“How is a person made?”¹⁶¹ Specifically, how is a person made as a function of “the biggest machine in the world,” the diachronic capitalist machine or what we have been calling the extended commercial enterprise?¹⁶² We take it for granted that such a machine is capable of making people rich or poor, happy or sad, well-adjusted or mad, powerful or mutilated; more importantly and urgently, it must be shown how the workings of its parts and gears actually make a people: “Our society produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the only difference being that…

By carefully mapping the field of commercial practice, we are not only able to affirm the legitimacy of K’s apprenticeship, but more importantly we put ourselves in a position to ascertain the “functions of the soul, and its status in the world of flux.” More specifically, by tracing and aligning the two movements that define the field, we put ourselves in a position to follow the soul of business “in its journey toward the source of all harmony,” a journey that amounts to a “program for discontent” centuries in the making, a “noble discontent” and “critical discount” the ultimate value…

Uncle John set forth a number of “action steps” in his first letter to K, one of which was to “specifically identify the learning process and what it entails, plus the time space necessary.” He did this in a second letter after he and his wife, Ginny, had made a trip to Berkeley to meet with K and Ally to further explore the possibility of K leaving school to join the dealership.

April 10, 1997

Dear K,

We have had two weeks to review our situation and what direction we need to take for you and Ally and I-10 International…

Our construction of the notion of whole person attempts to do justice to the multiple relations through which persons define themselves in commercial practice by effectively combining society’s working relations with the learning curriculum that is demonstrably present in those very relations. The K-function is precisely the combination of the two, laying out a plane in which economic organization is inseparable from a profound form of human development (or arrested development) that is operative and consequent, yet until now has managed to evade detection and therefore remains largely taken for granted (see Figure 1.28).

As the ethnographer of copresence and…

What sort of evidence can we bring to bear on such a problem? It is precisely at this point that the study of learning asserts not only its theoretical importance, but even its necessity as it may be impossible to recognize the co-variation and symmetry that define the logic of commercial practice without assuming the perspective of a partial participant whose vector or trajectory of participation effectively leads from one limit of the field to the other. Indeed, it is essential that we “bring ‘degrees of development or perfection’ into the picture.”¹¹⁶ By following and recording the essential moments of…

The “way in which manual labor is applied to production can range in different societies from the coercion of machine guns, bullets and trucks to the mass ideological conviction of the voluntary industrial army. Our own liberal democratic society is somewhere in between.”¹⁰⁷ The sociologist takes the same basic observation and restates it in terms of “the experience of labor” in general: “The experience of labor lies between two extremes, forced labor, which is determined only by external constraint, and scholastic labor, the limiting case which is the quasi-ludic activity of the artist-writer. The further someone moves from the former…

The field of participation is the “plane of organization and development” and is necessarily determined by a certain “transcendence” that distinguishes it from “the plane of immanence or consistency”.⁸⁹ From a cognitive ethnographic perspective, the former appears as a series of overlapping communities of practice and corresponding control mechanisms and the latter as a “universal encyclopedia”⁹⁰ or the “immense thy of a pig”.⁹¹ From an ethological perspective, the former appears as a loosely connected set of “Umwelt” held by a variety of animals, unequal representatives of labor power and agents of capital (“society of human beings”) and the latter as…

To make your own “Constituent Success Platform on the Internet Computer” cocktail, gather together the four basic ingredients:

• Open source customer relationship management (CRM) software (e.g., CiviCRM)
• Robust models of participation (e.g. IAP2’s Public Participation Spectrum)
• Time-tested leadership-development concepts (e.g., Leadership Management Institute’s Concept)
• The Internet Computer (Dfinity)

Combine, shake or stir (or, better yet, both), and serve with your favorite DApps. Enjoy!