Science Communes are a Fix for the Issues of Modern Research
Imaginative Proposals, Number Three
This is part of a series, but it isn’t necessary that you read Parts Zero, One, or Two to understand this part. The series is thematically linked, not sequentially linked.
As I explained in Part Zero, this is not something that I am going to feel tied to. It isn’t what I believe is the one solution to humanity’s ills. I’m not describing this to convince you of anything, let alone out of the hope that we will all go somewhere and enact it on the world. I’m explaining it to stimulate your imagination, to expand your mind about what is possible and desirable within the realms of political and economic institutions.
I have previously discussed the progressively-deepening flaws of the higher education systems of America and — increasingly — Europe:
In that essay, I pointed out that all institutions of higher education were becoming nothing more than companies that sold mere job-training — and that, due to various economic forces, this was an inevitable transition. Of some interest in the current crisis, I mentioned that a transition towards online education could only accelerate this.
At the end of that essay, I left you all with no particular solution — in fact, at the end, I instead clarified that the internet could not even provide greater freedom to replace the material supports that had been lost.
Today, I will give you a solution — or, at least, a partial one.
Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.
And, of course, that is exactly how what little research that is still conducted — both within academia and within the halls of corporate R&D — is performed.
What would the optimal form look like, though?
It seems like what you would want to do is to put a bunch of PhD-having researchers (perhaps segregated by field, perhaps shuffled together into some sort of interdisciplinary patchwork, perhaps somewhere between these two extremes) into one place — after all, the best way to make smart creative people act even smarter and more creative than they already are is to put them in close and regular proximity to other smart creative people, so that they can collaborate, bounce ideas off of each other, and generally inspire one another. This is, perhaps, the one thing that modern forms of research are doing right.
It also, very likely, does not much matter how you compensate the researchers, as long as you do so in a manner that is both fair and sufficient — most of the motivation of a researcher is intrinsic, and everyone that acquires a PhD has, at least in my mind, already spent a massive amount of time and resources signaling that they possess this intrinsic motivation.
What, then, would it look like to “give them the resources to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads”? The easiest way to answer this is to turn the question around, and ask how — under the current system — compensation for research actually occurs. The answer to this — assuming that the research is being done by a company dedicated to research and to nothing else — is through the revenues from patents.
As such, it seems best to assume that teams will be formed within the grouping of researchers, to assume that these teams will be run in a basically democratic manner, and to give each team member 1 portion of ownership in the next patent that the team produces, per month of work with the team — as it is very difficult to determine the value of each person’s contribution with any greater amount of accuracy.
Beyond the team’s shares of ownership in their own patent, though, it would be necessary for the organization that funded these researchers to be entitled to some share of the profits of (or even direct ownership in) the resulting patent — both for the purpose of funding other future researchers, and for the purpose of financially incentivizing researchers not on the team to share in their own research and to assist the team. The lack of this, according to Graeber, has been a serious problem:
In the natural sciences, to the tyranny of managerialism we can add the privatization of research results. As the British economist David Harvie has reminded us, “open source” research is not new. Scholarly research has always been open source, in the sense that scholars share materials and results. There is competition, certainly, but it is “convivial.” This is no longer true of scientists working in the corporate sector, where findings are jealously guarded, but the spread of the corporate ethos within the academy and research institutes themselves has caused even publicly funded scholars to treat their findings as personal property. Academic publishers ensure that findings that are published are increasingly difficult to access, further enclosing the intellectual commons. As a result, convivial, open-source competition turns into something much more like classic market competition.
The formation of an intellectual commons, clearly, requires that everyone who contributes to that commons stand to benefit from doing so.
Finally, what does it really mean to “leave them alone”, in Graeber’s words? It means that no one but researchers are really qualified to manage researchers. This seems like an obvious statement, but it is the insanity of modernity that we seem to possess the societal belief that bureaucrats and MBAs should be competent to tell the rest of us (possessed of specialized knowledge that bureaucrats and MBAs clearly are not) whether we are doing our jobs — or even living our lives — properly. As such, the only reason to have a firing mechanism is to ensure that no one loses their intrinsic motivation and starts leaching off of the organization, and that no one pursues avenues of research judged to be wasteful by all their peers.
As such, it seems like one of the easiest methods is to periodically have everyone secretly fill out the name of the person that they would like to see dismissed, with the option to fill out no name to dismiss no one, and then to draw out one of those names (or non-names) at random. If someone’s name is drawn, hold an organization-wide referendum as to whether or not they should be dismissed — to prevent random and unnecessary firings of good researchers.
And, finally, the contract between the researchers and the organization should specify that no patents produced within this will ever be sold, to prevent the suppression or monopolization of research. As I do not think that anyone involved wants their research to be spread less than they wish to be rich, this should be an agreement that is gladly entered into.
I call this organizational form the “science commune”.
A science commune would need start-up money, to fund the researchers before they had produced their first patents. This is the biggest hurdle to establishing such a thing — such an avenue of uncontrolled research would likely be a threat to anything that might fund it.
An enterprising government, company, or extremely rich individual might conceivably want to fund such a thing — but it seems as though they would also want to stipulate limits on the research being done.
It seems that the easiest thing to do would be to simply turn to the public for help, selling bonds on the open market or simply begging for donations online.
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