Surviving the Culture Wars

From elearnspace:

Adhering to the motto “a provocative title will surely increase readership”, Atlantic has an interesting article on How the Crash Will Reshape America:

Economic crises tend to reinforce and accelerate the underlying, long-term trends within an economy. Our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation—similar to that of the late 19th century, when people streamed off farms and into new and rising industrial cities. In this case, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries—and that, too, favors America’s talent-rich, fast-metabolizing places.

With that in mind, watch the following video:
Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 - Constructive Capitalism


I have a postulate for a module to add to the model that Umair Haque presents:
I postulate that in contrast to the traditional economic definition, goods and services are, in fact, the same thing.
I think that over the last few decades as our economy has shifted from goods-based to service-based, we are debunking a powerful myth.

Goods are services.

Now, before you object, consider this: Let's say I'm a car manufacturer, making Hummers. Now the 20th century capitalism says that a car is a product. I say, the production of that car is a service. A service with environmental impacts that are overlooked if the car is treated as a product. If the car is a product, then the manufacturer forgoes all responsibility the moment that car is purchased. From that point, it's the consumer's choice how to use the vehicle, and the manufacturer cannot be held accountable for the environmental consequences.

In today's economy, car sales have fallen off a cliff, while repair shops are overflowing with work. The car isn't a good, and the maintenance of the car is a sustainable service-based business model. In the following video, Shai Agassi makes the same point about paying for services and not for products-- like with cell phones.


I think this makes a lot of sense for open content, too-- like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is in the upper right quadrant of one of Umair Haque's graphs, as simultaneously disintegrating both property rights and governance. This is the real emergence of collective intelligence, and we are indeed on the cusp of a revolution. The social media revolution and the capitalistic depression are catalyzing this social capital revolution.

Those that thrive in the hybrid economy recognize that services outweigh goods. Google provides a search service. Companies that profit from the Internet are its service providers. Most web servers run Linux. Let this be the first lesson then:

Pay for services, not for software.

This is the unofficial motto of companies like Red Hat, as described in "The Commons: Celebrating Accomplishments, Discerning Futures" (about 36 minutes in.) What servers do Google, YouTube, Facebook, and every other successful web company run on? You guessed it, Linux.