Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (29 page)

Distributism should not be confused with leftism. It’s calling not for the
re
distribution of earnings or capital through taxes or state action after the fact but for the widest possible distribution of the means of production as
pre
conditions for a healthy marketplace. Workers ought to own the tools they use, and their contributions to an enterprise should earn them an ownership stake in the business itself. Distributism also discourages the externalization of costs to other parties or government, the privatization of currency, the treatment of economics as an impartial physical science, and the way big business and big government drain the market of liquidity.

Like the Internet itself, which spreads its packets through the path of least resistance without regard to hierarchy, distributism is to be guided by an economic principle the popes called
subsidiarity
.
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Power is to be granted to the maximum number of the smallest possible nodes—guilds, communities, cottage businesses, and the family. This, in stark contrast not only to the self-interested libertarian individual but also to the seething mass of Communism’s “the people.” According to the principle of subsidiarity, no business should be bigger than it needs to be to serve its purpose—whether that’s feeding pizza to the town or making roads for the state. Growth for growth’s sake is discouraged. The ideal business,
according to the popes, is the family business because of its limited size, its focus on long-term sustainability, and the likelihood that people will treat one another as something more dignified than replaceable employees. (And, as we’ve seen from the data, such businesses are also more resilient and long-lived.)

No, we don’t need to convert to Catholicism or even approve of Vatican doctrine in order to appreciate the popes’ vision of a more distributed economy and to see how it can contribute to our own. Besides, it’s less their religious faith informing their recommendations than their memory of the wheels of commerce that preceded the engines of the industrial age. They are in many ways medievalists, after all, who can help us retrieve lost economic sensibilities the same way the Amish can remind us how to implement technology in a more considered fashion, or an aboriginal farmer can teach us how preindustrial crop rotation practices preserve soil nutrients. They remember.

A form of networked distributism may just be our last best hope for peace in the digital economy today. The conscious application of more distributist principles into the digital economic program could yield an entirely more prosperous and sustainable operating system. Instead of simply amplifying the most dehumanizing and extractive qualities of industrialism, it pushes ahead to something different—while also retrieving the truly free-market principles long obsolesced by corporatism.

The digital industrialists have it wrong. There will be no second machine age. Like any truly new medium, digital technology will amplify and retrieve different values than the technologies that came before it did. Individuals and businesses will succeed in different ways and by different means than they have been.

This is good news: what was repressed by the industrial corporation can be retrieved and renewed by the distributed enterprise—while the excesses of the industrial era can themselves be repressed, or at least
reduced, in a digital one. If anything, digital distributism retrieves some of the mechanisms and values of the artisanal era—that first column in the chart, back when everyone was growing, making, and trading stuff.

The platform cooperative recalls the values of the family business. Local currencies support the velocity of transactions, much like the market money of the bazaar. Crowdfunding lets people pay in advance for a business they want to see exist—in the fashion of an old village providing a barn and meals to a needed blacksmith until he could get his shop up and running. The handmade bias of the craft era becomes the hands-on bias of collaboration and wiki. The geographically local emphasis of the artisanal era is echoed in the consciously bounded investing and business
practices of our era. Subsistence farming of the preindustrial era finds new expression in the sustainability agriculture agenda of today.

This leap forward by hearkening back is characteristic of any great cultural or economic shift. That’s why at the vanguard of digital culture we see the retrieval of lost medieval values and practices, from the Burning Man festival to peer-to-peer currencies, and paganism to steampunk handcrafts. It’s not moving backward. It doesn’t constitute a regression so much as a recursion—a rediscovery of something old but in an entirely contemporary context. As Pope Francis put it, preempting this very accusation, “Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.”
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Keep the progress, but recover the lost values. Technically, then, he’s talking about
renaissance:
the rebirth of old ideas in a new framework. It’s a tall order, but given the profound reversals required to forge a new economic reality, a full-on renaissance may just be the goal here.

My late friend the philosopher Terence McKenna used to joke that if a person who knew nothing about human reproduction came upon a woman giving birth, he would surely think something terrible was going on: there’s a giant tumor in her abdomen, there’s screaming, there’s even blood. He would conclude that the woman is dying. Yet we know the opposite is true. Though climactic, childbirth is not death but the emergence of new life.

Is it too hopeful to view the self-destructive bifurcation of our economy as, at least potentially, such a process? Might the extreme divisions of wealth we’re enduring be less a permanent state than the sort of mitosis a cell undergoes just before it reproduces? Could a new economic landscape be emerging—a recovery of preindustrial mechanisms but enabled by digital platforms? Could this crisis be less our economy’s death than its rebirth in a new form?

Let’s put it to the test. If it’s a genuine renaissance we’re undergoing,
we should be seeing evidence of widespread rebirth of lost values across many different sectors of society at once. For example, we remember the Renaissance for civilization-changing innovations such as perspective painting, circumnavigation of the globe, rational science, and the printing press. The Renaissance got its name because its many innovations “rebirthed” the long-obsolesced values of ancient Greece and Rome: the centrality of power and expansion of empire. If we’re simply continuing the economics of the past, then we should expect to see those same values amplified in today’s innovations. If we’re enjoying a new renaissance, however, we should expect to see something else being reborn.

So what are today’s parallels to the tremendous leaps made in the Renaissance? In the original Renaissance, the new technique of perspective painting gave artists the ability to represent three dimensions on a flat, two-dimensional surface. It was an amazing geometric trick that stunned the art world. But such pictures also conveyed a set of values. Perspective paintings required the viewer to stand at a particular angle, stressing the importance of a
single, correct perspective
.

Is there a digital era equivalent to perspective painting, which dazzles people with the illusion of increased dimensions? A hologram can represent a 3-D picture of a face or a bird, or even a moving image of, say, the face winking its eye or the bird flapping its wings. But in order to perceive the depth or motion of the image, observers must move across it. Instead of retrieving the Renaissance’s emphasis on the single, objective, observing individual, a hologram recovers holism and relativity. The monopoly of a single perspective is distributed throughout the image. In fact, every tiny piece of a holographic plate—like a fractal, another digital corollary to perspective—contains information about the whole image. In contrast to the singular royal perspective retrieved by the Renaissance, we recover the more communal, even tribal value of clarity through collaboration.

Renaissance ships circumnavigated the globe, mapping the channels for colonial conquest. In our age, we have orbited the planet and photographed the tiny blue sphere from space. We have surrounded the globe with satellites and connected it with telecommunications. Where Renaissance
man saw new territory to conquer and exploit, we see the finite reality of a biosphere to steward and protect. Spaceship Earth, the blue marble. We reclaim not the values of colonial conquistadors but those of a bounded community.

The literature and philosophy of the Renaissance retrieved the emphasis on an individual hero. This was the era of supreme individuals, such as Faustus, who sought to transcend mortality, Leonardo da Vinci’s Godlike “Renaissance Man.” They restored and upscaled the ancient Greek notion of a heroic “self.” This emphasis on the individual, in turn, supported the values of self-interest and competitive economics. Our renaissance, on the other hand, is characterized by innovations such as computer gaming and social media. Storytelling today is less about individual authorship or heroes and more the collective fun of fantasy role-playing games and fanfiction sites. We don’t read vicariously about a single character enduring his hero’s journey; we join a massively multiplayer online role-playing game and make our own choices about how it will progress—in the virtual company of thousands of others. In the process, we train ourselves to make collective decisions about a distributed fantasy. Instead of retrieving the values of the court, we retrieve those of the folk.

Examples abound. Where the Renaissance initiated a system of arts patronage from above, funded by the aristocracy, our era promotes art from everywhere, funded by crowds. People’s creative capacity has been unleashed irrespective of the taste of any elite. While the cause-and-effect logic of the Renaissance fostered a science of dissection, categories, and repeatability, the advent of genomics and computers promotes a new science of creation, design, and novelty. Finally, where the original Renaissance brought us the printing press, books, and the individual reader to own and interpret them, our era brings the Internet and—selfies notwithstanding—a newfound respect for networked intelligence and connectivity.

If we are, indeed, in a new renaissance—and I sincerely hope we are—then it only makes sense that we would reclaim some of the values
that were repressed the last time we underwent such a shift. And so we’re recovering lost cultural values from women’s equality and integrative medicine to worker ownership and local currency. The Renaissance perpetuated the decline of handcrafted goods in favor of those manufactured by the machine and promoted by early corporate branding. Now we’re back to limited-run artisanal beers and one-of-a-kind items. Our digital renaissance quite literally retrieves the
digits
—human fingers—as essential to the creation of value in a networked age.

Even if renaissance is a long shot, we may have no other option: like an overdue fetus becoming toxic to its mother, a new economy must be born or our very survival will be threatened. Economically driven climate change should be a big enough cue that it’s time to go into labor; the polar shelf collapsing may as well be our water breaking. Indeed, history and humanity are both on the side of a new economy characterized less by industrial extraction than by digital distribution. And the planet appears to be demanding it, or else.

But how do we push toward such a wonderful outcome?

The many examples of more distributive business practices I’ve proposed throughout the book are, sadly, more exceptions than the rule. How are we regular workers and business owners, mortgage holders and real-estate brokers, supposed to usher in a better tomorrow or even just cope in the meantime? What can serve as a compass or North Star for navigating in this new terrain?

Let’s use what we now know to develop one. Recall the tetrad we developed for the industrial corporation: it amplifies extraction, it obsolesces the peer-to-peer marketplace, it retrieves empire, and, when pushed to the extreme, it flips into personhood. What might the tetrad for a genuinely digital, distributist business look like? One that could live up to the demands of a renaissance?

It would amplify value creation from everywhere as much as from the center—distributed creativity. It would obsolesce centralized monopolies, working to break them up and share the means of production with customers. It would retrieve the values of the medieval marketplace, recovering
inexpensive means of exchange between peers. Pushed to the extreme, well, a digitally distributed company would probably seek some sort of collective or spiritual awareness—another retrieval of a more familial or even tribal sensibility. (Where the traditional corporatists at Google seek to build an artificial intelligence and bring on the singularity, the digital-distributist equivalent would be to achieve a networked collective consciousness—but that’s another book.)

Sounds pretty grandiose. But we can make our own personal and business decisions along those same lines. You don’t have to be in charge of the company to argue for one set of priorities over another and to use the long-term health of the business and its market as your justification. An Internet platform can always lean away from monopoly and instead give its users the opportunity to create value for themselves. If you’re working for the company behind it, you are entitled to make that argument, too. An airline can let fliers trade miles with one another. A restaurant can forgo the bank loan and crowdfund an expansion, just as a startup can choose not to scale but to grow as needed. A business can share ownership with its workers and let them participate in the expression of its mission. Independent contractors—competitors, even—can forge networked guilds and establish best practices and minimum wages. As investors we can begin to consider supporting companies that make our world a better place, and recognizing those returns as real. As consumers we can begin to value and reward the human labor invested in the things we buy.