Las Indias in English

las Indias Cooperative Group

Bitácora de las Indias

  1. Why you should flee the job market forever

    15 May 2013

    1

    Let’s be honest. For you, someone who’s not among the new “hijos d’algo” of globalization, for your whole generation, what’s coming is a horror. Socially and personally. And there’s no sense hoping “it will all just blow over.”

    It’s not just the crisis and it’s not just Europe: trend analysis of unemployment among youth worldwide speaks of a deeper change. And that’s just one of a number of symptoms that are beginning to alarm Institutions like the IMF, which highlights the growing percentage of temp work in developed countries.

    ShareableBecause if unemployment comes together with temp work, what we’re seeing is not temporary, it’s a process of dualization. Generational dualization: the children compensate, through salary reductions and temp contracts, the costs of firing the parents. Additionally, it’s sectoral dualization: services compensate through price for the inefficiencies of the surviving obsolete industries.

    Result: jobs with higher qualifications and productivity become lower-paid than industrial jobs, overqualified children make less than their parents for the same work, the discontinuity in employment raises the retirement age, and the new home with adult children and even grandchildren, becomes the major investment of the family unit.

    The hunger for home ownership is awakened and becomes an intergenerational cause: renting is dangerous when you can’t make long-term plans, so entry and part of the transition costs are borne by the parents. Mommy will fill the fridge with food in Tupperware on Mondays.

    It has to do with the same causal thread that ties the industrial reconversion of the ’80s in Spain and Italy with the housing bubble of the ’90s and on. That’s why the professional and personal logjam of young college graduates in the US seems so familiar, so close to us. We lived it. And it brought us here.

    And if we look at it from the point of view of businesses, the picture is completed. On the one hand, you have social expenses: workers negotiate their salaries for what they make, but what the business pays is almost a third more. It’s a classic bargaining model. On the other hand, signaling mechanisms are broken, university degrees don’t indicate people’s capacities, even they themselves don’t seem able to do it in many cases… and yet, ever more ITC businesses understand the necessity of of understanding interrelationships, and that their costliest move is hiring the wrong person. And it’s not even because of the severance pay, but, above all, because in a world with dissipation of rents, a step backwards means a lot in opportunity costs. And this is all the more true, the smaller your scale, because when “people” doesn’t mean a universalist and abstract aggregate reducible to statistics, but rather a group of real names, a real community, a person, the geometry of the conversation changes.

    Result: when you have a market that’s increasingly temporary, with people who are better-trained, and — as such, we assume — more versatile, but with higher transaction costs, businesses will necessarily appear who see a market for mediating and assuming part of these costs as a financial risk. In the ’90s, it was temp agencies. Today, it’s freelancer agencies.

    So…?

    Let’s be honest. For you, someone who’s not among the new “hijos d’algo” of globalization, for your whole generation, what’s coming is a horror. Socially and personally. And there’s no sense hoping “it will all just blow over.” Doing that, and deciding to “weather the storm” in hopes of better times, can only offer the worst of industrial life: being reduced to a piece in the process, absence of conversation, and underestimation of talent. And while, in the past, that could be compensated for with a certain fantasy of security, in the future, we foresee only temp work, lack of meaning, and absence of and sort of professional career.

    And it’s no small thing that the new temp agencies are for freelancers. The job market is over. The future is small-scale and free-knowledge-intensive. It’s not a fantasy or a utopia: giants like Disney, General Electric, Top Office, and even the Chinese government are reorganizing and investigating to adapt their strategies and products while hundreds of SMEs in Asia struggle to stay one step ahead.

    Are you going to keep looking for work, hoping for an opportunity from those who have shown themselves to be irresponsible? Take command. Look elsewhere. Put your head in a different place. Even if it’s not the most comfortable.

    A place where capital and market mean very different things from what they meant in the old companies. At small scales, where scope is key, the word “person” is no longer a empty, generic abstraction in corporate-speak that can be reduced to statistics and results; people are names, peers, friends you don’t manage, but rather hold conversations with and build with from and for a different definition of security, and above all, of success.

    Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

  2. “Culture”: a user’s guide

    11 Apr 2013

    2

    What is national culture, really, and how should it be understood when it’s time to travel and deal with people “from outside?”

    puerosetvexiliosWhile the word “people” is in ever-greater danger of sliding, the word “culture” was born in a dangerous place, because, in spite of how it might appear, it’s very much a political term, a concept formed and created in the bosom of German romantic nationalism. It carries such amibiguity that Gustavo Bueno, a notable archaeologist of concepts, ended up exclaiming that

    No one understands what Culture is, as no one understood in the days of yesteryear what the Grace of God was. Culture is a myth, and an obscurantist myth, as was the myth of Grace in the Middle Ages or as was the “twentieth-century myth,” the myth of Race, in the first half of that century. In a certain way, it could be said that the myth of Culture incorporates, additionally, through the nationalisms of the end of the century, many of the functions that the myth of Race performed until the end of World War II.

    What Bueno is telling us in his book on the topic is that culture, once it ceases to mean the “cultivation” of knowledge itself and begins to refer, as Herder says, to who-knows-what characteristic of “people,” it can’t be anything other than national culture, and as such, the product and central object of the “Culture State,” which is the nation-state.

    In reality, if we develop the idea, understanding why it emerged and expaxded in the nineteenth century, national culture operates as a playpen more than as an identity. That is, it’s not that we have a culture for some mysterious reason, and so we need a state to protect it, it’s that the State needs to instill an exclusive culture in us to be able to present itself as the expression of our identity. That’s why, in fact, as we wrote in “From Nations to Networks“:

    National culture is nothing more than the collection of social and media imaginings that live in a permanent exception to national reality, an exception that waterproofs it against interaction with foreigners (by definition, aliens), and at the same time, destroys the meaning of nationals outside of the national territory (if everything that addresses this reality is exceptional and has local causes, how much I know and what I think has no validity outside). The national is an orphan, or an autistic person who has difficulty creating meaning outside of the relationship with their State-territory-nation. That’s why nation-States give themselves a folklore of national animals that die if they cross the State border, from the Puerto Rican coqui to the Iberian lynx, a Disneyfied model of the main national virtue, not being able to exist outside of the borders of the State and its imagination.

    That’s why culture and its constituent role will be the tool that allows the State to subsume all conflicts in the bosom of the nation, which is to say, to assure its survival independent of the nature of the political, economic, and social conflicts and antagonisms of the times, restricting them as much as possible to the forms and figures of its own administrative management.

    That is to say, the nation-state will make its cultural/identity policy a secular version of the medieval empire of faith and its control of heresy.

    And what does that mean when I deal with “outsiders?”

    The State, the media, and education are creators of national culture. And although some people understand that it constitutes them, in reality, they are only the ones who choose to be constituted by it. As Foucault describes, from its origins, “biopolitics,” the conditioning that the State and large-scale organizations subject people to, works “statistically,” which is to say, it is a constraint, but not determinant, on each one. And it also varies over time as a function of different capacities and crises. This is something that is accentuated with decomposition.

    So, “cultural studies” and trend reports are useless to me?

    Statistical matters must be understood statistically, which often means that, concretely,they contribute little. National culture operates as a context that delimits what’s acceptable, but it doesn’t tell us anything at all about the person or the real community in front of us… which is what matters to us. It doesn’t do me much good to know that roast beef is traditional and even part of national identity in Uruguay, and txuletón in Biscay, if I don’t know it the person I’m dealing with is a vegetarian. I can have good statistics on the most widespread values in China, but in reality, the family business culture of a concrete businessperson probably has nothing to do with them.

    What makes sense, then? Studying ideological frameworks, the evolution of consumption patterns, the evolution of social archetypes… and understand them as a framework, as a changing space, not as the result of “nature” or an “immanent spirit.”

    Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

  3. “People”: a user’s guide

    11 Apr 2013

    2

    Words like “P2P” or “people” become dangerous if we allow them to be used ambiguously. Not because it’s destructive per se for their meanings to evolve, even to mean less, but because they are pushed to mean the opposite of what they meant, supported by the feelings and emotions that the original definition brought out in us.

    manifestiThe “great meaning-destroying machine” never sleeps. There’s no concept it doesn’t make fashionably banal, idea it doesn’t reduce a caricature, or word it doesn’t empty out until it’s powerless. Its strategy is relentless: expand use through emotional associations, separate terms from their context, and stretch a thing until it means its opposite. Its list of crimes is almost infinite. Just on the Internet, we saw a few in the last five years: interaction is confused with participation, which, in turn, is confused with adherence, reducing the value of commitment to nothing, or close to it; distributed became a synonym for decentralized, even though it means the opposite…

    The ability to generate oxymorons on the basis of eroding meanings looked like it had reached an objective limit, but no, when the crisis came, we had yet to discover that there are cooperatives that, instead of developing autonomy, are created to look for employment in businesses beyond their members. Work cooperatively to find a job working for someone else?! The more instinctive, more basic, and less used the word in question, the easier it is to decontextualize it. The trouble is that, without context, not only is knowledge not developed, but it’s corrosive to the community that accepts the change.

    That’s why I’m worried about the extension of the use of the word “people.“ No word could be more instinctive, closer, or headier. “People, not machines,” we say. “Incubate people,” we insist… But the flank we offer is immense, and we risk feeding — who knows? — a new monster. While totalitarianism of the twentieth century was built on ideas about homelands and classes, many things point to this century’s totalitarianism being built by embracing the banner of “people” and the “common good.” The new starting points offer less resistance.

    When “people” means the opposite of people

    We all know what we mean by “people.” We’re referring to real beings with first and last names. We’re talking about ourselves and others in the concrete dimension, irreducible from the real community. And we do it because we’re fed up with imaginary communities (the proletariat, homelands, gender, youth, and whatever’s yet to come…) and with the infinite destructive capacity of thinking “from God’s vantage point,” which will only call us to new sacrifices time and time again putting big words and big abstractions above the people we love, above what we call our real community, where everyone has a name and a face that we remember, and calls up emotions in us.

    “People”: a user’s guide

    But “people,” the word, is a awful pit. It’s terribly easy to use it as an abstract concept, as a nebulous and intangible God, and yet be heard by the listener as if the speaker was referring to actual people… So, I propose a technique, a simple game to tell when they’re trying to give us the bait and switch, universalism for community:

    1. How would it sound if we substituted “people” with a list of proper names? For example, when we Indianos talk about the Indianos, we could substitute “Indianos” with our names, and it wouldn’t change the meaning of the sentence, it would just make it longer; but when someone says that to rescue politics, “we need to put people at the center,” could we substitute “people” with a concrete, finite list of names of real people that the speaker knows and is referring to? I would say no.
    2. Can “people” be substituted in the sentence with an abstract concept? For example, “the Proletariat,” “fellow citizens” or “the workers?” Bad sign.
    3. Can it be substituted with the word “resource” or “labor” without the sentence changing meaning?
    4. Is its purpose in the sentence to mark, more or less subtly, a division between two imaginary communities? For example: “the people who were born here” not only can very rarely be replaced by a concrete list of known names, but also defines a person by a quality (having been born “here”), leaving out those who don’t have it (immigrants). It’s unknown whether it’s because they’re not people, or because the message is that there are people and there are “people.”
    5. Is “person” accompanied by an adjective? This kind of constructions are generally used to depersonalize and reduce someone real to a representative of an imaginary community. For example, when the media talk to us about “an immigrant person,” or “a sub-Saharan person,” instead of using their name or initials, or worse still, accompanying them. If he or she is a person, they have a name, and if not (if it’s not Maria, Sasha, Manuel, Rashid, or whatever it happens to be), then, we’re really in for more of the same in a slightly more roundabout way: a timid euphemism to keep devaluing real people, who are reduced, as in every imaginary community, to representatives of an archetype that supposedly configures them and presents the community to us.

    The moral of the story

    Words shape worlds — they legitimize some narratives and delegitimize others. One of the most regrettable phenomena of decomposition is that it works as a “great meaning-destroying machine” that empties out words, dissolving that which words bring together in conversation. And it’s not just the ability to create knowledge through words and contexts, it’s the value of the bonds in the community that degrade.

    Words like “P2P” or “people” become dangerous if we allow them to be used ambiguously. Not because it’s destructive per se for their meanings to evolve, even to mean less, but because they are pushed to mean the opposite of what they meant, supported by the feelings and emotions that the original definition brought out in us.

    Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

  4. Three things you urgently need to learn about the crisis of scale

    01 Apr 2013

    2

    Promoting a new model of relationships needs social conversation, and therefore, networks and the Internet, just as organizations need them to be able to continue providing value to what they produce.

    skystream_CAD_interalA key result of what we’ve worked on for the last year has been understanding that technological development has reduced the optimum scale of production continuously since the end of WWII, and that the way financial capital has defended itself to maintain its place in the economic system has gutted the better part of the productive community and brought on the current financial crisis. This underlying economic and historical movement points, over the medium and long term, towards two possible outomes (decomposition — that is, the simultaneous destruction of state, market and social cohesion — on the one hand, and the transition towards a P2P mode of production on the other).

    But having a medium and long-term perspective doesn’t free us up from fighting today’s battle. And today, in every difficulty local industry has, in every challenge faced by those faced with keeping production and jobs around, the crisis of scale appears again… and we need to learn from it.

    1. The reduction of optimal scales not only puts Big Capital and Big Business in check by reducing their efficiency, it first affects small companies that remain anchored in average technologies. We see it every day, it goes like this: you have a business that has a very specialized process within a large production chain (i.e., automotive). The prices drop for the machines you do your work with, and at the same time, the machines themselves are are ever more specialized, improving quality but useful for a smaller and smaller range of products. If you’d chosen to keep producing with multiproduct machines that were less specialized, your situation would have become difficult in recent years. Obviously, as the price of specialized machines falls, your buyer will be more and more tempted to include them directly in its chain, eliminating its dependence on you and gaining quality in its components.Which is to say, capital being less important can, paradoxically, damage the smallest players, if they’ve let the bonanza years go by without innovating or developing their product or good. The trend is towards, and opportunity is in, reducing scale and increasing scope. Optimal scales are reduced “by themselves,” as an effect of technological evolution, but finding the way to increase scope depends on each person, and on a whole range of strategies, from customization to the incorporation of design, and from internationalization tothe development of new products. And, as the the crisis shows, there’s not too much time ahead to do it. Those who haven’t done it already are having a hard time.Examples of those who are able to get out of the trap also emerge every day. What needs to be clear is that the industrial world is no longer the calm waters of “business as usual.” And, no, it’s not the “fault” of Chinese manufacturers and their (less and less) low salaries. What they produce are commodities, without much value added. Things that machines make with less and less human support. If you want your industry to survive, you have to rethink it with the logic of the new world: distributed networks, knowledge, conversation… To begin, the Internet and free software. An example from today: maritime drones — Nat pointed out the other day that this new industry would create 100,000 jobs in the U.S. alone over the next ten years.
    2. In this context, the horsemeat scandal has turned out to be very revealing… and not just for us: as the weeks pass, analysis that points to excessive scale and its dangers started to become commonplace. Once again, the solution is not in enclosure, or in falling into localism and under-scaling, thereby losing productive capacity, but rather in substituting scale with scope. And this is done with disintermediation on the one hand, and a global and democratic conception of productive subjects on the other. That is to say, Internet, Internet and more Internet to allow direct relationships, chains with fewer links and more global responsibility. Yes, like “fair trade,” except taking it seriously, as part of the business and how it’s organized.
    3. Today, the ones who have understood these possibilities best are not the giants who seek the recentralization of the Internet. Rather, they are the family businesses on the periphery. Just today, analysts from the big financial funds were complaining that they can’t deal with the small Taiwanese tech companies (which, in case anyone didn’t know, pay their workers salaries that are similar or a bit better than Spanish tech companies). It’s simply that they won’t let themselves be bought out: they live passionately in a model of relationships where the personal is important, and they continue making enough money to maintain themselves and continuously invent new things. We could give similar examples in Latin America, some in Africa, and even in the US. Putting up barriers to financialization and the destruction of the productive community also has to do with the business model and the logic of relationships.

    Conclusions

    The current crisis of capitalism is fundamentally a crisis of over-scaling, and is prodded on by the fact that, while over-scaling creates inefficiencies, it also creates rents, and the beneficiaries of those rents have access to power. The combination is dramatic. However, the degree of reduction of optimal scales is so great that, for the first time, the emergence of small-scale organizations can represent an alternative global production model. But, for this to happen, it would take two things: new models of relationships and scope.

    Which is to say, promoting a new model of relationships needs social conversation, and therefore, networks and the Internet, just as organizations need them to be able to continue providing value to what they produce.

    Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

  5. A word from your translator

    20 Mar 2013

    1

    We know you’re interested in content from other languages, or you wouldn’t be reading this now. Now we’d like to know more about you.

    As the English translator for Las Indias for over a year now, I hope you find these posts informative and thought-provoking. They’ve been challenging, but rewarding, to work on.

    On the basis of this (and other) work, my own co-op has begun to put together a project that will market our translation services to the general public, and the cooperative sector in particular. Our marketing strategy will be entirely Internet based, and instead of buying ads, we will run a blog of articles on co-ops that are translated from Spanish into English. We will also be translating books that are either by or about cooperatives in Spanish-speaking cultures. We hope to provide a broad overview of Latin America and Spain, though so far, it’s tending to concentrate on northern Spain and southern South America. The exact nature of the content will probably evolve over time, as we get a better picture of our sources, our audience, and the long-term viability of the project.

    We know you’re interested in content from other languages, or you wouldn’t be reading this now. Now we’d like to know more about you. It would mean a lot to us if you would complete a brief survey — it should take less than five minutes. As always, you can also leave us comments here. Thanks!

  6. Ethics and the State is like freedom and Tony Soprano

    04 Mar 2013

    1

    Can you think of suicides or any other thing in terms of “public policies?” Of course, but it’s unethical position… which I roundly reject.

    SopranoYou have to be pretty shameless, in the middle of decomposition, to say that, literally, we owe our lives to the State… but that’s the inevitable result of the biopolitical thinking that characterizes nationalism-statism. It starts with the idea of the worker as an inferior being, needing protection and care… and after convincing half the population of their inability to survive without it, when it reduces its level of protection and some people collapse, the moral is… you see how much you needed us? Not even Tony Soprano would be so tan crudely cynical.

    Personally, I think the only decent ethic is one that refuses to think in terms of “public policies,” and as such, refuses to accept that real people are mere constructs, lab mice in a social machine controlled by a caste. A caste that famous authors, like so many others, look to in the illusory happiness of “feeling safe,” of placing themselves above the mice, at the “control panel” of a divine rationality, but which, in the end, was only made by tax collectors and civil authorities in many different uniforms.

    But, in any case, shouldn’t we “assume” the state, and therefore, think like it for a while, even just to avoid its abuses? My ethical position is very clear: no. We can see the State as a data point, or as a player in the game, we can predict its moves like predicting the weather or the attack of a wild animal, trying to be as dispassionate as we can. We can even pass it the ball in the game, but without forgetting that we don’t play on the same team, much less singing songs to it, or telling it our strategy.

    Hasn’t the State sometimes played a positive role in people’s freedoms and even survival? Yes, but that doesn’t require us to identify with it. And what happens if we don’t have an alternative to every “solution,” at every moment? Nothing. It’s like free software, it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, we’ll improve it; it doesn’t matter if there’s support or not, we’ll organize it. Freedom is fundamental to what is truly alive and human. It’s the starting point for all ethical thinking, not a distant objective. It’s not with Toni Soprano — or what’s worse, with his bards, or, worse still, as the case may be, with the initiation chants of the children of his theoreticians and rentiers — that the starting point lies for thinking in communal and social terms.

    What we can’t do, under any circumstance, is take its point of view in responding to questions, concerns, or reservations, from real people and communities, because as soon as we do, we accept a reasoning, a logic which is, in itself, destructive and corrosive, even if it offers “protection”… like any mafioso, even one as nice as Tony Soprano.

    Translated by Steve Herrick  from the original

  7. Is it harder to innovate in democracy?

    23 Feb 2013

    1

    Democratic organizations that don’t hold broader conversations than everyday management are condemned to be even more conservative than traditional businesses.

    mundo-reticularTomorrow we’ll begin the formalization of our entry into ner group, which is the result of months of conversation and work together in Fondaki-SIP-ner. The balance couldn’t be more positive, and what we’ve learned, despite the short time spent here, is more than a little. For us Indianos, as the ones who market Fondaki, it means that for the first time, we’ll be working with clients with a different profile than those we’ve had up until now. Smaller businesses, but above all, more democratic. That’s fantastic, of course, it’s what fits with our values, but… it requires us to change the narrative about innovation and the meaning of our work when it comes time to sell. Why?

    1. In a democratic business, decisions are shared and explained among many people, if not among all.
    2. While, in a traditional business, you can more or less work out a context with the decision-makers; in a democratic business there’s no time to transmit and discuss contexts with everyone, so…
    3. …decisions are based on clear cause-and-effect narratives (about net results)

    The result is that:

    1. There’s no place for contextual seduction that opens the other person up to hunches because…
    2. …the opportunity to bet on an incalculable benefit at minute zero and the “cost of inaction or ignorance” are difficult to transmit, which means that in the end…
    3. …intangibles are not met with support, or are simply associated with risks, even thought they are more uncertainties than risks (which is to say, they can’t even be assigned an ex ante probability with which to measure the efficiency of the expenditure).

    It’s clear that in this context, only “planned innovation” is easily transmissible, which the old captains of industry liked so much, and which has absolutely no innovation in it. Another way of incorporating innovation, which Mondragon has followed, is to separate out different organizations and processes. But my impression is that this is like making a tunnel to alleviate traffic: you can easily move a certain distance further, but at the end of the tunnel (that is, when it’s time to sell something new to cooperatives and the broader surroundings), the cars will find themselves at the same stoplight as always; we’ve simply provided ourselves with another place for a traffic jam.

    So…?

    Indianos, and those of us generally who have spent decades designing and selling innovation are used to a certain schizophrenia: knowledge is developed openly, in conversation in and with a setting that is not our clients. Then, that is distilled into products, and the products are sold to little groups of decision-makers that have not taken part in the debate. The products “express” us, express that knowledge, but in reality, only transmit it when they are developed or put to use by the client.

    In democracy, things are different. In fact, they’re just the opposite: if we don’t incorporate the people who make up the organizations into our concerns before we offer them answers, there’s no way they’ll understand the relevance of the proposals and products. It’s the same whether we’re talking about commercial intelligence or about using free software on in-house servers instead of depending on an external server. Seen another way, democratic organizations that don’t hold broader conversations than those about everyday management are condemned to be even more conservative than traditional businesses.

    In reality, we don’t need to sell differently: enthusiasm, and the existence of meaning, come through to the people who listen to us. But we can’t ask them to transmit it if they don’t answer the questions that are being asked in coffeeshops, over meals, or in assemblies. What we have to do is invite others to question, to see their project as part of a much bigger picture of a world in social, technological, and geopolitical change, where they have a leading role.

    That’s why the most important thing we’ve made so far is “Resilience!” Its effect, opening and giving wings to internal conversations in each project-community, is laying out the path for us to follow.

    Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

  8. A community-company incubator

    29 Jan 2013

    Expanding the field and the ambition of the debate these last weeks…

    Yesterday, Saturday, over vermouth and under the lukewarm January sun, we were going in circles around the idea of creating a school of community companies. The more we debated, the more we had to face the criticism that, in reality, we had fixated on the most “appetizing” part to us, losing sight of the big picture: the need to set up a new kind of integral incubator, that starts with people and prepares entire small communities. Or, in Indiano organizational thinking, going from considering “The Art of Things” as a tool to prepare and shape internal projects to giving it an autonomous and ongoing life at the service of our surroundings… which implies assuring its sustainability. Back home, a comment in the same vein from Juan Rico only helped us make up our mind. So, let’s start sketching out ideas…

    Differences between what we want and a customary incubator

    1. Origin in people. The starting point is people, not projects or businesses. People, small communities (families, groups of friends, discussion groups…) that have reached the point of proposing to build a community company.
    2. Destination in the community. But a community company is not a conventional start-up – there’s no capitalizing on expectations of capital gains and expansions, simply because the key to the model is that the company must always be property of community members. Although it can be financed in a complementary way, investors shouldn’t have a speculative view of the stock; its profitability will come from distributed surpluses, not from the sale of their shares to new investors in successive capitalization rounds. In other words: it’s a classical investment.
    3. Scale and capitalization. Community companies are not large-scale undertakings, but rather large-scope; they don’t need millions in capital. In fact, our experience tells us that overcapitalizing is more dangerous than undercapitalizing, because it results in oversizing, which can turn out to be a dead end. While the scale of initial of a start-up is between 100,000 and a million euros, a community business’ is between 10,000 and 20,000 euros.
    4. Free is better than open. There’s nothing more secretive than a project in gestation to become a start-up; and there’s nothing that benefits a community company more than taking advantage of the existing commons, like free software, business models, ideas… and above all, there’s nothing better than creating it on the basis of interaction with peers. That’s why “hacker hostels” have emerged, and the Y Combinator has set up a successful model of new incubators in the US.
    5. Community as objective and as know-how. The key to community businesses is… knowing how to think about commercial/business matters with the mindset of the community. The most successful incubator initiatives in the latoc world, like TEC Monterrey, with more than 1,800 businesses successfully incubated, are the ones that have been able to understand the centrality of family and community relationships.

    How would an integral “community companies” incubator work?

    1. It would would select candidates (with the novel Storge systems).
    2. It would give selectees a preliminary online contextual training through an agenda of readings and commentaries, which would also be selective.
    3. Selectees at the second phase would spend three months as interns at a residence much like the hacker hostels: modest (cots for all), but with broad and luminous common spaces to work and interact.
    4. During the residency, selectees would design and develop the basics of their projects and would collaborate with others on theirs. All with advice and monitoring by our team. Objective: go from cooperative learning to collaboration and from collaboration to the design and founding of projects.
    5. After three months, the entrepreneurs would return home and, using what they’d learned and worked on, would develop a new phase of debate and work with the members of their community, giving the final shape to the project, incorporating the business, and setting it in motion. After monitoring their development online, some of them would be invited back again for brief stays, during which our team, much like the Y-Combinator, would organize informal dinners with possible investors — only one per dinner — in which the results of the work would be presented.

    How would the costs of an incubator like this be covered?

    1. The online courses are paid for by the successful candidates, and we calculate that, without many losses, costs would be around €300 per person. More could leave out interesting people, and less would likely produce an adverse selection.
    2. The residency and incubation period has a “hostel” cost — we’d have to look for providers and write a budget — and some monitoring costs per hour, which would require a (not necessarily overly generous) external sponsor. This sponsor or group of sponsors could have a preferential option on the business shares that may result, assuring them only that they would be the first with the option to participate, but also, perhaps, certain conditions of social and economic profitability. We would have to think that no project, under any circumstances, will have more than 35% external capital.
    3. Community entrepreneurs would make a commitment that any company born of the work done in the residency will donate a percentage of its shares (or money, using some equivalent formula) equal to 3% of its annual surpluses to the project. With that, over time, we could expand our services and reach full sustainability.

    Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

  9. On the death of Aaron Swartz

    26 Jan 2013

    A tribute to the hacker as hero, a “pirate” whose life the poet would choose out of all possible lives.

    aaron-schwartzI read his obituary in The Economist, and today, El País reported on his death at the age of 26. They called him a pirate, but, as I said many years ago now, an information pirate is a hero of innovation. And Aaron was a hero. The obituary of the British weekly ended by saying that once, at about 16 years old, he wrote something about how he wouldn’t mind dying as long as the contents of his hard drives …

    …were made publicly available, nothing deleted, nothing withheld, nothing secret, nothing charged for; all information out in the light of day, as everything should be.

    His greatest heroism was to break the security barriers of JSTOR (which mourns for the death of its pirate), twice, to give everyone access to scientific articles — otherwise, universities would have no choice but to continue to pay for subscriptions to the magazines that contain them.

    As it happens, these days, I’m putting the finishing touches on an article I’ve written, trying to carefully cite the references used with their date, volume, and the pages they’re on, and I see them and I want to have them to finish my academic task, when this wouldn’t be at all necessary, if JSTOR didn’t artificially blind our access to journals, thereby supporting the publishers. Anyone who goes through troubles like this must recognize with me that we would waste less time if we could enjoy the work of a hacker like Aaron Swartz.

    As a tribute, I’m going to reproduce several paragraphs from what I wrote years ago on the occasion the presentation of the book “From Nations to Networks.”

    Let’s see…

    A hacker calls into question for the first time the theoretical economic separation between producer and consumer. Hackers are, in principle, privileged and experienced Internet users, who explore new territory, just the way the pioneers explored the frontier in the Old West. But that exploration makes them producers, because, in their exploration, they break closed codes (like the cowboys tore down barbed-wire fences put up by farmers), develop new code, and insist that it be available to everyone. That is, they are producers of open code as well as users.

    Timothy Garton Ash, writing in El País, gave us a brushstroke of the values that define this or that facet of hackers, although he isn’t referring to them:

    The productive facet is based on people being governed by values like effort, punctuality, discipline and a willingness to accept delayed gratification. In contrast, the consumer facet is based on being expansive and given to allowing themselves whims, seeking pleasure, and living for the moment.

    What’s interesting about this distinction is that, today, it’s possible to accept delayed gratification and simultaneously live for the moment. And this mix is very hacker.

    Getting more technical, I would say that a hacker is an expert in using the Internet, a user-producer who seems to be a vehicule for a number of values that I’m going to try to distill from the personal characteristics of my favorite hackers favoritos and from some of the few publications that exist about it. Here are those values.

    1. Freedom is, without the slightest doubt, their basic value, and for hackers, it’s more important than happiness: they will never accept a solution, even if it’s perfect, if they can’t observe its inner workings and alter them.
    2. They don’t believe in the excesses of intellectual property rights (beyond the recognition of authorship, which they demand forcefully) and are prepared to share their solutions or their creations in order to feel like part of a collective adventure, looking for the land of abundance, where private property no longer matters, all that matters is access to las cosas buenas in life.
    3. Even though, day to day, they feel like they’re part of a cultural movement goes beyond IT, their individualism and their pride in being authors are legendary, and so they only respond to intellectual incentives associated with recognition of their creative intelligence, and this way, they contribute to maintaining diversity within the wider cultural movement.
    4. Their rationality isn’t merely functional, but rather, they show important features of expressive rationality, because one of their highest aspirations is being recognized as hackers.
    5. Because they are users and producers at the same time, they know that identity is something that is very real, and can be played with, though not for free, and they have choice but to deal with multiple loyalties.
    6. This last one makes them contradictory beings that move on impulse, in and out of concrete projects at the service of various causes, which they serve with this or that loyalty or identity.
    7. It’s precisely their double condition as user and producer, aside from the intangibility of their product, that justifies their aversion to salaried work.

    It’s very illuminating to understand how hackers work and deduce the consequences of that way of working. Hackers work in a network, which is to say, they’re not subject to any hierarchy  nor do they have a centerpoint. We could say, following the terminology of Deleuze and Guatari, they are the postmodern figure of the rhizome, which opposes, and contrasts with, the modern figure of the tree, whether we’re talking about science, technology, or industrial relations. Now, this way of working has very important consequences.

    1. Because they have no choice but to recognize their double personality as users and producers, hackers turn out to be the right people to use their networks to encourage the formation of other networks identity-based networks not centered on technical aspects, but on any common feature. That is to say, they are ideal netweavers.
    2. This proliferation of overlapping networks (since each citizen can belong to several) widens and completes markets, which can and must bring with it an important increase in productivity.
    3. The last consequence of the way hackers work is that the weaving and unraveling of identity-based networks (netweaving) is going to accelerate. In effect, according to Akerlof and Kranton, the permanence of an identity depends on the values of certain parameters that reflect both the cost of separating from the community and the punishment one would have to endure to rejoin it. What hackers’ ability to weave networks is going to bring with it is a change in the value of those parameters in the direction of facilitating their formation and their liquidation. Some networks will last quite a while, driven by a significant network effect; but other networks, and ultimately, all of them, will end up unraveling. These conditions facilitate the formation of temporary productive teams that would produce those new goods that maintain the economic system through la creative destruction.

    And I ended with a little paragraph that I offer to close this tribute to a hero.

    In summary, perhaps rather ironically, a hacker is like Sabina’s pirate, whose life the poet would choose out of all possible lives: “La del pirata cojo, con pata de palo, con cara de malo, con parche en el ojo.” (“The life of the limping pirate, with a wooden leg, with a mean look on his face, with a patch on his eye.”) They only look mean — they’re actually loyal to the members of their community; but they fight like dangerous bulls, perhaps because they limp, or only have one eye. But, yes, they are pirates, just like the black corsair who was in love with Yolanda and was condemned to wander the world for an original sin committed in Piedmont.

    Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

  10. What are “community companies” and how are they organized?

    24 Jan 2013

    Family businesses, common structure companies, kibbutzes… community companies take almost as many forms as the communities that sustain them. However, the common elements are stronger than the differences.

    inventingourlifeYesterday, after making an argument about why to create a community company, we were asked in the comments for the manuals for this operational model. Before that, we should define the concept a little more, and understand the main ways it can be organized.

    What is a “community company?”

    A “community company” is a market-oriented economic structure that gives a community a way to develop its autonomy. What distiguishes it from other kinds of businesses is that it’s not economic activity that drives the people who work together to develop fairly strong community relationships. Just the opposite, it’s about a community, a set of people that know each other and share a common understanding as peers, who form a business and direct it according to community interests.

    Kinds of community companies

    It can be a cooperative, a foundation-business (only in Switzerland), an LLC, or a corporation. Our experience tells us that corporations come with greater obstacles and insecurity for the development of a community business. In fact, our favorite form is the cooperative, both because it regulates the member entry and exit mechanisms in a much simpler way without adding incentives to potential conflicts, and because it allows up to 30% of “social expenses” to be tax-free as “funds for training and the promotion of cooperativism.” [only applies in Spain -- translator] But, obviously, in each case, the choice will depend on the available legal structures,the organizational priorities, and above all, on the relationship with property each community wants to have.

    The relationship between property and community

    There are basically three kinds of community companies:

    1. Common structure company. This is the most lax model, and is normally restricted to liberal professions and merchants. The members share certain structures equally, as well as commercial agendas and information, and sometimes price policies; they develop a common image and strategy for external purposes, and mechanisms for financing and solidarity between them. Their billing is divided into two parts: individual, and what’s held in common in the form of payment for common services. The classic example would be a cooperative lawyers’ office, or a small clinic that belonged to the doctors that work there, but also a cooperative of software developers who share a house and/or offices. What’s different about these cases is that the amount of the collective appropriation dedicated to common structures and causes generally exceeds half of the earnings. The company is, in the end, a form of savings and collective investment. In fact, it’s relatively common to go from such a company to a kibbutz, as well as kibbutz members leaving to start a company like this.
    2. Community family business. Its demos — those who have decision-making power — is generally made up of the members of a generational cohort (a group of brothers/sisters, and, in many cases, their partners) which, over time, opens up to some of their children and perhaps some collaborator. Normally, there’s some confusion about assets: all properties belong to the family business, which holds the collective savings together.In these businesses, the partners, the more-or-less blood relatives, usually have a salaried relationship with their own business, all making about the same salary.
    3. Kibbutz. The word kibbutz means “community” in Hebrew. The ties between the original kibbutz movement (which was basically agrarian) and Israeli nationalism meant that, as of 1948, it enjoyed specific and highly favorable legislation. Kibbutzim were originally Israeli, agrarian, and rural, but in Israel itself, they evolved towards industry and services when the first “urban kibbutzim” emerged, and the most restrictive internal rules were reformed. Also, the model was extended beyond the ideological and geographical environment of the Zionism that gave birth to it. Today, the kibbutz form exists around the world, linked to all manner of movements: from Catholic and Protestant communities to German anarchist communities to English or US ecovillages. It’s calculated that more than two million people live in organizations of the kibbutz type.A kibbutz is a cooperative and a community of free association(which is to say, its members are not based on previous family relationships, but on prior processes of deliberation and trust) managed by assemblies in which shared savings are maximized as an asset of the cooperative. The members generally don’t have a salary, just a small advance on surpluses that has to let them cover their “personal expenses,” which are usually minimal, since in a kibbutz, housing, daily food, work tools, and transportation are shared.

      So, kibbutzim are quite resilient, and usually have hefty surplus accounts — since they don’t distribute more than a minimum among the members — of which a substantial part is dedicated to actions in their surroundings (training, promoting new cooperatives, social insurance, etc.)

    The foundations of a community company

    We could summarize the common elements of these three forms in three points:

    1. The origin is a conversation, a deliberation (and, as such, a certain kind of professional or ideological knowledge) within the community. The structure is formed as part of that process, with the idea of securing it and giving it autonomy.
    2. Economically, there exist different levels of confusion about assets, but, above all, a clear renunciation of the totally individual appropriation of the surplus characteristic of the classic capitalist business.
    3. Management is “flat,” with different kinds of assemblies that prize consensus over voting, even though there are normally elected figures who are in charge of representing the company to the outside world, and, at certain times, may have decision-making ability in the absence of consensus in an urgent situation.

    But beyond this anatomy, surely what best explains the spirit and the daily life of community companies is the famous phrase from “Islands in the Net“:

    We don’t have jobs. Just things to do and people who do them.

    Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

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