April 1, 2012

"Tasks with other purposes"

I recently published an e-book entitled "Slaying Corporate Vampires: A Proposal in the Age of Occupy Wall Street", which proposes and details the use of participatory economics as a lynchpin against corporate power. The end of the book lists a number of proposed tactics, and I'd like to excerpt here one of the tactics for discussion.

The internet has provide a welter of resources, and should be utilized by proponents of [challenging corporations with paticipatory economics]. (I'm referring of course, to the internet least more or less as currently configured; if network neutrality isn't maintained and online freedom is squelched in large scales, corporations may grab that medium too.) Let me quote an email from one advocate of participatory economics who was also involved in some of the early development of Wikipedia, and referred to some principles of anarchism in Wikipedia's structure:

"Wikipedia was a wonderful example of anarchy, but we agreed at some point that we were (1) building an encyclopedia and (2) borrowing some principles from anarchism in order to facilitate that...I bothered in Wikipedia because it was accomplishing something--the world's greatest resource of information, [free] for all to use--not because it was anarchistic. The spread of pareconish [participatory-economics-like] principles will come from people adopting them into tasks with other purposes; if Wikipedia had been about proving an anarchist model for information aggregation, it would have fallen flat on its face on the millions of arguments that arise." (Emphasis added.)

So, that's the question I pose here: What are some examples of incorporating participatory principles into tasks with other purposes?

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