Fixing the system (or how we need limited liability for private households too)

 capitalism, financial crisis, financial deficit, innovation, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, sorted, system  No Responses »
Apr 192012
 
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Limited liability has clearly driven capitalism’s glittering history of innovation.  It has allowed imaginative entrepreneurs to take reasonable but not excessive risks with their own livelihoods to the benefit of technological progress.

But, in times of severe economic crisis when these things truly begin to tell, it has also created an awkward imbalance between the rights and responsibilities of corporate and limited liability organisations on the one hand and ordinary real-life human beings on the other.

Much of current anger at the system we have is directed at those organisations which – in an absolutely worst-case scenario – lose only their honour, not their shirts.  Meanwhile, for the rest of us out here, enforced upper-torso nakedness is but one reminder of other 20th century unhappinesses.

The undercurrents of feudalism in our society become terribly apparent in such times of community distress.

What to do then?  What to do?

I just saw a tweet about a North East of England police force’s terrorist unit picking up on some sort of racist hate crime and bringing in five men alleged to be responsible.  And it made me think in the following way: “Ah, you see; maybe the police aren’t just there to repress.”

A small act of counter-narrative in the massive overloaded narrative arc of our current oppressive state.

Problem is, there’s plenty of evidence of a casual instinct to the latter.  As I tweeted earlier:

No point in making reasonable suggestions to tinker with Coalition policy. Any reasons will never be bigger than aim of simply making money.

But back to the counter-narrative.  If we truly wish to rebalance the system, and it’s essentially unreasonable to take away from the business world all the obvious advantages of limited liability, why not instead propose establishing a system where housing, minimum living standards and access to basic utilities can never be removed from absolutely anyone?  That is to say, a system of limited liability for real-life human beings and their households.

Once established the principle for eternal corporate bodies, why not for the flesh and blood creatures that populate the planet?

In fact, couched in such terms, you really never know, it’s possible we’d even acquire a useful yardstick to help reconfigure our welfare system.

“So how would we pay for it?” I hear you ask.  And I’d knock that one back at you: “How have we managed to fund limited liability for medium-sized and large business operations for at least the past century – maybe longer?”

Surely the answer lies in the oft broken-backed flesh and blood creatures I’ve already mentioned above.

Time, then, to repay that debt so easily acquired?

Where there’s a way, all you really need is the desire to squirrel out that will.


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On innovation in politics (or Cameron & Co’s considerable downfall)

 David Cameron, in a hole, innovation, political innovation, Steve Jobs, Tech Dirt, www.politicalinnovation.org  No Responses »
Oct 232011
 
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This is pretty interesting on the subject of Steve Jobs and Apple:

And that’s kind of the point: part of the way innovation works is that you build on the works of others. That doesn’t just mean wholesale copying, but trying to take what works and improve on it — or take what doesn’t work well and figure out a way to make it work better. Steve Jobs did this many, many times, but so have Google and many other companies. It seems rather hypocritical to get all bent out of shape because others are doing the same thing.

Bent out of shape?  In what way?  Well, what’s to follow.  Steve Jobs apparently going ballmeristic:

In Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs,” a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post, the author recalls that Jobs, who was known for his fierce temper, “became angrier than I had ever seen him” during a conversation about Apple’s patent lawsuit, which by extension also accused Android of patent infringement.

“Our lawsuit is saying, ‘Google you f***ing ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off,’” Jobs said, according to Isaacson. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.”

Now I much prefer Tech Dirt’s take on the subject to hand – that is to say, the first quote above – to Steve Job’s alleged reaction as quoted in the second.  And I wonder if something of the latter’s unhappiness hasn’t been dogging our politics for far too long.

The proprietorial instincts which modern politicians show over the only moderate gulfs which serve to separate them can hardly lead to political parties being able to usefully build and improve on another’s foundations.  I always wondered – before, that is, they half-came to power – whether Cameron’s Tories were going to be clever enough to inflict on New Labour’s successors that body blow they could’ve applied, if only they’d realised that to preserve the best of Blair’s time in power would’ve given them their time to do their very worst in the areas they really cared about.

A bit of simple political prioritisation.

But no, dear reader.  They haven’t been clever at all.  Thankfully, I suppose we should say.  Instead of continuing to pick off and take apart small regions of British political activity, as Hitler started out doing with Austria and Poland, the hubris which leads to a desire to conquer all has overwhelmed them from the start.  They have opened up fronts on all sorts of sides – and rather than using the wheel to roll over the peasants, they’ve sought to reinvent the blessed device from scratch.  They could’ve kept the Russias of this world completely onside.  But now, instead of shifty allies, they have everyone lining up graphically to oppose.

Their vision of political innovation, then, is about as unworldly as it can get.  No business model, nor businessperson worth their salt, would ever consider starting so categorically from zero.

Yet these lot think it can be done.

They think they are the Steve Jobs of political endeavour – where even Steve Jobs wouldn’t have considered such an approach.

True innovation requires that somewhere in your being a degree of humility must coexist with ego.

David Cameron & Co don’t have that humility in the least.

And it will, one day, sooner than they think, prove to be their considerable downfall.


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Innovation = youth, outsiders and the currently uninvited (or how opportunity knocks for the UK)

 Creative Commons, in a hole, innovation, Lawrence Lessig, on a high, Paul Evans, political innovation  No Responses »
May 302011
 
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Paul draws my attention to the following video from Lawrence Lessig, published recently on Vimeo.  Well worth watching.  It’s a brief ten-minute run through on the subject of what kind of governance the Internet deserves.


Keynote – e-G8 from lessig on Vimeo.

I’m interested by Paul’s resistance to the thesis of the video though.  I’m not sure it’s a misunderstanding of what Lessig is proposing but, rather, perhaps a result of Lessig’s broad-ranging approach to the virtual and offline worlds we now inhabit.  If I understand correctly what Paul is worried about (and please do correct me if I am wrong), he feels that Lessig’s experience of American politics has led him to believe in some kind of libertarian minimalist government – not only for the Internet and innovation more widely but also, even more broadly, society itself.

I’m not sure that Lessig is proposing exactly this: I can see, however, why such a conclusion might easily be perceived.

Let me start off by saying I’ve never seen Lessig as a careless and happy-go-lucky libertarian – though he may be.  He has, for me, always clearly believed in structure – his “code is [now] law” meme about as clear an indicator of that as anything he has ever come up with:


Code is Law: Does Anyone Get This Yet? from lessig on Vimeo.

He also clearly believes in copyright as a definer and protector of creative output – to such an extent that he spent an important part of his early career battling the excesses of the content industry, and then set up and implemented the wonderful Creative Commons.

So I think to define him loosely as a libertarian is to misunderstood the nature of the dichotomy between the offline and online worlds we currently inhabit – and the stresses and strains in all areas of life which this disjunction is beginning to generate.  Which is why I think Lessig is right about the Internet and innovation – less governance is more real freedom (whether these freedoms be considered negative or positive).  And why, possibly, in a world where the Internet revolution might be able to properly take flight, we wouldn’t even deserve so much government interference as we currently endure.

I say endure because, as Lessig points out, government – both in the States and here in Europe – seems to act in favour of vested interests (the “incumbents” Lessig describes) rather more frequently than it does on behalf of the ordinary folk who populate this planet.

The latter being the innovators, in fact – the young, the immigrants, the dropouts; all those uninvited who don’t care to attend official forums or engage in “listening” exercises designed by top politicians to rubber-stamp their prejudices.  (And to this list we could, of course, quite easily add the dispossessed and poor who live at the bottom of the social pile.)

Innovation, however, has two sides to it under current copyright law: on the one hand, that genuine progress engineered by bright and diverse individuals capable of setting our worlds alight; on the other hand, that retrograde dead-hand imposed by those large overhead-heavy companies capable only of churning out for the masses (but never then managing to properly develop) all those truly original ideas they voraciously buy in – though sometimes, sadly, not even that.

When Paul says …

Surely the answer is less this opportunistic call for minimalism (amazing how often the richest 0.1% of the world population get to make this demand) and more for the use of this hive mind to fix the quality of representative democracy to ensure that these ‘incumbents’ can’t unduly distort public policy?

… I do then wonder if the real battle ahead isn’t between the incumbents (corporations, legislators, senators, congresspeople and MPs) who are trying evermore fiercely to remake the Internet in their own offline images – clearly and verily for their own peace of mind and benefit – and the user-producers (that is to say, you, me, your auntie and anyone else you communicate with) who spend most of their offline lives interacting with an effervescent and difficult to structure online environment.

Difficult to structure, that is, with the law books of old.  Easily, and already, structured with the software code we now live our lives inside – a code which is rapidly becoming our latterday, and de facto, constitution.

For countries with no traditional written constitution, then, this is most definitely an opportunity.  For the UK, more than any other.  It’s like all those developing countries which ignored cheques as a payment system and jumped straight to credit cards.  Or never suffered the misery of dial-up but leapt up to superfast broadband.

If only we knew how to grasp this opportunity constructively and with intelligence.

Any ideas anyone?

Minimalist government perhaps, as a lesser evil – as, indeed, Lessig does in some way seem to want to suggest?

Or is it time, perhaps, not to ask for minimalist government all round but – rather – define, structure and implement a virtual parliament entirely dedicated to software code and its implications on societal mores?

That is to say, not less government exactly but – instead – a fundamental shift in the way we legislate for the 21st century.

For we can’t stop innovation.  We can, however, choose either to mother it – or smother it.  And that, I would suggest, is the fork in the road we currently find ourselves uncertainly, maybe even nervously, at.


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More arguments against paywalls, copyright abuse and public domain exclusion: "So why did Germany outpace the British Empire?"

 British Empire, copyright madness, Germany, innovation, invention, on a high, paywalls, sorted  No Responses »
Aug 242010
 
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There’s a fascinating retweet from Paul Evans here:

Paul0Evans1RT @AlbertoNardelli: RT @tweetminster: “Did Weak Copyright Laws Help Germany Outpace The British Empire?” http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/copyright-germany-britain/ <- interesting POV.

The Wired article in question is well worth reading.  I suppose my only comment would be that I would far rather that something along the lines of “environment conducive to invention and innovation” be used to describe the thesis instead of the culturally loaded and corporately brainwashed “weak copyright laws”.

Copyright is not a question of weakness or strength but adequacy to its function and place in the chain of thought processes that make up and foment a technological civilisation.  Meanwhile, and quite incidentally, it does also occur to me that if Germany outpaced the British Empire because its population was flooded with intelligent thought, what better argument do we need to combat the insidious growth of paywalls than this?  Over the past decade, we have fashioned and acquired a porous and osmotic web of communication and social intercourse.  We deserve no less than this for the next ten years.

One simple exhortation only before I finish this post: please, please, please let us not couch the debate in terms of a greater or lesser exertion of power.  Big copyright owners would have you believe theirs are inalienable rights which require the weight of heavy fines and prison sentences to back up such inalienability. But this is simply not so.  Inalienable rights are things like roofs over people’s heads, water, a job, education and access to healthcare.

Most certainly, however, there is nothing inalienable about the act of taking public domain stories such as “A Christmas Carol”, “Snow White” or “Beauty and the Beast”, making millions of dollars out of their retelling and then refusing to return content to and re-enrich in turn the common store of human thought that is the glory of this domain.

If I have already criticised latterday capitalism for its inefficiency in administering and circulating wealth around a shared economy by sanctioning a concentration of such wealth to the clear detriment of its maximisation, it is equally true that the fundamental legacy industrial art such as cinema, TV and popular music has had on the 21st century is the massively gaping 20th century hole in shareable and retellable art that should now be in our hands but is not.

Just think about it.  Charles Dickens, an original artist if there ever was one, has had his work retold and republished more times than anyone alive has had hot dinners.  Yet when was the last time you saw a re-interpretation of Mickey Mouse that didn’t include either a payment of cash cow rights or – more likely – a lawyer’s injunction?

Just think about it and ask yourself: where is the natural justice in that?


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On the subject of "crazy entrepreneurs"

 entrepreneurs, Eric Schmidt, Europe, Google, innovation, invention, on a high  No Responses »
Jun 302010
 
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Here’s an interesting article on the subject of “crazy entrepreneurs”.  Though I agree with most of it, I strongly take issue with the simplistic approach enshrined in the following threadbare soundbite:

“Jobs are created by the private sector not by the public sector. Wealth is created by the private sector not by the public sector.  [...]“

In truth, the situation is far more complex than this, as today’s news in the Guardian indicates:

Unpublished estimates of the impact of the biggest squeeze on public spending since the second world war show that the government is expecting between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs to go in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 to disappear in the private sector by 2015.

The close relationship between public and private which New Labour’s period in government exemplifies gives at least a partial lie to the notions expressed by Google’s Eric Schmidt.  Working in an intelligent partnership with those who know not only how to invent but also how to innovate, clever governments can do far more for a wider populace than the restricting matrix of venture capitalists and budding Edisons may ever hope to achieve.  We need the brilliantly oddball, that is true – but we also need to be clear that what drives them most is not money but opportunity.  And, on a 21st century planet where everyone’s fate is now clearly common, we can no longer take a granular approach to innovation.  Every iPod which is manufactured and sold and serves to add value for Apple obviously has its downsides – downsides which end up affecting us all.

The innovators, like our physicians before them, need a moral framework and culture before we can allow them the freedoms that Schmidt is understandably arguing on behalf of.  Otherwise, they will continue to create at the longer-term expense of future generations.

This is no longer justifiable.

This is no longer enough.

Freedom with responsibility.  Even the crazy can understand that equation.


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