Category Archives: Disintermediation

David Graeber explains why Workantile Exchange is hard to explain to some folks

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Not literally, but there is a kernel of truth in this particular passage from his “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture” [PDF] that informs my current understanding of how Workantile Exchange is set apart from traditional “economic development” projects. And also, somehow, it seems to be “about” the frustrations that Agile Software gurus are feeling, as the movement they framed as a fundamentally social thing reverts to a mere “strategy” in corporate life.

It might be helpful here to reflect on the nature of the violence—”force”, if you like—that police represent. A former LAPD officer writing about the Rodney King case pointed out that in most of the occasions in which a citizen is severely beaten by police, it turns out that the victim was actually innocent of any crime. “Cops don’t beat up burglars”, he observed. If you want to cause a policeman to be violent, the surest way is to challenge their right to define the situation. This is not something a burglar is likely to do. This of course makes perfect sense if we remember that police are, essentially, bureaucrats with guns. Bureaucratic procedures are all about questions of definition. Or, to be more precise, they are about the imposition of a narrow range of pre-established schema to a social reality that is, usually, infinitely more complex: a crowd can be either orderly or disorderly; a citizen can be white, black, Hispanic, or an Asian/ Pacific Islander; a petitioner is or is not in possession of a valid photo ID. Such simplistic rubrics can only be maintained in the absence of dialogue; hence, the quintessential form of bureaucratic violence is the wielding of the truncheon when somebody “talks back”.

I began by saying that this was to be an essay of interpretation. In fact, it has been just as much an essay about frustrated interpretation; about the limits of interpretation. Ultimately, I think this frustration can be traced back to the very nature of violence—bureaucratic or otherwise. Violence is in fact unique among forms of human action in that it holds out the possibility of affecting the actions of others about whom one understands nothing. If one wants to affect another’s actions in any other way, one must at least have some idea who they think they are, what they want, what they think is going on. Interpretation is required, and that requires a certain degree of imaginative identification. Hit someone over the head hard enough, all this becomes irrelevant. Obviously, two parties locked in an equal contest of violence would usually do well to get inside each other’s heads, but when access to violence becomes extremely unequal, the need vanishes. This is typically the case in situations of structural violence: of systemic inequality that is ultimately backed up by the threat of force. Structural violence always seems to create extremely lopsided structures of imagination. Gender is actually a telling example here. Women almost everywhere know a great deal about men’s work, men’s lives, and male experience; men are almost always not only ignorant about women’s lives, they often react with indignation at the idea they should even try to imagine what being a woman might be like. The same is typically the case in most relations of clear subordination: masters and servants, employers and employees, rich and poor. The victims of structural violence invariably end up spending a great deal of time imagining what it is like for those who benefit from it; the opposite rarely occurs. One concomitant is that the victims often end up identifying with, and caring about, the beneficiaries of structural violence—which, next to the violence itself, is probably one of the most powerful forces guaranteeing the perpetuation of systems of inequality. Another is that violence, as we’ve seen, allows the possibility of cutting through the subtleties of constant mutual interpretation on which ordinary human relations are based.

“Violence” here is used in the broad, structural sense we don’t get to talk about any more in American culture. Yet I think these troubled groups I’m thinking about—WorkEx and Agile—are facing it.

Entrepreneurship as Social Evil

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[cross-posted from nontrapreneur]

Little-e entrepreneurship is the charming eccentricity that drives business innovation in our culture and economy.

It’s a willingness to accept risks that others would shy away from, in exchange for eventual rewards nobody else can see.

It’s the Earliest Adopter’s enthusiasm for a fad that doesn’t yet exist.

It’s the heady taste of hubris that helps you move step past thinking I could do that, and actually give it a try.

It’s an inordinate willingness to ignore risks, to forge ahead, to plot a course into the unknown. On a promise.

Big-E Entrepreneurship is the cultural fetishization of that risk-seeking behavior, magical thinking and obsession. It’s taught in business schools. It’s the sole focus of some economic development institutions, it gets investors’ hearts racing, it’s the stated core of our government’s hope for the national future.

This cartoon “Entrepreneurship” has become a pervasive economic fetish.

Why is that a problem? Look:

Some young women are naturally beautiful, and also naturally thin. Our culture’s fetishization of Thin Beauty has fostered deadly anorexia, poor self-images among normal women, the sexualization of children, drug abuse, and more.

A real cottage in the country is unusual, and can also be pretty and restful. Our culture’s fetishization of Suburban Life has fostered an industry of chemical lawn treatments, greige developments at the edge of every city where the windows never open, social isolation, mortgage debt, financial crisis, the necessity of driving everywhere, and more.

It’s rewarding and healthy to play sports. Our culture’s fetishization of Professional Sports has built media empires and lobbying companies, offered false promise to disadvantaged youth, encouraged drug abuse by even school-age athletes, glossed over the effects on city centers, and more.

We’ve fetishized commerce and craft into shopping mall sprawl. We’ve fetishized the complex consensus-bulding of politics into talking points and intransigent argument. We’ve fetishized combat and national defense into gun sports.

In the same way these other unusual but natural extremes have given birth to social evils, the notion of big-E Entrepreneurship depends on over-exaggeration and over-generalization of natural but unusual extremes: the little-e entrepreneur’s eccentricities of risk-seeking, and magical thinking and obsession.

We’re told we can be “entrepreneurial” church members, “entrepreneurial” social activists, “entrepreneurial” artists, “entrepreneurial” employees.

Think about that. What does that really mean?

You don’t need Angels or VC to change the world. They need you. They need you to rush ahead. They need lots of you in their portfolios; your rare returns are their sole resource. You are their crop. You are their slot machines.

You don’t need to monetize everything, or promise ten-fold returns. Financial capital is not the only kind. A project can make you rich in social capital, intellectual capital, individual capital.

You don’t need to grow forever, or to burn down to bankruptcy. Maybe what you’ve done so far is enough. Even if you disappoint business culture because you’ve started a “lifestyle business”, at least you still have a life to live.

You don’t need to think of people as tools and resources. People are people. This institution you’ve started must be for the people who comprise it, more than they are expected to work for it. Never lose sight of the fact that it is an it.

You never have just one goal. Your venture is not your world. Even the most obsessive investor will admit that reducing risk is as much a goal of any venture as increasing returns. When you begin to believe some subset of “winning” is the only goal, when your investors drive you to forge ahead at all costs, when your instinct is to cut away the parts of your life that other people think are important just to make it to launch? That’s when you’ve become a danger to yourself, and to society.

Big-E Entrepreneurship is just like Hollywood and the NBA and the Billboard charts and the bridal magazines. You are not going to make next Google or Facebook. Your idea isn’t as original as you imagine, your skills aren’t all you need, your beautiful office in a fashionable ZIP code won’t make your product any better.

And those successful, rich people you find egging you on, “advising” you and “supporting” you and “connecting” you?

They’re just as caught up in the illusion as you are. Pity them. It was their luck that got them through the maze. Not their skill, not their mentors, not their investors, not their “best people”, and certainly not The System as a whole.

The culture reinforces them at every turn. Is it any coincidence they’re surrounded by all the evidence they need to keep believing that their illusion is universal and valid? They’re swimming in success. They see evidence of the System of Accepted Business Practices and Rituals working around them, all the time.

Because they have arranged life so they never see it fail. They’re not allowed to see anything else as success.

Where are the Big-E Entrepreneurs whose ventures didn’t grow? Didn’t hit it big? They were torn down for parts and raw materials, skillsets and capital, and dumped right back into hopper to be fed into the machine.

Who are you? If you define yourself by your project, I don’t think you’ve answered the question.

What do you want? If you only mention your project, you’re a liar.

What are the risks? If you don’t know, I can start your list with this one: “I don’t know the risks”.

What will be enough? If you don’t have any idea, I’ll guarantee that “more” isn’t the only answer.

What will you sacrifice? If you didn’t say “myself”, then take a moment to consider the Big-E Entrepreneurship complex out there, waiting and ready, yearning to drop you into the hopper.

You’re a pile of raw materials.

Portfolio filler for investors.

Promotional material for your city.

Future donating alumni of your University.

The cover of unsold magazines.

Oh yeah, and you did some stuff once. What was that thing, that company you did back when?

That was your vision? Huh. Who knew?

What is your academic paper for?

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No, really: Why did you write it? Why did you stay up two days before the extended deadline, typing furiously and graphing these arbitrary-seeming charts and wrestling with the layout software and the publishers’ vanilla template so you could wait for some of your peers (read: “betters”) to thumb through it desultorily, looking for obvious grammatical gaffes or misspellings, only then to rubber stamp it? Why did you feel the need to travel to [relatively distant foreign city] to stand in this ill-fitting suit and mumble about it in front of this not-quite-reconciled slide deck which, counter to most of our understanding of how computers work, is actually out of order and missing some pictures?

Was it to inform us? The easy targets—your thesis advisor and chairman and dean and editor and even unto your spouse and parents—they already pretty much know all they need to about this stuff. Everybody outside that social circle within telephone reach, odds are, doesn’t care.

Was it to promote your field? Past your thesis advisor/chairman/dean/editor, who actually has read every word of your paper?

Not I.

Was it to travel? To sell something? To demonstrate to whatever committee currently controls your life that you have spent the last few months “productively”? To build your CV, or make a splash in the thrilling field of [your field here]? To get your next job?

If you wanted to inform us, why didn’t you just tell us? All of us. There is email. There are blogs, available for free. Tell us.

Have you considered that you are transforming the library (possibly, but rarely, libraries) where the scarce physical copies of your work will be stored into mere County Courthouses, where birth and death records are maintained in perpetuity for legal reasons and the occasional amateur genealogist?

If you wanted to build your field, or tout and expand your particular specialty, why not just tell the people most likely to adopt your innovations? This thing here, it smacks of spam; it says you cannot be bothered to identify colleagues, and instead must rely on random suckers. By telling this to five interested, salient people, I bet you could spread the word in a way that would ensure its dominance.

Or have you not bothered to learn the other influential and receptive people in your own field? Think on that a moment.

If you wanted all along to do something else you’re not telling me… hey, I’m willing to believe and support that. Your paper was a ticket, in that case, or an advertisement. And that modality has a long and thriving publishing history in the sciences and in engineering fields around the world.

This paper then is a piece of instant ephemera, isn’t it? After you’ve traveled, gotten your next job, patented that cool new widget: this is the ticket stub in the public scrapbook, the snapshot they make of you and your one-time boyfriend at the top of the log flume in the amusement park, and offer to sell you at the exit.

Could you maybe stamp that at the top? “I had to write this down so they would give me $175 so I could afford on my wages to travel to some far off place and broaden myself, and maybe have some fun, by meeting others just like me.” “I had to prove to some dude that I could ape his sensibilities.” “I had to get the fifth entry on this scavenger hunt of a resumé.”

Those might be good things to place in the paper itself, maybe between the abstract and the useless keyword list, for the casual reader’s benefit.

Or did you write this with delight? Delight in your work, in your progress, in your field and its implications?

Did you write it to tell me, not in these fucking granite stone steps of words, worn dangerously round by years of passive use by monks through the ages, but in poetry? In your choice of haiku, psalm, pentameter?

So where are you, in this?

Did you write it to efface yourself? To blend in against the throngs of nearly identical agents of abstraction?

Mm hmm. I think you maybe did.

Yeah. That worked.

Otherwise, do this: Sit down now, having written this thing, this scrap, this bone that implies no dinosaur but rather a common cow, and start again. Make me laugh. Make the goddamned hairs stand up on my arms. These are words, which do not exist in a cultural vacuum but instead reach across the ages in links to Plato and Byron and David Foster Wallace, to Tolkien and Darwin and Jesus Christ. To novelists, poets, essayists, preachers, and all manner of communicators of delight.

Where are you, in these words? No, wait—I don’t really care. Where is the delight in these words? Make me see that, and you may follow.

You are not allowed to keep delight to yourself. Moron. This, above all the other things, is the thing the Academy has lied you into misunderstanding, with its delayed gratifications and postponements of your life: Delight, kept secret, always fades to nothing.

You are being trained to disappear.

But I think maybe you, this reader, because you have made it this far, you still have a gleam of curiosity in you, some spark of delight left burning and warming you.

Say it. Invoke the muse we still possess, out here in the world. Say it in too many words (though carefully chosen), be too long (there are no page limits), be wordy, be florid, and above all be engaging.

More people will read your work, given some flavor or some spice or some interest and even one goddamned joke—perhaps even a scrap of that body-filling awe that drew you to this work yourself—than will ever sit squirming in the chair at the conference, or dive deeper than your published abstract.

Otherwise, you and your delight are lost. Look at the marriage and death records in the County Courthouse, and tell me where you see the love, the grief, the joy and pain in them.

Your paper is headed to the courthouse of your scant society even now. I will not see it again.

Make us another one. Build yourself one in which you can live.

This convention of unreadable, distant, self-effacing, four-page, two-column, Times Roman fact is not a bow to “reality”, you know. Reality doesn’t give a damn what you say about it, or how many words or pages you use.

It is, rather, the very mechanism by which your career makes you its prey. The sound of droning-but-succinct academic “prose” is the sound of your soul’s bones being chewed by your Institution.

Those other words, the long-form prose, the writing skills you should have learned in your “breadth” training, when instead somebody made you start focusing on your specialty: those are the only sword you are afforded, with which you might, possibly cut your way free.

Otherwise: you’re institution-poop for sure, child.

Sing, or fade. Sing, or die.

Write better.

Now.

We will take your holiday under consideration and contact you if an opening arises

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I was handing out Laura Fisher’s “Better Without Bosses” stickers yesterday when somebody pointed out that it was Boss’s Day sometime soon.

That would be today.

I don’t have a boss. Most of the people I work with don’t have bosses. We don’t even feel the need to say we’re “our own bosses” without being ironic.

It is not your boss’s fault she is your boss. The role is not the person. I’m tempted to appropriate this thing from the useless Chamber of Commerce and make today the day we relieve bosses of their onerous and burdensome task of projecting an unwarranted air of authority.

They are still, after all, chained to that rock.

Grasping at golden straws

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Yesterday Barbara and I attended a panel discussion at the Kerrytown BookFest called “The Future of Print Journalism”. I’ll leave the details to others; what I found of particular interest was the thrust of the discussion among the panelists, who were all editors of one sort or another who’ve survived in transition from being old-fashioned newspaperfolk.

On the face of it, the narrative was about the future of print journalism in a world where the business model has been undermined by free online content. There was talk of aggregation by Yahoo! (and Google, though nobody mentioned them by name once) and how it undermines the authority of newspapers. There was a stern comment from the audience about how bloggers stealing content from papers without citing it should be sued. There was a lot of realistic-sounding exploration of paywall protection of content and the apparent failure of newspapers to fathom micropayment approaches. A lot of discussion of “free models”, and what came across as antagonism from the folks still at the big plop-on-your-steps papers at the notion of free content.

I started being bemused half-way through, though. Because four of the five panelists explicitly described the economics of their business, talked about it worriedly, and then wandered away again into how crucial good writing is, and how expensive professional journalism can be, and all the other stuff that justifies their special credentialled sociopolitical role in whichever Estate they used to be.

I’m sure the fifth panelist would have acknowledged the business facts in an instant… if it only been brought up explicitly: Modern newspapers don’t sell journalism. They sell advertising. During the 20th Century, newspaper revenue has come primarily from advertisers.

And from about 1900 to about a decade ago, newspapers sold print advertising at monopolistic prices. They were essentially a cartel. Ads in books never took off; ads in magazines reached only widely-distributed subscriber demographics. Only the local newspaper reached the walk-in traffic that retailers sought; coupons really don’t work well in telephone campaigns; TV is ephemeral, leaves no record.

Yet nobody says of the Internet, “Those unqualified online advertisers are undermining our professionally-trained crack advertising team,” or “Do you realize what it costs to pick an ad to run next to an article on a foreign war?” or “Photographs of ham can’t just be downloaded from some website you know; you need professionals on staff 24-7 to get the quality our customers deserve.”

No, the discussion was about “the economy being bad” and “readers out there expect content to be free” and bloggers and customer bases and the threats and uses of aggregation.

I’m sure if there had been time to drive the conversation my way, somebody would have jumped in and said, “Yes, of course we know print advertising pays the bills, but nobody would buy the advertising and get the bills paid if it weren’t for the high-quality reporting we generate using all that revenue.”

But: Maybe people are still buying advertising. Just not from you.

Here. We’re friends. I’m just as predictable as anybody else: I’m going to talk about history now.

Pick up an actual print newspaper from 1820, from 1840, from 1860, from 1880, from 1900, from 1920, from 1940, from 1960. From 1980. Count the ads. Think carefully and look at the books (if you have access to them) and estimate the proportion of the income of each newspaper that came from advertising revenue. Yes, I know in the early days they were small, local affairs with maybe a thousand subscribers each.

But they got their bills paid. What proportion of those bills were paid by monies coming from the sale of print ads?

I’ll bet you a Get Out of Disintermediation Free Pass right now that the earlier papers had almost no advertising (including the money from articles somebody was paid off to print), that the proportion bloomed into a majority in the days of Hearst and Pulitzer and the Great Syndicators, that it became a cash crop paying 80% or more of the bills in the latter-day cull that killed all second papers in cities.

Print advertising was a monopoly. Still is, one supposes.

You can’t buy ubiquitous home-delivered print advertising anywhere else. Sure, you can pay sub-minimum wage people to wander neighborhoods and rubber-band flyers to front doors, or wait a few days and send out coupons in the Clipper thingie.

And yet. And yet. Everybody knows (and for once I mean it unironically) we all love the visceral quality of print, the solidity, the ability to page back and check, the clipping, the passing it around, the crosswords, the comics. The biggest fuss when a newspaper shuts down comes not from the advertisers (who are already gone by then), but from the subscribers. The people with the blue paperboxes lining the country roads. The ones willing to trudge out to the roadside in winter, before breakfast, and take in the paper and sit and read it in their homes.

Physical paper. People love print. People live print. If they get sad enough at the diminishment of print journalism, do you think they will let it die?

Don’t be a fool. They’ll pay somebody good money to pass it out to them.

Are people buying ads? Shut your stupid marketing department’s yammering up and look. People don’t want ads, they want printed information. Even the people who clip coupons would be just as happy to pay you if you just listed the prices of every item at every store in town. They don’t want the coupon, they want the information about pricing.

And so what’s the future of print journalism?

In many cities in this country, the one newspaper is facing financial crisis. In smaller towns and wannabe cities (like ours), “the one newspaper” is dying. Yes of course in all those places there is probably also a superlocal paper about high school lunches and church meetings, and an edgy counterculture free monthly, and a free coupon collector, and a free real estate listing in the supermarket foyer….

Like I said, The One Newspaper is dying.

You might think this is what it will be like: Like 1882. Or 1860 or 1900 or 1930, even. The Empire of news is dying, not news itself. Not journalism itself.

The advertising monopoly is dying. The ecological niche occupied by The One Paper is a goner, not papers themselves. Specifically, the One Paper’s national-scale ad revenues are a goner.

Printed newspapers will have to start relying, again, on the revenue streams they enjoyed in the 19th century.

And because it’s how I always do it, let me jink suddenly from historical analogy over into biological metaphor:

Big animals get big not because they are specialists in what they eat, but to take advantage of economies of scale in their eating. The biggest cats are obligate hunter-carnivores just like some shrews, but have very special characteristics of gigantism and complex lifestyles to keep from wandering around all day burning calories hunting. Big whales eat very special meals (giant squid, krill), like many other marine species do, but are huge so they can avoid flashing around in big schools all over the place. Big dinosaurs probably got big so they could reach or manhandle their very special meals, but littler species could as easily have climbed trees or ganged up. And marsupial lions and wolves? Giant carnivorous birds, or moas? Giant sloths and mammoths? Specialists, but big because of economies of scale in their diets.

In the big picture—in the course of evolutionary history—megafauna come and go. As a type, following a particular specialized strategy that depends on being gigantic, they’re often driven to extremes by the presence of a small fruitful slice of resources in their environment. Unlike their smaller cousins, they go out on a limb and optimize their energy use and lifestyles so they can spend as little as possible to get as much food as possible as easily as possible.

But eventually the limb is gone.

And there you are, you big pile of yummy meat. Surrounded by other kinds of specialists, who didn’t invest in becoming huge.

The future of print journalism is a feast, not a famine. The One City Newspaper, the national newspaper, the Inherited Newspaper Empire: that is the main course.

A decade ago I would have predicted we’d see the industry roll back all that expensive infrastructure the One City Newspapers have developed, in setting themselves up as megafaunal ad-eaters, and we’d end up back in a situation about like 1880. A dozen papers, each with a slice of the subscriber pie, with a little advertising revenue each to keep them afloat.

Now I’m older and not so sure. Now I see a lovely chaos, a bloom of strategies, a roil of useful collaboration and competition.

What I wonder though, is what was never asked yesterday: who will be the first to fire the marketing department and keep the writers and editors?

That’s the next wave. That’s the immediate future of print journalism.