NuConomy and the recent move by YouTube to share advertising revenue with popular contributors is different to the users actually OWNING the system. The former is a popularity system, an old fashioned Star System owned by an elite who share some of theprofit generated by the talent that they own, with that talent. The later, ideal organisation, is a community run and owned enterprise. A worker owned factory. Not a new idea. These are dreams of the labour movement. I mean labour movement, not New Labour.

YouTube’s new rewards system is not meritocratic. Merit is a value judgement. The YouTube clip, History of Dance may be funny and hugely popular with 40 million hits, but it isnt meritorious. Its popular but not important.

Tony Blair’s New Britain was to be a meritocracy, and so he reformed the old aristocratic stronghold, the House of Lords. What did he replace it with? His friends and political donors (mostly the same). Not political supporters ( i.e. voters) but rich and powerful people. Loans for Lordships.

Workplace democracy has been worked on by MIT Sloan business school professor in his book and the Sloan Business school

Industrial democracy (the idea behind this post) versus industrial fascism (the reality of most corporations now) is covered by such writers as Noam Chomsky (MIT Linguistics an Philosophy Institute Professor) at great length and is the core of the critique of corporations and US foreign policy: Corporations are private tyrannies owned by a tiny elite that are taking decision making and resources away from the general population.

Chomsky describes himself as as an anarcho-syndicalist or libertarian socialist. In ‘Government in the Future” he makes the case that anarcho-syndicalism (or libertarian socialism) is actually more a decendant of classical liberalism (which spawned the liberal democratic model that this post describes as ‘democracy’) than state-capitalism (US) or state-socialism (Cuba, North Korea etc). The union movement has been working on industrial democracy and workers councils for at least 100 years.

Participatory economics is a part of the participatory democracy movement being developed as an extension of the anarcho-syndicalist or libertarian socialism advocated by Noam Chomsky and the Boston/New England radical scene.

The Pentagon are interested in this self-organising, bottom-up, non-hierarchial, distributed, anarchic, network-centric warfare model. Gulf 2 was based on net technoolgy and principles and my guess this is part of the reason why they invited Noam Chomsky anarcho-syndicalist to talk at West Point about Just War. Conservatives who disdain Chomsky might also ask why he has been funded and supported by the Pentagon system for all these years via MIT. What does the Pentagon system learn from an anrcho-syndicalist? Why did they fund the Internet and the W3C via DARPA?

The tiny rewards for content contribution are a bit like the affliate systems of Amazon etc. There will be a threshold and most people wont be able to trigger. The corporate calculus will be that say YouTube will get more money from increased and targeted advertising and more valuable, quality content. Its also good for BIG MEDIA, they suddenly get paid for Seinfold or whatever clips, as the rightful copyright owner. Suddenly Advertisers and Contributors are the customers and Viewers are the product.

I’d also point out that meaningful FREEDOM is declining in the USA and around according to the International Press Council. Nominally democratic institutions exist and are spreading but are empty of purpose or corrupt, all form and no function. Citizens periodically ratify the will of the powerful. Those charts from Freedom House which is supported by the Bush administration

Sites like Myspace and Wikipedia are not democracies, they are dictatorships where people work for free.

Ultimately a single, unaccountable individual controls the website. Users work for free and get little or no reward. In the case of Myspace News Corp owns it, and gets ad money and a marketing environment. Jimmy Page, the founder of Wikipedia working out ways to make money, see Wikisearch and the private company… Times ‘ exploit. Not coincidentally, the other Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sangler gets little credit but did nearly all of the actual work in the early days, but he was only an emply so he doest count.

does that sound like ‘democratic media’ to you?

Larry Sangler has started another wikipedia fork, Citizendium.

I’ve had a similar dream for a member owned and controlled media organisation, for a while too, but I reckon the poltical economy of any internet media needs to factor popularity, importance, timeliness and timelesness, novelty, succinctness, density, clarity, credentials, accessibilty, richness AND popularity. I’d say that the users should get rewarded for contributions, have control over decision making and the framework for decision making and also own that system. Legally. As in some kind of membership organisation

Athenian democracy contained randomness as a major organising principle: sortition. Sortition is public office allocated by lottery, so as to avoid corruption. Voting is liable to manipulation and corruption by power seeking indivduals and factions (corporations). Real democracies have many more organising principles and mechanisms than simply popularity.

So, if freedom and democracy have any real chance of gaining meaningful advances we need to go deeper than ideas of ‘democratic media’. We are headed in the right direction, but dont be suprised to find the powerful there already entrenched and happily exploiting ‘free’ labour.

There is an opening for real progress. But there is no gurantee the internet will not go the way of all media, consolidated, controlled and a system for manufacturing consent. Thought control in democratic societies.

The latest argument by elites is that the internet is so powerful, we dont need to worry about increasing concentration of media ownership. But the problem is, the internet is becoming part of that corporate control system.

We most certainly do have a problem with the word. Unfortunately I can’t think of a better one and frankly its historical importance is too great for me to want to give it up. So, I just deal with it.

Thanks a million for the correction, and I apologize for the outburst.

Good point. I was afraid a true anarchist in the strict political sense of the word might come along and deconstruct my superficial notion of anarchy. I used the word not as a political term but how it’s commonly used and understood as “randomness”. Which in this context is unprecise and thus: I corrected it.

You guys do have a problem with that term though. Most people just don’t know what anarchy really is and they will never know, as the common usage is so negative and associated with jungle and beasts that no one cares for looking it up…

Anarchy is defined by any anarchist as opposition to power and authority. There’s nothing anarchistic about one guy pummeling another. Anarchy is in action whenever and wherever people choose, without any form of coersion, to respect each other. Everything else, from governments to the school yard bully, is nothing more than power seeking more power, and it is the polar opposite of anarchy.

For fuck sake’s, can’t you guys talk about democracy without spreading ridiculous misconceptions about anarchism? We’re not evil! We just hold different ideas about right and wrong, about human nature, and about what exactly it is we’re living in right now. “Reign anarchistically” is an oxymoron in its truest sense.

Look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism

I have a few small changes I’d like to make …

You do have the attribution in the article. The quotes are all from Wikipedia. But you can find them spread all over the net.

I don’t criticize the free market, I criticize the obsolete form of government within the majority of our corporations. But dude, communism is dead for almost 20 years now. It’s not the time to defend old capitalism anymore. It’s time to develop capitalism. New Economy has developed and proven a more efficient and more reasonable form of economic government: Democracy.

That this form of government corresponds with our political system is not an accident, as it has developed out of it. If you’re against that, then please tell me: What’s wrong with democracy?

I believe that most corporations still follow 19th century oligarchic patterns, some even follow 18th century absolutist ones, and that it’s time to move on. Being grateful for the work and the know how you got from working for your former employer is okay. I don’t say Ballmer or Gates are evil, that’s your interpretation (I don’t even talk about Gates). Yet Ballmer’s management style is overdue. And, old or not old video: He is still the same dude:

The old video just shows much better what I intend to say. Maybe I should have used this one though:

Of course you need a sense of humour to understand what I’m saying…

And that video is years old. It was years old when I was at the Empire. You can do better than that.

I have no loyalty to them, other than gratitude for the personal projects my salary let me fund, and I know this is a blog and all, but some standards of journalism might be good.

I don’t think Ballmer is evil. I don’t think Gates is evil. But I also think there’s nothing wrong with capitalism.