[p2p-research] Funding an Ecosystem Prototype (was: User Freedom and the Purpose of Profit)

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/12/10, Patrick Anderson <agnucius at gmail.com> wrote:
> Kevin Carson wrote:
>  > To me the problem with this whole system is that the owner of
>  > resources seems to get very little out of agreeing to license his
>  > enterprise under such rules
>
>  This is similar to the one of the reasons a computer programmer would
>  choose to license the results of his labor under the GNU GPL.

Thanks for the clarification.  There would certainly be advantages to
having a fairly secure customer base in the user community.

>  > aside from a lot of extra administrative
>  > hoops to jump through.
>
>  Yes, the way I describe it seems nit-picking.  I was trying to be
>  exact in my explanation, but we could lighten-up on the precision to
>  begin such ecosystems in prototype .

>  We could loosen in our implementations by investing only a small % of
>  the Profit for the Payer while paying-out the rest to various
>  participants, including the traditional VC investors and of course the
>  Workers.

>  This could allow us to begin as a hybrid corporation similar to what
>  Suresh and others are working toward.

I can also see the appeal of expanding an enterprise into a
stakeholder coop, from the standpoint of a beleaguered and indebted
small businessman who trades the vagaries of enterpreneurial profit
for a steady supervisory wage, in return for some guarantee of
amortizing his debts and capital outlays.

OTOH, for those not already so saddled, I can see the attraction of
entering the field with low-capital and low-overhead methods that
don't carry a high burden of debt or risk, and taking a chance on
recouping all the short-term entrepreneurial profit.

>  > The owner's prices would be driven down
>  > to production cost through the automatic function of the market,
>  > without a lot of paperwork and administrative complications.
>
>  One thing I've noticed about even pure* Capitalism is that it always
>  requires more than one Physical Source to bring Profit down.  And even
>  then there is Profit hidden in high wages and other requirements.
>
>  But even if the Prices were identical in both systems, there would
>  still be the problem that I, as end user, do not have dominion over
>  those Physical Sources - and so cannot do the work myself and do not
>  have much of a say over things except to beg those owners.

Sure.  But as someone who works for a wage, I can see a problem from
the opposite direction.  Dominion over production, through getting to
play "King for a day" as consumer when you buy something, rings pretty
hollow when you have to go back to being a serf every time you punch
that time clock.  And most of us spend a lot more of our waking hours
working on somebody's clock than we do buying stuff.  I would still
argue that the main source of disempowerment for the consumer is legal
barriers to competition in meeting the needs of end users.  Most of
the stuff consumers object to in product design results from
proprietary design.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html