Reading this article in MyDD brought to mind an old notion that I’ve had that needs updating. I look back to some of the decade-old material I wrote for the Encapsulations newsletter, and realize that a lot of what we talked about then has come to pass in terms of build-out of infrastructure (large-scale adoption of computers, wide availability of relatively broadband service), the polity has not shifted into a mode that allows people to operate as agents in a design service economy – an economy based around taking advantage of the American capacity to generate nuance – new interpretation, new meanings, and then to generate the appropriate, just-in-time-delivered artifacts that pertain to perceived needs. The political powers-that-be are completely committed to a nation of weave slave-dom. They are dependent on the stream of payroll taxes paid by wage earners. But what if large swathes of the people operating in the economy suddenly constituted themselves as free agents? Imagine people constituting themselves as businesses, plugging their efforts into a matrix of income earning activities? What if the people really did own the means of production – that it was what’s between their ears, and that capacity to think is transformed into value by virtue of the capacity of the network?
The counter-argument to this runs to the common question “In an unlimited world, who kills the pig?”; that is to say, who does the grubby, non-intellectual, non-connected work in the society? My answer is: we all do. As I look into the future, there’s not doubt that the factory farming food production system put in place in this country will come increasingly untenable, given how dependent it is on petroleum. Others cover this better than I, but in a design service economy, people’s lives and livelihoods will be more varied, and there will need to be time to tend to food production and gathering at a local level, in a much more diversified and integrated way. (This topic calls for infinitely more research and development – the key points being that much of what is considered as work that people don’t want to do, when sufficiently demassified, becomes the work of the community. Again, much more needs to be worked out about this.
But imagine a world in which all people see themselves as full-enabled participants in the networked economy – free agents who recognize that their capacity to create some new, unique perception will give them the capacity to realize value as a result of their efforts. Each person contributing, each person connected.
I think the Democrat party needs to evolve toward a leadership model where the President is a super systems integrator. Somebody with the vision to address the needs of an emerging society where each person is not seen as a taxpayer, bound to the state by their payroll dedication, but as true free agents operating in new and novel ways to maximize the freedom value they experience personally which is, by definition, maximized by access to contributing to the whole of society. What is the necessary platform for integrating people in this way?
I can certainly say that very little of what exists as a platform is oriented toward this happening. The first impediment – seemingly intractable – is the very dependency of the US government on wage taxes. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the government and its various abetting agents and agencies have conformed the structure of the society to force people into relationships where the government automatically captures a substantial portion of the individual’s income. This system is patently inefficient; on the other side of the dependency is the political aristocracy that funnels these revenues into directions that it sees fit. This implies a large-scale disconnection between labor and its value. (Yes I’m self-conscious about using Marxist language, but the analytical integrity holds.) In a scenario where people are no longer locked into the wage tax model, and are free to constitute themselves as independent enterprisers, the addict’s supply is suddenly wrenched away. In this model, individuals collect all their income first, make decisions about its distribution, make investments in their own productive capacity, and then pay the government its due. In this case, people get to maximize their overall productive capacity of their network by investment in personal, family, and community resources. By so doing, they raise the overall income base. And, they demand an infrastructure that allows the nation to solidify and extend its competitive advantage in productive work. Further, in conjunction with the demassification of many of society’s “chore tasks”, each person will participate in a constant variety of productive efforts, which will add to their capacity to create nuance through the sheer multiplication of experiences.
What I present here is my own formulation of ideas that have been expounded on across the spectrum of thinkers and pundits. What’s been missing, as far as I’ve been able to discern, is a political tongue facile enough with these concepts to speak to people – to address the concerns that they actually do face, even if they have not overtly spoken about them. This is about real leadership for the future – and building a platform that brings cohesion to it all. Does it attack some of the most reliable Democratic allies – specifically unions? Well it would seem to, on the face of it. But the specific policy directions that building out such as vision implies actually present an opportunity for unions to achieve some of their long-sought-after agenda: universal health care access, educational equality, and the capacity to coordinate people’s lifelong expansion as productive agents.
The Design Service Economy is already here. Where people can plug into it and exchange their efforts by generating nuance, they are profiting. The political and economic infrastructure to support it are not yet in place, and there is little sign that anyone in a position of power has any more than a fleeting recognition of the fact that it is the prevailing model for competitive advantage in this country. The important recognition is that we need to enable all 295,000,000 people in this country to participate in it, and we need to do it quickly. Recognition is the first step.
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