Info, Power, & Development New role of Culture in Economics Growing potentials for Human Development & Organization The Threat to Capitalism & Industrialism.

Info, Power, & Development

New role of Culture in Economics

Growing potentials for Human Development & Organization

The Threat to Capitalism & Industrialism

Finance & the Hijacking of the Info Revolution

From Scarcity to Abundance

Redefining Wealth

Quantitative: Money & Material

Accumulation

Qualitative: Well-being

Regeneration

Communication & Consciousness

• Relationship of levels of economic development with regimes of communication, with forms of participation, with modes of consciousness & Selfhood

• Oral, Script, Print, Electronic

McLuhan on Technology• Extension of human senses

& functions

• Civilization: extending muscles & bodily functions like heating

• Electronic technology: extending the human mind & nervous system

Common Sense Economics

Herman Daly “Trade Recipes,

not Cookies.”

Increase restrictions on the flow of material goods and physical capital (to minimize transport costs, etc.)

Lessen restrictions on the flow of information and culture.

note:

Globalization does exactly the opposite: via free trade and intellectual property law.

Knowledge-based Development

• Dematerialization: intrinsic: substituting information for resources

• Detoxification: ...great potential to tune into benign process & substances.

• Decentralization: intrinsic part of the network economy

Dimensions of the Green Economy

1. The Service Economy“Hot Showers and Cold Beer”

Nutrition, Illumination, Entertainment, Access, Shelter, Community, etc.

2. The “Lake Economy”Economic Biomimicry, flowing with nature,

Every output an input, Closed-loop organization, Let nature do the work

The Economy in Loops

Hardware & Sustainability• Electronics: design for

obsolescence. The Waste Economy. • Design for monopoly: incompatibility• E-waste & toxicity• Electronics & global labour

exploitation.• Crucial role of Extended Producer

Responsibility (EPR) in reducing & reusing.

• New possibilities for efficiency in the “World Wide Computer”

Grids: Electrical & Informational

Historical parallels in development of the electric power grid & the emerging information grid:

• early manufacturers had to be energy producers with generation hardware on site – Insull & the power grid separated generation from use.

• today we maintain our separate computer hardware & software—a tremendous source of e-waste.– Cloud computing (the World Wide Computer) offers

opportunities to do more with less.

Commons in the Info Economy

• Sharing & conservation: key role of design.

• Sharing: flip side of the new importance of creativity.

• Green goods and info goods as “public goods”, not easily served by market exchange.

• Key struggles today: over control of the Commons—the “2nd Enclosure”

Brand: “Information wants to be free!” Daly: “Trade recipes, not cookies.”

Mass Collaboration

1. Changes how we do many things, with sharing often more efficient than competition & monopoly.

2. Allows us to do many more things by making organizing way easier.

Organization, Management & Communication

• the firm: ability to reduce transaction costs by doing these operations within.– “Managerial revolution”: era of the

big state and big firm. Fordism.• scarcity & role of professionals

• Today: many transaction costs are dropping radically: explosion of amateurism, a threat to professionalism and markets.

• Sharing collaboration & efficiency: Demarketization.

Beyond Property:Demarketization at the Cutting-

edge• Wikinomics: New forms of peer-

production & mass collaboration superior to even the best-paid hired talent.

• Need for new forms of remuneration to support cultural & eco-production in the Commons.

• Culture & Information restricted by the rules of old-line scarcity-based markets. Brand: “Information wants to be free”.

• From belongings to belonging: culture-based economics demands access not ownership

Property as Theft?• Capitalism as intrinsically material-

based and scarcity-based

• Property, Ownership & material accumulation

• Markets: forms of material allocation.

• Abundance: the natural state of information & culture.

• Real development in an Info Economy: access, not ownership.

• Green Development: ownership has to be subordinate to stewardship & empowerment.

Work (Creativity) in the Info Economy

• a growing proportion of work is involved in the production of “meaning & value”

– ...including old forms of “manual” work (e.g. construction, landscaping) that now involve deeper eco-knowledge

• a break from the historic role of worker as cog in the Megamachine

• the decline of bureaucracy• people as means & ends of ‘development’; inversion

of ‘investment-consumption’ relationship• all-round human development: underlying basis for

“creative class” economy: freedom & individuation.

N.B.: The overwhelming portion of ecological development—green building, permaculture, renewable energy, eco-industrial networks, reuse-based waste management etc.--all require greater knowledge

Transforming Professionalism

• professionalism and scarcity: professionals do necessary stuff that

wouldn't get done otherwise upholding of standards requires a

gatekeeper function the information revolution makes

possible many things previously feasible only with professionals & conventional markets.

• mass amateurism and the erosion of professionalism

gatekeeper function of professions can become reactionary, perpetuating unnecessary scarcity.

Post-1980 Casino Capitalism: Hijacking the Information

Revolution

• Main strategy for reproducing scarcity shifts from waste to debt• New info technologies supply new ways of creating money:

Fantasy Finance• Decline in real wages; increasing polarization of the rich and the

rest. Benefits of productivity gains monopolized by the 1%.• Great Risk Shift from organizations to individuals. • Rise of McJobs, outsourcing.• Shift in power from manufacturing to financial capital

The War on Creativity

• New wave of intellectual property law: use of copyright and patent law to suppress rather than encourage innovation.

• Making pirates out of everyone, and criminals out of young people.

• Current struggles over IP and the Internet among the key strategic struggles of our day.

Democracy & the New Commons

• the Digital Divide– One Laptop per child

• Net Neutrality & the Information Highway

• Community Broadband Initiatives

Rules for the New Electronic Commons

“...battle over the institutional ecology of the

digital environment”