Capitalism is the problem, but why?

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This #Occupy post came up recently, defining capitalism as characterized by “private ownership of the means of production.”

I prefer a definition of capitalism as a system based on extracting labor from others through coercion. Then we can understand that private ownership of any means of productive activity implies coercion: the only way you can be a productive human is suddenly through contract labor with the owners. Otherwise, you’re cut out.

People are happy to defend private property; it’s a privilege few are willing to easily give up even if they’d benefit from it. Reframe it as coercion, and you can paint a picture of greedy pigs and thugs with guns holding productivity hostage. This then helps even in situations where “means of production” is complicated to pin down. It points towards a solution from the inside-out: democratizing production.

At the very least, identifying that private ownership has a coercive quality is important, I think.

Taking advantage of the labor (heck let’s just say effort) of others without their consent is contrary to human dignity. Even worse is artificially reducing resources in order to coerce them and calling that consent, thus legitimizing exploitation. That’s the system we have.

Community values, the state, planning, management, autocthany, authenticity, indigineity, and historical preservation

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These things are on my mind this morning.

This came across my Twitter feed recently:

“Govts are God’s scourge, established to discipline the world. Do you really expect them to destroy themselves to create freedom?” #Proudhon

I’m reading The Battle for Gotham, which features a lot of discussion of the defense of communities in the face of demolition and, well, change from top-down planning, and at one point author Roberta Brandes Gratz quotes Jane Jacobs as saying:

“The West Village Committee was totally self-organized. Anything self-organized is inimical to planners who want control. The city was furious. We had an informant in the Planning Office who told us what was said: ‘If we let this neighborhood plan for itself, all will want to do it too.’ Planners always pick control over spontaneity. If one believes things can happen spontaneously and work well, it diminishes the importance of planners.”

This echoes some of the recent writing of David Graeber where he points out that, in my words, your average American liberal, of the social Democrat ilk, probably a lawyer or manager working in the arts or media or social services realm, must believe in the value of management, of “we know best” planning and policy-making, which reinforces that same approach to government. Self-organizing is an impossible goal because it represents not progress but a threat—a threat not just to the governing social order, but to their very jobs and identities. If management is what you do, what you believe in at your core, and how you organize your life, you’re not going to easily accept that people don’t need hierarchical governance.

Disciplining the world. Someone else knows better than you. Your input is not valued, your consent is not necessary. Is this human? Is it humane?

Jane Jacobs stressed that plans and projects should come from the bottom up, not from the top down. She argued that communities know what they need and how they will be affected. David Graeber and other anarchists make the same argument, that whatever initiatives are imagined, they should come from those who want them or stand to be affected by them. At worst, they should have input from and be consented to by those who stand to be affected by them.

It’s interesting to me that most of the defenses that communities launch against imposed development draw on values that re-center group identity and, well, the “existing social capital” of in-place groups. The language of authenticity reflects this – change not from a community is inauthentic to that community. The attempt to use the power of the state against itself by creating and activating laws of “historic preservation” are themselves drawing on a desire to preserve a shared past, which informs a shared identity. If community basically reflects an accumulation of past actions, which have created an accumulation of social ties, the struggle against development is fundamentally a struggle against outsiders who wish to demolish community, dissolve social ties, and leave people dispossessed.

Furthermore, development that brings in outsiders, well, it’s not necessarily bad, but it should not dissolve existing tradition. A good analogy would be joining a club. If you wish to join the local Elks lodge, it’s because you recognize there are qualities to that group that you value. You should be expected to learn their ways and adopt some of them—the group will certainly expect you to do so. However, groups take in new members not just to grow themselves, but, if they’re wise, to constantly renew through new ideas and energy.

I guess what I’m tiptoeing around is a tentative idea that claims of autochthony, indigineity, authenticity, what-have-you, with regard to populations and communities, are generally meaningless outside of an atmosphere of coercive or non-consensual change. They are generally used when outside forces threaten to rupture and violently transform communities. Humans can be expected to fear change, sure, but they have every right to fear potentially damaging, drastic, high-contrast change. People should be allowed to consent to change and take things slowly and all of that. With less violent, state-mandated, capitalist-driven change in the world, who would care so much about coming up with claims of autochthony or indigineity? To some degree, authenticity is strictly related to a subject’s acceptance of the thing being labeled authentic. Or I’m just making things up, and anyway I’m digressing….

So, a community has good reason to welcome outsiders, but communities also have good reason to expect outsiders to respect the community and assimilate somewhat. This is, perhaps, the fundamental problem of “gentrification.” Population change that devalues what an existing community has to offer is unhealthy, cancerous population change. Population change that values and in fact seeks to strengthen the existing community—respecting its businesses and participating in its productive capacity without displacing or attempting to out-compete existing efforts—that is human, humane, healthy population change.

And to me, this all again points to the strengths and benefits of horizontal self-organization, direct democracy, informed by values of consent and non-coercion. It’s helpful to ponder these questions: how would big projects a la Robert Moses get done in such a society? How would any big projects get done?

Without getting into details, and acknowledging that most of this would be figured out in practice rather than theorized from first princples, here are some initial guesses.

First off, if big projects don’t have the consent of those they would affect, they should not get done. Period. I cannot see any reason a large project that is not consented to should be forced to happen. Such projects are by definition inhuman, inhumane, and not at a human scale of experience. (Incidentally, this is a good part of why capitalism is a bad idea. It presumes that all the things it can accomplish should be accomplished, at vast human expense. This is not the case. If it’s going to devastate whole regions, it shouldn’t be done. If it’s such a great idea, surely you can win their direct support?)

As a friend pointed out in conversation, “big projects” are not the “civilization achievements” we’re meant to think they are. The Egyptian pyramids, for example, are impressive, to be sure—and they used up impressive quantities of human lives as well. That’s not much of an achievement to envy, if you ask me.

That said, I can’t see why big projects wouldn’t get done. For example, millions of people would love to go to the Moon or to Mars, and support such efforts. Clearly, big ideas can gain lots of support. The idea is, you actually have to win that support and rely on actual desire of people to contribute and participate. (Incidentally, Internet technologies are also often good examples. The processes by which standards and protocols get designed and adopted often resemble horizontal organization.

Hypothetically, a world could be organized in a bottom-up manner, wherein large spokescouncils could be convened to address issues and ideas that could affect federated communities. Generally in consensus it’s useful to form working groups, which are generally considered to be empowered to make decisions under their purview without bringing them to the full group, with certain guidelines. Graeber addresses this a bit; many people do. What if some working group conceives of some giant project and then wants to impose it on many communities?

Well, first off, they wouldn’t. Communities would desire input and, well, we’re talking about a lot of cultural change leading to such a world. Values of consent and non-coercion would be much higher than they are in our capitalist, non-democratic society. It should be unthinkable to proceed on any project without the consent of those affected.

Second, most big projects would probably already have tacit support, since in order for higher-level, federated/spokescouncil-driven working groups to exist in the first place, they’d have been created because ideas came from the lower-level groups and were consented to at the spokescouncil level after other groups were able to give their input.

Future friendly amendments from affected communities would allow consent and probalby even improve projects. It’s amazing how many reasonable alternate suggestions communities gave to Robert Moses projects that would otherwise devastate their communities. He just ignored them. People would say, “alright, do this, but here’s a different way you can do it that would be better,” even the governor of New York once said as much for one project, and yet Moses, empowered as he was, just ignored them and did what he wanted anyway.

Anyway, it’s an interesting exercise to ponder how projects from below can differ in comparison with projects from above, and what each reveals about the fundamental human (or inhuman) values at play.

Rights theory/language, Responsibilities, and Values

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I’m no expert on this stuff and would appreciate feedback, especially from my friends & metamours more schooled in theory, philosophy, religion, anthropology, etc. than I.

I started writing this as a lengthy Facebook comment and then realized it was too long, so I’m basically just transferring it here. I came across this link while searching for “rights language,” and will quote this bit:

As Christians we need to recognize that there is a very real sense that the United States was, for the most part, founded by Christians with very bad presuppositions. and as a result the nation began on a godless footing, for there can be no true divine presence apart from community and there can be no true community when we begin with the autonomous individual who demands their unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By starting with the autonomous individual rather than the community, the founding fathers undercut any authority (other than arbitrary rules) by which authentic human dignity could be maintained.

The whole screed is interesting, and I’ve certainly, of late, come across more than a few reasons to be frustrated with the “rights” framework for social theory, legal theory, etc. But unlike this author, I still think focusing a bit more on “responsibilities” is precisely the route to take in the present socio-political climate, as it’s tied very closely to the notion of “community.” But even then… the author has a point about the dialectic trap.

So, the Christian perspective here seems to seek or posit a “correct answer we someday arrive at that resolves everything” (or that we’ve already received it and just need to accept it (God)). This is also the common utopian perspective, it seems. We seek a way out of our conflicts. But I think change and conflict are merely part of life, and the only way forward is working with that reality rather than against it. (Which is the back-story we paste on enlightenment social theory, though in practice it was always just a bunch of men of power fighting over a pie. But I digress.)

In other words, I don’t think there’s a way out of the dialectic problem, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the whole problem anyway. Autonomy/liberty isn’t just a framework of rhetoric, it’s a cultural value, an ideal. If we can’t escape the dialectic problem, if it lies at the foundation of what it means to be both social and agents, then our best bet is to work on the values that inform our management of these conflicts. If “autonomy”/”liberty” is a problematic value as a cultural ideal, leading to an unhealthy obsession with rights-language and individualism, perhaps we should transform it somewhat into values that nurture a bit more community and sociality. I’ve been toying with “non-coercion/consent” as an alternative to “liberty,” along with upholding “compassion” more and more as an adult cultural value.

That is also not a “correct final answer,” but maybe it’s a slightly better framework for managing things?

Non-coercion and consent are two sides of the same coin; the former a sort of responsibility, the latter a sort of right. Compassion is just an ideal that is sorely missing or weakened in our tradition in general, and is intimately tied with community and “social responsibilities.” Responsibilities should themselves be chosen, consented to, given freely, rather than forced out of people, and a heightened cultural valuing of compassion would perhaps lead to greater practice of compassion (it must be practiced, as with empathy; neither are innate skills). Greater practice of compassion would, I think, lead to greater conscious embracing of responsibilities.

That last paragraph was rather off-the-cuff, please rip me to shreds, especially if I’m barking up trees in the wrong forest.

The Razor’s Edge, Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

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I’m sharing this excerpt from Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen because it struck me as I read it as one of the best descriptions I’ve come across of zen buddhism’s view of the state of being-in-the-world and the purpose for and place of zen practice (sitting meditation) within it. It certainly resonates with my thoughts and experience as of this week, at least.

“The Razor’s Edge”

We human beings all think there is something to accomplish, something to realize, some place we have to get to. And this very illusion, which is born out of having a human mind, is the problem. Life is actually a very simple matter. At any given moment in time we hear, we see, we smell, we touch, we think. In other words there is sensory input; we interpret that input, and everything appears.

When we are embedded in life there is simply seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, thinking (and I don’t mean self-centered thinking). When we live this way there is no problem; there couldn’t be. We are just that. There is life and we are embedded in it; we are not separate from life. We just are what life is because we are being what life is; we hear, we think, we see, we smell, and so on. We are embedded in life and there is no problem; life flows along. There is nothing to realize because when we are life itself, we have no questions about life. But that isn’t the way our lives are—and so we have plenty of questions.

When we aren’t into our personal mischief, life is a seamless whole in which we are so embedded that there is no problem. But we don’t always feel embedded because—while life is just life—when it seems to threaten our personal viewpoint we become upset, and withdraw from it. For instance, something happens that we don’t like, or somebody does something to us we don’t like, or our partner isn’t the way we like: there are a million things that can upset human beings. They are based on the fact that suddenly life isn’t just life (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, thinking) anymore; we have separated ourselves and broken the seamless whole because we feel threatened. Now life is over there, and I am over here thinking about it. I’m not embedded in it anymore; the painful event has happened over there and I want to think about it over here so I can figure a way out of my suffering.

So now we have split life into two divisions—over here and over there. In the Bible this is called “being banished from the Garden of Eden.” The Garden of Eden is a life of unbroken simplicity. We all chance upon it now and then. Sometimes after sesshin this simplicity is very obvious, and for a while we know that life is not a problem.

But most of the time we have an illusion that life over there is presenting us with a problem over here. The seamless unity is split (or seems to be). And so we have a life harried by questions: “Who am I? What is life? How can I fix it so I can feel better?” We seem surrounded by people and events that we must control and fix because we feel separate. When we begin to analyze life, think about it, fuss and worry about it, try to be one with it, we get into all sorts of artificial solutions—when the fact of the matter is that from the very beginning, there is nothing that needs to be solved. But we can’t see this perfect unity because our separateness veils it from us. Our life is perfect? No one believes that!

So there is life in which we truly are embedded (since all that we are is thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and we add on our self-centered thoughts about “how it doesn’t suit me.” Then we no longer can be aware of our unity with life. We’ve added something (our personal reaction) and when we do that, anxiety and tension begin. And we do this addition about every five minutes. Not a pretty picture…

Now what do I mean by the razor’s edge? What we have to do to join together these seemingly separate divisions of life is to walk the razor’s edge; then they come together. But what is the razor’s edge?

Practice is about understanding the razor’s edge and how to work with it. Always we have an illusion of being separate, which we have created. When we’re threatened or when life doesn’t please us, we start worrying, we start thinking about a possible solution. And without exception there is no person who doesn’t do this. We dislike being with life as it is because that can include suffering, and that is not acceptable to us. Whether it’s a serious illness or a minor criticism or being lonely or disappointed—that is not acceptable to us. We have no intention of putting up with that or just being that if we can possibly avoid it. We want to fix the problem, solve it, get rid of it. That is when we need to understand the practice of walking the razor’s edge. The point at which we need to understand it is whenever we begin to be upset (angry, irritated, resentful, jealous).

First, we need to know we’re upset. Many people don’t even know this when it happens. So step number one is, be aware that upset is taking place. When we do zazen and begin to know our minds and our reactions, we begin to be aware that yes, we are upset.

That’s the first step, but it’s not the razor’s edge. We’re still separate, but now we know it. How do we bring our separated life together? To walk the razor’s edge is to do that; we have once again to be what we basically are, which is seeing, touching, hearing, smelling; we have to experience whatever our life is, right this second. If we’re upset we have to experience being upset. If we’re frightened, we have to experience being frightened. If we’re jealous we have to experience being jealous. And such experiencing is physical; it has nothing to do with the thoughts going on about the upset.

When we are experiencing nonverbally we are walking the razor’s edge—we are the present moment. When we walk the edge the agonizing states of separateness are pulled together, and we experience perhaps not happiness but joy. Understanding the razor’s edge (and not just understanding it, but doing it) is what Zen practice is. The reason it’s difficult is that we don’t want to do it. We know we don’t want to do it. We want to escape from it.

If I feel that I’ve been hurt by you, I want to stay with my thoughts about the hurt. I want to increase my separation; it feels good to be consumed by those fiery, self-righteous thoughts. By thinking, I try to avoid feeling the pain. The more sophisticated my practice becomes, the more quickly I see this trap and return to experiencing the pain, the razor’s edge. And where I might once have stayed upset for two years, the upset shrinks to two months, two weeks, two minutes. Eventually I can experience an upset as it happens and stay right on the razor’s edge.

In fact the enlightened life is simply being able to walk that edge all the time. And while I don’t know of anyone who can always do this, certainly after years of practice we can do it much of the time. It is joy to walk that edge.

Still I want to repeat: it is necessary to acknowledge that most of the time we want nothing to do with that edge; we want to stay separate. We want the sterile satisfaction of wallowing in “I am right.” That’s a poor satisfaction, of course, but still we will usually settle for a diminished life rather than experience life as it is when that seems painful and distasteful.

All troublesome relationships at home and work are born of the desire to stay separate. By this strategy we hope to be a separate person who really exists, who is important. When we walk the razor’s edge we’re not important; we’re no-self, embedded in life. This we fear—even though life as no-self is pure joy. Our fear drives us to stay over here in our lonely self-righteousness. The paradox: only in walking the razor’s edge, in experiencing the fear directly, can we know what it is to have no fear.

Now I realize we can’t see this all at once or do it all at once. Sometimes we jump onto the razor’s edge and then hop off, like water dropped on a sizzling frying pan. That may be all we can do at first, and that’s fine. But the more we practice, the more comfortable we become there. We find it’s the only place where we are at peace. So many people come to the Center and say, “I want to be at peace.” Yet there may be little understanding of how peace is to be found. Walking the razor’s edge is it. No one wants to hear that. We want somebody who will take our fear away or promise us happiness. No one wants to hear the truth, and we won’t hear it until we are ready to hear it.

On the razor’s edge, embedded in life, there is no “me” and no “you.” This kind of practice benefits all sentient beings and that, of course, is what Zen practice is about…my life and your life growing in wisdom and compassion.

So I want to encourage you to understand, difficult though it may be. First we have to understand with the intellect: we must know intellectually what practice is. Then we need to develop through practice an acute awareness of when we are separating ourselves from our life. The knowing develops from the base of daily zazen, from many sesshins, and with the effort to remain aware in all encounters from morning till night. Since we are most unwilling to know about the razor’s edge, this wisdom is not going to be presented on a platter to us; we have to earn it. But if we are patient our vision will become clearer and then we will see the jewel of that life, beginning to shine. Of course the jewel is always shining, but it is invisible to those who do not know how to see. To see, we must walk the razor’s edge. We protest, “No! No way! Forget it! It’s a nice title for a book, but I don’t want it in my life.” Is that true? I think not. Basically we do want peace and joy.

STUDENT: Please talk a little more about separation from life.

JOKO: Well, the minute there is a disagreement between ourselves and another person—and we think we’re right—we have separated ourselves. We’re over here and that nasty person is over there and he is “wrong.” When we think this way, we don’t have any interest in that person’s welfare. What we’re interested in is our welfare. So the seamless unity has been broken. For most of us, years of relentless practice are required before we abandon such thinking.

STUDENT: I see that upsets have to do with me not wanting to face what’s going on. But I guess I’m still not clear about why the upset is the separation from life.

JOKO: It isn’t separation if it is nonverbally experienced. But most of the time we refuse to do that. What is it we prefer to do? We prefer to think about our misery. “Why doesn’t he see it my way? Why is he so stupid?” Such thoughts are the separating factor.

STUDENT: Thoughts? Not the avoidance?

JOKO: The thoughts are the avoidance. We wouldn’t think if we weren’t trying to avoid the experience of fear.

STUDENT: You mean the thoughts cause the separation?

JOKO: Not if we are fully aware of the thoughts and know they are just thoughts. It’s when we believe them that the separation occurs. (“A tenth of an inch of difference and heaven and earth are set apart.”) There’s nothing wrong with the thoughts themselves, except when we don’t see their unreality.

STUDENT: Can we react without there being any thoughts?

JOKO: If we react, thoughts are occurring. They may not be obvious to us, but they are there. For instance, if you insult me I won’t react unless I have some thoughts about the insult. But when we begin to judge people as right and wrong we’ve separated ourselves; right and wrong are just thoughts and not the truth.

STUDENT: What you’re describing can sound like being very passive or being a doormat. Could you address that?

JOKO: No, it’s not about being passive at all. We can’t deal intelligently with the issues of life if we are stuck in our thoughts about them. We have to have a view that’s larger than that. Zen practice is about action, but we can’t take adequate action if we believe our thoughts about a situation. We have to see directly what a situation is. It’s always different than our thoughts about it. Can we take intelligent action without really seeing—not what we want to see or what would suit our comfort, but just what’s there? No, I’m definitely not talking about being passive and not taking action.

STUDENT: When I see people who are centered in what’s happening, they act much faster and better than I do. I noticed in the Mother Teresa film that she went right into a disaster area and started to work.

JOKO: Just doing. Just doing. She didn’t stop and ponder, “Should I do this?” She saw what had to be done and did it.

STUDENT: It seems a lot to expect of ourselves just to be on the razor’s edge, because our memories enter into each moment, what’s happened in our life.

JOKO: Memories are thoughts and nearly always selective and biased. We may completely forget the nice things our friend has done if there is one incident that we see as threatening. Practice does expect a great deal of us; but we are just living this moment; we don’t have to live 150,000 moments at once. We are only living one. That’s why I say, “What else do you have to do?—you might as well practice with each moment as not.”

STUDENT: Well, I think the razor’s edge is sort of a boring place. We usually take notice when we have a huge emotional outburst, but when we do the dishes, there’s not much to say. It’s just…

JOKO: Right. If we could just do what there is to be done in every second, there could be no problem; we would be walking the razor’s edge. But when we feel upset, then the razor’s edge seems alien to us because to experience upset is to experience unpleasant bodily sensations. Because they are unpleasant, we can’t see the upset as basically the same life as doing the dishes. Both are utter simplicity.

STUDENT: If we give up our belief in our thoughts, it seems scary—how would we know what to do?

JOKO: We always know what to do if we are in touch with life as it is.

STUDENT: For me the razor’s edge is the experiencing of what the moment is. As I continue practice I find more and more that the simple mundane things of life aren’t as boring to me as they once were. There is sometimes a depth and beauty that I was never aware of.

JOKO: That’s so. Once in a while a student comes in to talk with me, and she is sitting well but she complains, “It’s so boring! I’m just sitting and nothing’s going on. Just hearing the traffic…” But just hearing the traffic is the perfection! The student is asking, “You mean that’s all there is?” Yes, that is all there is. And none of us wants life to be “just that” because then life is not centered on us. It’s just as it is; there is no drama and we like drama. We prefer to “win” in an argument, but if we can’t win, we’d rather lose than not have a drama centered on us. Suzuki Roshi once said, “Don’t be so sure you want to be enlightened. From where you’re looking, it would be awfully dull.” Just doing what you’re doing. No drama.

STUDENT: Isn’t following the breath being on the razor’s edge?

JOKO: Indeed it is. I would probably prefer to say “experiencing the body and the breath.” And I want to add that, in following the breath, it is best not to try to control it (control is dualistic, me controlling something separate from myself), but just to experience the breath as it is: if it is tight, experience tightness; if it is rapid, experience that; if it is high in the chest, experience that. When the experiencing is steady, the breath will gradually become slow, long, and deep. If attachment to thoughts has markedly diminished, the body and breath will eventually relax and the breath will smooth out.

STUDENT: Why is it a bigger upset when the upset is with someone close to me?

JOKO: Because it’s more threatening. If the person who is selling me a pair of shoes announces, “I’m leaving you,” I don’t care, that’s all right with me; I’ll get somebody else to sell me a pair of shoes. But if my husband says, “I’m leaving you,” it’s not in the same ballpark at all.

STUDENT: Is that threat immediate or does it come from a reservoir of unresolved psychological material?

JOKO: Yes, there is a reservoir; but that reservoir is always held in our bodies as contraction in the present moment. When we experience the contraction or tension, we pull up our entire past. Where is our past? It’s right here. There is no past, apart from right now. The past is who we are at this moment. So when we experience that we take care of the past. We don’t have to know all about it.
But how does the razor’s edge relate to enlightenment? Anybody?

STUDENT: It is enlightenment.

JOKO: Yes it is. And none of us can walk it all the time, but our ability to do it vastly increases with years of practice. If it doesn’t then we’re not really practicing.

Let’s finish. But please maintain your awareness as much as you can in every moment of your life. And keep the question with you: right now, am I walking the razor’s edge?

Thoughts on “Modern Monetary Theory”

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This isn’t meant as any sort of argument or in-depth analysis, this is just me quickly and verbosely reflecting on what I’ve read in this “Part 1″ blog post on Modern Monetary Theory, informed slightly by ideas from David Graeber’s Anthro Theory of Value book.

Taken as a whole system, a society (or the planet) consists of people producing themselves, each other, and more people – because ultimately, human life is about living that life. We live because living is nice, and to live we have to eat, so we grow and prepare foods, create and design shelters, and then get on with the fun of living – sharing those things with each other, helping each other as needed, inventing drama to keep things interesting, relieving drama to give ourselves peace.

That’s the whole picture.

I’m uncomfortable with the division of “private” and “public” sector, but let’s work with it for a moment before approaching it too critically.

It seems to be that current human society has a couple of major divisions.

First off, the more day-to-day obvious one: we have roughly divided the production of “things” from the production of “people.” “Work” is where we produce things (and provide services that are easily commodifiable, but let’s not get carried away, let’s keep this simple). “Home” is where we produce people: make them, raise them, entertain them (hanging out with your friends is a sort of people-production activity, as the social back-and-forth is a socially productive activity, even in terms of reaffirming & reforming personalities, for example).

But both “work” and “home” are part of the same thing: the living of life. We need the “things” of Work in order to maintain the activities of Home. The only reason the “work” stuff exists is because we want to do and keep doing all the things we separate into the “home” category.

The other division, which contains the first, is between private & public. What is the “public sector?” well it seems to be the sum of things we set up to help regulate the dramas, the conflicts, and even just the flow of private life. “Legal sanctions” as opposed to diffuse sanctions, to use Barclay’s framework from People Without Government. It’s somewhat illusory, because the public sector is itself somewhat the “work” of people who are part of the whole society, and thus part of the whole hustle-and-bustle of life that we tend to associate with the “private” sector, but let’s remember even “private” and “work” and “home” are made up things, just rough guidelines for rough organization.

It helps in the living of life to be able to have an abstract representation of value. Money fulfills that. Its ultimate use is in the living of life; it serves no purpose on its own. In order to facilitate the living of life, people act, and seek the action of others; because money represents action in the abstract, people seek money – and they save some. Money is both stored human labor and potential human labor. It’s both, and “human labor” can be re-stated as “the living of life,” for what is it we do when we live but act in the service of future activity? Labor is activity. What we value is ultimately human activity – its effects, its promise.

Human activity is always both an end and a beginning. It is fueled, and it fuels. We burn as we create. Nevermind the physics of entropy, nevermind biological population limits and all the rest for now. Humans do tend to invent ways of overshooting and overcoming predicted limits, and yet entropy may slam us down one day – but right now neither matter, we’re just interested in social behavior reality and tendencies, not what that social behavior may one day run up against.

Human activity, i.e. value, i.e. money. We create it as we burn it.

Except some of it, we save, we stockpile. If it’s saved, it can’t be used until later. Anywhere money accumulates, it goes out of immediate service. It could be used one day, but it’s not being used in the current day-to-day of the system, so as far as that system is concerned, it’s disappeared. It must be assumed to have disappeared, because it may well never be used. Family lines may simply accumulate more and more, and the savings of others may be lost or forgotten and simply erode before it can be found and re-injected into the system of activity.

To repeat, the overall system of activity is working with a static pool of money, the “medium-of-activity.” It slowly leaks away into savings storage piles. Some of that re-enters the system, but…

Population increases! More people exist! People save more and more as nest-eggs, as hope-financers, as … for all the things we dream and all the emergencies that come up.

So there are always more people, and that pool of value, money, must service ever more people, activity, and dreams, even as it slowly leaks away.

So all the MMT people are saying is, in effect, “Money is a tool for measuring and storing human activity, for the more efficient expression of human activity. But the system that does that is constantly expanding, and storing away some of that tool, so there’s always less to go around. We can better keep the system going by injecting more of the tool!

Capitalism doesn’t create money. It does facilitate human activity to various degrees and various success, which shifts the existing money around. Some of that activity does facilitate the creation of new humans and the expression of greater human activity, but as for the money, it just gets shifted around.

The way liberal “democratic” republics are set up today, MMT people are saying it’s the job of government to inject more of the tool of money into society, or rather, to manage it and regulate it as a shared resource, which sometimes requires increasing its quantity and availability.

Thoughts Towards Jumping the Google Ship

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NOTE: This post rambles a bit in explaining why, and then ends with some tentative notes for switching away from Google (and other locked-in corporate “cloud”) services, but I haven’t done it yet. Time is limited.

I was late to the Google party. I seem to recall hearing about it in the late ’90s or early ’00s, but I didn’t catch on to the part where their search results were simply better than anyone else’s for a while. And then I dragged my feet on GMail, and their other products, for a few years, because I preferred to do most things myself. It’s supposed to be possible to do that on the Internet.

At some point I got tired of using Squirrelmail on Dreamhost (where damek.org lives) and went ahead and switched to Dreamhost’s Google Apps integration. Now my damek.org stuff is all Google, except for the web pages.

So for me it had to do with convenience. I got tired of fidgeting with things when everyone else was becoming more inter-operable with ease. Mail, Calendar, Chat, and Documents – it just belongs together.

But when Google dropped Google Reader, I’ve been reviewing those choices. And with this as probably the best explanation of what’s happened at Google, who did indeed seem like Technology Angels for almost a decade, I’m thinking a bit more like this and rethinking my use of Google’s tools.

The principles involved should be: do I still have my data if the service borks; can I still inter-operate with others reasonably well; can I still do most of what I can do now; is it difficult enough that it’ll give me a headache?

I already start out ahead because I have the damek.org site. I can run my own web apps on here if it comes down to it. But I’d rather avoid headaches if I can, so services other people run would be preferred.

Dropbox is an ideal example. All they do is file syncing. There are alternatives, like Skydrive and Owncloud and of couse GDocs GDrive. But Dropbox is fine for me, and I retain my data because it’s always got a copy on my computer. And there’s an app for my phone.

Email is pretty easy because it’s been around forever and there are plenty of standards. Paid solutions like Fastmail, or roll-your-own like Roundcube or even going back to Squirrelmail on Dreamhost – all would work fine.

Everything else is more difficult, but possible.

Here’s the thing: email begain in the dark ages of the Internet, when—get this—to preserve the ability of everyone doing their own thing, everyone agreed on standard protocols. OK, a lot of the time these things grew or evolved, and out of splintered environments, but the point is that email has standard protocols and that’s why everyone can talk to everyone else regardless of where you are or what you want to use.

Calendaring has a sort of standard in ical, and things like CalDAV for sharing calendar data.

Contacts have a sort of standard in vcard and things like CardDAV for sharing data, but perhaps less so than with calendars, and it’s certainly not “social.”

For things to be social, the systems basically have to know more about everyone else than you want them to know about you, and you relegate all the work of “identity” and “recognition” to machines.

I mean, we can all be plenty social with just our email, but our brains need to do more of the processing of who is who, what to pay attention to, etc.

But I digress.

The point is just that, it’s starting to feel like time to jump ship from Google, but with that, from services like Twitter and Facebook. They’re more concerned with advertising to me and paying their shareholders, ultimately, and it’s important we never forget that.

If I leave them, how will I communicate with others? Well I *still* sometimes “tweet” at my close friends via email. And send them emails to schedule things I then put on my own calendar. And send them emails to share photos. And send them emails to share contact info. Heck, sometimes I send emails as if I’m Instant Messaging.

So really, there isn’t necessarily a problem with curmudgeoning oneself, other than potentially not being part of this giant discussion everyone else is having.

Well, there are already nascent open-source “social networking” standards. Perhaps one day there will be something like what I thought Google Wave would be: a protocol for distributed social networking. I now see that Google would never do that. It’d mean less advertising for them, not more. And these days they and everyone else care more about you being +2 eyeballs to their system than being of +1 service to humanity.

Notes on Tools for Transitioning:

GMAIL –> Roundmail or Fastmail. Fastmail requires no maintenance, but costs money, and has no calendar ability. Roundmail has plugins available for calendaring and contacts, but that stuff can also be done separately, perhaps better.

GTALK –> jabber. easy peasy. As long as Google hasn’t killed non-GTalk jabber federation…?

GCAL –> Some sort of CalDAV solution for phone syncing. This doesn’t need to integrate with the email solution, I barely take advantage of GCal’s integration with other people’s accounts anyway. But it shouldn’t be some other web-based service that requires its own apps. Owncloud has a calendar feature, but might be overkill, and there are calendar plugins for Roundmail…

CONTACTS –> some sort of CardDAV solution for phone syncing?

GDOCS –> i’m less concerned about this. I can’t quite get away from it, and if i remember to keep my important stuff copied OFFLINE i’ll be fine.

FEEDLY –> as long as I can export OPML, this serves my purpose. There isn’t really “data” that I need here, and rolling my own probably won’t solve anything.

DROPBOX –> just fine

GSEARCH –> might be time to start using duckduckgo

CHROME –> Firefox, or the open source Chromium branch of Chrome that doesn’t track me. On my phone, Dolphin Browser or Firefox?

FACEBOOK –> ??

G+ –> HAHAHAHAHAHA

TWITTER –> ??