Category: Uncategorized

Writing about the Aaron Swartz case in which, as I understand it, a boatload of journal articles were liberated from behind some kind of paywall, Carolyn Ann tells us:

The thing is, information is the bedrock of all economic activity. If people wanted information to be free, they’d create a society where competitiveness couldn’t exist.

I’ve come to the same conclusion. I differ with Carolyn Ann on whether this is a good idea:

But no one is in a rush to do that, because people, especially in western societies, like the way society is structured. Sure, it changes, but the underlying ideas are accepted. And one of those ideas is that information has value.

I, for one, don’t like the way society is structured. Society is structured on the leveraging of social and informational exclusivity. In other words, it is structured in a way that seems carefully calibrated not to play to my strong suits. That information has value is without question. It gets back to the age-old questions of exchange value and use value. I suspect most if not all of information’s exchange value rests entirely on the intellectual property regime and therefore the state. I don’t think that leaves us with use value only, because I think strategic value is the real reason information does not want to be free. As Carolyn Ann puts it:

If you’re a researcher, you probably don’t want anyone knowing you’ve read this or that paper; it might lead someone to the breakthrough they need to change the way something is done and make them a gazillionaire overnight. Or it could be fundamental research that you need to read in order to gain a leg up on others doing the same research; to the first published go the prizes and all that. So the research definitely has economic value.

What is being described here is a “winner take all” process, of a type that also probably has its origins in the state. There are a lot of other situations in which people stand to gain from playing their cards close to the vest. Many of these business models are based on exploitation of relative ignorance of the going rate for things. Although I’m not sold on the market paradigm, I am of the understanding that price transparency is a prerequisite for what they call perfect competition. So strategizing around information can itself be seen as a form of rent-seeking. The question is whether the more effective remedy in the long run is raiding the silos à la Swartz or reverse engineering the mirror shades. I think between the present and the future, both tactics will play a vital role, and I think the exploits of Swartz will be remembered for more than a few weeks.

Knowledge and know-how. Znanie and umetnost. Is it just my imagination, or does the world conspire against the possession of both by one individual? It’s as if embarking on one path forever closes the other, or at least makes it significantly more of a logistical challenge. Programs of instruction that can be described as professional, technical or vocational tend to be scheduled very tightly, not only with little to no room for electives, but with a highly structured first year curriculum, second year curriculum, etc. An examination of almost any college catalog will reveal that in the majors that are also job titles, the prerequisites and co-requisites are stacked up so that the prescribed curriculum for a given semester is a package deal. All or nothing; emphatically not pick-and-choose. The instrumental (by which I mean education-as-a-means-to-an-end) programs also tend to have a “cohort culture,” often enforced through academic policy, that keeps “cohorts” in sync—the people with whom you did your first year are supposed the same people in your graduating class. I can imagine a number of reasons why it may be that the deck is being stacked in this particular way:

• Enculturation, as in, the central purpose of the curriculum is not know-how, but molding of the personality to the occupation’s culture.
• Curriculum contains proprietary information. Knowledge with an arbitrary shelf life, like certification in a certain version of a certain computing platform.
• Maybe certain combinations of competencies are actually feared. Divide and conquer?
• Credentialism and guild mentality.
• Keeping the arts and sciences economically dependent.

One thing that would be nice to see in the creation of alternative education projects (p2pu, Wikibooks and the like) is deliberate attempts to break down the walls between theory and practice, with maybe a little raiding (or reverse engineering) of the latter’s silos.

A post by Arnold Kling got me dredging up some thoughts from the back of my mind concerning the non-profit sector. For a long time I’ve had mixed feelings about this sector. On the one hand, I regard non-profit organizations as institutions (and I regard institutions as the enemy of thick individualism) which of course is an entry in the minus column. On the other hand, non-profit status per se appeals to my anagorism and suspicion of the profit motive.

Kling uses the following table to illustrate the differences between for-profit and non-profit entities:

This doesn’t quite match my understanding of the situation. I would use “Customers” rather than “Consumers” in the lower left corner cell. Every consumer (in this particular context) is a customer, but not every customer is a consumer. There are, after all, some important differences between B2B and B2C commerce. A consumer, unlike a business customer, is an individual. Actually, the inclusion of the word ‘consumer’ in the table is what unleashed the present post from the mental stew. The trend toward referring to “Beneficiaries” of both public and charitable agencies as “consumers,” like most campaigns of conservative messaging and framing, has not exactly been subtle. This tendency is one more reason for my “I hate charity” attitude. All charity is philanthropy, but not all philanthropy is charity. The forms of philanthropy I most admire (and actually do try to support, even with my meager means) are those that are out to change the world. Charity, as I understand the term, is about changing individuals. The interpersonal manifestation of charity is what is commonly referred to as “making someone one’s project.” A good popular culture example is the “takeover makeover” described in the song Popular from the Broadway musical Wicked. Resistance to this practice consumes a lot of mental energy I’d much rather be free to invest in other things, and I wish the prevailing mores and norms treated it as atrocious etiquette or something. The institutional form of charity is infinitely worse. This is especially the case if the charity in question uses means testing. At any rate, institutional charity is often literally about re-formatting a personality to reflect middle class norms, such as dressing conservatively or self-identifying as a homeowner. The most abusive charities, of course, are those connected with evangelical charities (basically any organization with “rescue mission” in its name) who speak in terms of people “hitting rock bottom.” Use of this phrase by anyone (especially when referring to themselves) should in all cases be interpreted as code for “Yes, Virginia, I’m one of those people who believe human nature is inherently rotten.” As an anarchist, I hold such attitudes in actual contempt.

In Kling’s analysis (referencing the table above) the argument is more classic liberal than paleo-conservative. Human nature essentialism is still at the core of it, but to the lesser charge of being inherently self-interested, and maybe a little bit inherently lazy. Yes Virginia, I’m the kind of anarchist who sees nothing wrong with regarding liberals as a lesser evil than conservatives. Anyway, according to Kling:

In the profit-seeking sector, there is tension among all three groups. Shareholders and managers would like to sell to consumers at the highest possible price and lowest cost. Consumers want the opposite. Shareholders would like management to be maximally effective and minimally compensated, and management wants the opposite. But, as you know, the forces of competition force an alignment of interests. In particular, consumers have a strong say in what happens, because they can choose how much they are willing to pay for what the business is selling.

In the non-profit sector, donors are comparable to shareholders and agencies are comparable to management. But the beneficiaries have no say in the matter.

In short, competition is what lights the fire under our buns, and is uniquely qualified to motivate us (us agents) to be accountable to our principals. As I suggested above, the reason beneficiaries have no say in the matter is because they (by their very status as beneficiaries) are deemed incompetent to run their own lives. Also, the fact that they bring no money to the table means they command no resources in the type of command economy known as a market economy. The market may be the sine qua non standard of efficiency in allocation of resources, but with the huge caveat that the criterion of efficiency is the budget line, that is, cardinal utility constrained by income. The idea that business does philanthropy better than philanthropy has become quite a hobby horse at the Library of Economics and Liberty blog. They’re really catapulting that message aggressively. Apparently the Reagan-era campaign to replace social programs with “volunteerism” was just the beginning. It seems the goal of really hard-core laissez-faire ideology is not just elimination of the public sector, but the entirety of human activity taking place within the for-profit sector, which I can only imagine resulting in the efficient sorting of all individuals into the categories “asset” and “liability.” No activity without a business model, without which we are aimless and unaccountable. I’m not on board with this. With me, dystopia is not an option.

I hope to find a good analytical treatment of the anarchist ideal of mutual aid. Any suggestions?

I love the Freeebay website for their commitment to the gift economy, although I find the writing there to be very academic and usually way over my head. Today, however, David Graeber’s On the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations is readable, humorous and really offers some believable explanations of things. Required reading for anagorists and our detractors alike.

Traditionally, entitlement referred to the condition of the aristocracy, the nobility, the landed gentry; someone with a title. The conservative public relations machine has been very successful at re-branding, in the public mind, safety net programs as “entitlement” programs, or “entitlements” for short. The liberal project started out as an attempt to make sure nobody was entitled to anything; sort of a negative equality to go with their negative liberty. I would say they’ve succeeded mainly at replacing the de jure aristocracy in land with a de facto aristocracy in currency-denominated “wealth.” I myself endorse, at least as an asymptotic goal, post-scarcity, which might be thought of as everyone being entitled to everything. Adopting (for the sake of argument, of course) the rightist credo that “utopia is not an option,” we are stuck with a “pick two” universe; entitlement for some or entitlement for none. Entitlement for some may have something to do with civilization itself, as it may take a certain level of economic surplus to support what might be called a leisure class, and it may take a leisure class to invent handy-dandy tools such as literacy, and maybe some forms of inquiry. This may be reason to believe that civilization (and technology, urbanism, literacy, etc.) are incompatible with anarchy. Be that as it may, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle simply does not appeal to me. I find technology fun as well as useful, and I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to get educated; while respecting the overall tenor of anti-schooling arguments.

There has been some trickle-down of entitlements, but universalizing of even the most basic entitlements seems to elude the forces of progress as if by an Iron Law of Economics. A “first world” nation can be civilized enough for workers to be entitled to basic protections of labor law, but it seems there’s always a (usually migrant) workforce outside the “labor law system,” which only covers “real jobs;” permanent and/or full-time jobs, and the Central Dictate of Market Economics (even in the freed market, to some extent) is that work itself is a privilege and not a right.

From John Madziarczyk (emphasis mine):

I think that the positive features of socialism need to be emphasized. Folks have criticized socialism as being envy, greed, opposition, and potential tyranny without any real overall goal. To me, socialism, while emphasizing equality of condition, is also about the freeing of people to pursue self-realization on a mass scale. It’s about making it possible for individuals and groups to test the outer limits of creativity through liberating them to exercise their minds and their decision making power on all levels of life, through mass democratic participation. This participation will be able to constitute a true co-creation of society. In order for this to occur, society has to become a true commonwealth where all people share in the wealth created by the whole. To become a true commonwealth a socialist revolution of some sort is needed. Measures passed by government under popular pressure can bring us closer to a revolutionary situation, and can help a great number of people, but ultimately there has to be a decisive break with the present society and the replacement of the old by the new. The division of labor has to be destroyed, the domination of society by the rich overthrown, and the control of capital vested in society as a whole as opposed to private hands. Destroying the present division of labor in society, which is the foundation of the various classes in society, entails a restructuring of work on a basic level. Through these means it will be possible to chart a new course into uncharted territory with respect to art, culture, technology, and social institutions as a whole.

There does seem to be a “noble” side of nobility, and it’s a crying shame that certain luxuries are not available to every human being.

Regular readers of this blog probably know that I consider business people to be an elite subset of the population, and that I include small business in this characterization. Even the low-income or insolvent among the self-employed I regard with what can only honestly be called a certain amount of envy. I envy their independence, and I suspect that differences in independence, like differences in social rank, income, wealth and political power, can be the feedstock for hierarchies. Often people associated with family businesses talk (sometimes brag) about having worked long hours at age 7, 8, 9 etc. Sometimes this is presented as a sacrifice, sometimes as a learning experience; almost never as a privilege. Given that calls for privilege-checking are getting a bad rap from those (including some in the left) who like ridiculing political correctness, I’ll back off on any such assertion. I’ll simply say that it would seem such experiences might translate into some social and economic advantages, along with perhaps some possible disadvantages.

The legacy of a family with entrepreneurial roots goes well beyond the family business and other assets, into what must include social capital. At least as common as stories of the accomplishments of people from business families are stories of immigrants who arrived propertyless and pulled themselves up from their bootstraps. One approach to redistribution of family social capital comes from Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut, basically in the form of a government policy assigning people to extended families. Government policy, of course, is not legitimately part of the anarchist tool-chest, but perhaps there are even better alternatives. The Anarchy and Society blog informs us:

If one’s comrades know whom to contact from other communities, this is valuable information in the search for allies and broader solidarity. Most importantly, anarchist networks are premised upon the free access to information, whether it is mere data, facts, analysis, ideas, or theory. Consequently, anarchists place an emphasis on lowering the cost to information (via free ‘zines, leaflets, internet essay archives, or guerrilla radio programs), the democratic creation of movement analyses (such as with the Independent Media Center model), and mass distribution of news (for example, the A-Infos News Service and accompanying free radio project). To the extent that these information channels permeate every sector of the anarchist movement, the more likely participants will be highly-engaged in important movement debates and theorizing, will have up-to-date understanding of current events and movement activity, and will feel a sense of unity with each other. The quality of information people can acquire in these networks will determine the level of social capital and thus influence the potential of movement personnel’s ability to achieve their goals. Movements can aspire to accomplish their goals by wielding information as a tool to combat ignorance, confusion, censorship, and seclusion.

Freedom vs. Safety

David brin says: “Nobody makes me choose between freedom for my children and their safety!” That’s fighting spirit, and I love it! The idea that there’s a tradeoff between freedom and safety is the basis to all the post-9/11 hysteria and the resulting surveillance state. It’s also a proven strategy for pitting public opinion against ACLU types, let alone anarchists. I’m probably not quite as sold on the idea that there is absolutely no tradeoff between freedom and safety, but I’m so thrilled to see someone refuse to have their ideals pitted against one another, that I too wish to make a “no compromises” statement. Several, in fact.

Liberty vs. Equality

This is the big one. Strict NAPster libertarians of course insist that equality is a prerequisite for liberty, and that libertarian thought endorses egalitarianism—specifically analytical egalitarianism, according to Steven Horwitz, writing for the think tank Foundation for Economic Education:

Too often it is used to mean “equalizing outcomes” by the hand of the State as opposed to treating people equally and accepting that unequal, but just and socially desirable, outcomes will result. Libertarians who rightly defend such inequalities of outcomes need to recognize that those are only possible in a world where the assumption of analytical egalitarianism operates and where the State treats all humans as having equal moral standing and equal capacity for free choice. Equality should not be a dirty word for libertarians since equality of liberty and equality before the law are in our intellectual DNA.

Put another way, equality should not be a dirty word, because equality (like everything else) should be so narrowly defined as to be a formality. Basically the old right-wing canard “equality of opportunity, not of results.” Horwitz is advocating an even narrower understanding of equality, basically “equality at birth.” From that point forward, life is a rat race, and to the victors go the spoils. Like most Americans of my generation, I was raised with the mantra “you can be anything you want when you grow up.” Perhaps a variant on Brin’s statement above is in order: Nobody makes me choose between freedom for my children and their equality with their peers when it comes to life chances! Just to be clear, I think analytical egalitarianism is part of life chances, but access to resources is another part, and social capital is another.

Opportunity vs. Security

Whenever there is Euro-bashing (i.e. social democracy bashing) there is the rhetorical question: Would you rather live in an opportunity society or a security society? Hello? Economic security is a foundation on which economic opportunity is built. The freedom to take entreprenoorial risks often rests on some fall-back position, such as bankruptcy law. I’d rather live in an opportunity and security society.

when compromises must be made

Like I said earlier, I’m not 1,000% convinced that there are no trade-offs. I understand the idea of competing goals, or multiple objectives for optimization. As a matter of principle, we should go to great lengths to verify that whatever compromises we make between our most cherished values are as efficient as possible, that is, and we should always push the envelope and try to expand the envelope when it comes to feasible combinations of these factors.

My fixation on the sacred/profane dichotomy is apparently shared with one Charles Eisenstein.

In the spirit of using plain English definitions, what is the definition of commercial? A TV or radio advertisement, of course. By this yardstick it would be empirically (i.e. behaviorally) demonstrable that a sizeable population harbors an anticommercial attitude. More generically, commercial means “pertaining to commerce.” Lacking a precise understanding of what “commerce” means, I think of commerce as a suite of practices that together comprise the “conduct of business.” The key commercial skill sets, as I see it, are salesmanship, negotiation and other persuasive communication skills. Kind of reminds me of the old ancap slogan “businesses persuade, governments force.” OF COURSE business is the lesser evil here. Far be it from me to deny the obvious. What puts me off about the non-aggression principle is the assumption that one can unambiguously categorize social situations as either coerced or voluntary. I’m simply not capable of believing that the world is that simple.

A good (and I think agorism-friendly) starting point, I think, is the understanding that independence is a prerequisite for freedom. It behooves us to ask what characterizes a portfolio of personal skills sufficient to the task of economic independence, and what does not. I have no quarrel with the idea of division of labor; indeed of its utter necessity. I don’t even fret about the size of the “rainmaker’s cut” unless my cut ends up being a less-than-living wage. The problem is, that’s been the case for most of my adult life. It seems to me that it’s a question of relative prices, which is to say, the price one commodity would go for if the “currency” used to purchase it were another commodity. For the purposes of the rainmaker problem, we’ll call these commodities “production skills” and “promotion skills.” This introvert’s theoretical questions are:

• What is the relative price of promotion skills, measured in production skills? How can it be determined objectively? Does the Iron Law Of One Price apply?
• Since negotiation falls under promotion skills (for the pupose of this probably-flawed analysis, anyway) what strategies other than negotiation exist for getting relatively cheaper promotion?
• How much of the triumph of promotion over production is due to statism?

Surely by now the entreprenoor types are asking, why not simply develop promotional skills? That’s a good question. Every now and then I try to develop these skills; I’d like to think with some success. I must confess that, rightly or wrongly, I associate commercial skills with personality traits that I don’t entirely admire; maybe a certain pushiness, one-upcrittership, willingness as well as ability to “pester” people, etc.

Just as there’s empirical reason to believe that the typical person (let’s assume for the sake of argument that there is such a thing) prefers commercial-free TV (all other things being equal, anyway) the TV commercials themselves suggest that “haggle free” shopping can be a selling point for some. Whether or not this particular market segment is the majority, I don’t know. It’s obviously not everybody, but it’s equally obvious that it’s a great many people. I’m willing to confess that I dream of a haggle-free economy!