Surviving the Culture Wars

The talks I attended were stellar. The conversations I had on the expo floor were powerful. SCaLE 7x was, in fact, the best weekend of my life. I got to hang around with Jono Bacon, among others. Expect lots of revisions to this post, mostly expansions particular talks.

The best:
Stormy Peters - Companies & Communities (read)
John Todd - Open Source in an Economic Downturn (it wins)
Ross Turk - Open Source Business for Hackers (watch):


The day after SCaLE ended I got to have a conference call with Jamie Boyle and Joi Ito, the Chairman of the Board and CEO, respectively, of Creative Commons. You can listen to the call here:

At about 34 minutes in, in the middle of one of my questions, you can hear a car peel out. I was mortified by embarrassment, but in retrospect it's hilarious. I was calling from a park in Boyle Heights, a physical commons, since I needed a space to listen to the call and take notes away from middle-school kids. As it started to rain, I had to take shelter under a tree with some construction workers from a project nearby while they were cooking some tacos for their lunch break. As it lightened up a bit, they offered me one. Too glued to all of Jamie's words, I didn't want to take any time away from the call. "In a bit," I said. Half an hour later, the call was over and the workers had left, with one taco left on the grill for me. I learned an amazing lesson about community, and it's hard to articulate completely. Here's how I usually think it: "We're all in this together." Our commons are something we all intuitively understand, through our basic understanding of each other's basic human needs and those needs of our common planet, we can also intuitively understand what needs to be done. All that is left to do, is to do it. With that, I give the Legacy of Lessig:

It is more or less a combination of all his talks up until now, and even still in a modern context.

P.S. I might be busy as I have some internships to apply to.

P.P.S. At the end of the call Joi mentions rebranding? I thought this was good:

And this is even older:

I guess digital natives like myself are biased. True enough, the possible brand confusion with closed captioning must be rectified.

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.

I will blog for two people, myself and you. As for myself, I will try to navigate the ethical contradictions in which I grew up, with an eye on the future of these ideas. As for you, you are interested in the ways to make money using free stuff.

I will blog to the target demographic which I believe has the highest demand but the smallest supply: open business models--how to make money with Creative Commons. The 'hybrid economy' is the strength of Joi Ito's talk at DLD (one of the Seven Movies of Destiny listed at the bottom of the page), and it is the subject of the following one:

Michael Masnick @ midem 2009 - NIN case study video: Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy


Then again, why try to guess at the NIN business model when Trent Reznor is perfectly transparent about it in a more recent video: