• power-from-within or empowerment
• power-with or social power
• power-over or coercion

In this second part, I get into the practical stuff: 11 steps towards healthy power dynamics.

I’m primarily writing this for people that strive towards “non-hierarchical” organising, but expect the lessons will translate into any organisational context.

Empowerment: How to Maximise Power-From-Within

Everyone is born with great potential, but sometimes it takes a bit of encouragement before we fully embrace it.

Because of the intersecting injustices of modern societies, the degree of encouragement you receive when you’re growing up will vary greatly depending on many factors like your personality, gender, physical traits, and cultural background. If you want everyone in your org to have full access to their power-from-within, you need to account for these differences.

Step 1. Encourage your peers

This is very simple, but it can still have a great impact. Notice what happens when you spend more time saying “good job”, “you can do it”, “I believe in you”, “I’ve got your back”, or “I’m with you”.

Step 2. Discourage permission-seeking

Notice when someone is asking for your approval before they act. Is it absolutely necessary? If not, try responding with “what do you think?” or “let’s figure it out together” or “why do you ask?” or “you know what to do.”

Step 3. Create practice spaces

If you’re not used to exercising your creative power, it can take practice. Even a small thing like a regular ‘check-in’ round, where all meeting participants are expected to say a few words before the work begins, can be a significant training ground for people to practice owning their voice and holding the attention of a group.

Step 4. Find you mentors

Great mentorship makes an enormous difference. A mentor is someone you can identify with, who has more experience or maturity or growth in some area that you care about. You can imagine parts of their life story as your own. Great organisations support people to find mentors that are truly inspiring.

Step 5. Rotate roles

Rotate roles to give more people the experience of being in an empowered position. Take turns to facilitate meetings, have co-presenters on stage, support coordinators with a peer or understudy.

Okay, that’s the easy level. If your group power dynamics feel out of balance, you can always return here to keep practicing these fundamentals. Now it’s time to get into some more difficult territory.

Social Power: How to Make Power-With Transparent

“Power-with” is that social power that determines how much you are listened to in a group. It can operate in the shadows, and lead to manipulation and paranoia. Or you can throw a light on, and use this influence network to support good governance and effective decision-making.

Step 6. Break the power taboo

When we work with teams who want to improve their power dynamics, the first thing we need to do is break the power taboo.

In most spaces, it is uncomfortable, exposing or counter-cultural to talk about power. It’s not just awkward, it can be a deeply unsafe, psychologically triggering conversation. It takes a lot of preparation and care to create a safe and productive container for a group to talk about their power dynamics.

But once we break the taboo, we can start to distinguish between the different kinds of power. We notice that some power imbalances are toxic (e.g. bullying), while others are healthy (e.g. eldership).

Surprisingly, when Nati and I host conversations about internal power dynamics in a team, the insight we hear most frequently is a sense of empathy for the people who are holding the most power. We hear how difficult it can be for the people holding the most influence, responsibility and care for the project, especially when their mandate is unclear and their support is insufficient.

Step 7. Name the levels of engagement

In his major study of online communities, Jakob Nielsen found about 1% of people actively create content online, 9% will curate, and 90% will passively consume. The numbers may be different for your organisation or community, but the pattern is common: in every group I’ve encountered, there’s a minority of people who are super committed, and the majority of people are participating with less engagement.

This creates a lot of angst for people who think it’s important for everyone to be engaged. Trying to “engage everyone” is a Sisyphean task. In my experience it’s much easier to just make the different levels of engagement explicit, give each group of stakeholders a name and set of rights and responsibilities, and create transparent supported pathways for people to move in and out.

I learned this pattern from Enspiral: the People Agreement explains that most network participants are “Contributors”, and about 10% or 20% of them take on the extra role of “Member”, which temporarily conveys extra rights and responsibilities. For a more business-flavoured example, check the Fairsharesframework for multi-stakeholder co-ops, which defines 4 categories, each with a different role to play in governance: founders, workers, funders, and users.

In the Enspiral example, the people with more influence also have more scrutiny. The Members hold each other to a much higher standard than the average Contributor. This is an essential principle of accountable governance, and another ingredient to create transparent power-with. I don’t know how to create these accountability structures if the different levels of engagement are implicit.

Step 8. Limited decision mandates

Think of an organisation you work with. If you wanted to publish a press release or a blog post about your work there, who would you check in with before you press “send”? If you sensed an interpersonal conflict arising between two colleagues, who would you take your concerns to? If you were stuck with a complex spreadsheet formula, who would you ask for help?

Probably you think of different people for each of these questions. The person that comes to your mind for a specific domain is the one who has more social power in that area.

In “horizontal” or “non-hierarchical” teams, we can have an aversion to naming these differences. We can avoid naming who is leading in which department, but that will not necessarily level the power dynamics. Rather, it seems to me to be safer and fairer to give transparent, enthusiastically consentful, limited mandates to people to make decisions within their domain of expertise.

Manuel Küblböck’s blog about decentralised decision-making at Gini is an excellent reference here. See also Tom Nixon’s blog about initiative mapping, which uses Maptio, a sweet software tool for making these friendly circular hierarchy drawings 

Coercion: How to Minimise Power-Over

Okay, so you’ve encouraged people to find their own power-from-within. You’ve mapped out the different levels and domains of power-with. Now we get to the boss level (forgive the pun): it’s time to minimise power-over.

For me, the question of coercion is the single most important determinant of organisational life: does anyone have the power to force another person to do something against their will?

Coercion is the norm in many traditional workplaces: my way or the highway. Coercion is cultivated both in the formal command-and-control structures that determine worker behaviour from above, and the informal power games that emerge in the fiefdoms of office politics.

When we describe ourselves as “non-hierarchical”, I think that’s what we’re reaching for: a space free of coercion. But labelling your group “flat” or “self-managing” or “decentralised” does not automatically resolve the subtle, complex, tenacious habit of people trying to control each other. I believe the right organisational structures and cultures can help us grow out of this habit.

I have a few practical steps to offer here too. 2 of them are easy, but you might freak out at the last one.

Step 9. Consent-based decision-making

In consent-based decision-making, you ask “does anyone have a principled objection to this proposal going ahead?” In sociocratic terms, we’re asking if the proposal is “good enough for now & safe enough to try”. It’s not exactly about building consensus, so much as it is about checking for dissent: “could this do harm?”

There are some critical decisions I still want to take by consensus, where we patiently negotiate until everyone is satisfied that this is the best proposal we can come up with. But for most day-to-day decisions, consent is sufficient. It’s a beautiful balance between the speed of autocracy and the inclusion of consensus.

Samantha Slade’s blog post on Generative Decision Making explains a simple method you can try it in your next meeting, in any organisation. Or if you don’t want to always be in meetings, you can make consent decisions online with Loomio.

Step 10. Celebrate dissent

Celebrating dissent means trusting that people know what is best for them.

In collective decisions, notice if someone says “No” when the rest of the group is saying “Yes”. It can be frustrating when someone presents an objection. But before to jump to changing their mind, start from empathy. Being the lone dissenter is always a risky and courageous position. My first priority in that situation is to check that they have someone supporting them in their dissent, before we try to negotiate further and bring us to a new agreement.

The kind of people who are attracted to “non-hierarchical” organisations (like me, for instance) are often hyper sensitive to coercion. We will get defensive at the slightest hint of conformity or peer pressure. It helps me a lot if you regularly remind us that we have the right to choose, e.g. starting a workshop with a reminder that anyone may pass on any exercise or question.

Step 11. Share the ownership!

There are many steps that any organisation can take towards a healthier power balance, but your progress will be fundamentally limited until you’re willing to take this last step: co-ownership.

While horizontal management is getting more fashionable these days, this is the one critical step that almost no self-management coach or decentralised organisation designer or collaboration thought leader will ever tell you.

I mean “ownership” in every sense: directorial (who sets the direction of the organisation), financial (who allocates budgets and profits), legal (who is responsible from the perspective of the law), and psychological (who loses sleep worrying about it).

Co-ownership distributes these risks and responsibilities across many different stakeholders, not just the founders or financiers. Co-ownership is the ultimate safeguard against coercion at work.

You may work in a highly decentralised company, but if there is someone with the authority to unilaterally decide that you don’t work there anymore, your power dynamics will always be out of balance. If someone has the power to fire you, they will use that leverage to force your compliance whenever they think it is necessary. That’s a fundamentally coercive environment.

This is why I believe it is dangerous to focus on the shape of an organisation instead of its power dynamics. Labelling your workplace as “non-hierarchical” or “self-managing” or “decentralised” can create a false sense of security that ends with a painful wakeup call. I’ve seen this most recently as a number of my friends in the blockchain industry lost their jobs when a number of crypto companies laid off 10–70% of their staff. Before the lay-offs, they thought they were living in the “future of work”.

I’m not willing to argue that every organisation should be co-owned by all the workers, but I can confidently declare that all workers should be clear about the real power dynamics of their employment environment.

My concern is that words like “non-hierarchical” and “self-organising” create a smokescreen, masking the real power dynamics that are ultimately determined by the ownership structure.

If you want to explore different ways of sharing ownership, you will find a thriving network of worker-owned co-operatives in just about every corner of the world. There’s a Worker Co-op Weekend coming up in the UK in May. There are other models too, check out Steward-Ownership and the Fairsharesmulti-stakeholder governance model.

There Is No Perfect Shape

I honestly don’t care if your org chart looks like a triangle, or a circle, a subway map, a snowflake, or a galaxy. What matters is the power dynamics.

You can take these 11 steps as a prompt for reflection and experimentation in your group:

11 Steps Towards Healthy Power Dynamics at Work

1. Encourage your peers
2. Discourage permission-seeking
3. Create practice spaces
4. Find your mentors
5. Rotate roles
6. Break the power taboo
7. Name the levels of engagement
8. Limited decision mandates
9. Consent-based decision-making
10. Celebrate dissent
11. Share the ownership!

My experience is mostly with decentralised organisations, so I am mostly speaking to you cooperators, horizontalists, Teal reinventers, collectivists, Agilists, and self-managing starter-uppers. I know from experience how power works in these groups. And I’m willing to speculate that many of these suggestions can be applied in any group, right now, regardless of what structure you use.

Postscript: Further reading & doing

• If you want to move your organisation towards healthier power dynamics, check thehum.org or contact me for info about out trainings, retreats and coaching. We have public events coming up soon in London, Glasgow & Brussels.
• For practical & personal stories of people navigating the new power dynamics of decentralised organisations, read Better Work Together, the new book from Enspiral (the chapters by Silvia Zuur and Kate Beecroft are especially relevant).
• If you’re in a more hierarchical organisation seeking to transition to a more decentralised approach, check Samantha Slade’s book Going Horizontal. I haven’t read Aaron Dignan’s new book Brave New Work yet, but it is bound to be great too.
• And check Manuel Küblböck’s new blog on leadership in a self-organised workplace, its another zinger!

p.s. Published by Richard D. Bartlett, with no rights reserved. You have my consent to reproduce without permission: different file formats are on my website. If you’re feeling grateful you can support me on Patreon.No rights reserved by the author.

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Rok Kranjc | Feb 6, 2018 | The Commons Post: Many of today’s proposals for and experiments with Universal Basic Income (UBI) in so-called developed countries seem to be congruent with, and indeed in some instances explicitly catered towards maintaining the dominant political economic architecture and status quo imaginary. Some of the more salient narratives regarding UBI present it as a silver bullet for all kinds of (neoliberally framed) social and economic woes and as a remedy for the pressing issue of automation which is assuredly having disruptive effects on the business-as-usual as practiced to-date. On the other hand, more radical proposals relevant to the UBI debate find themselves confined to academic and political ghettos, while those that do make it to experimental stage are watered down to versions of ‘basic income light’[i] through processes and barriers integral to incumbent political economic structures and forms of political deliberation.

While such experiments and proposals may be crucial stepping stones in fostering social salience and political legitimacy around alternatives to dominant welfare and wage labour models, it is important to recognize their limitations, particular application contexts, scales and time-horizons, with reference to wider integrative visions and potential mechanisms of socio-economic and political transformation. However the reality is that at this time such wider and integrative visions are lacking, while radical and systemic alternatives to welfare remain severely undertheorized in crucial areas. In the following I outline three critical areas that in my opinion can further the UBI debate, guided by the overarching question of what might an open ended, ecologically sound and socially just welfare system and pathway towards it look like.

1. Considering UBI as an interim model for citizen empowerment

Imagining potential futures of welfare from a ‘long now’[ii] perspective necessitates the recognition that some solutions should be designed to have intentionally short life-spans while others should be designed to change over long periods of time.[iii] The reality is that the forms of UBI thus far explored are likely not the be-all and end-all of alternatives. It is thus important to consider the view that UBI models based on fiat money pooled and distributed by means of more or less conventional market and state mechanisms (e.g. taxes, redistribution of state funds) may be an an overall important, yet perhaps best seen as consciously interim step in institutional re-design and citizen emancipation and empowerment. It is relevant to note however that UBI models, defined as unconditional payments of certain sums of money to individuals of a society, already today find rivals, for example in the concepts of Universal Basic Assets (UBA)[iv] and Universal Basic Services (UBS)[v], which importantly shift the debate from income to access to and participation in the commons. Using the ‘city as a commons’ framework and the critical concepts of UBA and UBS as starting points, it is possible to conceive of commons-based welfare models that operate on the principles of universal rights and effective access to basic and potentially expanding asset and service options (e.g. housing, food, energy, healthcare, mobility, internet, education, sport, recreation) and the care, co-creation of and democratic deliberation about them using novel collaborative, open-source, circular, sharing and regenerative economy approaches, among others.

2. Anchoring alternative welfare systems in alternative currencies

One issue that is very rarely addressed even within more radical UBI debates is that of the currencies and accounting frameworks on which such systems are (to be) based.[vi] Arguably, pursuing the interrelated goals of ecological sustainability and social justice calls for a reconsideration of ‘money-as-usual’. Many currency systems have been proposed that too range from local, complimentary and other currency types more or less congruent with or supplementary to the economic status quo, to radical alternatives.[vii] The envisioned ‘commonified’ basic assets and services model(s), indeed commons and commoning activity generally, may be anchored in a rich ecosystem of alternative currencies, indices and accounting frameworks operating at different scales and in different socioeconomic and socioecological contexts. Some of the more prominent proposed money anchors specifically include energy, time, CO2 emissions, single resources such as water or grain, or ‘baskets of resources’.[viii] Additional aspects to consider include:

• the ethics, scales and forms of cosmopolitan and translocal solidarity
• gift cultures and economies
• open data
• forms of transaction (e.g. ‘commoner smart cards’ for food, public transportation and skill-sharing)
• the potentials of blockchain technology

3. A deep rethinking of ‘work’

The currently ongoing and planned UBI experiments in the Netherlands, once presented as a beacon of hope in mainstream media, have recently been subject to a number of relevant critiques. It is important to outline that these experiments are not of universal income as they specifically target the unemployed and those already receiving some form of social benefit; nor are they unconditional, but configured with mind to supporting existing ‘labour market integration’ policies and mechanisms. Today, it is crucial to expand our definition of work and to rethink our engagement with it, a discussion that should go well beyond the reductionism of the automation narrative as presented in the mainstream. What is thus needed are systems complimentary to UBI/UBA/UBS that open up and encourage access to skills, (co-production of) knowledge, and discovering and trying oneself out at various (sometimes not at once apparent) forms of social and ecological ‘service’ and ‘life callings’ in transitional times; as well as civic media infrastructures that can support proactive public discourse around and experimentation with alternative institutional options, balancing the challenges of sustainability and social equity with resilient subsistence and social welfare contribution and provisioning. An interesting idea in this regard is the ‘balanced job complex’,[ix] proposed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel in their model for participatory economics; a deliberative democratic model that may be found useful in conceptualizing dynamic ways of societal self-configuration of equitable and contributory work loads depending on needs, capacities, preferences and challenges.

Conclusion

By imbuing the UBI debate with a more systems-oriented and commons perspective, I have argued that an important shift is made from income and work as such to deeper interrelated questions of 1.) rights, capabilities and effective access; 2.) forms of deliberation, governance, entrepreneurship, collective care and accounting; 3.) forms and scales of pooling resources and work, and; 4.) forms and scales of equitable distribution and sustainable and resilient provisioning of universal basic commons entitlements. The perspective illuminates the contingent relationship between the contextual and subjective ‘political viability‘ of the UBI, and the scopes and salience of articulated (critical, open-source, open-ended) alternative institutional possibilities; and the prospects of a polity that exploits a dialectical relationship between interim or hybrid institutional models on the one hand, and radical experimentation with other socio-economic configurations, emergent city-making/place-making cultures and political possibilities in the here-and-now on the other.

[i] Schouten, Socrates. 2018. Baby Steps on the Road to Basic Income. Green European Journal. Available at: https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/baby-steps-on-the-road-to-a-basic-income/

[ii] Brand, Stewart. 1999. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. New York: Basic Books.

[iii] Irwin et al. 2016. Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research. Design and Culture, 7(2), 229–246.

[iv] https://medium.com/institute-for-the-future/universal-basic-assets-abb08ca2f0fc.

[v] https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2017/10/universal-basic-services-or-universal-basic-income

[vi] Bauwens, Michel. 2006. Complementary Currencies and the Basic Income. Available at: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/complementary-currencies-and-the-basic-income/2006/02/14; Bauwens, M. & Niaros, V. (2017). Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Value  Accounting. Chiang Mai: Heinrich Böll Stiftung & P2P Foundation.

[vii] Dittmer, Kristofer. 2011. Local currencies for purposive degrowth? A quality check of some proposals for changing money-as-usual. Available at: http://degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Dittmer_JCP_pre-pub-manuscript.pdf

[viii] New Economics Foundation. 2013. Energising Money: An introduction to energy currencies and accounting. Available at: http://neweconomics.org/2013/02/energising-money/

[ix] Albert, Michael. 2003. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso

Photo by Mister Higgs

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Fabian Wallace-Stephens: Innovative initiatives are emerging to improve the quality of work across the globe. The recently launched Future Work Awards aims to recognise and champion them. What are we looking for? What do we expect to find? And how can you get involved?

A good starting point is the burgeoning WorkerTech scene in the UK. A partnership between The Resolution Trust and Bethnal Green Ventures has spawned initiatives such as Organise, the UK’s first workplace digital campaigning platform. Among their successes, Organise can count helping McDonald’s staff get their biggest pay rise in 10 years.

But traditional trade unions are innovating too. Through a partnership with IndyCube, a network of co-working spaces, Community Union are offering a range of services to self-employed people, including affordable invoice factoring. And the TUC has recently launched WorkSmart, an app to support younger workers who could benefit from union membership.

Even businesses such as Tesco are experimenting with technology to offer workers greater control and flexibility over shift scheduling. While Uber are piloting city-based engagement programs for their drivers.

Previous RSA research has highlighted how across Europe and North America, self-employed workers are banding together to address the challenges they face in the labour market. Based in San Francisco, Loconomics is a platform for booking local services (akin to TaskRabbit), which is cooperatively owned and governed by the service professionals that use it. And in Denver, Colorado, Green Taxi Co-operative has licensed an app which enables them to compete with other platforms.

In the Netherlands, self-employed people can join Breadfunds, a mutual sick pay fund, where members also offer each other practical support in times of ill health. While in France and Belgium, Business and Employment Cooperatives (BECs) such as Coopaname act as umbrella organisations for freelancers, enabling them to pool together business administration and other services such as training and workspace.

There is no one future of work

So far, we have only scratched the surface. Our search for the Future Work Awards is global. And our themes are diverse, spanning skills and training, worker voice and economic security (a full list can be found on our website).

However, we expect that in different countries, different innovations will be having the greatest impacts on workers because of the distinct challenges that they face. For example, many good work initiatives in the UK stem from trade union decline or growth in atypical forms of employment. But for parts of the world struggling with high levels of youth unemployment, the priority may be upskilling and/or job creation.

In our previous research we found that differences in economic and legal context can significantly affect the need for initiatives and their attractiveness to users. One of the reasons Breadfunds has over 12,000 members is because income protection insurance is excessively expensive in the Netherlands. But more reasonably priced services may be available in different markets. While BECs are essential in France because of differences in social security. Self-employed people don’t pay into the Government’s unemployment insurance fund but Coopaname enables them to become an ‘employee’ of the co-operative, meaning they are able to access these benefits.

Looking towards the future, trends can also appear more or less distressing in different places. Take the emergence of the gig economy. In the UK, this is often viewed as one whereby businesses are transferring additional risks onto workers. But in parts of the world such as South Asia, where so many are already independent workers, without employment protections to undermine, we should emphasise the opportunities. Economic activity will be better co-ordinated, with algorithms super efficiently matching supply and demand and creating more work in the process. And, as some commentators have pointed out, platforms can offer informal workers a degree of formalisation, by improving access to financial and digital services. Shifting from cash to e-payments, for instance, creates a transactional history that could help when applying for credit in the future.

How you can get involved

Through the awards, we hope to recognise and reward social innovators who are helping to bring about a better world of work. And by showcasing best practice from around the globe we want to encourage others to consider kick starting similar initiatives in their own communities and sectors.

If you run a good work initiative or know of one that deserves attention, you can submit a nomination through a short online form or find out more from our Future Work Awards site.

Nominations are open until mid-September, after which a panel of global judges will review the entries and announce the winners in November.

The Awards are hosted by the RSA Future of Work Centre and sponsored by Barclays. The RSA’s partners in the venture include the Canadian impact investor Social Capital Partners and systems design agency Alt Now Projects.

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Furtherfield Gallery
Saturday 14 Jul until Sunday 19 Aug 2018

Open Sat – Sun, 11:00 – 17:00 or by appointment – Admission Free

Would you like to monetise your social relations? Learn from hostile designs? Take part in (unwitting) data extractions in exchange for public services?

Examining the way that the boundaries between ‘play’ and ‘labour’ have become increasingly blurred, this summer, Playbour: Work, Pleasure, Survival, will transform Furtherfield Gallery into an immersive environment comprising a series of games. Offering glimpses into the gamification of all forms of life, visitors are asked to test the operations of the real-world, and, in the process, experience how forms of play and labour feed mechanisms of work, pleasure, and survival.

What it means to be a worker is expanding and, over the last decade, widening strategies of surveillance and new sites of spectatorship online have forced another evolution in what can be called ‘leisure spaces’. From the self-made celebrity of the Instafamous to the live-streaming of online gamers, many of us shop, share and produce online, 24/7. In certain sectors, the seeming convergence of play and labour means work is sold as an extension of our personalities and, as work continues to evolve and adapt to online cultures, where labour occurs, what is viewed as a product, and even, our sense of self, begins to change.

Debt: Bad Spelling, an Adult Problem, Cassie Thornton

Today, workers are asked to expand their own skills and build self-made networks to develop new avenues of work, pleasure and survival. As they do, emerging forms of industry combine the techniques and tools of game theory, psychology and data science to bring marketing, economics and interaction design to bear on the most personal of our technologies – our smartphones and our social media networks. Profiling personalities through social media use, using metrics to quantify behaviour and conditioning actions to provide rewards, have become new norms online. As a result, much of public life can be seen as part of a process of ‘capturing play in pursuit of work’.

Although these realities affect many, very little time is currently given over to thinking about the many questions that arise from the blurring between work and play in an age of increasingly data-driven technologies: How are forms of ‘playbour’ impacting our health and well-being? What forms of resistance could and should communities do in response?

To gain a deeper understanding of the answers to these questions, we worked with artists, designers, activists, sociologists and researchers in a three-day co-creation research lab in May 2018. The group engaged in artist-led experiments and playful scenarios, conducting research with fellow participants acting as ‘workers’ to generate new  areas of knowledge. This exhibition in Furtherfield Gallery is the result of this collective labour and each game simulates an experience of how techniques of gamification, automation and surveillance are applied to the everyday in the (not yet complete) capture of all forms of existence into wider systems of work.

In addition to a performance by  Steven Ounanian during the Private View, the ‘games’ that comprise this exhibition are:

• Public Toilet by Arjun Harrison-Mann & Benjamin Redgrove, which asks visitors whether the Furtherfield building should be a gallery or a toilet… and also who has the right to make this type of decision.
• Treebour by Marija Bozinovska Jones (with special thanks to Robert Gallagher) is a sound work in which three anthropomorphised ‘trees’ personify the different kinds of work trees are required to do in contemporary society.
• Feminist Economics Yoga (FEY) by Cassie Thornton, The Feminist Economics Department (FED), invites us to think about how our screen addictions connect us to the predatory workings of the economy at large.
• Hostile Environment Facility Training (HEFT) by Michael Straeubig enables visitors to create their own ‘hostile environment’, a design approach used by governments in a variety of settings – schools, banks, universities, hospitals, places of work – to make staying in this country as difficult as possible for migrants.

Lab session leads and participants: Dani Admiss, Kevin Biderman, Marija Bozinovska Jones, Ruth Catlow, Maria Dada, Robert Gallager, Beryl Graham, Miranda Hall, Arjun Harrison Mann, Maz Hemming, Sanela Jahic, Annelise Keestra, Steven Levon Ounanian, Manu Luksch, Itai Palti, Andrej Primozic, Michael Straeubig, Cassie Thornton, Cecilia Wee, Jamie Woodcock.

Curated by Dani Admiss.

For more information visit the Furtherfield site

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The organization of work and of the production of goods and services is experiencing profound changes that may strongly alter the way we work and the future of work itself.

Cooperative employment tends to be more sustainable in time, suffer less income inequality, tends to be characterized by a better distribution between rural and urban areas, and enjoy a higher level of satisfaction and self-identity than the average. Cooperatives are also a large laboratory experimenting innovative and sustainable forms of work and work relations within the enterprise with continuous creativity and innovation. Almost a century-old model of work organisation based on worker ownership is proving its remarkable modernity to adapt to new challenges when work and working conditions are threatened.

The strategic paper analyses four challenges contributing to the transformation of work, present and future:

• technological change and the knowledge economy
• change in demographic, societal and environmental trends
• globalization and de-industrialization
• working conditions, inequality and social protection

How do industrial and service cooperatives react to these challenges? What are the most recent innovative cooperative models, based on worker ownership, being established in response? CICOPA’s strategic paper on the Future of Work attempts to answer to those questions and address recommendations to policy makers in that field.

• Download the report in PDF: The Future of Work: Where do Industrial and Service Cooperatives Stand?
• Opinion: “Cooperatives and the Future of Work”
• News: How can cooperatives in the platform economy shape the future of work?

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Contextual Citation

The call for a Reparation Ecology by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel:

“Weighing the injustices of centuries of exploitation can resacralize human relations within the web of life. Redistributing care, land and work so that everyone has a chance to contribute to the improvement of their lives and to that of the ecology around them can undo the violence of abstraction that capitalism makes us perform every day. We term this vision “reparation ecology” and offer it as a way to see history as well as the future, a practice and a commitment to equality and reimagined relations for humans in the web of life.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

Description

1. From the publisher:

“Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today’s planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.” (https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520293137)

2. From the intro by the authors, Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel:

“In our new book … we show how the modern world has been made through seven cheap things: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. Every word in that sentence is difficult. Cheap is the opposite of a bargain — cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wider web of life that includes humans. “Things” become things through armies and clerics and accountants and print. Most centrally, humans and nature don’t exist as giant seventeenth-century billiard balls crashing into each other. The pulse of life-making is messy, contentious and mutually sustaining. Our book introduces a way to think about the complex relationships between humans and the web of life that helps make sense of the world we’re in and suggests what it might become.

As a teaser, let’s return to those chicken bones in the geological record, a capitalist trace of the relation between humans and the world’s most common bird, Gallus gallus domesticus. The chickens we eat today are very different from those consumed a century ago. Today’s birds are the result of intensive post-World War II efforts drawing on genetic material sourced freely from Asian jungles, which humans decided to recombine to produce the most profitable fowl. That bird can barely walk, reaches maturity in weeks, has an oversize breast, and is reared and slaughtered in geologically significant quantities (more than 60 billion birds a year). Think of this relationship as a sign of Cheap Nature.

Already the most popular meat in the United States, chicken is projected to be the planet’s most popular flesh for human consumption by 2020. That will require a great deal of labor. Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work.

In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care.

The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That’s a strategy of Cheap Food.

Chickens themselves are relatively minor contributors to climate change — they have only one stomach each and don’t burp out methane like cows do — but they’re bred in large lots that use a great deal of fuel to keep warm. This is the biggest contributor to the US poultry industry’s carbon footprint. You can’t have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy.

There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown — mainly in China, Brazil and the United States — to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money.

Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of human life — such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color and immigrants — have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element — the rule of Cheap Lives.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

Excerpt

(from the introduction)

How climate change spurred the end of feudalism

Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel: “Civilizations don’t collapse because humans reproduce too fast and starve, as Robert Malthus warned in his Essay on the Principles of Population. Since 1970, the number of malnourished people has remained above 800 million, yet few talk of the end of civilization. Instead, great historical transitions occur because “business as usual” no longer works. The powerful have a way of sticking to time-honored strategies even when the reality is radically changing. So it was with feudal Europe. The Black Death was not simply a demographic catastrophe. It also tilted the balance of forces in European society.

Feudalism depended on a growing population, not only to produce food but also to reproduce lordly power. The aristocracy wanted a relatively high peasant population, to maintain its bargaining position: many peasants competing for land was better than many lords competing for peasants. But feudalism was a system born of an earlier climate. Historians call this the Medieval Warm Period — it was so balmy that vineyards reached Norway. That changed at the dawn of the fourteenth century. Climate may not be destiny, but if there is a historical lesson from climate history, it’s that ruling classes don’t survive climate transitions. Feudalism’s class-enforced monocultures crumbled in the face of the Little Ice Age: famine and disease quickly followed.

As a result, with the onset of the Black Death, webs of commerce and exchange didn’t just transmit disease — they became vectors of mass insurrection. Almost overnight, peasant revolts ceased being local affairs and became large-scale threats to the feudal order. After 1347 these uprisings were synchronized — they were system-wide responses to an epochal crisis, a fundamental breakdown in feudalism’s logic of power, production and nature.

The Black Death precipitated an unbearable strain on a system already stretched to the breaking point. Europe after the plague was a place of unrelenting class war, from the Baltics to Iberia, London to Florence. Peasant demands for tax relief and the restoration of customary rights were calls that feudalism’s rulers could not tolerate. If Europe’s crowns, banks and aristocracies could not suffer such demands, neither could they restore the status quo ante, despite their best efforts. Repressive legislation to keep labor cheap, through wage controls or outright re-enserfment, came in reaction to the Black Death. Among the earliest was England’s Ordinance and Statute of Labourers, enacted in the teeth of the plague’s first onslaught (1349–51). The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionization harder.

The labor effects of climate change were abundantly clear to Europe’s aristocrats, who exhausted themselves trying to keep business very much as usual. They failed almost entirely. Nowhere in western or central Europe was serfdom reestablished. Wages and living standards for peasants and urban workers improved substantially, enough to compensate for a decline in the overall size of the economy. Although this was a boon for most people, Europe’s 1 percent found their share of the economic surplus contracting. The old order was broken and could not be fixed.

Capitalism emerged from this broken state of affairs. Ruling classes tried not just to restore the surplus but to expand it. That was easier said than done, however. East Asia was wealthier, so although its rulers also experienced socio-ecological tribulations, they found ways to accommodate upheaval, deforestation and resource shortages in their own tributary terms. One solution that reinvented humans’ relation to the web of life was stumbled upon by the Iberian aristocracy — in Portugal and Castile above all. By the end of the fifteenth century, these kingdoms and their societies had made war through the Reconquista, the centuries-long conflict with Muslim powers on the peninsula, and were so deeply dependent on Italian financiers to fund their military campaigns that Portugal and Castile had in turn been remade by war and debt.

The mix of war debt and the promise of wealth through conquest spurred the earliest invasions of the Atlantic. The solution to war debt was more war, with the payoff being colonial profit on new, great frontiers. The modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at this frontier. What followed was an epochal transition: one that reinvented the surplus around a cocktail of banking, slaving, and killing.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

On the perspective of World-Ecology

Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel: “Our view of capitalism is part of a perspective that we call world-ecology. World-ecology has emerged in recent years as a way to think through human history in the web of life. Rather than begin with the separation of humans from the web of life, we ask questions about how humans — and human arrangements of power and violence, work and inequality — fit within nature. Capitalism is not just part of an ecology but is an ecology — a set of relationships integrating power, capital and nature. So when we write — and hyphenate — world-ecology, we draw on older traditions of “world-systems” to say that capitalism creates an ecology that expands over the planet through its frontiers, driven by forces of endless accumulation.

To say world-ecology is not, therefore, to invoke the “ecology of the world” but to suggest an analysis that shows how relations of power, production and reproduction work through the web of life. The idea of world-ecology allows us to see how the modern world’s violent and exploitative relationships are rooted in five centuries of capitalism and also how these unequal arrangements — even those that appear timeless and necessary today — are contingent and in the midst of unprecedented crisis. World-ecology, then, offers something more than a different view of capitalism, nature and possible futures. It offers a way of seeing how humans make environments and environments make humans through the long sweep of modern history.

This opens space for us to reconsider how the ways that we have been schooled to think of change — ecological, economic, and all the rest — are themselves implicated in today’s crises. That space is crucial if we are to understand the relationship between naming and acting on the world. Movements for social justice have long insisted on “naming the system” because the relationships among thought, language and emancipation are intimate and fundamental to power. World-ecology allows us to see how concepts we take for granted — like Nature and Society — are problems not just because they obscure actual life and history but because they emerged out of the violence of colonial and capitalist practice.

Modern concepts of Nature and Society were born in Europe in the sixteenth century. These master concepts were not only formed in close relation to the dispossession of peasants in the colonies and in Europe but also themselves used as instruments of dispossession and genocide. The Nature/Society split was fundamental to a new, modern cosmology in which space was flat, time was linear and nature was external. That we are usually unaware of this bloody history — one that includes the early-modern expulsions of most women, Indigenous Peoples and Africans from humanity — is testimony to modernity’s extraordinary capacity to make us forget.

World-ecology therefore commits not only to rethinking but to remembering. Too often we attribute capitalism’s devastation of life and environments to economic rapaciousness alone, when much of capitalism cannot be reduced to economics. Contrary to neoliberal claptrap, businesses and markets are ineffective at doing most of what makes capitalism run. Cultures, states and scientific complexes must work to keep humans obedient to norms of gender, race and class. New resource geographies need to be mapped and secured, mounting debts repaid, coin defended. World-ecology offers a way to recognize this, to remember — and see anew — the lives and labors of humans and other natures in the web of life.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

The post Book of the Day: History of the World in Seven Cheap Things appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This article is based on a presentation given at Disrupting the Disruptors Platform Coop conference, 9 September 2017, Toronto.

Chloe Waretini: You might have heard the saying ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ It’s the idea that we can put in whatever strategy and structure that we want in our organisations, but culture will always trump it if it isn’t aligned.

I preparing this talk, I sat with the question of ‘what is the wealth coops are uniquely placed to create in this time in the world?’

When we look at the disruption companies like Uber and AirBnB have generated and the cost on society, how are coops best placed to respond? What is the missing ingredient in these companies that stopped them making life better for everyone?

I’d argue that it’s the culture that lives in their organisations.

Wait, what? Isn’t the problem that they were in a profit-maximizing structure and had no care for the industries they disrupted?? Yes, AND where do these come from? What is it that makes this ok, even celebrated? It’s the cultural paradigm that we’re in, reinforced by the culture of what is ‘success’ at work.

“Uber didn’t come out of nowhere, it came out of a culture and networks. We need to build the alternative.”

– Nathan Schneider, Platform Coops Conference 9 September

These organisations are set up with the vision of success as ‘getting ahead’. The one who claims the best territory and holds it wins. This goes for both the company and the people in it. Individuals are a fractal of the values of the whole. The ones who ‘get ahead’ are the ones willing to dominate, coerce, compete and fight. It pays to be out for yourself, distrustful of others and protective of your territory.

If you’re not someone willing to play this game, then your powerlessness is reinforced.

Credit — Kira Auf der Heide unsplash.com

“Toxic leaders aren’t just a bunch of bad apples in a barrel that need to be tossed out. They are employing a social strategy that works for them, given the institutional structure of the U.S. Army … The current institutional structure breeds toxic leaders … The only solution to this problem is a change in the institutional social environment.”

– David Sloan Wilson, Why Groups Fail

Credit — Benjamin Child unsplash.com

The humans we become at work

Think about how much of our lifetimes we spend at ‘work’, how this culture shapes us — our sense of self, how to relate to others, what is possible in the world.

Cooperatives were developed to address inequality, poor working conditions, create democracy and fairness. But without creating a strong cultural foundation of collaboration and humanism, they can get eaten by the predominant ‘dog-eat-dog’ work culture.

Imagine, if instead, the social environment in our organisations bred a different kind of culture? One where co-generation trumped individual genius, where you could safely assume that everyone else was thinking and acting in the interest of the whole, the difference between us was a creative resource instead of something to be managed, and compromise is a thing of the past?

Sounds pretty utopian huh? But it’s what a group of us have been prototyping for the past six years in New Zealand and around the world. This experiment is called Enspiral.

We started off as a freelancers collective dedicated to working together to more easily win highly-paid work so that we could spend the rest of our time working on stuff that really matters. We defined core values of collaboration, autonomy, transparency, diversity, entrepreneurialism, non-hierarchy.

As our numbers swelled, so did the complexity of our endeavour. Instead of being one company, we were over a dozen — linked by a central foundation. There are currently over 200 people in our organisation, all of which have open access to participate in our decision-making and financial management.

To cope with this complexity, we developed tools like Loomio for collaborative decision-making and Cobudget for participatory budgeting. Other groups became interested in operating like us and adopted our tools, structure and processes. But a strange thing happened. They still often didn’t collaborate well. There was something missing. In 2015 I was given the job of finding out what that was… It was the enabling culture that they lacked.

Credit — Chloe Waretini & Nanz Nair

How collaborative culture gets created

It’s easy to understand how to build software and structure, but how does culture get made? What was creating the particular social behaviours and norms in the society of Enspiral that was giving us the collaborative advantage?

“Enspiral believes solutions to humanity’s biggest challenges demand a new way of relating to each other”

– Enspiral Member

In studying Enspiral vs other groups in North America with similar ideals, some differences became evident. We had particular practices in the way we went about our work which paved the way for a different cultural mindset [Read here : 10 ways to make groups work better].

Through these practices and cultivation of a collaborative mindset, we each became different humans — re-cultured if you like. Work became a practice-ground to become the kinds of people that we need to become to create deep solidarity, dismantle inequality and toxic power dynamics. In essence, together we developed the human abilities required to make the paradigm shift the world is crying out for :

• Systems literacy (embracing the complexity of reality)
• Non-naive trust (assuming that your collaborators want to build you up)
• Flexibility and response-ability (adapting in dynamic realities and constant change)
• Collective intelligence through inter-subjectivity (letting go of the construct of objective truth)
• Surrendering control (actually the group is smarter than you are)
• Deep empathy and ability to use emotions in service of what we were creating together (yes you can bring your feelings here)
• Naming and navigating power dynamics (no there is no such thing as a flat power structure)
• Dancing between autonomy and collaboration (self-leadership and shared leadership)
• Lifelong learning (continual experiments and prototyping, insatiable reading)

Credit — Enspiral

This was especially evident at our Members gathering in February this year. There were a number of us who had been journeying together in Enspiral for 5 years and the amount of personal development was astounding — each of us knew that we would not be who we are today without Enspiral.

Credit — Matt Seymour unsplash.com

Coops as cultural platforms

This conference is about technology platforms and the disruptive impact they can have on society. But I urge you to also think about the cultural platform we’re building, and pay as much attention to this as the technology we develop.

Donella Meadows writes succinctly about the 9 most effective places to intervene for systems change. Number 6 is material flows (e.g. money), number 3 is the distribution of power. Coop structures can attend to these. But number 1 is ‘the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises’.

Can you identify the mindset your coop is operating from? Is it of the same paradigm that got us into this divided world or is it one that transform society to create solidarity and regeneration? Is your coop eating culture for breakfast or are you being eaten?

Read:

• Transformative principles and practices to make groups work better — Chloe Waretini
• Enspiral Tales on Medium
• Why Groups Fail (Hint: For the Same Reasons that Nations Fail) — David Sloan Wilson, Evonomics
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System — Donella Meadows, Academy for Systems Change
• Reinventing Organisations — Fredrick Laloux
• An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization — Robert Kegan

Thanks to Susan Basterfield and Peter Jacobson.

Republished from Medium

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Yesterday, we talked for a long time about the video above. It’s worth watching. Sinek’s thesis is that the culture of adherence “hooks” us, creating real addiction, because receiving “likes,” retweets, and silly chat messages from friends makes us release dopamine. Immediate satisfaction. Dependence. And inevitably, a mechanism substitution is produced: in any difficult situation, just like someone who relieved stress with alcohol during adolescence says as an adult “I need a drink,” the adherence addict looks at their cellphone, disconnects from the immediate surroundings, and seeks approval in the form of little hearts. Whether they are venting online or not, they disconnect from interpersonal relationships. The correlation between depression and use of Facebook beyond a certain number of hours seems to show that he’s right.

What Sinek points out about the generation born since 1984 is that this substitution has a disastrous cultural effect: in the first place, friends stop being a community, people you lean on, and become people you have fun with. If there’s a better option, they’ll toss you aside. Nobody gets too involved. Deep interpersonal relationships are not developed. Secondly, work inevitably becomes frustrating, because work or professional experiences cannot be gratifying and create meaning if you don’t feel that you’re building, and that building is a communal activity. The result is unhappiness. According to Sinek, “millenials” are running into two “inescable” obstacles: moments in which deep personal relationships are needed, and work.

Platform cooperativism

When we created the term “platform cooperativism” a few years before it became fashionable in the English-speaking world, we were seeking quick solutions to the crisis at a time when unemployment was beginning to take off in more and more countries. The idea of a platform that took advantage of the possibilities of automation to aggregate the services of independent freelancers was appealing to us as a fast and simple tool capable of bolstering the economic situation of those who were weakly situated in the market.

But we weren’t fooling ourselves: “platform cooperativism” basically means cooperativism without community, and therefore without learning, without knowledge shared and developed in common. A “cooperativism without touching,” without even meeting, that lost all meaning of worker cooperativism, and which only was interesting in the framework of a cataclysmic wave of unemployment in which any tool had to be considered good. It didn’t occur to us that anyone would turn it into the banner of “a new cooperative movement” with pretensions of “overtaking” traditional cooperativism.

But if we connect the dots, the result is obvious: “platform cooperativism” is a way to overcome the “obstacle” that the logic of belonging and commitment presents to the culture of adherence. Instead of learning to make community, rather than finding what the Adlerians call “the courage to belong” and enjoy fraternity, it redefines work with the logic of the books of faces to make it “easy,” so there’s no need to get involved, make contact, be appreciated, commit to others…

If cooperativism has value, it’s precisely because it isn’t emotionally “low cost”; because it requires us to learn to discuss, to disagree, to be appreciated, to come to consensus. It has value because isn’t a sugar-frosted or truncated experience. It’s powerful, it’s personal, it’s full of life. If we want conquer work to reconquer life we  must not fear life and try to protect ourselves from it, but embrace it.

PS. When “platform cooperativism” is not proposed as a form of work, but as a way of economically sustaining and distributing the eventual benefits from a service in the so-called “sharing economy,” there is a different critique, which we have made many times. In the first place, for every centralized service in the “sharing economy” a free (in both senses) and distributed alternative can be created that does not need a hired bureaucracy. We have demonstrated this with functional and useful code. So, what sense does it make to maintain a centralized structure? The answer is obvious: to create a bureaucracy that “mediates” between the “members” by taking a cut to pay for wages and infrastructure. It’s a way of “inventing” unnecessary jobs by creating scarcity artificially.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

Photo by zimpenfish

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“Civilization is not just about saving labor but also about “wasting” labor to make art, to make beautiful things, to “waste” time playing, like sports.”

Very interesting argument about the new type of civilizational progress made possible through universal networking, and why it does not show up in productivity statistics.

Excerpted from Kevin Kelly:

“(Robert) Gordon is focused, as most economists, on GDP which measures the amount of “labor saving” that has been accomplished. The more labor you save while making or serving something, the more productive you are. In the calculus of traditional economics productivity equals wealth. Gordon rightly points out that so far the internet has not saved a lot of labor. As I argue in my robot piece in Wired, Better Than Human (not my title), I think the real wealth in the future does not come from saving labor but in creating new kinds of things to do. In this sense long-term wealth depends on making new labor.

Civilization is not just about saving labor but also about “wasting” labor to make art, to make beautiful things, to “waste” time playing, like sports. Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy. The value he added to the economy could not be optimized for productivity. It’s hard to shoehorn some of the most important things we do in life into the category of “being productive.” Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity — output per hour — is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity. That is why science and art are so hard to fund. But they are also the foundation of long-term growth. Yet our notions of jobs, of work, of the economy don’t include a lot of space for wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.

Long-term growth of that type that Robert Gordon studies is really weird if you think about it. As he notes, there wasn’t much of it in the world before 1750, before technological progress. Now several centuries later we have a thousand times as much wealth as before. Where does this extra good stuff come from? It is not moved from somewhere else, or borrowed. It is self-created. There’s a system which manufactures this wealth “out of nothing.” Much like life itself. There are certainly necessary conditions and ingredients, but it seems once you have those in place, the economy (the system) will self-generate this wealth.

A number of economists have wrestled with the origins of this self-generating wealth. Paul Romer and Brian Arthur both separately point to the recombining and re-mixing of existing ideas as the way economic growth occurs. This view focuses on knowledge as the prime motor in a self-renewing circle of increasing returns. Unlike say energy or matter, the more knowledge you spend, the more knowledge you earn, and the more breeds more in a never-ending virtuous spiral.

What is important is that this self-increasing cycle makes things that are new. New goods, new services, new dreams, new ambitions, even new needs. When things are new they are often not easy to measure, not easy to detect, nor easy to optimize. The 1st Industrial Revolution that introduced steam and railways also introduced new ideas about ownership, identity, privacy, and literacy. These ideas were not “productive” at first, but over time as they seeped into law, and culture, and became embedded into other existing technologies, they helped work to become more productive. For example ideas of ownership and capital became refined and unleashed new arrangements for funding large-scale projects in more efficient ways. In some cases these indirect ideas may have more long-term affect on growth than the immediate inventions of the time.

Likewise the grand shift our society is undergoing now, moving to a highly networked world in the third phase of industrialization, is producing many innovations that 1) are hard to perceive, 2) not really about optimizing labor, and 3) therefore hard to quantify in terms of productivity.

One has the sense that if we wait a while, the new things will trickled down and find places in the machinery of commerce where they can eventually boost the efficiency of work.

But it seems to me that there is second-order tilt in this shift to a networked world that says the real wealth in the long-term, or perhaps that should be the new wealth, will not be found merely in greater productivity, but in greater degrees of playing, creating, and exploring. We don’t have good metrics for new possibilities, for things that have never been seen before, because by definition, their boundaries, distinctions, and units are unknown. How does one measure “authenticity” or “hyperreality” or “stickiness”?

Productivity is the main accomplishment, and metric, of the two previous Industrial Revolutions. Productivity won’t go away; over the long term it will take fewer hours of human work to produce more of the goods and services those economies produce. Our system will do this primarily because most of this work will be done by bots.

The main accomplishment of this 3rd Industrialization, the networking of our brains, other brains and other things, is to add something onto the substrate of productivity. Call it consumptity, or generativity. By whatever name we settle on, this frontier expands the creative aspect of the whole system, increasing innovations, expanding possibilities, encouraging the inefficiencies of experiment and exploring, absorbing more of the qualities of play. We don’t have good measurements of these yet. Cynics will regard this as new age naiveté, or unadorned utopianism, or a blindness to the “realities” of real life of greedy corporations, or bad bosses, or the inevitable suffering of real work. It’s not.

The are two senses of growth: scale, that is, more, bigger, faster; and evolution. The linear progression of steam power, railways, electrification, and now computers and the internet is a type of the former; just more of the same, but only better. Therefore the productivity growth curve should continue up in a continuous linear fashion.

I suggest the growth of this 3rd regime is more like evolutionary growth, rather than developmental growth. The apparent stagnation we see in productivity, in real wages, in debt relief, is because we don’t reckon, and don’t perceive, the new directions of growth. It is not more of the same, but different.”

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“We might even regard professions as types of commons. What does a profession do and how does it function? It consists of a variety of interlinked supports and guarantees: it ensures trust both internally and externally by providing the certification of the group and adherence to a robust code of ethics; it provides support for students and young professionals through education, training, and/or apprenticeships; it provides promotion, advocacy, and communications; it lobbies in government; it provides statutory protection for the work of its professionals. Last but not least, it provides for togetherness and sharing of ideas, friendship, and the common good. Professions thus have great importance both for their members and as models of what society can and should be.”

Excerpted from Tim Waterman in Landscape magazine:

“It is commonly assumed that the commons are historic conditions, but people still work together everywhere for mutual advantage, and we might even regard professions as types of commons. What does a profession do and how does it function? It consists of a variety of interlinked supports and guarantees: it ensures trust both internally and externally by providing the certification of the group and adherence to a robust code of ethics; it provides support for students and young professionals through education, training, and/or apprenticeships; it provides promotion, advocacy, and communications; it lobbies in government; it provides statutory protection for the work of its professionals. Last but not least, it provides for togetherness and sharing of ideas, friendship, and the common good. Professions thus have great importance both for their members and as models of what society can and should be.

Professions and institutions of all sorts are now increasingly under threat from competitive individualism, however. The relentless intensity of our working lives makes it ever more difficult for us to make time for togetherness and sharing. Downward pressure on professional wages in many sectors makes long periods of time and quantities of money spent on education and qualification seem wasteful instead of the vital structure of our mutual guarantee. Finally, and probably not only, our perception of society as composed of disconnected individuals means that we are putting greater trust in crowd-sourced certification (Trip Advisor springs to mind, with its five-star ratings for popular but unexciting restaurants) rather than expert or institutional judgment.

Competitive individualism complicates professions even further. We tend to see achievements as the work of disconnected and miraculously inspired individuals – this is evident in the trend toward starchitecture – rather than as the work of professions and the sharing and supporting networks engendered by them, from education to practice. We have come to see value as being created by the lone genius rather than by a great collective work over many years.

It may be that the multiple threats which professions face, as they are presently constituted, and in a winner-takes-all world, will be enough to overwhelm them completely. Or they may change and adapt to new forms that we cannot yet predict. Or finally we may decide that we need to make a case for the continued survival of professions and stand stalwart together in defence of the idea of mutual aid. As for me, I know I’m one for all.”

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