Austin PPS blogs — Dan

AFK for a week or so, as I’m here in beautiful Berkeley.  Very important posts when I get back!

A while back, Michael Albert wrote a piece arguing for the creation of a new International Organization for a Participatory Society.  I reacted rather negatively to it when I heard about it, because I felt that it glossed over the important things, the things that individuals advocating a Participatory Society are currently struggling with in favor of hypothetical problems that nobody is currently struggling with (e.g. how to handle fissioning a larger PPS into multiple smaller PPS’s).  Today, I’d like to suggest an alternative.

I’m suggesting an alternative because I think that there’s a problem; there’s a lot of interesting people with interesting ideas writing and thinking about parecon and participatory society; we all face similar problems in advocating parecon, as became apparent at the ZSchool last summer.  But we don’t have any mechanism for working together to overcome these problems.

So, I would say that the first things an IOPS would need is better communications:

• There is already an e-mail list for people interested in parecon that Marcus started (to get on that list, e-mail Marcus.  The e-mail list is good for back-and-forth discussion of issues.  It would be good to promote this e-mail list better, and to have it under the aegis of an IOPS, so that there would be a good succession plan if Marcus needs to give up administering it.
• There is the planet blog aggregator.  The planet is good for quick notes that you don’t really know if anybody will read, or you don’t necessarily intend anybody to respond to, so that others can get a feel for what’s going on in the minds and lives of people who advocate parecon.
• There needs to be a website with static content, so that new people can more easily discover the first two components, as well as so that they can read information that doesn’t change from month to month (e.g. a guide on how to start a PPS).
• There needs to be a place for people to collaborate on document creation.  Creating useful advocacy materials is one of the most time-consuming aspects of any PPS and we’ve all been hindered by our inability to work together to create the best ones.
• There needs to be more live communications.  I suggest a monthly internet conference call, for anybody who wishes to join.  This is one of the best ways to facilitate the creation of common projects and goals.

That’s it.  That’s the sum of my proposal for an IOPS.   Dues, limitations on whose a member, how to fission different PPS’s and all of that, can come later, if the first part gets off the ground.  If enough people respond positively, it should be pretty easy to establish all five of those bullet points.  But without communications, there will be no organization.  With communications, the organization can come together at its own pace, as there is a need for more work on infrastructure and process.

One of the core topics that parecon takes on is the question: how much should people get paid in exchange for their hard work?  We come up with an answer that we think is fair, yet often leaves people feeling a little ill at ease.  One reason I think people feel ill at ease with this answer is that, in capitalism, people’s income stands for more than the direct things which people benefit from; it stands for status.

When people engage in conspicuous consumption, for example, they aren’t buying luxury goods because they are so much more useful to them in the conventional sense.  They are buying luxury goods as a marker for status.  This might be obvious, but I think it’s vital: in every society, people care a lot about status.  Status can come in many forms: ability to command resources, prestige, etc.  In capitalism, it comes for the most part in terms of income, although some people prefer power, fame, or prestige.

If we want to create a fair society, we can not make our goal ridding the world of status.  Some people in every society are inherently status-driven and that won’t ever change.  Our goals instead, should be 1) flattening the status hierarchy, 2) providing status hierarchies in which being on the top isn’t so destructive to people on the bottom.

For the question of achieving the goal of flattening, I think we can look at the latest controversy about executive pay.  How much more, the question goes, should the people at the top of a status hierarchy be paid?  If left to run amok, the capitalist status hierarchy puts no limit on how much the people at the top should make, because they will always be in status competition with other people at the top.  However, the people at the top–and some others–get very upset at hard caps on pay.  It isn’t just because they want to have the money to spend; it’s because they want to be recognized for being successful. The CEO of Netflix argues for no caps on income, but high taxes.  This, I believe, is implicitly an argument for using status to reward people.  After all, if you let people declare their income to be $1M / year, but only let them keep $200K, they can still compete on status without having to actually allocate so many societal resources to them.

For the question of providing alternative status hierarchies, I think this is vital.  In the world of free software, the most powerful, popular people in the community are the people who started successful projects: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Guido van Rossum, etc.  Each of them is compensated for their efforts by one company or another, but only a small amount compared to those who started companies around their software.  Their real reward is being widely admired for their creations.  Because the free software world provides this recognition, it can maintain people’s inherent striving for status without allocating so many scarce societal resources to one pereson.

This, I believe, is a vital lesson for advocates of parecon: if you don’t want to reward achievement with money, you better have a lot of awards, admiration, and recognition to go around, to give people some sort of status to strive for.

In parecon, we talk about relationships between producers and consumers under the rubric of production negotiations at the Iteration Facilitation Board.  There, as the classic examples go, the consumers and producers make proposals for how much of what they will make.  This makes a lot of sense for the production of commodities. But what about non-commodities?

Marcus has just started a Z consumers’ council at Z, but the function of the consumers’ council.  His vision, I believe, is that the consumers’ council can act as an advisory body for the staff at Z to help improve their site in a way that the consumers of the site would like.  I think it’s worth noting that this is a departure (a welcome one, IMO) from the vision of a consumers’ council as strictly negotiating prices and quantities.

I think that this is an area some of us interested in Parecon have neglected–the feedback loop of IFB’s might be good enough to handle the sorts of feedback which consumers have become accustomed to giving over things that affect their lives.  After all, a Z consumers’ council couldn’t well just say: we want to pay $500 and get an output of a marginally cleanly designed site vs. $750 and a very-cleanly designed site.  The difference is that this consumers’ council is built to give constant, qualitative feedback about output decisions.

So, write after posting about why I’m not happy about Z, I run across this blog post by Chris Spannos, staff at Z.

Chris, in that post, seems to be trying to guilt-trip the entire left into using Z:

They may think that they agree with our efforts and that is good enough, or maybe they’ll even take the extra step to donate a few bucks as a sustainer, and think that is all that needs to be done before logging in to check facebook status updates and their friend activity. This orientation is easy to slip into and many people do including those on the Left. But just because it is easy or convenient does not mean that it works in their own interests and in the interests of Left communities they are a part of and care about, or the Left projects they support. Overall, the corporate interests are exactly opposed to their interests and in knowing this, especially Leftists, they should not give up the benefits of facebook, etc., but be more consciously active in the Left alternatives like ZCom, not by simply donating money, as much as that is needed, but by filling out their profiles, posting blogs, commenting on articles, uploading other content, connecting with other sustainers and writers, etc.

I really don’t like guilt trips.  Being told that it’s my responsibility to participate right away takes away the whole enjoyment of participating.  I want to build a better world, and I’ll decide for myself how best to do that.  Being told that specifically that I have a responsibility to sacrifice my own enjoyment (that is, if I enjoyed facebook) in order to use their clunky website, that takes chutzpah.

Ironically, I ran into a software oddity when I attempted to add a new comment by clicking the “add new comment: it asked for my email and password, which I filled in, then it took me back to the same page, without any difference.  I clicked the button again, and it gave me the same login box.  I looked up above, turned out I was already logged in.  Perhaps I haven’t paid enough to be allowed to make comments, but the software never told me that.

Z communications is one of the institutions at the heart of this community–the community centered around Participatory Society, and the community that broadly calls itself The Left. Michael Albert, one of the original creators of Participatory Economics, founded and continues to be one of the few (two?) paid employees of Z communications.  It is the “home site” of many famous authors of the left.

Even this doesn’t fully explain it’s place in this community.  For a lot of people, Z is the central source for news and analysis, and the central place of comparison; when a new person shows up at an APPS meeting, and says “I’m a long-time Z reader”, I know that at the very least I share a common language with them.

Unfortunately, it’s been years since I’ve felt really connected with Z–since shortly before they announced the new ZSpace.  A lot of the things I didn’t like about the new Z have been voiced in a recent blog post over at Z and the comment thread after it:

• Interface is too busy/clunky
• Split between “writers” and “sustainers” makes it feel like there’s a two-class system.
• Everything I read at Z feels serious and confrontational.  I think twice or three times about saying anything even related to it, because I feel the need to ‘defend my thesis’, rather than just share an idea.  Part of this is because it’s true of all the featured content by the writers, which sets the tone for the site.
• A lot of software difficulties (for me, this centers on poor quality RSS feeds).

I ended up creating Planet Parecon separate from Z because it just feels so much easier.

After I participated in the Z parecon/parsoc class over the summer, Michael Albert sent the participants a really, really frustrated, kind of bitter email in which he guilt-tripped the participants for not “pitching in” enough for the school to meet his expectations:

Perhaps by then we will all be ready to pitch in a bit more, and more folks will want to join us.

I’m a prime constituency who still speaks fluently in the language of Z, yet, I don’t feel comfortable there at all.  I’m willing to help find a way for people like me to feel more comfortable, to help build a community.  I really hope that the folks at Z see this as a form of “pitching in” and not just nagging.

APPS had our first public meeting in a long time last night.  It was very cool; some lurkers who had been keeping tabs on us showed up for a low-key meeting.  We’re looking at slow and steady, trying very hard to manage expectations to prevent burnout.

As for Planet, I updated the config so that it scrolls posts off after a year, not a week.  I also updated Austin’s announcement and discussions list.  I still don’t think I have the concentration to be a social lead for Planet, and it would be better if somebody else could handle it, but I’m not sure it would work at Z.  I wish Z could handle either fetching external RSS feeds or creating them.

In my last post, I discussed software that allows for efficient collaboration within lateral structures by partitioning the lateral structures into task-based small groups–software like Mediawiki (behind Wikipedia) and bugzilla.  I think some of the lessons from this software could be used beyond the worlds of free software and free content, within participatory structures.

Last year, I unwisely got myself heavily involved in discussions of governance in the student housing coop I was living in.  The governance problems the coop was having were all about issues of participation and effectiveness; there were committees for people to get involved in governance, but attendance was very low; there were open board meetings, yet people still felt out of the loop.  We went around and around in drafting rules.  In the end, we succeeded in passing some rules changes, but they haven’t had a major effect on governance.

And the further I’ve gotten from the situation, the more I’ve realized that we were going about it the wrong way.  While there were occasional clashes in values, for the most part, everybody involved wanted better and more effective collaboration.  The problems we were experiencing were not there because the rules were leading us the wrong way, though they probably were.  The problem was that nobody knew how to collaborate effectively amongst large (~200) groups.

One of the projects, therefore, I’d like to take on in building participatory economics and participatory society, is creating the tools for people who value the things we value to more easily see these values through.  Part of this will be software tools for brainstorming and part of it will be “best practices”.  If you’re interested in helping with this, send me an e-mail or just read on to my later blog posts as I start figuring out more of what this means.

A persistent theme in discussions of alternative economic systems is a trade-off between democracy and efficiency, with lateral structures considered more democratic, vertical systems more efficient.  There are, of course, some inefficiencies specific to vertical structures such as ineffective or corrupt leaders or a mismatch of priorities between the leaders and the led.

However, it’s certainly true that the more people involved in a decision, the more difficult making the decision becomes.  When three people decide something, there are three pairs of people.  When 50 people are involved, there are 1,225 pairs of people.  Subcommittees are used to avoid wasting everybody’s time, but they can become double time-wasters if the committee of the whole has to rehash everything from the subcommittee.  Parecon improves on this problem a little, by limiting input in decisions to those affected by them.  The committee of the whole never needs to address a problem that only affects those whose offices are on the third floor.  But there are still trivial decisions that nevertheless affect many people*.

Over the last couple decades, there have been real revolutions in addressing this problem.  The revolutions come in the form of fluid creation and rearrangement of small groups.  You can see this in “issue-tracking software” like bugzilla, software that creates tools for collaboratively addressing bugs in (other) software.  Individuals can easily join and leave the group of people involved in the discussion of the problem; people can post as much as they need to about one problem without affecting anybody not addressing the problem (as anybody not addressing the problem can leave).  Problems can merge (by marking one as duplicate of the other), or become related (by marking one as depending on another).

A more familiar example of this might be Wikipedia.  Similarly to bugzilla, by partitioning the concept of an encyclopedia into an unlimited number of “pages”, Wikipedia allows for the rapid creation of small groups.  Groups can be as small as 1, or they can rapidly scale to multiple people working on the same page.  If the page becomes particularly popular, many more people might work on it, or it might split up into separate subpages with different (but overlapping) groups working on each.  Without such software, it would be unthinkable for so many millions of people to collaborate on a project the size of Wikipedia.  Could you really imagine a mailing list or coordinating committee simultaneously juggling over 1m different encyclopedia pages?  Trying to filter the discussion for only those subjects you were interested in?  Despite relying on more traditional vertical structures for some things (such as maintaining the physical servers or deciding punishments for rule-breaking), Wikipedia has created a massive, lateral structure, with collaboration happening mostly in small groups.

This phenomenon–small groups within a large lateral decision-making structure–gets the best out of people–small group collaboration, without the inefficiencies of imperfect leaders.  Even as it has its own imperfections, Wikipedia has demonstrated that it is a far more useful and used project than any commercial encyclopedia could have hoped to be in the 7.5 short years it has existed.

In my next post, I’ll share my ideas for how to spread that revolution further, how to see it move out of the realm of spreading software and knowledge, and see it in other walks of life.

* OK, technically, this isn’t the same as a bike shed problem, but it’s pretty similar.

One of the things I’ve been frustrated about recently about Parecon activism is that I feel totally unprepared to answer the question: “so what?”  The reason, if I understood correctly, that most of us give for thinking about “end goals” is that having “end goals” helps point us in the right direction for the short and medium term.  That is, if we don’t know where we’re going, how can we possibly get there?

So far, most of my friends are with me.  Okay, we’re going to parecon.  Now, step 2 is: now that we know where we’re going, how *do* we get there?  Michael Albert tried to answer this question in some ways in Moving Forward, and that is why, of the Parecon books out there, I think it is my favorite.  But even so, the answers were still extremely abstract.

How would a movement informed by Parecon look different than one that wasn’t?  In short, supposing that you’re already convinced that you should be an activist, how does thinking about Parecon get you to the right place, whereas not thinking about it gets you to the wrong place?  In my next few posts, I’m going to explore some of my answers to this question, but I’d love to see other people talk about what projects they’ve conceived of or undertaken that help bring them closer toward Parecon.