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I think left libertarians risk watering down their message by adopting a coercion-centered understanding of the meaning of freedom. The types of (non-LITAS) libertarian and progressive rhetoric that have played a large role in influencing the development of my worldview tend to make heavy use of the term “social controls.” In the progressive case, social controls are sometimes referred to as a necessary evil, or last resort. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I don’t know of a formal definition of “social controls,” but I suspect that overly-formal or overly-analytical development of ideas may also be leading to the adoption of premises (rightly or wrongly) associated with the American right by the American libertarian movement, whose non-LITAS elements (let alone “private sectorist” elements) contain a heaping helping of American-style individualism. Everything I’ve read about social controls (which is mostly stuff about other subjects, that refers in passing to social controls) leads me to think that all coercion is social control but not all social control is coercion. Most other things referred to as social controls seem to fit into the category of behavioral psychology, specifically asymmetric applications of it, in which one party’s role is to condition and another’s is to be conditioned.

A rather spammy website called “MedConnections.net” offers a “medical” definition of social control that basically equates to “constituted authority.” This I find troublesome as it largely lets the private sector off the hook, although I like their use of the word institution. The more respectable-looking sociologyguide.com offers a less narrow definition:

Social control is the means by which members of a society attempt to induce each other to comply with the society’s norms. Social controls influence behavior constantly because they are internalized and come into play every time a person has a deviant impulse.

I like this definition because I find it very reminiscent of vocational (i.e. decidedly non-liberal-arts-oriented) education program offerings. In the course of turoring community college students, it became obvious to me that differences between liberal arts departments (say, the math department) and career-oriented departments (say, “medical assistant”) go far, far deeper than the “pure vs. applied” dichotomy I was taught to believe in once upon a time. It is a cultural divide as entrenched and gaping as Mods vs. Rockers, or Vickies vs. Thetes, or Red States vs. Blue States. A large portion (I’m tempted to say the lion’s share, but that’s an outsider’s view) of the mission of the vocational departments is less about teaching (or even hands-on training) than about enculturation. Pre-requisites and co-requisites are interlocked in a way that makes part-time study impossible, electives almost impossible, sabbaticals unheard of, and thereby enforces a chronological cohort system in which each graduating class is a subset (sometimes a small subset) of an entering class. Note that a few sentences back I said “medical assistant,” not “medical assisting.” The adoption of labeling programs as occupations rather than “disciplines,” I suspect, is no accident, but I’m a little bit paranoid, so don’t take my word for it. The trashy TV commercials of for-profit trade schools have long hawked curricula which are basically job titles, and in recent years that mentality has (unfortunately IMHO) infected the public community colleges. My closest ties to this world of trade-school mentality was when my LL was majoring in “physical therapy assistant” [sic] at the local community college. Like me, she’s a free spirit, and of course was drummed out of the program within weeks. A vocational program is very much a voluntary association (although I’m sure “workfare” schemes are eroding that aspect of it) but is also very much a nexus of social control, as defined by Sociology Guide, or by Webster’s Online Dictionary (are there as many Webster’s Dictionaries as there are Poor Richard’s Almanacks?):

The training or molding of an individual through various relationships, educational agencies, and social controls, which enables him [sic] to become a member of a particular society.

I’m more inclined to identify with the label “antiauthoritarian” than “antistatist” (although I am of course both). One problem with this is that people and groups who self-identify primarily as anti-authoritarian seem to offer no web content other than protest footage, and similarly boring conversation. Antistatism is much more developed as a theory, but is laced with decidedly narrow definitions that look to my largely untrained mind as if they’re designed to trip people up, especially people who can be thought of as either idealists or egalitarians. One of my favorite anarchist slogans, which was popular during the period of my life when my affinity to anarchism was at its peak (sadly to say, not the present) is “kill the controls.” I just did a Yahoo!/Bing search on that phrase and, depressingly, the entire first page of results is about gaming.

Just what are these “controls” that some of us would like to “kill?” To the extent that there really is a genetic component to human conduct, one of my first targets would be whatever genetic mechanisms are responsible for dominance-submission behavior, which of course is readily observed in most if not all animal species. This is the main reason why I’m not a primitivist. It’s a tricky area, because technology to genetically engineer ones progeny will probably precede technology to genetically re-engineer oneself. It seems to me, anyway, that the former is a “lower hanging fruit.” From the “kill the controls” perspective, it seems desined that things will get much worse before they get much better. Some targets that are already within reach might include psychological (self-directed, of course) “re-imprinting,” by which hopefully one can erase some of the cultural programming they’ve received, even in the “formative” years. Another project (which seems to be well underway, but has a long way to go) is the creation of networks of teachers and learners in which learning applied (useful) knowledge and learning for its own sake need not be a “pick one” proposition.

Most likely it’s been there for years, but I just noticed that at the bottom of Yahoo! search results it says “Powered by Bing™.”

“I’d hate to think what a university run for profit would be like. Even Sovietisation would be preferable to that.”—Steve

“[David] Graeber deserves to be on the Sunday television shows in the US, but of course, that is not going to happen. The middle managers know to stack their shows with Republicans and corporate Democrats (with Paul Krugman the one elite member who is allowed to say some things that are not very polite about capitalism) and Graeber would look like he was from Mars compared to the other talking heads.”—Mitchell J. Freedman

“The Tea Party and Libertarians is just the GOP with a bag over its head. I’m not going to engage it as if it’s a new movement. I refuse to talk to and engage the dummy on the ventriloquist’s lap as if it actually has a real viewpoint.”—Stephen

“‘Let the Market Decide’ Always Means ‘Let Rich People Decide’”—Dale Carrico

“To start a farm you need capital, which you have to earn or prove you can pay back. In one case you will become indebted, in the other you will have to work for wages. Neither is the epitome of freedom.”—Unlearningecon

Bryan Caplan never fails to demonstrate why the philosophy of libertarians and other conservatives is ‘kick ’em when they’re down.’

If, on the other hand, you’re poor and powerless, standing up for yourself is normally disastrous. If you have little to offer, you have to rely on the goodwill of others. And one of the surest ways to make a bonfire of your accumulated goodwill is to embrace a bad attitude.

The tendency that advertises itself as the philosophy of self-interest is more accurately advertised as the philosophy of ‘know your place.’ Kochsuckers.

Business is as business does, and if you’re not the paying customer, you’re the product being sold. If you’re on wordpress.com, you will now be able to view your statistics only at wordpress.com. It doesn’t appear to affect functionality beyond the need for many of us to reset some bookmarks. I guess it’s just the imperiousness of it all that’s putting people off. But still I say, if you want editorial independence for whatever it is you have to tell the world, you need a noncommercial venue.

“What would happen, though, if networks actually supplanted markets—if people stopped leveraging the unique contextual information they possess to game markets and instead shared it compulsively, without a view to undermining competitors but out of a quest for social recognition? Do we have to have markets providing an incentive to exploit information to make that information useful and efficacious, to translate it into ‘value’? Or could masses of volunteered information be sorted according to some other principle (‘merit’?) in order to derive facts about the conditions of the economy at various times and places?”—Rob Horning

“… or in other words, does economics (as it’s currently constituted) inherently promote a vision of markets for everything and no rights but property rights?”—JW Mason

“The broken window fallacy is always a fallacy, but creative destruction is a vital part of capitalism.”—Unlearning economics

“China and India didn’t steal our middle class jobs, so much as provide a death row holding cell for jobs that one way or another are going to be automated out of existence.”—shend

Below is one side of a handbill found in my mailbox. It advertises the course offerings of Dominican International Institute, which bills itself as “the most affordable & innovative in Higher Education…”

Half (15 of 30) courses listed on their “mini-catalog” (but there are a total of more than 600 courses) are under the heading “School of Health & Medicine.” The innovation of weekly rates, no-interest financing, and apparently superlative affordability, combined with the recent political shitstorm concerning Catholic (and other sectarian) hospitals (and other sectarian employers other than places of worship) and their employee benefits, combined of couse with my natural paranoia (but everyone has that, right?) leads me to wonder whether Mother Church wants an all-Catholic (specifically Dominican?) supply chain for hospital personnel. Here’s the front page:

They claim their tuition is “lower than any college in Michigan.” If it lives up to the hype, then it’s a game-changer. The MCC referred to is Macomb Community College, which is a public college. No doubt MCC is the infrastructure for the “600 courses & 35+ Careers…” while this parochial entity gets credit for revolutionizing the cost structure of higher education.

The trouble with professional networking is professionalism. Networking for activist purposes is an unalloyed good. To the extent that there’s currently rivalry between the amateur and professional realms (software, journalism, encyclopaediae, others?), I’m definitely rooting for the amateurs. Admittedly, I was once one of those “I want to be a professional when I grow up” kids. While the professional class is a lesser evil than the managerial class, it is still an elite class. While the entrepreneurial class is a lesser evil than the financier class, it is still an elite class. In fact, the complaints I hear by entrepreneurs about drumming up financing are very, very reminiscent of the J.O.B. application process. If members of the entrepreneurial class are serious about scoring some public relations points, they should try applying the Golden Rule by treating workers they way they wish financiers would treat them.

William Gillis reminds us:

The upshot is that connectivity is privilege. Not a privilege that should be abolished or rolled back, but one that should nevertheless be constantly recognized, addressed and struggled with in our daily lives. Disequilibria in connectivity leads to compounded relative inequality and implicit power dynamics, but because connectivity is what animates altruism (which provides absolute advances for all) the egalitarian solution in any context is always to expand connectivity for all.

If your revolution doesn’t place a pretty high priority on maximizing inclusivity, then I don’t want any part in it. The well-connected we will always have with us, but a bit of noblesse oblige might not be a bad idea. Mentors for the rest of us, if you will. And maybe, just maybe, we can get rid of the civil service bureaucracy without getting rid of the ideal of meritocracy.

This is a reply to a comment reply, but due to chronic writer’s block, and to the advantages in being regular and frequent in one’s blogging, I’m milking a post out of it. The reply in question is a reply to a comment by David Gendron, who tells us (I’m pretty sure) “how networking [wouldn’t] be sustainable in an anti-capitalist setting, where jobs [wouldn’t be] scarce.” To which Ricketson replies:

Well, I think that’s a loaded question (albeit, unintentionally).

First, I only see two “anti-capitalist” situtations where networking would be irrelevant: abundance, and centralized planning where a job is guaranteed to everyone and every job is essentially identical. The first I think is unlikely to occur (at least in the near future), and the second I think is undesirable.

I think that’s a loaded answer, but I’ll get to that farther down the page. A few sentences farther down Ricketson’s page we read:

…the “non-capitalist” economy that I focus on is one where individuals and small groups have control over all the materials that they need to make a living — housing, land, and tools. In this situation, the employer/employee power relationship doesn’t exist, and so neither does the conventional idea of a “job” being something that you have or don’t have (or something that could be abundant). All we would have is time and tools and the need to decide how to use our time and our tools most effectively to satisfy our desires. “Jobs” would be small, specific tasks.

I recognize some very real advantages in this version of a non-capitalist economy. If a worker doubles as a vendor or contractor or whatever you want to call it (I call it a capitalist FWIW) then the employer/employee relationship is replaced by vendor/customer relationships. The beauty in this is that the former is singular while the latter are plural. If all (or most) of one’s livelihood is earned working for one entity, that entity is a monopsonist, monopsonist being to buyers as monopolist is to sellers; the common term for both being “market power.” I believe that market power really is power; specifically political power. I’m actually agnostic on the question of whether it can exist independently of the state. It is in the spirit of Devil’s advocacy that I assert that it can. I also see a very real downside, in that one successful act of selling oneself doesn’t go as far as “landing a J.O.B.” so one is more on the defensive more of the time. For people like me who really hate selling, there’s also a quality of life angle. As a member of Generation X, I entered the workforce during the Reagan era, so J.O.B.’s within my reach (since I wasn’t a proverbial straight-A student, or ex-military) were either part-time or temporary, or both. At first I signed on with the pitemp agencies. Finding the effective (pro-rated, if you will) income insufficient to the (IMHO) humble goal of being self supporting, at some point I pondered whether moonlighting two or more permanent part time J.O.B.’s might be a less ineffective strategy than floating from one full-time temp gig to another. While I didn’t find this to be “the ticket,” I did manage to hobble together a “portfolio” of J.O.B.’s that at least got me out of the nest in a not-quite-solvent fashion. There really is a difference between being two layoffs away from having nothing, and one, but the difference only goes so far. On the one hand, half a loaf is better than no loaf, but half a livelihood is a form of non-survival, or at least non-independence. Now I know that a certain subset of Generations X, Y, Z and beyond see the trend from J.O.B.’s to gigs as an unalloyed positive. For the most part, I think the ones who feel that way are the ones who have demonstrated (most importantly to themselves) the ability to get gigs that actually require some intelligence, while I was more secretarial pool. I know I have capabilities beyond that, but communicating that fact to others has never been my strong suit. Call it a character defect if you must, but I remain convinced that a trend toward a more market-driven or entreprenoorship-driven economy, even if the trend is away from stifling bureaucracy, while probably a net positive, has at least the side effect of amplifying extrovert privilege. Yeah, I scratched a privilege. So sue me. Anyway, in my own experience, the disadvantages of precarity seem to outweigh the “freedom” of the “free” lance life. But compared to what? Being too young to have experienced the Golden Age of J.O.B. Security and Bennies from within the workforce, I may be underestimating the magnitude of such monstrosities as the Organization Man, the near absence of the Organization Woman, the witch hunts, the plain vanilla culture and even Inflation. I’d like to think I’d have gotten farther in life when the gatekeepers tended to include more civil service exams and periodic reviews and not as much the elevator pitches, “networking” and the necessity of utterly shameless self-promotion, but it’s not like extrovert privilege is a recent invention.

Now as to the loaded answer. It’s not obvious to me that everyone being guaranteed a J.O.B. somehow implies every J.O.B. being identical. It sounds suspiciously like the right wing talking poing of equating egalitarianism to a belief in or wish for all persons being identical. What I envision is the application of extreme transparency to the buying and selling of labor. I do prefer the “agorist” vision of small, specific tasks over the “capitalist” reality of winner-take-all pursuit of employed-status (and the noticeably more exclusive gainfully-employed-status, and solvent-status, non-homeless-status and all those other status goods that both capitalism and agorism seem to treat as, in the final analysis, non-entitlements.) The realization of extreme transparency would add some things to the otherwise agorist mix that would make it more palatable to me. One would be a level of detail in feedback that literally strips away any mystery as to why I might fail to be chosen for any particular “small, specific task” (S.S.T., if you will). The more vulgar type of (alleged?) market advocate will say, “oh, the lack of that type of feedback is just lawsuit protection.” I hope agorists don’t see the situation as quite that simple, and can at least imagine other contributing factors in the status quo economy, such as the use of asymmetric information as a strategic asset. Another side effect of extreme transparency would be knowing the identity of the people who do win each S.S.T., and at what price. Of course the identity of every “unemployed” person would also be public knowledge, which sounds dangerous, but I would feel more than compensated for it by seeing made objectively testable the question of whether underutilized talent has more basis in fact than do unicorns. If there are demographic patterns in who’s getting the S.S.T.’s (i.e., discrimination), that too should come out in the wash sooner rather than later under conditions of extreme transparency. No guarantees implied, BTW. But I think it would invite the surrounding culture to adopt full empS.S.T. participation as a social norm, which of course it already has, but this time in a “trust but verify” way.

Taking it back a step further to the question of whether a shift away from capitalism can potentially obviate the burden ofneed for networking—a particular S.S.T., like a J.O.B. is something one either has or does not have. Each one is a lower-stakes game, so one can afford to lose S.S.T.’s—to a point. Perhaps it’s the best of all possible worlds, abundance being unlikely, and all. Perhaps information doesn’t really want to be free, and extreme transparency is also a pipe dream (or cloud cuckoo land, as the right wingers like to say). But consider this:  If it’s unsafe (or even just inefficient) to consult a mechanic without knowing a mechanic, or being a friend of a friend of one, what we have, most of all, is a failure of transparency. Networking, in addition to being a form of nepotism, is a form of insider trading. If knowing who to hire for an S.S.T., where the S.S.T.’s are, or who is competent, or how to get value for one’s money (or whatever one uses in the agora) is guesswork, then we must question the claims that prices contain all information, or even much information. If finding out the answers to these questions is a social exercise, then socializing is part of everyone’s J.O.B. description: no social connectivity=no S.S.T.’s=don’t buy groceries. Even absent the state I have no problem referring to that as an aristocracy of pull.