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Voltaire Network >>
national |
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news report
Friday March 28, 2003 12:02
by bruce sterling
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Jump To Comment: 1This is an excerpt: Link below for lots lots more
Individuals Versus Big Corporations are just not the issue any more. It’s more like no-profit networked peer-groups versus loose gangs of for-profit contractual hucksters. Two ad-hocracies, both globalized now: the peers are on the net, while the corporations are offshored.
Offshored corporations have cash and can buy the nation-state, but that activity weakens nation-states drastically. Since corporations use national currencies, they’re kinda sawing off their own feet.
It’s hard to figure which of those systems is the more unstable and peculiar. Given that finance is collapsing while Linux isn’t collapsing, maybe the ground is shifting somewhat.
If you try to frame this situation as Little Me versus IBM, we get nowhere. That’s an argument John Ruskin was losing 150 years ago in the arts-and-crafts movement.
Peer-production versus offshoring is a much more useful situation to think about now. Like: exactly *why* is peer-production so bad at doing boring, useful, vital stuff like farming?
Then, instead of debating communism and socialism like we’ve been doing since 1848, we can ask: What might a plausible peer-production farm look like?
I’m guessing a peer-produced farm would be rather like a New Alchemy greenhouse. Except: rather than forcing its inventors to stay nailed to Cape Cod so that the all-organic sewers didn’t overflow, its management would be networked. You’d webcam your module of the farm, crops would send you SMSes. You wouldn’t be tied to the soil, which is surely one of the major components of agricultural tedium.
Of course you’d start out farming high-end hokum like baby arugula and mutant purple okra, because that would attract the star system-builders. Once they built the infrastructure and released it into the commons domain, THEN you get somebody less inventive to grow some rice.
At this point we’re supposed to jump indignantly sideways and say, well, the capitalist profit motive is central to the human condition, so of course Three Initial Corporation sells the digital urban rice!
Look: does that MATTER a whole lot now? The reality on the ground would be this: that digital urban rice has appeared. Digital urban rice would be very weird. We never had any of that before. It would change a lot of everyday reality.
Everyday reality IS changing. General Motors crumbles at a touch. There are no newspapers. Gangs of terrorists fight major military powers and bankrupt them. A black guy is the US President. Ten months ago, petrocrats like Putin and Chavez were conquering the world and now they’ve got soupbowls.
We need new ways to frame what’s going on.