SZCZBlog

“Every economy has prices.” I remember Robin Hahnel saying those words in one of the Shed Sessions produced by the folks at Z Magazine on participatory economics. What those prices reflect, and how those prices are calculated, can vary from economy to economy.

The prices in contemporary capitalism reflect mainly two things: (1) supply and demand, taken as a single entity, and (2) bargaining power. Bargaining power can reflect power relations between buyers and sellers, or between capital and labor, or even between sellers in a market (ask any small-town merchant about Wal-Mart and about the bargaining power of its prices).

Markets make primal the interaction between buyer and seller, but clearly a lot is missed in the price, mainly because markets tend to ignore anything that doesn’t immediately reflect the immediate interaction between buyer and seller. It ignores, among other things:

1. The labor costs related to the exchange. Ask Foxconn and Apple (irony: I’m typing these words on an Apple computer). Ask Nike and sweatshop shoes (heck, Nike has a chronic allergy to even acknowledging its labor practices). Ask Wal-Mart and its labor force (motto: “There’s a reason we’re the world’s most profitable company.We pay our employees peanuts. Wal-Mart: Always low wages. Always”).

2. The social costs stemming from the purchase. I used to posit a hypothetical example in discussions about parecon by using firearms as an example. It’s not a hypothetical anymore, at least not in the minds of most of the American public.

3. The environmental impacts connected to the purchase. This might be the kicker — the thing that might be most closely pinned to the destruction of the human species if we don’t change course. The purchase price of oil in its doesn’t reflect the pollution that’s emitted, the harm to breathing and to animals, the destructive impacts of a warming planet by burning fossil fuels (The Onion’s “Man on the street” once described it as follows: “The health of the economy demands that we destroy the planet.”) I used to have a poster that listed the revised sticker price for a standard automobile IF the costs of wars connected to oil were taken into account — in the ballpark of $150,000 for a car that would otherwise cost $8,000. (War is a hell of an externality.)

Why are such numbers ignored? Presumably because market economists want to make their model simple and manageable. I can understand the willingness to make a simple model for analysis. After all, if you don’t strive for simplification, you could be chasing will-o’-the-wisps all day, spending all the time hunting down numbers and avoiding having to make a decision. But while simplicity is sought for, so is accuracy, and the fact remains that while market economists stick their head in the sand, the ignored labor, social, and especially the environmental costs are kicking their elevated behinds.

In contrast, in a participatory economy, the prices that are used are what are termed “indicative prices” — meaning that they strive to indicate the various impacts of one or another choice. Markets ignore the effects beyond the immediate market exchange, and in fact there’s a name for these outside effects: externalities. They are clearly external — outside — the immediate exchange, and markets therefore ignore them. To their and our detriment.

This isn’t a call to skirt decision-making. Far from it. Of course, we could seek, but we should base indiciative prices on best available knowledge at the time. Indeed, in one of the very first articulations of the model of participatory economics, “prices are ‘indicative’ during the planning process in the sense of indicating the best current estimates of final valuations. They are not binding but flexible in the sense that qualitative information provides important additional guidance.”

But the model, and future articulations of the model, don’t specify what should go into an indicative. Based on what’s discussed here, let me offer the following four-component model of indicative prices in participatory economics:

1. Supply and demand
2. Known labor impacts
3. Known environmental impact
4. Known social impacts

The greater the negative impact of each component, the higher the component price and the overall price. How is negative impact determined? One way using current technology would be to use a cellphone app for people to add in their vote regarding the impact (positive or negative) for a given good. The results can then be aggregated and calculated to an indicative price component and ultimately affect an indicative price. (I have a set-up like this that’s used in my — cross your fingers! — forthcoming participatory economics simulacrum.) In the event technology could be considered a hurdle, there’s no reason other means could be used in a similar fashion to contribute to an indicative price.

The New York Times reported on Sunday, April 20th, that Koch Industries, run by the infamous Koch brothers — they of oil and global warming infamy — is considered the frontrunner in the race to buy the Tribune corporation’s newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.

Understandably, revulsion is widespread over the very prospect, but many folks apparently need to be updated on a few things.

For one, the very fact that the Tribune is being broken up, and that this sale is even happening, is the consequence of grassroots political activism going back at least a decade. The Tribune corporation, in 2002 and 2003, sought to become a first-tier media corporation, like Time Warner, or NewsCorp, or Viacom, and the plan was for the Tribune to expand via expanding its suite of profitable and influential cross-media ownership holdings — like owning TV stations and newspapers in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago. But instead of owning them in a handful of cities, the vision was to own them in _every_ city in America. The FCC, then led by the infamous Michael Powell (who’s now America’s chief cable TV lobbyist), was only too happy to oblige. But grassroots activists rallied Americans to what was happening just in time, and the resulting outcry galvanized a court challenge which overturned the FCC’s attempt to overwrite those media ownership rules. (A second attempt in 2007 to rewrite those rules failed a second time in court.)

The Tribune corporation, whiny over its loss, moaned about the turn of events on its editorial pages, and filed appeals to overturn the ruling. Those appeals failed, and when Tribune shareholders saw that the Tribune had no Plan B for carrying out this planned expansion, staged a revolt to demand an ownership change. They got it, in the form of Chicago-area real estate billionaire mogul Sam Zell, who then proceeded to make a bad situation far worse. Instead of charting a trajectory of growth, Zell led the Tribune into bankruptcy for four years, fending off well-heeled creditors who made hell for Zell.

In early 2013 the Tribune emerged out from bankruptcy, but all reports say that the commutation is actually a death sentence, as Tribune plans to sell off most if not all of its media properties. (It has already sold off the Chicago Cubs baseball team, which it owned since the 1980s.) First on the chopping block: the newspaper holdings.

It’s an irony that grassroots political activism played a key role in what could be a buyout of a major American newspaper chain by two of America’s most reviled billionaires. If the opposition were smart they would exploit this fact to discredit America’s media reform and justice movements. Nevertheless, the efforts to block the immediate media ownership rules at the FCC, while successful, haven’t (yet) addressed deeper concerns regarding undue political influence, and corporate involvement in media and politics. I’ve been working on this myself; no doubt others will as well. But suffice it to say that the Koch buyout of the Tribune newspapers isn’t a foregone conclusion for a number of reasons.

For one, the Kochs will now get the full-throated response of the environmental movement in addition to the media reform and media justice communities in its attempted buyout. That’s not insignificant; the environmental movement has increasingly been flexing its muscle on the climate crisis. Suddenly, once they hear that the Kochs may look to widen their influence by buying out a number of prominent newspapers, they will add their voices to the resistance. And it’s been the growth of voices of resistance which proved critical in blocking previous attempts at widening media concentration.

For another, the FCC (the government agency which would have to approve a transfer) is in a state of flux. They are short of their full complement of five commissioners, with Republican Robert McDowell departing and chair Julius Genachowski about to depart. The FCC might be leery to proceed on this without a full complement of commissioners, though its unclear how long it would be before it got back to full strength. Remember, the last two times the FCC tried to proceed on increasing media ownership concentration, the FCC got their rewrites smacked down in court. It might not bode well to go down that rabbit hole again for a third consecutive time. Even so, the FCC might still grant a one-time waiver or waivers for a transfer without having to enact a full and thorny media ownership rewrite. But even that might not work: the FCC actually granted an exception to the Tribune itself in 2007, and that action did nothing to prevent its current travails.

What’s more, the Tribune could choose a less-notorious (or less-well-known) company to buy out its newspapers. Sure, the Kochs are currently the leading candidate, but it might not stay the leading candidate. A deal could get scuttled in ways we can’t yet foresee, but which grassroots political activism could foment. What’s more, investors might be less than enthused to see Koch get into an industry that’s seen in many corners as moribund and steadily decreasing as a source of news and journalism, but which remains a prominent source of local community information.

Meanwhile, the effects of global warming will escalate, the conservative media establishment will continue to look like a bunch of headless chickens, and to quote one friend: “a new, right wing maneuver to capture the corporate media will make its biases even less implicit.” The endgame is far from assured.

Stay tuned…

The New York Times (in a long-delayed follow-up from Mother Jones magazine) finally reported on a story of recent relevance that would have made an impact, on the same day that anything resembling meaningful gun control reform in the United States got squelched by the U.S. Senate. When president Obama called for a vote, he wound up getting nine votes in the the U.S. Senate this week, only to see them all go down in flames.

The New York Times reported on the vibrant and massively secretive market for firearms purchased online. The Times found that 94 percent of the 170,000 gun ads posted on an online buying forum called Armslist were made by “private parties”. Such a classification didn’t require background checks or the keeping of records, and purchases can be made in cash. To quote from a post from Daily Kos:

The Times found many of those private parties seemed to be acting instead as gun dealers without licenses, selling significant numbers of firearms. They do so without running background checks on any of the people they sell do. Nor do they keep records of their sales. As the newspaper points out, where the line is drawn about what makes a dealer and what makes a private seller is blurry. How many guns can someone sell before becoming what the law calls “person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit.”

And Armslist is one of many, many such online buying forums for guns, the majority of purchases would fail elementary checks for checking backgrounds and record-keeping.

I’d like to make two points:

1. This is a critical example of the fallacy of ignoring market externalities. Market theory considers only the buyer and the seller in a purchase of a good, like guns. (Maybe it should be called a “bad” rather than a “good” in this case?) But there can be, and probably will be, serious externalities paid for by people who had nothing to do with the immediate purchase. Not to put too light a point on it, but twenty-six dead people at Sandy Hook Elementary School for a single purchase is a serious externality, even if the purchase was ostensibly legal. In markets, such externalities are ignored, to the detriment of everyone. In contrast, in a participatory economy, the metric of indicative prices would include the immediate predictable consequences of a good, like guns. In the case of someone getting killed by a gun that someone bought secretly online, those indicative prices would include a metric of “social cost”, which would understandably escalate the cost of the good, dramatically so. Hopefully, the rising cost would reach the point where many “buyers” in a participatory economy would decline to “purchase” the good on the grounds of the cost being too expensive to afford, to the benefit of those affected by the exchange but not taking part in the exchange. If anyone should consider a turn away from markets and towards a participatory economy, this stands as an enormously powerful reason why.

2. In light of the report, I can understand why some people sell guns. With little oversight otherwise either on legal or economic grounds, selling guns can be a quick way to earn some cash, and without the typical constraints of a standard job — no boss to worry about, no punch card to check in, just sell your guns online and enjoy your cash and/or pay your rent. In some circumstances, it’s probably the only way some people can to earn some cash, especially given the lousy economy and eroding position of the middle and working-class. So people sell guns. The situation reminds me of a quote from the extraordinary movie Bulworth, and a scene near the end of the film where a drug dealer explains why some people go into the risky but lucrative role of selling drugs:

I’m giving them entry-level positions into the only growth-sector occupation that’s truly open to them right now. That’s the substance supply industry. They gonna run this shit someday. They gonna have the whole empire. Man, y’all don’t give a fuck about it. You greedy-ass politicians. That’s what you tell me every time that y’all vote to cut them school programs; every time y’all vote to cut them funds to the job programs. What the fuck; how a… how a young man gonna take care of his financial responsibilities workin’ at motherfuckin’ Burger King? He ain’t. He ain’t, and please don’t even start with the school shit. They ain’t no education goin’ on up in that motherfucker. ‘Cause y’all motherfuckin’ politicians done fucked the shit up. So what they gonna do? What’s a young man supposed to do then, right? What’s he gonna do? He gonna come to me, that’s what he’s gonna do.

I would characterize my news consumption habits as extensive. My Newsfire RSS client, which I use extensively for my news and updates retrieval, at this writing, has 108 feeds in it, of which perhaps a third are active at any given time. (I admit, I’m scanning some of the headlines as I’m writing this.) Among the biggest feeds I use are the RSS feeds for ZNet (radical news and perspective on domestic and world affairs), the Benton Foundation (news on media policy and media issues), Think Progress (progressive blog of news and analysis), the newswire of Free Press (more news on media policy and media issues), Democracy Now! (daily independent news), Hacker News (computer-and tech news and things of note), and The New York Times (my main source of corporate news).

And yet, the argument has been made and
made again: reading news is bad for you. A recent article in the Guardian makes a pretty compelling case. Reading news wastes time, makes us passive, kills creativity, is irrelevant, has no explanatory power, is toxic, inhibits thinking, and works like a drug. It is a bold statement to make in any context, but even more so that it was elevated by one of Britain’s best known newspapers. Not everyone would promote a statement that’s contrary to their industry and business model, especially one in such precarious straits as news. It would be as if the steakhouse Smith and Wollensky were urging folks to become vegan.

The parallels with food are uncanny; you are what you eat, and if you eat lousy corporate food, particularly “fast food”, your health is bound to suffer. The “fast food” equivalent of information — news, particularly of the corporate variety — is arguably of little value, and I wonder if the parallel can be made with information. It’s not necessarily “news” that’s the problem but what kind of news that’s consumed. (This is a curious parallel for me to make, considering that 2013 will mark
my twentieth year of being vegan.)

At one point, I stand guilty of adding to the pile of news to consume: I help run the Chicago Independent Media Center, and help produce its TV and radio programs (I even research and write the headlines for the radio program). But I like to think that such news has some utility; it isn’t irrelevant (or tries not to be); it reports on people doing something, making a stand, and thus hopefully inspires folks to be active; it strives to provide some explanation for larger societal trends, where possible;
it encourages critical thinking by turning the received corporate propaganda model on its head.

What’s more, I tried quitting reading my news feeds a couple of weeks ago, in the hopes that it would help provide me some additional time for some other projects I’m hoping to work on. Didn’t work; I stopped reading my news for a couple of days, but I lapsed back to my old habits. This is going to be harder than I thought.

But I have to admit: in light of this article, I’m thinking of weaning myself off my news feed, or reducing my news consumption somewhat. I think that it’s currently stands, having a bead on what’s “news” is useful to me, both for my current “career” in “news” (e.g., writing those radio headlines), but also for my other intellectual endeavors (read: trivia), and even as grist for this blog. Plus, “knowledge” is power, right?

Of course, knowledge isn’t always power. The most knowledgeable people in the world aren’t the most “productive” or most “successful”. Plus, one would presume that there would be diminishing returns for the amount of information that’s learned or read. Spending _less_ time reading, spending more time doing, helping people and the planet in the ways I can.

There is one more parallel about food that’s might be a point of inspiration. I didn’t become vegan overnight; indeed, it was a steady evolution in my thinking over the course of 14 months, between when I was first seriously offered the suggetion to become vegetarian to when I took the dive to become vegan for life. If I can “give up” or reduce my news consumption, hopefully that would free up time for other things. Like that parecon-ish database I’ve been talking about for the last week and haven’t gotten around to finishing up.

You know, maybe I don’t need all 108 of those RSS feeds…

I help produce a monthly television show — Chicago Independent Television, the monthly TV series of the Chicago Independent Media Center (“Chicago Indymedia”). In the most recent episode of the show, we had a segment about a corrupt Chicago politician — Alderman James Cappleman — who decided to crack down on “unapproved” efforts to feed hungry people in his ward (neighborhood). Citizens in his ward then staged a protest of Cappelman’s aldermanic office in defiance. That protest included a public “feeding”: one of the Chicago “branches” of the anti-hunger group Food Not Bombs offered food at the protest for anyone, homeless or not, hungry or not.

In watching this segment, I was set thinking: “Wow. These volunteer activists are defying the local political system for what they believe with just the resources they have at hand. If there was a way that they could get other volunteers and other activists to help contribute, with resources and assistance… They could engage in socially-valued labor, and maybe even earn credit for their effort and sacrifice, and track the tasks that they do, make sure that they’re balanced for desirability and empowerment, and coordinate larger requests with other groups, and — HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!”

That was what inspired me to want to create a participatory economics simularity, and hopefully help bridge a variant of C. P. Snow’s famous “two cultures” argument. But instead of bridging the sciences and the humanities, who too often don’t connect with one another much to their (and our) respective, detriment, I’m talking about another cultural divide that I’ve seen among activists — those who “talk” versus those who “do”.

Some activists who are engaged in “getting their hands dirty” — feeding hungry people (like Food Not Bombs), defending unjust foreclosurers (like Occupy Our Homes), trying to build a trauma center on Chicago’s south side (like Fearless Leading by the Youth) — will critique other activists who don’t get involved for not getting involved. Such criticism is often justified, but I feel that, a lot of the time, the nose-to-the-grindstone activism that does take place fulfill its potential. People much of the time don’t know about it, or efforts fizzle out over time or after a big event (e.g., the biennial WTO Ministerials or the 2012 NATO Summit), or the campaign doesn’t get enough in the way of resources to keep going, or isn’t part of a larger cohesive whole and feels like just another random act.

This, I think, is the highest calling of “armchair” activism — to help provide that support, in getting wider attention, providing resources, offering strategic advice, any of the sundry “abstract” tools that can help in any and every way with those efforts. I just wonder aloud if we can go beyond, so that the activism involved in, say, helping to provide food for Food Not Bombs can be somehow incentivized more effectively, but in solidarity fashion. So that those who want to help can be incentivized _to_ plug in, offer help.

Here’s where I state my personal bias yet again: I saw the videos of an online course on Gamification, and if anything it got me thinking: I wonder if political activism can be “gamified” in a constructive manner, or maybe even an entire participatory economy can be “gamified”, to help provide incentives that might help spur the action that we sorely need to address pressing problems and ultimately to transform society for the better.

People could find out about the protest at Cappleman’s office and get a reward of credit for providing food, cooking some of the food, providing it to protesters or to the hungry. That credit could then be offered to those who are also participants in activism, to do or get — what exactly? Exchange to provide others? How is that different from a credit market? I suppose the credit earned would need to be balanced for desirability and empowerment with effort and sacrifice at some other tasks, and the credit could be offered to those who agree to be part of this economy, who themselves provide goods and services that are balanced for desirability and empowerment. Maybe start out with some smaller subset of work tasks for desirability and empowerment, rather than a whole new economy?

It might go somewhere, but I think I need to think through the details a bit further.

(Note to self: Next time you write a blog post, be sure to have some overall point or structure in mind _before_ starting to write.)

I’m currently reading Bob McChesney‘s most recent book “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy“. I’m lucky to have gotten an advance copy of the book, and I have interviewed Professor McChesney many times on my radio program, with another interview forthcoming.  Moreover, I own and have read nearly all of Professor McChesney’s books, which I count as invaluable and inspiring in my own work on activism, particularly on media and media policy.  A speech Professor McChesney gave in 1998 (which I have an audio copy of) proved influential in my own evolution from observer to activist.  So, it surprises me that I read something in a recent adaptation of “Digital Disconnect” (published in In These Times, and reposted on ZNet) which I disagreed with.  In particular, this passage:

[B]eneath the surface, there has been a rise in new kinds of economic ventures. In distressed communities like Cleveland, they are a source of promise for the future. We are beginning to develop some experience about what a democratic, post-capitalist economy might look like and how it could function. There will be markets, there will be for-profit enterprises, but under the overarching logic of the system, the surplus will be mostly under nonprofit community control.

In particular still, four words:

“There will be markets”.

Now I can understand the apprehension many people feel with regards to non-capitalist economies, and the fear of thinking that,
as bad as things are, yes they can get much worse.  And I can understand further why Professor McChesney didn’t go as far as
market abolition and/or market replacement in this article, though I think he certainly can.  He was arguably pushing the envelope
plenty in his article and in his assessment, he also didn’t want to push his luck and perhaps _lose_ what ground he gained with
potential readers.

It happens in everyday conversation too.  You sometimes have LOTS to say, but you reasonably hold off because it’s not appropriate to
to say everything you want to say.  Because the audience might not be ready yet.  Because the audience has a lot to digest already
and you don’t want to overwhelm them.  But I have to admit I’m a tad disappointed that Professor McChesney didn’t go the full
monty at challenging the primacy of markets, particularly since markets — I would argue — is critical to spawning the powerful
corporations who threaten the democratic potential of the internet that Professor McChesney has made the central focus of his book,
“Digital Disconnect”.

The negative consequences of markets — the effects of the “invisible foot” as some call it — are well known.  Markets weaken
the social ties that bind us all through its incessant focus on competition.  Markets don’t consider things like love and honor
and respect and justice that can’t be bought and sold, but which are still mightily important (this is called “commodity fetishism”).
Markets lead to unaccountable destruction of the environment by its misjudging and ignoring of external effects (what are termed
“externalities”).  Markets spawn the most destructive creation ever wrought on the face of the Earth — the limited-liability corporation –
which is threatening our planet via its escalation of the climate crisis (burning fossil fuels, escalating greenhouse gases,
threatening superheated feedback loops that would change Earth into a scorching planet like Venus).  And corporations also threatening
those media outlets and resources — the internet key among them — that through its democratic potential and
ability to connect our disparately divided societies, grant us some hope for a better future (or any future).

McChesney somehow glosses over these concerns over markets by saying “the surplus will be mostly under nonprofit community control.”
I don’t know that such handwaving is reassuring.  Markets under local control still leaves out the potential for markets under
the control of massive unaccountble corporations.  This concern regarding the potential of rollback, when it was raised to me during
a _media-democracy_ tabling I was at, is one big reason why I don’t buy the hype about markets, and so I am calling for something deeper.

I can understand, finally, that there’s simply not enough room within the confines of a 1500-word magazine article to squeeze out
all the words to express what you want to say.  Take what you can get, I suppose.  I’ve been there myself.  But at the same time, time is short, and we don’t have time to mince words.  It’s why I’ve taken to blogging on a daily basis, and why we need to push our luck before our collective luck runs out.

My apologies in advance for being more vague than usual in this blog post. The names have been scrubbed to protect the innocent and not-so innocent.

Some years back, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who would be described as “left of center” and who has been active in political efforts. In this conversation, we talked about the role that vision plays in political activism. Then as now, I
consider it a necessary guide to activism — a map, a compass, whatever metaphor you choose, you need a destination in order to avoid the risk of running in circles. This friend I was speaking with, with whom I would agree otherwise on nearly everything political, disagreed with me on this point to my surprise, saying that work on vision should be postponed until after the revolution (those words weren’t used, but that’s my paraphrase for what was meant). The objection that was raised was: You wouldn’t want to muddy the waters for letting people decide about the society they want by trying to suggest it to them in advance. (My attempts to try to convince this friend otherwise didn’t work.)

Some years after this conversation, I had a conversation with another person whom I would characterize as a passing acquaintance. I only met this person once, but we did have the chance to talk at length, and in this conversation the topic of vision in political activism came up. The main difference this time was that this other person might be best characterized as “right of center”, but curiously the rationale for political vision was rejected, and for the same reason: activists in the here and now shouldn’t color the potential of imposing the workings of a societal structure until the status quo has been abolished and a new societal blank slate has been won. “After the revolution”, in other words.

I quite agree that dogmatism, whether on the “left”, “right”, or “center”, has no place in political vision. If ideas turn out to be bad, then those ideas shouldn’t be pursued. And I think it is better to find that out sooner than later by putting those ideas to
critical scrutiny and (where possible) experimental verification. Likewise, vision should not be imposed on anyone, but rather brought for consideration and allowed to convince adherents and advocates on their merits. If a vision is found lacking or shown to have problems, by scrutiny and/or experiment, then by all means, that vision should be ignored.

But to dispense with pursuing vision altogether is irrational, ridiculous, and counterproductive. If you don’t have a destination, you stand the reasonable chance of going in circles, wasting time and energy and effort that we frankly don’t have anymore. It’s probably a big reason why activism has been (justly) accused of what we might call “randomism” — that is, positive actions of activism aren’t the result of a coherent plan with a goal, strategy, and tactics, and so they seem to outsiders as random, with little overall coherence and little actual follow-up.

One can understand why vision remains a largely taboo topic, across both the political right and the political left. Many times in history, those who did have a coherent vision and chose to articulate it have been repressed. Indeed, many of those with a vision still today are considered persona non grata in many fora and in many communities, even in those with a dissident bent. I can personally relate, in that my review of the book ~Parecon: Life After Capitalism~ went unpublished despite my attempts to get the review published in various “dissident” fora.

Vision can sometimes be thought of as restricting and dogmatic (the proverb “To a hammer, everything’s a nail” can apply), and yes, some visions can be exceedingly harmful. There’s no question about that. But some positive visions can also be a threat, not only to those in unquestioned power but also in “dissident” communities. I suspect that my review was squelched because my review may have opened a can of worms that they don’t want to have to address because they may not like what they see in the mirror.

I guess this would be a call for common sense on vision. Yes, we need vision to provide positive goals to work through, lest we flail away randomly forever. Yes, we should not be dogmatic about our vision, but judge its merits carefully and refine as needed. And some of us have more freedom in this day and age; the purges of ages past and years past are less of a threat. If all that’s standing in the way is a taboo, then we have no excuses to act. Even if it means blogging about it every day.

Last year, I devised what I called a “ten-year plan” of activism for myself to help build towards participatory economy. I’d like to share that plan here:

Step One – Write a blog consistently to chronicle it all. (Status: Done!)

Step Two – Devise some database, or simulacrum, or role-playing game of sorts, for a participatory economy. The idea is to show to ourselves (that is, parecon advocates) that the idea, frankly, is worth pursuing. If it’s not, we can drop the idea and look for something else. Plus, we can use this as a testing grounds of sorts to show for various circumstances and find things we didn’t foresee or imagine. (Status; I’m currently working on it; I’ve got a database schema drawn up and I’m presently building up the databases. I hope to share a skeletal framework and a small example or examples in a few days. I’ll call for help to populate them, but one thing at a time…)

Step Three – Devise some kind of outright tangible economics playoff. There are resources and pages, like those on ZNet, that do a comparison between on the one hand the unholy trinity of markets, capitalism, and corporations, with parecon on the other hand. But if we can somehow show a comparison of sorts between the two, building on the testing grounds idea in Step Two, I think we can convince more people. The playoff could be done using the ideas of what’s called agent-based computational economics — devising a simulated computer economy with the same “players” playing different “games” (that is, one person or society in a participatory economy, another in a market/corporate/capitalist hellscape), showing the outcome and comparisons between the two, and using this as a teaching tool (disguised perhaps as some clever game).

Step Four – Craft some kind of epic fictional story or novel set in a participatory economy. (Rumor has it that one noted sci-fi author is apparently doing something along these very lines; we’ll hopefully see the results soon.) This is harder than it looks, but if successful can have huge payoffs. For one, a good fictional envisioning would require some grounding in the real word, and that would require research — perhaps as much research as writing a nonfiction work. Even so, an envisioning is bound to get things wrong, embarrassingly so in some instances. The history of predictions is littered with howlers. (“It’s very hard to predict things. Especially the future.”) That’s why I think we must test the ideas we want to espouse first and learn about problems or concerns with them first before putting them in a wider arena and getting our lessons back in a more public and more painful manner. What’s more, fiction can be a useful vector. If we can disguise our ideas correctly, we can hopefully have a better chance to smuggle them into the stories that can pass through corporate media filters that would normally block such ideas outright. After all, it worked for Star Trek…

Step Five — What I call “The Patton Maneuver”: to convert an existing well-known institution into a participatory framework. I cite here the idea brought for by Eric Patton in his essay “Winning”, where he suggests the idea of converting an institution into a participatory example that can’t be ignored anymore by the dominant culture or for that matter even by opponents of the dominant culture (who themselves sometimes have a vested stake in current circumstances). I find the idea intriguing, but in order to build towards it, we have to make such ideas thinkable, preferably pointing to examples (even if fictional) that can spur such action and enable that hoped-for “snowball effect”.

There is one thing about this plan that I’d like to mention. It doesn’t entail a whole lot of what might be typically construed as “activism”; no protests, no marches, no signs, no dramatic arrests. It’s a lot of writing, thinking, and arguably some computer programming (the last of which I admit is due to a personal bias of my own since my job is programming computers). But the goal is progress, and we’ve seen that “typical” activism doesn’t always work. Ten years ago, on February 15, 2003, the world staged the largest ever mass-protest against a war (the 2003 escalation of the War in Iraq) before the war even formally launched, not to mention other marches, signs, arrests, and so on — but the war happened anyway. Sometimes, you need to take a step back in order to take two steps forward, and that’s what this “ten-year plan” is all about.

And for anyone reading this plan: Feel free to steal any parts of this plan.

Let me share two quotes:

Quote one: Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google, once gave the commencement address at his (and my) alma mater, the University of Michigan. He said: “I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition.”

Quote two: PHP is a very common programming language that’s used for development on the web, but on which in recent years has been derided for its many technical flaws. Even so, PHP remains staggeringly popular, being used by such websites and platforms like Facebook, WordPress, Drupal, and my very own website. You would figure that a language that’s widely derided for its flaws wouldn’t merit such wide use, but intertia is a powerful thing. In response, one commenter offered this advice: “The best way to combat something as pervasively and institutionally awful as PHP is not to point out all its (many, many, many) faults, but to build compelling alternatives and make sure these alternatives are equally pervasive, as easy to set up and use as possible.”

I mention these two quotes because they are connected in one project I’m thinking of building. Folks who follow my work know that I’ve long been an advocate of the model of economics known as participatory economics (parecon). But it hasn’t been as tested in the here-and-now real world as much as I would like (though it has been implemented; there’s even a book, which I contributed to, called “Real Utopia” about some of its implementations). If we want to make progress against the existing economic order, we do more than just point out the flaws of the existing economic order, we build a compelling alternative. I think we _have_ a compelling alternative; now we need to work on implementing it, or at the very least testing it in some wide fashion to confirm that it’s worth implementing more widely. But how?

Here’s where the mega-ambitious-dream part comes in: Let’s build our own worldwide participatory economy on the internet, for people to join in and contribute. (This isn’t a new idea; indeed, similar ideas can be found the very first articulations of parecon, but technically speaking this is far more feasible to implement now than ever before.) Say for the sake of argument that we make a website to implement a participatory economy. A person can visit the website, login to a secure, private account, and see (among other things) the following:

* A list of the tasks they have
* A list of the tasks they can choose, or build new tasks if they so choose
* A list of the jobs and work those tasks are a part of
* The desirability ratings and empowerment ratings for those tasks, to ensure that they’re balanced for desirability and empowerment
* The effort scores and sacrifice scores for those tasks, to calculate payment
* The payment penalties that are applied and automatically computed if the tasks are not balanced for desirability and empowerment (providing an incentive to ensure jobs are balanced for desirability and empowerment)
* The credits earned for socially-valued labor
* The consumption proposals relevant to one’s current circumstances, with the ability to view other proposals at any scale
* The indicative prices (and rationale for those prices) for goods and services in the economy
* The connecting of one’s work efforts in socially valued labor to fulfill needs in the participatory economy, completing the loop

This might be closer to an endgame situation rather than an opening move — what it looks like after the revolution rather than before it. But I think that there won’t _be_ a revolution without providing an alternative that I think will work, or if it won’t work, learn why and build from that. After all, “[l]earning is a feedback loop. You take an action, see the result, learn a lesson. The smaller the loop, the less time from action to result: the quicker you learn, the faster you advance.”

We could use this online participatory economy not just to connect folks who, frankly, are already reasonably affluent, but to connect folks who aren’t so AND who can tap into a system like this. (Yes, I know that there’s a digital divide that blocks many people to online, but let me imagine this for the time being.) People who have tangible needs on feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, conserving resources, brought in contact with folks who can cook food, provide shelter, build energy-efficient tools. Those who do the work would be credited for the effort and sacrifice for their labor, and can use the credits in the participatory economy as part of a participatory plan. Over time and over a wide enough scale, we might just abolish markets, corporations, capitalism — by making them obsolete.

So, that’s my mega-ambitious dream. What do you think?

Today marks thirty-nine years that I’ve been alive on this planet. I count myself as politically “aware” for the past twenty years, and politically “active” for the past ten years. I like to think that I’ve made helped make the world a better place now than it was when I arrived. I’ve helped with a few successes, some of which are included on my website. And yet, despite it all, I feel like the treadmill is moving faster than we can run. I feel like the work we’re doing to improve things, to change the world, to save the world, isn’t enough. I feel like time is running out, and that I have an obligation to do more, especially since “It’s not clear to me how that will effectively lead to changes during the few years we’ve got left to deal with carbon. Climate science enforces a certain brute realism. It makes it harder to follow one’s heart.”.

That’s a quote from Bill McKibben, writer and activist on climate change issues. He’s talking about the pressing issue of climate change, which if we don’t change things widely and (relatively) quickly, Earth will more and more resemble Venus, and that’s not a good thing. 200-degree (Fahrenheit) days will be common; the livable planet we all share and take for granted will be no more (what’s left of society will have to dig underground like moles). But overcoming that issue of stopping our own inertia seems an intractable problem. Even in the face of certain doom and increasing evidence, we seem to be doing little more at the societal level than moving the proverbial deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic. We’re heading to disaster, and arguably we (or some of us) _can see it coming_. We should be doing something to stop this, change course, slow it down, buy some time at least. But we’re not.

Most of my political activism in the past decade has been devoted to media (the politics of U.S. media, activism on media, and producing critical media in radio, print, web, and television), with a side helping on political economy (focusing on the model known as participatory economics). I’m increasingly thinking that I should switch matters: focus on political economy, downplay my work on media. We’ve arguably made progress on media issues, and things have changed considerably regarding media (e.g., this week, Fox threatened to pull its broadcast channel off the air and move it to table). But in my humble opinion, we haven’t made as much progress regarding political economy, particularly vision and structural issues, as we need.

Luckily, things are ripe though for progress on this score, given the calamities we face, the repulsive problems of markets and corporations, (helping to cultivate things like Occupy Wall Street), the wider awareness of all of these things, and the reduced absence of a taboo of discussing or considering structural issues of our society (at least less of a taboo). But we need to think, and talk, and act, and quickly. And I’d like to do what I can to help, in what spare time I can muster.

I’ve got a blog. I’ve had a blog for a while now, but I haven’t done much with it. I need to change that, in the time I have left — to write, to share thoughts, to challenge taboos, to set a positive example, as I’ve tried to do. I’ve been tempted to follow the lead of Glenn Greenwald, who has turned a passion for words and ideas into a font of progressive action. Ideas can hold power, and can change the world. Defeatism can be defeated. I’ve been fortunate enough to see this and be a part of this on media issues in my decade of work on this score. I have to admit: I sometimes can’t help but gloat at the Tribune’s current predicament, particularly since it’s arguable that I played a critical role in helping to shape it. So, on this, my 39th birthday, I’m publicly making the commitment and diving in. I hope, and plan, to blog daily — particularly on issues of political economy (especially on participatory economics).

This might not go anywhere. This might be just another lapsed promise. I’m afraid that it will be just another grand hope that went unfulfilled. Or it might be the start of something big and world-saving, the thing that historians will point to milennia from now and say “that’s where the effort to save the world began”. The only way to know is to get to work.