I first encountered the term “aikido activism” years ago in a post at tribe.net by one Spidey. Aikido activism is basically the idea that for-profit forms of organization might be better suited to activist goals than non-profit ones. Being, as I am, a knee-jerk (or maybe just a jerk of an) anticapitalist, of course, I thoroughly panned the concept. I was starkly reminded of the aikido activism concept when I encountered the CureTogether Blog. In their “who we are” statement, I found them to be an collaborative, information-sharing platform, which is the type of thing I’m always interested in. One the one hand, CureTogether is non-competitive and “not in it for the money.” On the other hand,

We chose carefully to be a for-profit company because we can do much more good as a business than if we had to constantly ask for donations.

I have made non-profit status part of the very definition of pubwan, my proposed suite of techniques for collaborative data mining of the consumer marketplace. Of course, pubwan as a project has attracted almost no interest and accomplished nothing of importance, and of course I’ve suspected that my resistance to what I perceive to be the tyranny of the business model may be a large part of the reason why. Pubwan supporter Poor Richard informs us:

…However, the simple corporate charter IS the most robust, bulletproof, legal instrument. The 501(c)3 corporation is subject… to many rules and legal challenges. Trusts, co-operatives, and even condo agreements are more specialized and legally assailable on more technical grounds. At the same time, the plain, simple corporation can do anything any of the more specialized forms can do except for tax exemption. Tax exemption you don’t want because it makes you more vulnerable to the state and to your enemies. All you have to do to avoid paying taxes is to break even, which is easy to arrange. The single disadvantage is that charitable donations to your corporation are not tax deductible to the giver.…

and, importantly

Note: the place to embed all your alternative, egalitarian principles and methods is in the corporate bylaws rather than in the charter. This makes them practically invisible to the external legal environment.

Getting back to CureTogether, the business model, as usual rests on the leveraging (though admirably in this case not merchandising) of its aggregate data holdings, constrained by the usual privacy policy boilerplate (emphasis mine):

Your data is your data, totally private for only you to see. Aggregate statistics are made available on our website – for free. Occasionally, we will work with reputable research organizations to get more brilliant minds working on improving everyone’s health, and they sometimes make donations to support our work. In these cases, we may share some of the data we gather, but always take numerous steps to protect our members — both technical (such as removing any potentially identifying data prior to sharing), and legal (requiring researchers to legally bind themselves to not even attempt to personally identify any of our members). Sometimes, we will do custom research studies for companies and get paid for it. In these cases, we never share raw data with them. We only generate reports based on abstracted findings, similar to what we publish openly on our website.

There are important similarities and important differences with the data model proposed for pubwan. I’ve already discussed the most important similarities; namely that it is a collaboration engine and information-sharing platform. The main difference is the first sentence above, and the reason I emphasized it. Pubwan, if implemented, would treat all data (particularly meta data, raw data, aggregate data) as “informational non-property,” which is to say, strictly copyleft. But if it can’t be implemented as a nonprofit, the next question becomes, is there a way to generate exchange value (CureTogether even views donations as “a reflection that we’ve built something useful”) while refusing to use the contents of an informational black box as a strategic asset? This question has important implications for anagorism as well as for pubwan.

For what it’s worth, hat tips are in order: I found the CureTogether Blog via Quantified Self, which it co-sponsors. The phrase “quantified self” I picked up from the KurzweilAI newsletter.

Is there some Iron Law of Economics to the effect that a walkable neighborhood in the U.S.A. has to be either a college town or a ridiculously gentrified east or west coast city?

h/t the admirable Nominatissima

On the previous blog I installed the free-as-in-beer version of the ClustrMaps gadget. They recently enhanced the quality of the data provided to the users of the free version of the product. Before, the “Current Country Totals” table listed the countries from which the site had been visited, and the number of hits for each country. Now, each countries count is expandable, and tallied by state or province for the United States and Canada, and city for the rest of the countries. The table itself (and the red dots on the map) still only reflect visits prior to the most recent update. One doesn’t get an update unless/until the total hit count is 5% (if I’m not mistaken) above what it was at the previous update, until it tops 1,000, and then it’s 10%. Another added feature is that the ten most recent hits are listed by city/state/province and country just below the map, and represented by yellow dots on the map. I suppose at this point someone could do an end run around the update policy by writing a screen scraper to look at the “yellow dot” entries at periodic intervals. Of course universities, who have a long tradition of operating their own physical servers, routinely dump far higher resolution server stats directly into the public domain. Ownership has its privileges, as they say—as does “server side netizenship.”

At first glance, this appears to be an example of free enterprise, or making an enterprise of what used to be free. During the mid-1990’s migration of the Internet from the .edu domains to the .com domains, finger and talk were replaced by instant messaging, IRC was replaced by chat rooms, USENET by message boards, blogs and eventually social network-type websites. All the relevant technology was in place before the commercialization of the Internet. Apparently what was needed to take it to the next level was the necessity of hanging a business model on it. So today, I still check my email, still check what people are posting online, still live chat once in a blue moon, only now I’m using 200 times as much bandwidth, 3,000 times as much memory and 400 times the clock speed.

What I refer to as “thick voluntarism,” it appears, is closely related to what economist Mike Munger refers to as “euvoluntary” transactions (h/t Arnold Kling). Munger is, among other things, a former Libertarian candidate for NC governor, so not surprisingly, the framing of euvoluntary is deferential to the rightist ideals of markets and property, and comes with ample disclaimers of ‘not that I’d want to make these things illegal or anything,’ or words to that effect. In Munger’s view, a transaction is euvoluntary if there are “no regrets,” while in my view, it is “thickly voluntary” if solvency is feasible. Munger’s stated (in this podcast (mp3)) intent is to build a bridge between philosophy and economics, so there is plenty of hair splitting. My intent is to build a bridge, if you will, between the formal idea of voluntary (which reads to me like the apologetics of exploitation) and the colloquial understanding of what voluntary means.

I also suspect that the difference between the merely voluntary and the euvoluntary may parallel the difference between restraints and constraints. Restraints are imposed by people, while constraints are those conditions exogenous to the human system, such as the laws of physics and perhaps the Iron Laws of Economics. But to many of us, for better or for worse, the difference is purely academic. The constraint-loaded life is not a very free life. There aren’t many real decisions. Everything defaults to the cheapest available everything; the low-rent district, etc. The constraint-loaded life really is lived in a smaller world, and I have a really hard time using the word “voluntary” to describe it.

In The big lie about capitalism… at The Ⓐ Word:

If everyone were a millionaire, who would empty the trash or repair the sewers?

An important point, but the trouble with that logic is that one could similarly argue: If everyone were economically secure, who would… The idea that humyn nature is so constituted that doing what needs to be done, and might not be fun, requires someone to have a fire under one’s buns from (take your pick) competition, precarity, authority…is, more than the state, more even than the dominance/submission reflex, what anarchism is against. So, as an argument for social anarchism, it seems weak.

My thoughts on this are, what everyone wants (well, certainly what I want) is to be a contributing member of society.  Since market economics makes this a privilege rather than a right, there are many of us who would be grateful for the opportunity to work in shit processing.

Or is the distinction between free market and unfree economy one of kind rather than degree? For example, between the set of economic norms prevailing in the United States before about 1980 or so, and the set of norms prevailing since that time, which is a more serious violation of free-market principles? The conventional (and of course flawed) understanding of “free market” principles would lead us to believe that the present is a lesser evil than the postwar era when it comes to “economic freedom,” as so many “market based” reforms and structural adjustments have been undertaken since then. I guess what I’m hoping to hear from the free-market anticapitalists is that the opposite is true; that the changes advertised as market-based reforms are actually steps away from the ideal of free markets, and that the economy was actually closer to the free-market ideal back when there were more jobs with bennies and more job security all around; say 1946-1979 (give or take). I don’t expect such a revelation, as free-market anticapitalists (among others) have identified that period as the “managerial age,” characterized not by economic freedom, but by a type of of bureaucratic order or cockroach caucus that somehow manages to buy off a sufficiently large fraction of public opinion with cushy jobs or what have you. By my reckoning, on strictly economic matters, America 1946-1979 was a better place than America 1979-present. I won’t go quite so far as to say that the past was better than the present because we may have (or may not have) made up for the losses in economic security with advancements in civil rights and personal freedoms, although the latter gains have pretty much been completely erased by the post-9/11 hysteria. My own take on it is that the post-war period was economically better, while the post-Reagan period is more market-oriented. What I want to hear the free market anticapitalists say is that the Reagan “revolution” made the economy less market oriented. That would be the only answer compatible with there being anything positive about the market system.

The basic equation was laid out in an episode of Nature on PBS. The domestication of the dog entailed (among other things) genetically selecting out one or more of the abilities in the sequence of actions comprising successful predation in the wild. An article from the Discovery News website informs us that domestication has been a dumbing-down process for dogs, who are thoroughly pwned by their wild cousins the dingoes and wolves in a food-finding exercise called the “detour test.” This leads one to wonder whether civilized humans, like domesticated dogs, are playing with less than a full deck, which is to say, a skill set less than adequate to the challenge of independent survival.

Skill subtraction is often attributable to non-genetic factors, such as de-skilling in the workplace. One consequence of a partial skill set is interdependence, which is one thing, but what if some people are more dependent than others? How would we go about determining whether this is the case, and which intrinsic abilities are most likely to be found in the dominant classes in human society? Surely there are gains from trade to be realized when people interact with those with complementary skill portfolios. According to theory, even someone whose skills are inferior across the board stands to gain from trade. Perhaps some comfort can be taken in the fact that the related theory of comparative advantage rests on a boatload of assumptions, including full employment. Perhaps the Iron Laws of Economics don’t always have the final say.

One countermeasure against the prevalence of highly incomplete skill sets could be a sort of cross-training program. One would expect an agorist or mutualist community to transform apprenticeship from an entry barrier into an open, inclusive learning opportunity, perhaps following the template in the fifth paragraph of Suggestions for modeling non-monetary coordination in the Angel Economy. The opportunity to be apprenticed in perhaps dozens of trades in the course of a lifetime may help make one less intimidated by the necessity of truck and barter, and maybe just maybe might play a role in the obsolescence of truck and barter.

The challenge is avoiding hierarchies of the ‘you need me more than I need you’ type. Mutualism seeks to cultivate a type of symbiotic relationship that is distinct from parasitism and commensalism. Perhaps commensalism can be seen as the social analog of lifestyle anarchism.

Can domestication and civilization be unbundled? And what of re-imprinting?

Let’s explore whether such an entity is possible. What are the limits of transparent accounting? For an idea of what is meant by transparent accounting, let’s consider the Transparency Extremist blog. Here are some key criteria:

1. “all ledgers are world-readable in real time (other than those from which it is possible to infer sensitive personal information).”
2. “contract is only enforceable to the extent that it is published, and we will provide exceptions and limitations to this principle to allow for the redaction from published contracts of sensitive personally-identifiable information about individuals (including individuals who are a party to the contract).”
3. “We will review the case for permitting non-disclosure agreements at all, particularly where they directly or indirectly restrain competition.”

The use of words like “permitting” and “enforceable” suggests a statist orientation of Transparency Extremist, but their ideas about accounting, I think, are ripe for implementation in non-profit cooperatives organized for the purpose of economic production. Nevertheless, there is much here that might be helpful in allaying some of the more intimidating properties of competitive economics. ‘World readability’ of all ledgers should take a lot of the friction (and one-upcrittership) out of ‘price discovery.’ Enforceability only of contracts in the public record also means less guesswork; that sinking feeling of ‘getting used’ can be compared against what terms and conditions, in general, people are agreeing to. One can get a relatively objective answer to the quesiton, ‘is this par for the course, or am I a fool?’ There is also the opportunity to ask what you might call sociological questions, such as, are certain demographically identifiable subsets of the population consistently subject to certain contractual obligations?

The question of whether non-disclosure agreements restrain competition is worth considering. Transparency Extremist, of course, seems to voice the view that competition is a good thing, and whether competitiveness needs to be protected from secrecy pacts. I have always suspected the opposite. I understand that price transparency is a fundamental property of competitive markets, but suspect that extreme transparency might actually be more conducive to cooperation than competition. Playing one’s cards close to one’s vest is itself a competitive strategy and a competitive activity in itself.

The exceptions to these guidelines for personal privacy are also instructive. While part of me wants to see how far it’s possible to take transparency in commerce, I do value personal privacy, even thought I suspect that it will turn out to be technologically impossible. In that event, the privacy exceptions to the proposed transparency guidelines are moot. For now, I appreciate the differentiation between individuals and entities other than individuals, such as businesses, and I would assume, cooperatives intended to assume their role in society. I have long advocated differentiating between privacy (which applies strictly to individuals) and secrecy (which applies to what I call ‘institutions’).

Agorist Wally Conger brings to our attention a common pitfall of the going-into-business-for-yourself routine; the need to be stingy with information. It’s basically a matter of being assertive, which Conger says is “really a simple mental adjustment.” Of course it’s simple. Probably for some of us it’s even easy. Sooner or later I will probably have to learn it. It seems that wherever the market spreads its tentacles, there is not only the necessity of selling, but the necessity of jealously guarding one’s turf, or one’s market share, or one’s reputation, or one’s trade secrets. “Free market” or freed market, the world is your oyster if you’re the horse trader type; not so much if your strengths are in less extroverted areas like productivity, quality, ingenuity. Perhaps if you replace rentiers with entreprenoors as the leadership cadre of society, the income gap between top and bottom will be less extreme, but even that’s a leap of faith that rests on untested abstract theory. And in any case, if some are more independent than others, some are more free than others. “Lording it over” one another is still the order of the day in the mad scramble for survival in the agora.

Eli Gothill explores the limitations to scalability of gift economies, and also explains how introduction of practically any kind of incentive ends up devolving gifts into priced commodities.

I don’t think the gift economy is necessarily an extrapolation of the existing consumerist phenomenon of birthday presents and the like. For one thing, the first question, as I see it, when blueprinting new kinds of economies, is how to assure the provision of necessities. Necessity goods as birthday or Christmas or other Hallmark holiday presents, if anything, somehow seem in bad form, by the logic of existing consumer culture. Instead of gifts to individuals, I suggest gifts to the world at large (like free software) or more locally, gifts to the nearest “free store” or the equivalent. Instead of inventing a reputation currency, consider implementing a policy of transparency for the free store, in which all transactions of materials in or out of the store, no matter how small, are in the public record. To partially preserve the notion of gift from evisceration by some form of keeping score, there might be an option for transfers of items into the store to be anonymous—the gift itself being on record, but not the identity of the giver. The general idea is extreme meticulousness and transparency of recordkeeping, but limiting ourselves to qualitative accounts of the items being tracked. The deliverables to the public domain are a description of the contents of the inventory, not an estimation of its value.

The article mentions that it would strike us as strange if a couple kept a ledger of household duties performed. Yet it is not at all uncommon for people to give gifts (especially anniversary gifts) to their beloved in the form of coupons good for the performance of some chore or another. These, I suppose, are technically fungible, probably not transferable (but what if the writing on the slip contains words such as ‘bearer?’) but not currency denominated. Something like this might be appropriate as a gift to a free store. A person could issue them in quantities consistent with their capacity for volunteering such services, perhaps with expiration dates so as to avoid having to fulfill a lot of them at once.

Scalability? Don’t know. Maybe it can’t be done. Maybe that’s where a sort of federalism comes in; gifts between free stores. One rather small scale unit is the family, and the article describes the internal economics of family life as almost all gift paradigm and almost no exchange paradigm—to a point:

The most obvious example is the family: goods and services flow between the members of a family, but not according to the logic of the market. Such exchanges are best regarded as gifts: a parent’s ‘services’ to a child can be regarded as largely one-directional gifts with little explicit quid-pro-quo. As the child grows older, the expectation of reciprocation, however informal, becomes more apparent. In the same way, partners expect each other to ‘do their fair share’ in the distribution of tasks and chores that go with running a household.

This paints a picture of a gift economy existing as an island within a market economy. The economic inputs and outputs of the family are most likely mediated through markets, but within the family the gift paradigm is the norm. This may be analogous to my take on angel economics, in which there is no direct attempt to challenge the existing market economy, but linkages to it, being the inputs and outputs of the economic system under construction, are minimized as a shared goal of participants.