<p>The last paragraph of this little thought capsule takes a positive view of the experience economy, as a bridge for a necessary transition from a subjectivity based on 'having' to one based on 'being'.</p>
<br><p>The Experience Economy as a bridge between scarcity and abundance:<br></p><p><br></p><p>We live in a political economy that has it exactly backwards.</p>
<p>We believe that our natural world is infinite, and therefore that we
can have an economic system based on infinite growth. But since the
material world is finite, it is based on pseudo-abundance.</p>
<p>And then we believe that we should introduce artificial scarcities
in the world of immaterial production, impeding the free flow of
culture and social innovation, which is based on free cooperation, by
creating the obstacle of permissions and intellectual property rents
protected by the state.</p>
<p>What we need instead is a political economy based on a true notion
of scarcity in the material realm, and a realization of abundance in
the immaterial realm. Complex innovation needs creative and autonomous
workers that are not impeded in their ability to share and learn from
each other.</p>
<p>In the world of immaterial production, of software, text and design,
the costs of reproduction are marginal and therefore we see emerging in
it non-reciprocal peer production, where people voluntary engage in the
direct creation of use value, profiting from the resulting commons in a
general way, but without specific reciprocity.</p>
<p>In the world of material production, where we have scarcity, and
costs have to be recouped, such non-reciprocity is not possible, and
therefore we need modes of neutral exchange such as the markets, or
other modes of reciprocity.</p>
<p>In the sphere of immaterial production, humanity is learning the
laws of abundance, because non-rival goods win in value through
sharing. In this world, we are evolving towards non-proprietary
licences, participatory modes of production, and commons-oriented
property forms. Positive forms of affinity based retribalization are
emerging.</p>
<p>But in the world of scarce material goods, a series of scarcity
crises are brewing, global warming being just one of them, that is
creating the emergence of negative forms of competitive tribalizaition.</p>
<p>The logic of abundance has the potential of leading us to a
reorganization of our world to a level of higher complexity, moved
principally by the peer to peer logic.</p>
<p>The logic of scarcity has the potential of leading us to generalized
wars for resources, to a descent to a lower form of complexity, a new
dark age as was the case after the disintegration of the Roman Empire.</p>
<p>So the challenge is to use the emergent logic of abundance, and inject it into the world of scarcity.</p>
<p>Is that a realistic possibility?</p>
<p>In the immaterial world of abundance, sharing is non-problematic,
and the further emergence and expansion of non-reciprocal modes of
production will be very likely. "Together we know everything", is a
rather achievable ideal.</p>
<p>In the material world of scarcity, abundance is translated into
three key concepts that can change human consciousness and therefore
economic practices. The notion of 'together we have everything' seems
not quite achievable, we therefore need transitional concepts.</p>
<p>The first concept is the distribution of everything. This means that
instead of abundance, we have a slicing up of physical resources and
the physical means of production, so that individuals can freely engage
and act. This means an economy that moves towards a vision of
peer-informed market modes such as fair trade (a market mechanism
subjected to peer arbitrage of producers and consumers seen as
partners), social entrepreneurship (using profit for conscious social
progress). Objective tendencies towards miniaturization of the physical
means of production makes this a distinct possibility: desktop
manufacturing enables individual designers; rapid manufacturing and
tooling are diminishing the advantages of scale of industrial
production, and so do personal fabricators. Social lending creates a
distribution of financial capital; and the direct social production of
money through software is not far away from being realized in various
parts of the world (see the work of Bernard Lietaer); If indeed
scarcity will create more expensive energy and raw material, a
re-localisation of production is likely, and peer-informed modes of
production will be enabled to a much greater extent.</p>
<p>The second concept is sustainability. Since an infinite growth
system cannot last indefinitely, we need to move to new market concepts
as described by the throught schools of natural capitalism (David
Korten, Paul Hawken, Hazel Henderson), capitalism 3.0 (Peter Barnes'
proposal to use trust as property forms because they impose the
preservation of capital), cradle to cradle design and production
processes so that no waste is generated. We need to move to a
steady-state economy (Herman Daly), which is not necessarily static,
but where greater output from nature, is dependent on our ability to
regenerate the same resources.<br>
The third concept is that of sufficiency. Abundance has not just an
objective side, it has a subjective side as well. In the material
economy, infinite growth needs to be replaced by sufficiency, a
realization that status and human happiness can no longer be dependent
on infinite material accumulation and overconsumption, but will become
dependent on immaterial accumulation and growth. Having enough so that
we can pursue meaning and status through our identity as creative and
collaborative individuals, recognized in our various peer communities.</p>
<p>And this is where the experience economy comes in! It is the agent
of that shift, from a need to have, towards the higher needs to be and
to experience. Only a rich experience economy can avoid a culture of
frustration and sacrifice, and the repressions and unhappiness that
such could entail. This experience economy however, will not just be
created by commercial franchises, but there will also be the direct
social production of cultural value. Businesses and peer communities,
enabled and empowered by a partner state, will have to create a rich
tapestry of immaterial value, and the thicker the surrounding
immaterial value, the lighter our attachment to mere having will be.</p><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/16/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Paul B. Hartzog</b> <<a href="mailto:paulbhartzog@gmail.com">paulbhartzog@gmail.com
</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">On 8/13/07, Vasilis Kostakis <<a href="mailto:kostakis.b@gmail.com">
kostakis.b@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>><br>> To begin with, Paul claims ,amongst others, that "the authentic life is<br>> always a subversion, a resistance, a revolution, against some attempt by<br>> someone else to bind it, to bound it, to define it, to constrain it…"
<br>> whereas afterwards he states that "to live authentically means to create in<br>> each moment something that cannot be taken and used for other purposes<br>> because it is necessarily invisible to those who would attempt such a
<br>> theft". To be honest I cannot follow this syllogism as I find it a bit of<br>> oxymoron. More specifically, supposing that authentic life is a revolution<br>> against some attempt to bind it, we simultaneously accept that authentic is
<br>> visible to its opponents or in other words to its exploiters.<br><br>Thanks for pointing out my little cul-de-sac :-) I was thinking that<br>the word "attempt" helped to clarify, but on review it seems it didn't
<br>help much. Off the top of my head, a weak example might aid:<br><br>Imagine a narrative in which "they" have designs to steal your book of<br>Aristotle, because they perceive that it is the source of your power
<br>to resist their Machiavellian schemes. What is "invisible" to them is<br>that it is your experience of the substance of Aristotle and not the<br>possession of the commodity Aristotle that is the source of your inner
<br>strength.<br><br><br>> Furthermore, Paul's final conclusion, which I find brilliant, is that "the<br>> really interesting and revolutionary things going on in the world are<br>> invisible to those who would oppose them". Therefore, I believe that the
<br>> really revolutionary things are visible to their opponents, who, however,<br>> fail to spot and feel the real essence of them - resembling humans despite<br>> that they can see the flower and even smell it, they are incapable of taking
<br>> real advantage of it: humans can only cut (by "killing") it, while bees<br>> succeed in channelling bliss from it. In that case both bees and humans can<br>> see the flower (it is not invisible) , but, to put it in Paul's terms, the
<br>> true substance of the experience -the authentic- belongs entirely to bees,<br>> and the superficial one to humans.<br><br>Thank you. Much of the work I have been involved with (futurist work)<br>has been for corporate clients. I have had deep discussions with my
<br>colleagues as to the possibility that we are fore-warning our enemies<br>by teaching them about the economic importance of open-source, or<br>cooperation, etc. These are troubling possibilities.<br><br>What is fascinating however is that by and large they truly seem to be
<br>incapable of "seeing" the essence of recent changes in production.<br>The music industry literally cannot understand the reality of digital<br>sharing; they (so far) only see it as epiphenomenal to their<br>
established (industrial era) economic processes. It is an<br>aberration, a parasite; it could not stand on its own (they say).<br><br>I will be giving a talk in November at De Montfort about<br>Oort-Cloud.org (an endeavor by myself and Richard Adler) and "Social
<br>Publishing" in general ( <a href="http://www.oort-cloud.org/?q=node/2">http://www.oort-cloud.org/?q=node/2</a> or<br><a href="http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/02/social_publishing.php">http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/02/social_publishing.php
</a> ).<br>The notion of social publishing receives the same treatment from<br>traditional publishing that music file sharing received from the music<br>industry: almost complete blindness. It is the same treatment that
<br>wikipedia receives from traditional encyclopedists (knowledge<br>elitists).<br><br>I have yet to find a good metaphor for this, so I am asking for all of<br>your help. A good example from history, of a new process that was
<br>ignored and/or downplayed by the establishment ("It'll blow over" or<br>"It's a fad") would suffice.<br><br>much thx,<br>-Paul<br>--------------------------------------------------------<br>
<a href="http://www.PaulBHartzog.org">http://www.PaulBHartzog.org</a><br><a href="http://www.panarchy.com">http://www.panarchy.com</a><br><a href="mailto:PaulBHartzog@PaulBHartzog.org">PaulBHartzog@PaulBHartzog.org</a><br>
<a href="mailto:PaulBHartzog@panarchy.com">PaulBHartzog@panarchy.com</a><br><a href="mailto:PHartzog@umich.edu">PHartzog@umich.edu</a><br>--------------------------------------------------------<br>The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
<br> --Muriel Rukeyser<br><br>See differently, then you will act differently.<br> --Paul B. Hartzog<br><br>--------------------------------------------------------<br>_______________________________________________
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