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.

Google Graffiti Pops Up In NYC:

Just another reminder that, while the government is not your friend, the private sector is not your friend, either.

Fictional characters to whom I relate

The meme (courtesy of Jamie) is simple; name six fictional characters in whom you could see yourself, and explain why you were able to do so. Mine are as follows:

1. Shevek: From U. K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. Not the theoretical physicist protagonsit, but the other Shevek, inventor of a bearing used in heavy machinery. But seriously, Shevek the main character was the inspiration behind pubwan, by being such a spokesman for non-classified non-proprietary research.
2. Rain: In Out of Oz, the fourth installment in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked Years series. I suspect he was trying to see how brazenly autistic a character he could come up with.
3. Kilgore Trout: featured in several books by Kurt Vonnegut, particularly Breakfast of Champions. Living on the margins, and relegated to obscurity by the necessity of the business model. In his case, science fiction being economically dependent on the business model of pornographic novels.
4. Sherlock Holmes: The one in the contemporary version now playing Sunday nights on PBS. Wonderfully deadpan.
5. Jen Lindley: character on the TV series Dawson’s Creek played by Michelle Williams. AFAIK the television medium’s first out-of-the-closet atheist character since the Meathead on All in the Family.
6. Betty Suarez: of Ugly Betty. An “ingenue” character. Those are always interesting.

Gawker on Silk Road (h/t The Daily Attack):

Back when we broke the story in June, Silk Road’s anonymous administrator said he wouldn’t allow weapons to be sold on the site. But since then, an entire subcategory for firearms has sprung up.

This is why I’m always looking for noncommercial (I would go as far as to say non-entrepreneurial) ways to do things. The thing that all business models seem to have in common is that at some point they lose their innocence. If there’s some pale you’re not willing to go beyond, at some point a competitor will be, and your scruples are your competitive disadvantage. Commerce will always be an arena in which nice guys and gals finish last. In related news, the Diaspora community finds itself in need of a business model:

Number four, DStar must take action to place JD on a sound financial footing. I see two ways to do this: (1) advertising, and (2) subscriptions. Most likely, both will be needed.

Analytics: Nearly every site uses some sort of analytics, if only to help with allocation of server resources and deploying anti-spam and anti-cracking defenses. I imagine that some idea of what features are used and in which sequence they get used is going to strongly influence which features get the most developer attention, also. JD should implement a solution like Piwik, until effective analytics can be integrated into the Diaspora software as a plugin. Without analytics, JD will have no way to know how to adjust the appearance and operation site to enable it to become profitable.

Advertising: Although Google’s adsense is said to be the more profitable ad network, there is absolutely no way that JD can use it. JD is going to have to build its own ad network (using OpenX or a similar application) or contract another ad network to service the site. However this is done, ads shown on JD need to respect its users’ privacy and the integrity of the Diaspora experience. This means no expanders, none of those popups when you roll over text, no “please view this ad while the page loads”, and positively no “you were discussing cats so we’ll show an ad for XYZ cat food”.

Subscriptions: Subscriptions are an excellent way to pay for some of the costs of operation. Subscription-only would chase away those who cannot afford it, or those who object to paid-only sites. Subscriptions as a “see fewer ads, subscribe” would be the best option.

The trouble with “see fewer ads, subscribe” as a business model is that the advertising becomes a value-subtracted feature. Soon the feature is not the advertising itself but the tamper-resistance of the advertising. Advertising is replaced with adware. Ick.

As for the analytics, if the real reason is to help with the allocation of resources within Diaspora, etc., then by all means make the analytical data available to the public. Assuming your analytics provider doesn’t contractually obligate you to do your analytic work behind a curtain…

In Facebook, there’s an “interest page” (I’m assuming here those can be viewed w/o logging in) called “Non Market Individualist Anarchism“.  These “interest pages” tend to be created when a Facebook user types in someghing under “interests” that’s not already on some user’s list of “interests”.  I found it using Google.  Apparently three people on Facebook share this interest.  No idea who—so much for building online community.  Facebook used to list those who “like” things, but no longer does, which may be just as well, considering the generally McCarthyist tenor of post-9/11 hysteria.  Of course the authorities are customers of Facebook’s extensive data mining operation.

It’s nice to see signs of interest out there, though.

This is my first attempt at a blog meme. With any luck my friends will get me off to a good start by helping me catapult the propaganda. Some may object that it’s off topic. Perhaps, although one of my reasons for being an anagorist is the market’s tendency to turn vocation-finding into a trial-and-error exercise. This meme is an exercise in assessing my strong and weak suits and maybe even coming up with an effective (if belated) strategy for dealing with that particular Reality.

The gist of the meme is to list three things in the course of your lifelong learning that came as natural as falling off a log, especially if they strike you as possessing elegance, expository power, arousal of curiosity, or best of all, a lot of formerly disparate concepts somehow “fall into place.” The other list is three things that are utterly opaque to your mind, that you have made repeated attempts to learn, but for some reason or other, you just don’t seem to be meant to learn these things.

Three things that make things make sense to me

1. Taylor’s theorem
   This is typically part of the second semester Calculus curriculum. This tied a lot of things together for me. Having already learned that polynomials are the easiest functions to differentiate/integrate, it comes as a relief to find out that all analytical functions are polynomials.
2. SQL
   Stands for “Structured Query Language.” It’s the language at the heart of most relational database software. For me, at least, it has the gentlest learning curve of all the computer languages. Granted, that’s comparing a data definition language to programming language, but from what I’ve seen since then of the former, the designation still stands. The relational model is the way that I (without knowing it) always organized facts inside my skull. Taking a database course and encountering SQL gave me the easy means to communicate a lot of what I had been thinking for a long time.
3. double entry bookkeeping
   I never took a course in this. I encountered this idea because one day out of boredom I took a peek inside an accounting textbook. I was dumbfounded by the elegance. This is how you implement a relational database when you don’t have computer technology.

Three things that I simply don’t grok

1. macroeconomics
   The NIPA (national income and product account) of macroeconomics bears superficial resemblance to the balance sheet of accounting. But the appeal in that was the relational integrity; the way all the reports are derived entirely from the information in the journals. Macroeconomics would make sense as reverse engineering, but instead is a compendium of official statistics. Macroeconomics reads like alphabet soup to me. Its definitions of terms are wordy, and 90% disclaimers by weight. Try as I might, I simply can’t wrap my head around macroeconomics.
2. statistics
   While generally competent at math, this particular branch of math eludes me. Sure, I can do cookbook statistics, but even that I have to look up because I can’t remember the formulas or the procedures. An intuitive understanding of significance tests and the like completely eludes me.
3. object oriented programming
   While I find it elegant to call methods on predefined objects such as columns or rows or whatever of an Excel worksheet with Visual Basic, the class definitions involved in writing object oriented programs from scratch is something I could never find the patience for. It just seems like you have to write many many lines of code just setting things up before you can write code that does things. I can see the advantages of object oriented programming for group projects, but never having managed to break into the profession, my only opportunities to program are whatever projects I take up for my own amusement, and they seem to be small enough to be less hassle without object oriented rubrics.

Nothing offends my sensibilities quite like anti-union (or even anti-union-shop) union members.  Whenever anyone has a complaint with any other aspect of the workplace, they’re the first to parrot the “libertarian” slogan “nobody’s holding a gun to your head.”  Good union jobs are wasted on such people.  Ironically, they’re also the first to tell me “there’s legions of people who’d give their left arm to have your job.”

List of platform planks stolen from the left-libertarian platform.

Copyright, Patents, and Trademarks

Intellectual property is a by-product of the necessity of earning a living. It is the kludge created to answer the question “how can I do something creative and get paid for it.” An inevitable side-effect has been a “gold rush” mentality that has more to do with staking claims than with creating things or making discoveries, in which the phrase “you’re fired” is a registered trademark. The only independent artist is an amateur artist. The same goes for writers, scientists, inventors, etc.  The solution to the problem is BIG.

Free speech

Free speech means zero tolerance for censorship, including when the censor is part of the private sector.

Sexism

Sexism is a by-product of the fact that economic independence is a privilege rather than a right.

Free Trade

An oxymoron. Free means you don’t have to pay. Trade means you do.

Debt

A transferrable form of indentured servitude. In indentured servitude, the party to whom one is indentured is one’s creditor. In the modern debt regime, a worker who is in debt (to anyone) is less free to “take this job and shove it.” This is why, as a J.O.B. applicant, “no credit is worse than bad credit.”

Banking

Like any industry, it serves a useful purpose, and like any industry, it’s best done as a cooperative.

Immigration

First off, we call it migration. Our position: No borders. No one is illegal. Neoliberalism deregulates the flow of capital and goods, and ties the hands of member states to do otherwise, while the same states throttle migration with large visa fees (which lead to indentured servitude), “managed migration,” hoops to jump through, etc.

Military intervention

Some sovereign entities are more sovereign than others. Sovereignty is not the answer.

Taxes

Not right, but not a front-burner issue.

Victimless crimes

Another oxymoron.

Death penalty

Incompatible with due process. There will never be an infallible due process, therefore capital punishment is unconscionable.

Social services

Social provision of services, i.e. mutual aid.

Corporations

Not a good thing, but the central problem is the profit motive, not the corporate form of organization.

Elections

Better to have non-binding public opinion polls. But democracy may be best for small groups. Federalism is the only way to implement organization on a large scale.

Contracts

I tend to avoid them. In theory, contracts protect both parties. In practice, the vast majority of contracts are “boilerplate,” drafted by one party (inevitably an institution) and offered to the other party (an individual, see thick individualism) on a “take it or leave it” basis. Even equitable contracts are based on pessimistic assumptions about human nature, as the “protect both parties” thing is “from each other.” I’m not impressed with contractarianism, but I’m considering inventing “thick contractarianism.”

Secrecy

Nothing good ever resulted from secrecy. Reverse engineering must be used as a weapon against secrecy.

Privacy

Privacy is not the same thing as secrecy. The latter applies to institutions, while the former applies to individuals. Privacy is a worthy, but lost, cause. It is becoming impossible for technological reasons, and I don’t think it is possible for policy (or social norms) to trump technology. Extreme transparency in some form is inevitable. The nightmare that is well worth guarding against is that extreme transparency should take an “asymmetric” form. I propose pubwan as a strategy for dealing with this.

Pollution

Perhaps no definitive solution short of primitivism, but partial solutions require reduce, reuse, recycle, IN THAT ORDER. Small is beautiful.

Licensing

An entry barrier, to be sure. One of the few areas where libertarianism actually speaks up for the underdog.

Police and prosecuters

As they say in the opening credits to Law and Order:

In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.

Libertarians, of course, object on “collectivist” grounds, to the phrase “people are represented.” I object on the grounds that police and prosecutors (being “archists”) are human-nature essentialists, which is why in cop culture, “individual” tends to be used as a pejorative. While not a statist, I think the idea of checks and balances has merit, so (at least for the time being) I’m generally supportive of the adversarial legal system. Prosecutors have defense attorneys as adversaries. But whom have the police?

International development

Development of increased sophistication I can get behind, but growth for its own sake is not sustainable. International implies nations, so let’s stick with development without adjectives.

Education

I’m for education. I hate ignorance. Obviously it’s best to de-institutionalize education, and failing that, to tip the balance of power as far as possible in the direction of joint faculty/student governance. I’m especially a big fan of education as an end in itself—enough of this right-wing fixation on “practical education.” There’s a place for on-the-job training. That place is the (hopefully syndicalist industrial) union-based apprenticeship, which is open to all who are interested.

Domestic slavery

Had to look that one up: “A civil relationship in which one person has absolute power over the life, fortune, and liberty of another.” That’s horrendous. Every effort must be made to rescue persons in such straits; pacifism be damned.

Abortion

I vote pro-choice.

Healthcare

If it is a privilege, then expect the positive correlation between income and life expectancy to grow stronger; one of many things I categorize as nightmare scenarios. If that makes me a collectivist, so be it. Medical research (like all research) should be nonproprietary.