Community Wealth Building: The Bodies Corporeal Vs The Body Corporate
Co-Creation Vs. Peer Production: Digital Co-Creation and the Ghost Of Disraeli In The Algorithm. #culturebanking
I’m reading this article: ‘Britain ignores social mobility at its peril’ which leads me to this article; ‘Labour borrows one nation idea from Benjamin Disraeli’ by a Google search of Disraeli’s words: “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy”.
What happens next is that from the second Independent article, I follow the algorithmically generated Fujitsu Ad about ‘Digital Co-Creation’. I’m rarely a follower of ads but it proves instructive to see what the digital world makes of you at times. On this occasion my following leads to the ‘Fujitsu Service and Technology Vision Manual’ which, as described, is all about ‘co-creation’. As am I — or so I thought… So far the algorithms are doing their magic well….
As I read on in the 60 page portfolio and visioning document, I realise it really isn’t speaking to me at all. So who’s responsible for the mis direct? The language is a language I can understand — but only because I’m good at language. The inaccessibility is hard to identify at first, until I realise what the problem is. This is ‘B2B’ literature. It uses much of the language that softies like me who operate in the belief that people power still exists and that language can be used to express common values and initiate changes and social movements etc; language like ‘co-creation’, ‘collaboration’, ‘asset development’, ‘sharing economy’ etc. The kind of phrases I’ve got used to searching over the internet in the hope that they will lead to greater wisdom — and I still hope they do. But, what has actually led me to understand what these expressions mean is following the algorithms. Fujitsu talk, at length, about manipulating, sorry, co-creating with ‘big data’ — as they move from manufacturing to service provision for, as they see it, a growing new wave of ‘smart manufacturers’. This, I think, is where the initial phrase: ‘Co-Creation’ comes in…
Essentially, amid all the business speak, what Fujitsu are offering via ‘co-creation’ is to ‘increase (my) efficiency and minimise (my) risk’ by putting (my) property behind their paywall of, essentially, data, communication and information management. Surely that’s what I want? — I’m a business leader after all.
Well, I do own a business. I am interested in collaboration and co-creation. But I really can’t see, yet, how Fujitsu can help ‘me’.
So what?
Well, what I’m interested in is the development of cultures which help people to work with other people, grow what they do and thus improve their lot. Kind of basic and a bit old fashioned, but actually, precisely the kind of Social Mobility Disraeli was talking about and the lack of which almost definitely enabled Brexit. So much for ‘hard working people who want to get on’!
Still, that basic interest is not addressed in all of the literature of Fujitsu and it’s very large scale operation. The reason why is deceptively simple: People, for Fujitsu, are either business leaders, employees or ‘data’. They have no agency purely as ‘people’. Not least because ‘people’ are innately risky; they need to be mitigated. People exist only in relation to Fujitsu’s corporate motivation towards market share and capital growth. It is literally impossible for Fujitsu to interact with you, me or anyone as people — other than as data — until we create our own corporate identity and intellectual property. That’s the crucial bit Disraeli couldn’t quite have envisioned.
Essentially, we must create a separate embodiment of ourselves to ‘exist’. Then and only then can we enter the — very seperate — B2B world of ‘co-creation’.
Thus ends Disreali’s unintended diatribe on Social Mobility in the future world he correctly imagined in ‘Sybil’, which now, through globalisation reaches beyond just a divided nation to:
“…two worlds between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy”.
How is Peer Production Different?
Peer Production, as espoused by Michel Bauwens, Dymitri Kleiner and others, is, as the name suggests, a method of production — or ‘creation’ — in which peers begin with an equality of access to a common stock. It favours the importance of labour over (intellectual) property by rewarding the value we add to the common stock from our own efforts. For example, songs can belong to everyone — but musicians can get paid for performing them. The critics suggest this did-incentivises creativity and originating thought, but actually, Peer Production Licenses have long been in existence for creators to attach to their work in order to get paid under a ‘copyleft’ style license such as Creative Commons etc. Where these licenses have failed is in actually collecting incomes for artists. The PRS and PPL work on a principle of copyright infringement and so use aggressive tactics to harangue, say, police forces for listening to the radio etc. Direct sharing and digital payment gateways for ‘creative content’ mean that infringement will be an obsolete concept in the future.
The next evolution in Peer Production licensing is to invent a common identifier under which new creative assets loaned into ‘our cultural commons’ can be traced and monetised to support their costs and intended beneficiaries. For example, the possibilities that new technology offers for the hypothecation of future incomes from ongoing cultural heritage assets to the costs of their preservation are phenomenal. Profits and civic roles can be co-related. Heritage can be created in a dispersed way, in the localities where the activity happens. Where collections of ‘stuff’ are drawn together physically, the distributed community of interests that surround that heritage can contribute to and take ownership of their cultural heritage.
Distributed manufacturing is going to make Intellectual Property far more centralised unless designers can access the IP system directly, without the need of large centralised capital industries behind them. This in turn, creates a drag on creativity rather than increasing it.
A retailer and manufacturer who wants to sell the latest ‘blades’ for paralympic sprinters will need to access the legacy payments necessary to reward the chain of creativity and work which has led to it. This is the cultural heritage of paralympic sport — and therefore this ‘civic role’ — of future development and heritage preservation can be hypothecated into the price of the blades and paid back to the commons in the form of direct taxation.
Neither the ongoing production of Paralympic assistive technology or the future costs of its cultural heritage need to be centralised. No one body ‘owns’ either of these functions. They are distributed across a network, or a community, of peers.
Large ‘corporate’ bodies like Fujitsu are an idea of the past. As are their limitations on individual ‘peer to peer’ liability and their extractive methods of asset management long even, after the assets, or value has ceased to be produced.
We are all quite able to act, to create, to produce and to trade on our own merits. When large sums of capital are needed, the Commons will provide, but we will not need to over produce to warrant share price rises and profits — as we will already have been paid well for the fruits of our work and those causes — research, heritage, civic roles etc, which do not always, of themselves produce future income will also have been satisfied. When they are not, our liabilities will be ours — not corporatised into thin air. Like wise, when responsibilities (rather than liabilities) are met we will be rewarded — not shareholders or over paid ‘executives’.
Disraeli’s ‘One Nation’ idea is actually an achievable reality…..
If peer production or co-creation are to prosper, we must first design common identifiers for their resulting assets and a means of sharing our intellectual ‘property’. This is why I have been promoting the single action of #culturebanking cultural production with a single hashtag. It’s a simple but quite effective start. the next stage is to attach peer production licenses which create common stock for sharing — and for wealth creation.
What we actually need are ‘Intellectual Commons’ and Intellectual Common Rights, which pay us for our contributions. Ironically, the IP system already has most of the rules in place to achieve this as Dymitri Kleiner expalined so articulately in his Telekommunist Manifesto. We just need to change a few key terms!
#culturebanking
#IntellectualCommons #CommonRights #CommunityAssetRightsManagement #platformcoops
#CommunityAssetRightsManagementAssociation #CARMA #cocreation #peerproduction #P2P #commonstransitions #cultureisdigital #CivicRoleArts #CommonIdentifier #COALA #commonstransitionUK #cultureisdigital #ParalympicHeritage #CulturalHeritage #PublicPolicy #CommunityWealthUnit #CommunityWealhBuilding
