This post is about cooperatives – even though it may not immediately appear to be the case.  Bear with me, though, and all will shortly be revealed.

Président Camembert comes in a beautiful wooden box.  As you can plainly see, its design harks back (or perhaps we should now say forwards) to a different world from the world we live in: the latter being a world which has accustomed us to the cheap and cheerful output of whopping great factories.

We see on the front of the box, nestling down at the bottom, a friendly little village – the sort we would all love to end up living in.  Not a whopping great factory in sight, mind.

Nor is there anything cheap and cheerful about Président cheeses – except when our local supermarket puts them on offer.  Then is when I eat them quite often – though, like Guinness and Ireland perhaps, they always seem better in France than they do over here.

So they’re not expensive and they’re not at all bad – yet along the way, I would still argue, something has been lost.  Perhaps not in the taste, perhaps not in the presentation.  Maybe not in the end result – maybe it’s got more to do with our perception of process.  For – I’m sure you’d agree – something so very true and life-enriching in all of these corporate products has gone visibly missing, and the proof of this something is in the marketing strategies that so many companies are beginning to use.  The video that follows is an example of such a strategy.  It uses a hand-held camera and soft lighting to such an extent that not having seen it on TV, I actually wonder if it’s an advert made for the company in question or – instead – a gentle take-off by some admiring consumer.

The question, then, that I really ask myself is as follows: if big companies, in their droves, find it necessary to refer back to a different age – an age of small and local and real and familiar – then why cannot they act on that need and reconstruct their business structures accordingly, so that they may align themselves with what people really seem to want, which they themselves have determined people yearn after, rather than schizophrenically detach their outer selves from their inner truths?

You think I ask a foolish question perhaps.  A rhetorical question maybe.  An impossible question even.  Well, no.  Via Twitter, as so often happens these days, the following link came my way:

Google was started in a garage in 1998. It now has a market capitalisation of $173 billion. It is one of a number of companies of comparable size – Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Cisco – who are leading an information and communications revolution which is redrawing the economic landscape. This is the necessary starting point for a review of the future of co-operation.

As this introduction to a massive new cooperative project goes on to point out:

The informal information economy is open and global. It is driven by interest and enthusiasm rather than money. The bulk of its traffic is free. It is taking time to digest the implications of these changes, and for those involved to work out what rules are necessary to govern behaviour. Some have seen it as a new form of the commons, and looked at codes of behaviour that have been developed by those using common land or fishing grounds. But this informal economy is more than sharing a common resource, for with the web the resource is unlimited. It is merely a site for relationships, and where joint projects are involved, it requires the kind of qualities found in those pioneer communities where everyone worked together to raise the roof of a home.

It is nothing other than a co-operative economy that is now growing with the speed and diversity of a tropical forest. It is informal and astonishingly inventive. It shares many of the same values and practices of formal co-operatives, and opens up numerous possibilities for a meshing between them. William Morris’s News from Nowhere depicted a world based on mutualism that for more than a century was seen as utopian. But in the last decade it has emerged as a reality not on the banks of the Thames but in the world of the web.

It also underlines that:

Previous technological changes of this magnitude were about material production – textile mills, railways, steel and Ford’s mass production factories. The information and communications revolution is different. It has created a virtual economy that sits in cyberspace above the material economy of goods and services. It is connected by airwaves and spectrums rather than roads and railways. It sends messages by satellite and ethernets, and uses cloud computing. Like the sky its horizons seem to stretch to infinity.

But its impact is only too material. Traditional industries are finding their foundations dissolving – music, broadcasting, the press, publishing, postal services, travel agents, branches of retailing all face a receding economic tide. Others are expanding in their place. Design, data processing, scientific research, software and computer systems, management and technical consultancy, education, artists and a host of maintenance and support services – these top the list of most rapidly growing sectors.

The traditional pillars of the 20th century economy – the great centralised corporations and welfare administrations – are far from finished. But they are being hollowed out, bypassed, or if they are banks, have to be publicly propped up in order to survive. What at once felt solid is being remoulded. Which forms will become dominant is not yet clear. Their emergence is contested. There are alternative paths of development and how they are organised. I refer to this as a second industrial divide.

This is, I’m sure you’ll agree, awe-inspiring stuff.  A nexus of communication which, almost despite itself, has already created so many products and services that we exchange at the level of individuals, rather than buy or sell in singularly overpowering quantities, and that is ripe for decent and sincere business models to be applied to its functioning – thus making, from what many have judged to be entirely unsustainable relationships, firmer futures for all those of us who would like to eke a better living out of what is clearly a marvellously expansive and opportunity-filled virtual landscape.

For in the future of cooperation lies another opportunity we may grasp: to turn the outer selves of our existing structures – those real and familiar places our big companies insist we not only yearn for but are also superficially regaled with over and over again – into the inner realities of new structures.  If, via the web and its mutualist instincts, we could somehow square the circle of those friendly little villages that are currently outperformed by all those whopping great Camembert factories … without traumas, without victors or losers, with simply an all-encompassing change in political and socio-economic instincts … well, it would be quite another world, wouldn’t it?

Quite another world indeed.

And then a friendly little village nestling at the bottom of a wooden box would represent an honest reality of undeniable strength and vigour.

Now wouldn’t you prefer to work for a community of interests such as the one I have outlined above?