In Defense of Anagorism

political economy in the non-market, non-state sector

Tag: p2p

  • Quotebag #100

    “The sharing economy is not an alternative to capitalism, it’s the ultimate end point of capitalism in which we are all reduced to temporary labourers and expected to smile about it because we are interested in the experience not the money. Jobs become ‘extra money’ just like women’s jobs used to be ‘extra money’, and like those jobs they don’t come with things like insurance protection, job security, benefits — none of that old economy stuff. But hey, you’re not an employee, you’re a micro-entrepreneur. And you’re not doing it for the money, you’re doing it for the experience. We just assume you’re making a living some other way.”—Tom Slee

    “Things that require a network effect, after they get it, are in a super leveraged position that they can cash in.”—octaveguin

    “We should consider it a point of pride that we are no longer all forced to live under the permanent supervision of our families. That the current Great Recession has made independence unobtainable for many of the current generation should be regarded with horror by anyone concerned with feminism and individual freedom, and yet another reason to demand immediate economic justice.”—Alice Raizel

    “And to the extent that those power imbalances are an inevitable result of free competition iterated over generations from moderately unequal beginnings, there can be no freedom under an ideology of absolute freedom. Freedom must be tempered with active rebalancing of economic and political power, in order to preserve enough equality for any freedom to exist at all.”—Tiercelet

  • In pursuit of a nonbusiness model

    Any nonbusiness model. A single example of a noncommercial (but also nongovernmental) operating model in the context of any plausibly economic activity in any social setting. Perhaps there is not and never will be and even maybe never can be such an example; demonstrating yet again why nature abhors an anagora. Tom Slee, in Open Wide — The New Inquiry, gives us multiple examples of commons-based online communities that lost their innocence in one way or another, and in the process lost

    Image courtesy Sir josef (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)
    Image courtesy Sir josef (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

    whatever authenticity, outsider appeal, alternativity, and the like that originally made these cool spaces in which to be a participant. Not wanting to pirate the article, I will give a list of the entities used as case studies:

    1. Bebo.com, now part of AOL
    2. Goodreads, now part of Amazon
    3. Mendeley, now part of Elsevier
    4. Tumblr, now part of Yahoo!
    5. Zipcar, now part of Avis
    6. IMDB, now part of Amazon
    7. Couchsurfing.com, formerly couchsurfing.org

    In about three quarters of these examples, the fact that the enrichment of the commons had become the sharecropping of the long tail became evident in the form of mergers and acquisitions. I have long wondered whether there’s something in the Iron Laws of Economics that dictates that the role of small businesses and startups is to serve as feeder fish in the world of commerce. I have also questioned whether the trend from employment employment to self employment is at all liberating, empowering, or even conducive to independence in some sense. In terms of my own options for combating nichelessness, I’ve thought of the trend from J.O.B. security to precarity as something I’m being backed into by a combination of a less labor-intensive economy, a less labor-driven polity, a disentitled generation of young adults, and other factors making “cushy” jobs harder to come by. So far, I’ve given the prevailing trend the benefit of the doubt and assumed that there are some people for whom a less risk-averse and less competition-averse culture is a better fit and a more opportune ecosystem, and that these people are in some way changing the world, but I’m beginning to question that. Startup founders describe themselves and their ventures as “disruptive,” but it’s getting hard to identify possible outcomes for such ventures other than (1) a failed business or (2) a business that is for sale. At best, it seems that cooptation is a stronger force than disruption. Is this too an Iron Law of Economics?