make it a double.

….

and keep it coming.

A number of commenters, whether here or on their own blogs, refer to some established a posteriori bases for dismissing the subject propositions, whether in part or out of hand. Such bases run the gamut from flaws in communist dogma to the futility of scoring Walmart on ethics. Taken together, though, they are almost entirely focused on unrealistic human ideals vs the ‘soulless’ and inevitable dominance of financial entities. This simply reinforces, to me, the fact that morality is a human construct (whether you choose to see it as innate or imposed) whereas money is amoral.

I’ve yet, in the spread of theoretical 2.0 conversation, to see much detailed focus on participants in these new social web applications. This surprises me, since one of the healthiest non-commercial entities so far is blogging, which is also where much of the online conversation is taking place. The open source vs proprietary tools issue is also a determining factor in whether a rennaissance of broad individual opportunity becomes a reality, and is discussed in the 2.0 context as infrequently as blogging.

As long as all the focus is on ideologies vs capitalist forces, on free vs profitable, there is no real attention being paid to morality, nor much to creative development of real alternatives.

I don’t believe that the most important factor in analyzing sharing sites has anything to do with sharing. The sharing ability/software itself is just another tool, and its configuration is to date determined by the agendas of a very few. Free sharing could turn out to be a diabolically Sun Tzu’ian campaign spreading its tentacles. The founders of sharing sites, those who espouse the open information ethic, may be either ‘useful idiots’ (as per Lenin) or Machiavellian strategists aiming from the very beginning to cash in on eyballs for billions of dollars. In either scenario, the users are pawns.

The essential factor in analyzing sharing is determining value, how it is captured, and by whom.

Real sharing (or free content) presently has mostly transitory value to the individual. Community and group development of higher quality content could evolve that toward sustainable individual benefit. As things now stand though, it is in the direct interests of the big media players to deliberately promote volume vs quality of content, since they are the only players currently realizing substantial value, and their application of this value, so far, recognizes only a consumable and disposable human product. Should participation/production start to fall, they’ll simply shift their investment dollars in whatever direction the consumers’ attention shifts.

The ability for the individual, via integrated communities, to capture and realize sustainable value is what I keep referring to as the third option. The concept of healthy and viable communities necessarily includes commerce as well as sharing and altruism. There also have to be some walls in human relationships, just as ethical behavior requires value systems and rules. No walls is a bit like free anonymous sex. Sounds great in theory but has real limits and consequences. In the same vein, anyone cruising and participating in everything free online learns to exercise caution.

I’d very much like to read a post mapping sustainable and increasing value “user to user” via application of Web 2.0. The idea that content improves with growth and use raises more questions than answers for me (as separate from the concept of artificial intelligence). Wouldn’t an ‘organic’ behavior platform for humans be, by definition, multi-dimensional as well as interactive?

Vera

Of the people on these comments pages that I know by reputation or have met personally, all have practical real world experience of business. You may not agree with what they are saying, but I can assure you that they are not saying it from a position of ignorance.

What would be interesting would be to know why from your experience you believe that what they are (I am?) saying is wrong. Holders of different viewpoints can learn a lot from each other through debate. Even if they still don’t agree. 😉

http://www.khichdee.com/category.asp?catid=11&paraid=0

Vera: Those who have the most power over the direction and development of the wired world and its structures, I believe, do have a third choice beyond what has existed before.

Yes and ‘those who have the most power’ is a changing demographic too. Hopefully as you say broadening so that
there is more of a connect through the different factors or ethics which create healthy and innovative communities.
I don’t know how this will play out but I do understand that both capitalism and communism have been practised as brokered systems in the past. The medium of interactive dialogue on this scale is a tool we have not explored fully yet but people are seeing FOSS and projects like wikipedia as indications that we can organise differently.

Prof and most others,

Was there a blue light special on Golden Shovels this week? So much said here which shows a complete lack of real world experience in business. Its a crying shame.

Economics *should* be unseperable from ethics and I agree with your point, Janet, on the volume of the strident capitalist voice. My own life experience is that a great majority of people haven’t any overview of such unifying concepts, except as they may be presented and preached by a political or religious authority they follow. Communist oriented dogma of such authorities is, to me, more dangerous to the unquestioning follower than capitalist, if only because it tends to result in more power in fewer hands.

Here I go again splitting definitions …money can represent and wield power but power does not originate specifically from the possession of money. The tenet that communist ideology is about individual sharing of power has not translated effectively into practice, whereas such power distribution is still hypothetically possible in a free market economy/society. In practice, of course, power has naturally accrued to a small authoritarian group in the latter. In either, an individual’s only possibility of sharing in the power structure has been to become a star pupil, a disciple if you will, of those who ‘reign’.

I’ve had an odd and unusual life, in that I’ve spent roughly equal time observing and assimilating a wide range of points of view. That range includes both different cultures and widely differing levels of education and life experience. I feel at home (yet usually a stranger) in most sound segments of this online cacophony. From this derives my belief in beginning from the admittedly fractured viewpoints and understanding of a ‘middle’ citizen (neither the priveleged elite nor the totally disenfranchised) as the best starting point for community effort toward real, rather than idealistic, individual empowerment for many. We achieve personal power through accumulating knowledge and understanding, regardless of the political and economic landscapes (and value systems) we inhabit. Those who have the most power over the direction and development of the wired world and its structures, I believe, do have a third choice beyond what has existed before.

The polarized options of serving the barons of industry vs the masses (ie. fake vs real sharing) are, in my view, not opposites at all but completely unequal. For one thing, the former have a sophisticated and informed world view, even if frequently skewed.

If I define the ‘middle’ citizen as the majority of us (reasonably self sufficient and typically with some education and life experience), then I venture that their personal viewpoints tend to be quite pragmatic on the concept of value vs cost and reward vs investment. They’re also increasingly blurry on personal responsibility (integral to the topic, but I’ve too many words here already).

I’m not conviced that improving the value of spaces and their content can be fully effected solely by an elite few, whether for money, power, or altruism. The goal, for me, is to develop and participate in a multitude of new virtual ecosystems that offer specialization and therefore advancement to an endless number of core communities and that both naturally overlap and are deliberately linked. One way in which I picture this is as a color chart with thousands of identified hues.

Reality ethic vs capital ethic sounds very much pointed in the same direction to me. I still believe that getting there, though, involves a journey toward understanding, and that to fully comprehend the whole one must also identify the parts. One of the steps, I think, in that process is to disentangle the concept of money from the concept of personal identity, in order to see where the entanglements create barriers instead of links. Taking things apart can be an effective way of learning how they are connected, as well as a way of discovering why something is ‘broken’ and how to fix it. Major advances in human knowledge rarely come about from piling more new and refined thought on top of an accumulated mountain. Communal contribution to adding links to a basically sound chain, though, can be a swift and effective path forward. I think this can be applied equally to the most complicated realms of science and to more mundane arenas of daily life. We can also do unintended harm by not ensuring the soundness of the chain first, by not identifying ‘fatal errors’ in the foundation.

Vera

I agree with this. And such “rights” actually become disincentives to creativity. Look at the death of sampling or compare the Beatles to a DRM-encumbered Natahsa Beningfield CD that installs a rootkit on your computer.

An ethic of freedom has economic benefits. Ask Soros. Ask Google. But we should not confuse “rights” with “incentives” the way the media lobby does. Incentivization is an impoverished way of looking at the world, a gross over-simplification of society.

If it is OK for YouTube to make money from Fair Use, why is it wrong for me to wish to use and to allow this freedom myself?

Reputation, gifts, economic benefit, these are downstream products of freedom. Of ethics. To treat these products as novel phenomena requiring other ideological causes is, to use a word I didn’t know as an art student, reification.

shazam. Janet Hawtin you’ve redeemed yourself!

the subject is motivation: what gets people up out of bed in the morning to go to work and produce something useful.

for some the motivation is financial; this is economics. for others the motivation is moral; this is ethics. communism is an ethical incentive, capitalism is an economic one. communal-ism might seen as a hybrid of the two.

roughly speaking.

“the web” provides a platform for economic and ethical incentives and an amalgamation of both: shaken, not stirred.

one is not better than the others, or more efficient in producing value (although economic incentives have a pretty impressive track record.) the goal of society is to maximize the result using all the available incentives. in our view, anything short of peaceful and cooperative co-existence is sub-optimal.

couching the subject of incentives using only the language of economics, ethics, or communal-ism, is where we all stumble and fall.