the content producers are compensated and the content ‘consumers’ are treated as assets. That’s problematic enough, but it holds even less water when the content is contributed by the users, as it is in Facebook and, for that matter, Handmeon.
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Contributions and Comments
Good thinking, guys.
Now you need a manifesto.
I suggest something along the lines of….
“When in the course of cyber events…..”
A manifest sounds a lot quicker and easier than a constitution. Besides, to paraphrase Leona Helmsley, “constitutions are for the little people.”
And your point is, tall person…....?
Hey, I think the constitution is great. I just don’t want to try to write one. (Not to mention the fact that I can’t stand committee meetings.)
So you don’t see yourself as a latter day Alexander Hamilton….?
Publius
I see myself as a latter day J. Alfred Prufrock.
Since it is not the season for peaches, I think you could dare to think big a little…...
Said the Giving Tsar, “To write a Constitution would tie up the better part of the weekend. A unilateral shrink wrap agreement could be finished today. I just have to call our legal dept. The people will accept whatever I write in fine print too small for them to read.”
Phil, you are quite right. A manifesto butters no parsnips. I suffer the sin of sloth. (I am tempted to add, so sue me…)
Methinks the buttered parsnip protests too much…...
When you say “Let’s face it, there is no such thing as the double bottom line”, what are the two things that are inevitably incompatible? And is that inevitable conflict limited to online enterprises or offline also?
“Double bottom line is a business term used in socially responsible enterprise and investment. While all businesses have a conventional bottom line to measure their fiscal performance—financial profit or loss—enterprises which seek a second bottom line look to measure their performance in terms of positive social impact.” – wikipedia
The implication is that the business is somehow going to maximize both its financial and social performance simultaneously, or else balance one off against the other (in a usually unspecified fashion.) This can work in the case of a sole proprietorship or closely held business that is not really being run to maximize profits, but once you have outside investors, it becomes a problematic and frequently murky concept. As soon as you have outside shareholders or investors, you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize return on investment – and all the logic, customs, habits, and rules of the marketplace tend to work in that direction. I consider the concept fallacious because it seems to promise something that it can’t deliver. This goes for ‘brick and mortar’ as well as on-line businesses.
In the case of providing responsible stewardship for the contributed content of our users, we can swear until we are blue in the face that our intentions are honorable, but what happens when we take on venture capital money (for instance) and they start insisting that we run it as a ‘real business’ – or sell the whole thing to FaceBook?
Currently, we are an ordinary Vermont LLC, which gives us a lot of flexibility, and that is probably best for the time being because we don’t have all that many users or all that much content. But we are interested in opening the conversation so that we can set things up in an exemplary way and maybe set the bar a bit higher for the entire industry. But it is a big question – and potentially pretty expensive in terms of legal fees, etc. (which as things stand would come straight out of our own pockets) so I think we will also be looking for some ideas on how to creatively finance the entity.
Just to clarify (I hope) my previous comment. My skepticism of ‘double-bottom line’ companies doesn’t mean that I am opposed to green products, say, or social responsible investment funds. On the contrary. And I certainly don’t have a problem with companies making ethical choices to “do the right thing” rather than simply maximize profits.
My problem is with hegemony of business over all aspects of the public sphere, and the associated colonization of our conceptual space by economic metaphors. These are two separate, but related issues.
The second point could probably use a little elaboration.
In a nutshell, it’s the hammer perceiving everything as a nail problem. The more we use economic metaphors to describe our world, the more our world will come to resemble an economic system. Economics has its place, no doubt, but we shouldn’t let it ‘monopolize our psychic economy.’ (Oops! you just can’t get away from it.)
Here is an example from close to home: When I use an expression like “I owe you an invitation for dinner”, I may have wanted to say “I would love to spend some time with you” but, at the same time, I am implicitly establishing and reinforcing the expectation that I have to have you over for dinner exactly the same number of times that you have me over for dinner. The ‘give and take’ of friendship has been subtly colonized by the less convivial system of business law. Even the most intimate relationships can become infected by a tit-for-tat mentality that stifles generosity and openness of heart.
Once we pick up the economic metaphor hammer, then all problems start looking like Adam Smith™ brand nails. The next thing you know, we conclude that ‘double-bottom line’ companies will do a better job at solving the world’s problems than governments or non-profits could ever hope to.
OK, so we do have more or less the same understanding of double bottom line. (I habitually include—because of my biases, background, and values—environmental impact as well as or instead of social impact.)
I think there’s a mathematical point to note, which I may not be able to express well, but I’ll try. In a system of two functions, say f(x) and g(x), the maximum for f(x) might not occur at the same as a maximum for g(x). But it may (depending on the functions), be possible to find an x that bring f(x) and g(x) as close to their maxima as is possible, given you’re only allowed one x.
Because of this, and because business and economics try to function mathematically (sorry, but I didn’t really want to say logically), I think there can be a point x (a set of business activities) that bring profit and social/environmental values (f(x) and g(x)) to their combined or synergistic maxima.
I do believe that it’s possible to write business missions statements and practices to reflect this intention, and that it’s possible for businesses to do this. I certainly wholly agree it gets murky—as everything does—when the number of folks involved is greater than 0. (Er, yes, 0. grin Because I don’t happen to believe we can be that logical or that wise or know all the factors that come into play—it’s a wicked cool modeling problem, but not, I suspect, entirely modelable).
All that aside (it just says we have overlapping perceptions and that’s the overlap I see and why), I was struck by this:
Another example that justifies your concerns: LiveJournal (initially …Belgian?) was sold to SixApart, and a year or two later, sold to a Russian company .
So about the overlapping hegemony bit: Essentially, I wholly agree with 1 & 2 above, but I wonder: is the concept of owe, give and take, balance, older than the economic layer or meaning you perceive, that colors your (my) perception? I don’t at all deny the prevalence of interpreting meaning through a money/business/economics lens, nor the inadvisability of making that practice universal in all human interactions. But I also believe that this practice is possibly only a cultural habit, resistible, and without necessarily recourse to Humpty Dumpty’s “When I use a world it means what I want it to mean, no more, no less”.
Given that, then, how do we transform meaning without necessarily requiring a whole nother language? Partly it’s choice of words (I could have said “transactions” instead of “interactions”). How do memes spread? Ah, if only I’d been a linguist! (or a virologist) chuckle How does that Cat Stevens line go?
Or you could create a new compound function fg(x) as, say, a·f(x) + b·g(x) and then optimize that, but the chances are pretty good that the max point for fg(x) would be different from that of either f(x) or g(x) alone – not to mention that the value for x that maximizes fg might be extremely sensitive to the relative values of a and b.
Also, there is a certain amount of consensus on the financial side of what you are trying to optimize and how to quantify it. (e.g. profit, ROI, or some other form of $) but it is far less clear in the social or (as you rightly point out) the environmental side, what formula to choose for g(x). (On the problems of establishing metrics for nonprofits, so for example the debate at TacticalPhilanthropy.com
But let’s suppose that we make such a function. What do we do to set about maximizing it? Maybe offer the CEO a fat bonus for increasing the value of fg(x). That is essentially what businesses do now to try to maximize old fashioned f(x). But the most common way of incentivising executives nowadays is to offer stock options and let them try to maximize stock value (with all the dysfunctional results we know). Obviously that approach isn’t going to work for the double-bottom -line approach. But where else are we going to come up with the 10 or 20 million dollar bonus that self-respecting CEOs expect nowadays? Well, if they are trying to eliminate global warming, maybe we could offer them an iceberg?
Regarding my owing you a dinner invitation, that may not have been the best example, but there are a lot more examples of moral accounting at the Conceptual Metaphor Home Page. Sure the effects of such metaphors are resistible, but not without a certain amount of effort, and perhaps not entirely. I agree that changing the words and images we use to describe things is one of the strategies of change. As is inventing new memes. Language is a virus.
I am not convinced that meaning precedes saying, which makes the goal of saying what you mean a little bit difficult. I might go for: