Collaborative service communities, between proletarianization and emancipation
As the collaborative economy gains traction with services such as AirBnB, Uber, Blablacar & cie, discussions arise to eventually define who, from the entrepreneur or the community, owns the platform.
Rob Horning — Executive Editor of The New Inquiry — recently wrote about collaborative services that:
« (…) their effect is to more thoroughly atomize individuals, demanding that they regard themselves as a kind of small enterprise while reducing their social usefulness to the spare capacity they can mobilize for the platforms to broker. »
As a matter of fact, the scale that collaborative economy reached over a couple of years illustrates the tremendous pace it is growing. Pretty fast. And indeed, hurry may not help the individuals who join this joyful trend to anticipate how lonely they may end up running their so-called “house business”.
Rob Horning even states that the communities these collaborative services claim to build turn out to be only mediums for people to share their idle capacities or know-how. According to him, these platforms eventually become ‘anti-communitiy’ driven, where “empathy and conviviality are tactics and no succor may be extended without a price attached”.
But as we saw in the Groupe Chronos’ research about “communities in the making of collaborative services”, these so-called ‘communities’ are a bit tricky to be defined with unique situation or taken down to networks, associations, unions or any other collective organization forms.
The ‘not so new’ dream of distributed manufacturing.
No I won’t try to define the ‘community’ term myself, nor will I try to comment right away upon the condition of this new ‘homo contributivus’. However, I would rather question what looks like a new ‘industrial model’ to produce and deliver services or goods.
Even if a wide variety of models coexist, our idea of our current industrial model remains based on Ford’s system, that is to say a model combining Taylor scientific labour organization which allowed to reach efficient mass production and indexing the worker’s wage on the productivity gain which allowed to spread mass consumption. This mass production/consumption economy allowed to generate enough wealth on which to build up the Wellfare state we know of, leading Henry Ford to be called one of the ‘father’ of this Wellfare state.
This Ford’s system took advantage of a century of industrial revolution lead by steam engine. But even if we are able to label it from where we stand today, it didn’t occur over night : it took at teast from 1908 to 1929 to be deployed in US and until the 50's to widely reach Western Europe. And as I recently wrote, it still remains possible to witness tailored economic activities surviving next to a pure Taylorist approach, thus aknowledging that Ford’s system remains one out of many.
As the connected digital fabrication tools and knowledge are spreading worldwide, some say we are at the edge of a ‘new’ industrial revolution Jeremy Rifkin and many other commented upon. Recently, I listened to the ‘Open Experience’ talk in Paris about Open Manufacturing. While presenting the WikiHouse project, Justyna Swat stated that “machines are coming out of the factory to come back home”. It is a similar vision than Mutinerie developed, writing that the modern coworker, thanks to his computer and smartphone, now owns the tools he needs to work and is therfore free from the factory that used to centralized working tools, knowledge and capital out of the worker’s hands.
Even if this image of empowerment is only partially true, it definitely is a powerful image to help a change to happen. Already in ‘Le Travail’ published in 1901, Émile Zola developped a similar vision about how the brand new electric power would enable people to locally produce and use electricity, thus decentralize the steam or charcoal powered factories into smaller scale production units, owned and ruled by workers themselves. What a dream! As Martin Kupp from ESCP Europe shared at the Open Manufacturing talk, it seems that business typology goes in loop from a ‘household’ scale, to a ‘professional manufacturing’ scale and reach a ‘mass production’ scale, before moving toward a smaller scale again to fullfill the needs for customization or tailored goods.
Having written this, it appears that if there is such a thing as a ‘new’ industrial revolution going on, it is not only the production organization on its own that we need to focus on, but, as Ford did wisely envision, the combination of collective production efficiency & individual’s retribution for its share in the outcome.
The ‘Fordist compromise’.
In the years before Ford’s time, other collaborative models to run economical activities did emerge and were experimented. In 1844 for instance was created the first co-op in UK, the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pionners. Or in the second part of the XIX century, entrepreneurs like Jean-Baptiste Godin builded upon Charles Fourier’s experiment of the phalanstère and hygienist theories to experiment the Familistère. The Labor Day dates from 1886 ; at this period employed workers dared to gather in order claim some rights and reduce the working weekly hours. Interestingly, the first attempts to provided a state ‘social insurance’ happened under Otto von Bismarck, a couple of years before trade unions had any right to gather and organized themselves in Germany.
Around these years in Western Europe, the industrial revolution dragged million of farmers in front of machines. And as Franz Kafka would later explain, people coming from villages, who were used to bow in front of castle inhabitants, first kept on bowing in front of the factory owners. In front of this situation, Karl Marx and other intellectuals did theorize this ‘class society’ and elaborate visions of a more fair system. Émile Zola himself, while exalting labor as “necessary and noble”, did advocate for the “abolition of wage system” in order to enable people to set up their own manufactures.
“Je veux montrer toute cette vieille charpente sociale craquant sous la poussée démocratique, la question de la réorganisation du travail se posant comme la question-mère de la société future pour une juste distribution des richesses.”
Émile Zola
Modern society models were experimented here and there. In 1908, Henry Ford tried his own system by applying Taylor’s principles and started in Detroit the production line of the later famous Ford T. The conveyor belt was non-less famously inspired by slaugtherhouses assembly lines and it enabled the factory to gain in productivity. Later, still driven by his efficiency mindset, Henry Ford raised the workers’ wage to 5$/day in order to lower the turn over in the work force and therefore avoid wasting time teaching new comers what would their task be. Henry Ford then advocated about these 5$/day initiative as a way to turn his workers into Ford’s first customers, the premices of a mass consumption society that would fuel his mass production industry.
Even if these workers earned more than in other factories, they were asked to do repetitive actions without thinking, while other people were payed to think — the managerial class. Therefore Ford’s workers did not avoid the situation of their fellow class workers : they became prolaterianized, meaning that they were just machines, not owning their tools, nor their knowledge, nor the capital. In other words, they did not ‘own’ their work. It may be interesting to recall that Henry Ford was adamantly against labor union.
But then, John Keynes somehow encouraged the State to fuel the consumption market, in order to boost the employment, and Ford’s system did spread all over. Alain Soupiot calls this situation the ‘fordist compromise’, where the fondation of the Wellfare State “consists to trade some economical security against work dependancy, that is to say to have corporations pay the price of alienation estimated to be unavoidable in its principle.” The Wellfare State and other non-salary advantages were built on and remain the acceptance of proletarianization.
Marx, Zola or Fourier’s visions remained as dreams of a better world, one day to be achieved. But does the ‘new’ industrial revolution we are living these days in the Western world claim the end of proletarianization? Bringing machines out of the factory back to home or being a coworker owning his own computer and smartphone, without managerial class, aren’t this examples of what Bernard Stiegler coins the ‘de-proletarianization’? (The worker owning back the tools and the know-how to deliver his labor)
The ‘open air factory’ of mechanical turks: a digital anthill.
Speaking about online collaborative services, Rob Horning isn’t sure about that ‘de-proletarianization’ effect :
« Just as factories allowed deskilled workers to “cooperate” and create value that accrued to the factory owner who brought them together, sharing-economy apps coordinate disparate users and extract value from their being brought together in networks. But unlike the workers who meet on the factory floor, the sharing-app users meet only as commercial adversaries, and build not solidarity but merely a mercantile “trust” that facilitates wary exchange. »
To agree with him, Bernard Stiegler would mention Facebook or Google as examples of the new proletarianization of users as atomized contributors. As online technologies may help us to emancipate, they may as well proletarianize us even more. In these online social networks designed as ‘digital anthills’, we are producing and following ‘digital pheromons’.
Because without noticing, we all work around this huge conveyor belt as mechanical turks to treat and produce data for larger corporations. Ford’s production line, like Taylor’s theory, is just an efficient assembly line. And platforms like Über, Airbnb, Blablacar & cie. are platforms designed to efficiently assemble. But because we don’t see factory walls doesn’t mean that we are not in a factory ; these processes are the automated assembly lines of a factory without walls, what I coined an ‘open air factory’.
And despite what Rob Horning writes, similarly to what happened when workers could gather within a factory, the question already arises whether who actually owns that ‘open air factory’? The entrepreneur or the trade union? The startuper or the community?
On Shareable, Janelle Orsi — Director of the national nonprofit Sustainable Economies Law Center — recently wrote a brilliant article commenting the case against Über and Lyft in US, where current class action lawsuits argue that the drivers should be classified as ‘employees’ of the company. On these platforms, users are displayed as ‘micro-entrepreneur’ kind of economical agents, neither professional neither fully amateur. But ironically, what California Public Utilities Commission proposed would allow companies like Lyft, Über, and Sidecar to avoid burdensome regulations on taxis and shuttles, only if the companies exercise more control over drivers, including requiring special licenses and background checks. She writes:
« The more control the companies exercise over drivers, the more it looks like the drivers are employee. »
So where does it lead us? Is the collaborative economy movement just a way to get us working for lower wage if not for free? Like in Lenin’s dream, for whom the bolchevic revolution would be achieved the day the entire society would be nothing else than ‘one single factory’, ‘one single office’. Does Internet drive us to incorporate that ‘one single factory’ idea?
The ‘open air factory’ of pollinators: a digital hive.
Hopefully enough, there are still a multitude of models for us to elaborate from. At the ‘Open Manufacturing’ talk, Simone Cicero told us the story behind the Open Source Vehicule project. They envision themselves as a platform too — i.e. a distributed open air factory — built to design, produce, distribute and self-assemble cars. But above the distributed production, this platform is ment to give “every player in the value chain the possibility to participate to value creation and profiteering”. In other words, this project embed the question of a ‘fair’ value redistribution.
Other projects have emerged around this question of how wealth can be fairly redistributed in-bewteen the contributors, in order to keep them involved into the process of developping the platform and the project. The 5$/day issue, remember? One of the interesting initiative is the Open Value Network from Sensorica. Their idea is an algorythm that enables all contributors or linked projects’ teams to track and estimate each one contribution, at each step of the project, in order to redistributed the outcome of it, once it will be on the market. The process is clearly ment to organize a transparent governance, regarding project technical decisions as much as budget allocations for instance. And it functions in what Michel Bawens brilliantly described as an economy of scope rather than an economy of scale.
Open Value Network : Allow everyone to join and create value together in an open environment, enable mass-customization that will have a higher value than mass-production. (Economies of scope vs. economies of scale)
Since 15 years, the web 2.0 technologies enabled users to experience something close to what ancient Greeks called an ‘isonomy’ : an equi-distance and equi-power between all members of the community. Even if we are not there yet because not everyone is connected to the Internet, and even if legislations like ACTA, PIPA, and other are threatening this standpoint, these internet technologies keep on fueling our dreams of a free and accessible knowledge for everyone : Wikipedia, Open Street Map or Massive Open Online Courses are just a few examples of contributive platforms that generate value open for everyone to use it. Some even call it a ‘common’.
And when looking back in the real life, this web 2.0 technologies may have taken the shape of ‘third places’ such as coworking spaces or fablabs. Each of these local ‘work laboratories’ runs under a specific set of rules ; but one thing common to them all is that they encourage what Bernard Stiegler names ‘cross-pollinization’. By sharing and discussing ideas, we act as pollinator agents and we therefore contribute to knowledge to flourish.
One other similarity to all of these projects, unlike the AirBnB, Über or Blablacar platforms, is that their business models encompass collaborative governance issues and take into account values that are not only the ‘exchange value’ and the ‘use value’ — Bernard Stiegler would mention the ‘practical value’ and the ‘social value’ to be taken into account. In other words, these coworking spaces and fablabs do not really develop the pure ‘marketability’ of human resources (helping people to get a job), they rather boost their ‘entrepreneurship’ and notoriety (motivating them to own their job).
But by accounting all these different ‘values’, don’t pollinators start to look like mechanical turks? When it comes down to assessing wealth, are beehive and anthill alike? To run that ‘open air factory’, do we necessarily need to track down and account for every single contribution and every single retribution ?
The 5$/day issue must become a collective dream issue.
At the end, this Western world discussion about an ‘efficient, sustainable and inclusive industrial models that would incorporate a fair wealth redistribution’ seems to be a never to end discussion, isn’t it. And be it proletarianized ants or pollinating bees, if we aim at redistributing wealth, we first think that we have to assess every single generated value, and thus we start accounting every single contribution required for the production and we then design great algorithm to estimate each one’s fair share.
But is it really such a zero sum game? I guess not, because it is not only about figures and data. As Alain Soupiot recently warns, “governing by the laws is being taken over by governing by the figures”. Data are useful to help us reach the goal we assign ourselves, but not to define what that common goal is. We shall be humble and not account for ‘everything’, we shall not base everything on ‘efficiency’ and ‘big number calculation’, but we shall rather first envision and discuss the world we want to live in : what is the Progress we aim at.
Moreover, we could wander why Western world governments ended up during the XX century supporting the Ford model rather than the resilient associative ones. Do our governments only value as a Progress the ‘Fordist compromise’ that produces employment and a uniform social peace over the ‘contributive economy’ that produces ‘de-proletarianisation’ and a multitude of knowledge and initiatives? Or is Bernard Stiegler’s vision of an the “end of job” as unlikely to happen as Émile Zola’s electricity powered distributed manufacture never occurred?
It may be a bit too Manichaeans to look at it all that way. But what ever ‘new’ industrial model we contribute to set up, it will only be complete once it includes the topic of an inclusive wealth redistribution. Or in other words, once it incorporate the Welfare State topic. And if Welfare States appeared to protect employees from the machines, shall we now go for the Welfare State to protect contributors from algorithms? Or what would be the shape of a peer-to-peer Welfare State rather than a patronizing Welfare State?
In-between Zola and Ford, there were 2 different visions of Progress. What would be our definition of Progress today ? Resilient communities versus transhumanism ?
One thing is for sure : while we try out our ‘new’ industrial models, we just ought to keep in mind that work is not only about more efficient production, may it be more sustainable or based on idle capacities. Work is about the Progress we want to collectively achieve, so we definitely need to keep on dreaming the collective future our labor aims at.
