All the posts are part of a single series. You might want to start at the beginning.
A gift community is (amongst other things) a bit like a business without the organisational scaffolding. A group of people working together to create valuable goods and services, but self-organised instead of centrally organised.
For those engaged with the “new ways of working” movement, as it’s sometimes called, the terms self-management and self-organisation are often used interchangeably. That’s a shame because the very important idea of true self-organisation gets lost. A company that gives a lot of autonomy to individuals and small teams is leaning towards self-organisation, but it is not there. If it was, the company structure would be redundant. From previous posts you’ll know that I believe such organisations tend to get caught between either allowing dominion to enter (possibly hidden), or being weak.
A name we sometimes use for truly self-organised social setups is in the ‘scene’, as in the London art scene, the Liverpool music scene. Importantly these are not flat—there are big players and small—but there is no clear centre. Are these scenes free from dominion? Actually no, not at all. An important gallery or record label could easily achieve a dominant position, becoming one of Blake’s “cogs tyrannic”, moving by compulsion the other players, distorting the scene in favour of the wants and needs of domineering people. Of course, that oversized cog is not itself self-organised. It is a machine inside a living system.
Can we imagine some kind of creative scene where such bullies do not emerge over time? It’s a stretch, because power (dominion) begets more power. Like wealth, it tends to concentrate. My belief and hope is that by becoming more aware of our power blindspot—that there are two kinds of power, dominion and potency—and by consciously growing a culture that works hard to promote potency and reduce dominion, we can do dramatically better.
And one insight in particular—that any kind of co-owned creative project is an invitation to dominion—could help us a great deal.
In this post we’re going to look at an example of an entrepreneurial scene committed to the idea of individual creative ownership. We’ll start small, thinking about something akin to a startup. We’ll then give some attention to the question of how dominion can be kept at bay as things start to get bigger.
A startup as a network
The previous post ended with a question: could a gift community really become a powerful and profitable source of economic value production, outperforming a tightly integrated and controlled company? To explore the question we will look at that modern powerhouse of profitability: the tech startup. What would the GC answer to a tech startup look like? Would it work as well?
Before we charge ahead, it’s important to keep in mind that our idea of “works well” might be quite different. To keep it simple, we’ll focus on two simple goals:
dominion is as absent as possible, both from the start and as things grow,
the products and services should do well in the market, when competing with dominion based companies.
We’re going to focus specifically on a software startup. These are particularly interesting from a GC perspective because with software it’s entirely possible for a single individual to build a product, market it, and start to make money. This leads naturally to the idea of a network of independent entrepreneurs. But while that may be possible, it is more common that successful startup founders hire people as soon as they can afford to, in roles like:
Product development
Design
Customer support
Marketing
Sales
Accounting/finance
The founder is the one paying the salaries here of course, and so a dominion hierarchy starts to form. How could this be avoided? That last role points towards a simple answer. Most small businesses do not need a full time accountant and so engage an external firm or freelancer. The commercial relationship is similar—work gets done, people get paid—but in contrast to the employer/employee relationship there is no dominion. The relationship is peer-to-peer. The startup is free to switch to a different accountant any time, the accountant is free to drop a client if they so wish. The crucial point here is dependence. The two are not dependent on each other, but they are connected. Each enriches the work of the other. They are interdependent.
Eliminating dependence is not just related to our goal of avoiding dominion, it’s pretty much the same thing. If I depend on you in order to pay my rent, you effectively have dominion over me, regardless of whether you are my manager, my employer or my client. As the term ‘wage-slave’ painfully captures, money is the polite modern equivalent of coercive force. Interdependence, which in this context means peer-to-peer client/service relationships, is the only kind of relationship we are interested in.
Returning to our list of roles, it’s pretty easy to see that outsourcing all of them is at least possible. But will it work well, according to the two goals we identified? As we’ve seen, it does remove dominion from the picture, but will it make for an effective business? Will this approach prosper in the market?
Let’s consider the different roles. Freelance product development and design are certainly a perfectly viable and in fact common ideas (and how I pay the rent myself!). Outsourcing support, marketing and sales is also clearly possible (and common with larger companies, but that’s a rather different story), but is it wise for an early stage startup? Most would consider these functions too close to their core DNA to risk outsourcing. They are the connection points with the customer, and so in a way they define the company. Many startups take great pride in their own unique culture. They want to carefully create their support culture, marketing culture and sales culture. Demoting these functions to mere external services is not compatible with these goals.
But our proposal here is not an alternative route for regular startups. We are exploring something entirely different. To see how it might work we need to step back, right back to before anything that looks like a startup even exists: the moment a creative person has a new idea. Let’s call her Mary.
Mary is a software developer and a member of a gift community. She is already actively engaged in building trust with her peers: sitting together regularly, sharing stories, sharing dreams, sharing support. She has received gifts and given gifts. The community is becoming important to her. Now she feels ready to start an entrepreneurial adventure of her own. She’s had a great idea, she knows a few people who could help her, she’s ready to start building.
We’ll fast forward past a few months of Mary working hard, mostly by herself. She has a product online and she’s making money! She’s been supported by the community all along with encouragement and advice. She wouldn’t be where she is without them. The opportunity is looking big enough that she would love to see someone working full time on sales, and she’s making enough money that she could, in principle, hire someone. Does she? She is entirely aware that an employee is a dependent. Dominion starts small. Such a move would be deeply against the values of the community which has helped her. She also happens to know a freelancer in the community with sales experience who is available to work with her, interdependently.
Mary is in the driving seat here—it’s her money, after all. If she hires someone, she’s the boss. She calls all the shots. Maybe she thinks the business will do better this way. And if the business is healthy that’s good for the employees too, right? Most people do think this way, saying to themselves this is my business. To choose interdependence is to say something very different. Yes this is my creative project, but if a business is going to grow big, it will be ours.
There are no rules in gift community, only culture. We can’t say for sure what Mary will do. In truth the whole project relies on the hope that many people will prefer connection to control; will prefer to be a living part of a living system, rather than the biggest cog in a machine of their own making. I’m optimistic, but we won’t know until we try.
If, instead of hiring, Mary chooses to engage with other freelancers in the community to take care of every need she has as her business grows, what we have is something rather unusual. It’s not a company but a network of peers. As it grows, we are interested in the same two goals. Is the network structure stable, or will dominion creep in? And if it does remain dominion free, what does that mean for its prospects in the market?
Scaling up
The key difference between this model and other approaches to community friendly commerce such as worker-owned cooperatives, is that Mary fully owns the product herself. If her product becomes very successful, all sorts of new and potentially disruptive forces come into play. We should think these through.
Critically, every customer who pays for the software is paying that money directly to Mary (or more likely a limited company, but one that she owns entirely). If this is becoming a big business, she is gaining a great deal of potentially domineering power. It’s well known that the best startups sell incomparably more than merely OK businesses. Mary’s could find herself the gatekeeper of a vast flow of money into the community. This sounds like a problem.
The key, as before, is interdependence. If, as demand has grown, Mary has been able to keep up thanks to a deeply interlocking set of peer relationships, then the money she is making is not sustainable without those. The business is not just a product but a whole suite of services and operational capacity that surround it. Her success is not, in fact, her own. She is certainly in a position of power, and could potentially wrest her business free from the network and start hiring, but breaking away means breaking the operating structures of her business. It would be incredibly disruptive, perhaps existentially so.
Going further, it could be that the software product itself is in fact no longer a single creative work, owned by one person. If you’ll allow me I need to dip into my area of technical expertise here, just for a moment. As software grows, the goal of good engineering is to manage complexity by breaking the problem up into multiple smaller and simpler parts. All skilled product teams do this, regardless of their ideas about ownership. The most complex software often ends up with what is called a service oriented architecture, in which many separate components are combined in a continual exchange of messages (Amazon Web Services famously built exactly this idea into $100B in annual sales). In many ways this is a digital version of the human structure of gift community: separate parts, integrated through client/service relationships. Service oriented architecture is interesting to us because it is eminently suited to individual creative ownership. The technical client/server boundaries (i.e. the ways different parts of the software talk to each other) make perfect ownership boundaries (I’ll build this part, you build that part, we’ll connect them like this). It’s entirely possible that Mary ends up not owning the entire product, and yet her customers still enjoy a beautifully integrated experience. True interdependence.
I believe that exactly the same kind of modular approach to ownership can be applied (and will be very effective) with non-digital businesses. This is actually nothing other than a proper expression of free market ideas—a network of independent actors, collaborating through the sale of products and services, coordinating through pricing signals. The big problem with free markets (and the reason, for example, that we need government regulation and antitrust laws) is precisely the problem of dominion. It is one of the modern world’s great and tragic ironies that the biggest winners in the so-called free market are also the world’s biggest dominators, getting rich at the expense of the freedom of millions. A truly free market could be a wonderful expression of a living system (this is a huge and fascinating topic—we will have to come back later to ideas like coordination cost collapse and the Coasean floor).
The best part of all this is that we have arrived, without even focusing on it, at our big goal from a post or two back. We have on our hands a self-organising competence hierarchy without dominion. When all the connections in this network are peer-to-peer client/service relationships, there is no dominion, and there is every opportunity for competence to be amplified. Each player is motivated to work with the best people they possibly can, and is entirely free to do so. The person with the best product idea ends up with the best designers, the best engineers and so on, exactly the way Louis Armstrong could attract the best musicians. Personal potency is leveraged up into systemic potency. To recap an idea already discussed, this is critically important. Placing a great deal of power in the hands of highly competent people is one thing that dominion systems can do. They do it extremely imperfectly, but they do it, and much better than organisations that try to be flat. The impact in a competitive market is gigantic. If we don’t find a dominion-free way to amplify competence, we lose.
Before we move on from the idea of remaining dominion free as business grows, I’ll briefly touch on a point that might have occurred to the attentive reader—the problem of expensive infrastructure. I cheated a bit by picking software as my example, because the means of production are perfectly affordable—laptops are all you need. If we tried to work through big-infrastructure examples, like food production, power generation, or manufacturing, the story would look very different. This is another big topic for a future post but I’ll tease where I’m headed. As you know by now, I see big problems with the seemingly innocuous idea of shared creative ownership. I have not, however, said anything against shared ownership in general. Infrastructure and creativity are entirely different things. They can be separated. There is a very big idea in here, one I believe could potentially redeem some important but failed ideas from socialism.
Beyond work-life balance
In a true gift community, the separation between a network of commercial relationships and a community to live in would start to fade. What starts as a network that loosely resembles a tech startup later includes freshly baked bread, dance classes, music festivals, electric scooter manufacturing and kindergartens. And it becomes impossible to draw a clear dividing line between any of it, because the whole is nothing but a self-organising network of dominion-free interdependence. It all becomes one big live/work/learn/play/grow/love thing. It sounds highly utopian; I personally think it’s also highly practical. The hard part will be getting started.
A healthy life in community is one where we are free to genuinely become our powerful selves, yet simultaneously we are nothing without our community. We do not control each other, but we are interlocked. If we grow tall it’s because our roots are deep.
It’s worth noting that the communities we live in are not only self-organised. There are laws, of course. If you assault people or steal their stuff there are authorities who will bring consequences to bear. But it’s also obvious that what really holds the strongest communities together has nothing to do with written laws and policing, and everything to do with the unwritten (and unwritable) laws of belonging. True self-organisation is a mystery. We don’t know how we got flying squirrels, we don’t really know how we got jazz, but we did. We also got each other. If we can learn to make ourselves truly powerful together, without resorting to bossing each other around, things could start to get very interesting.
Winning
Yet all of this is for nothing if the products and services offered by centrally controlled businesses are better and cheaper. Everyone loves a local community success story, everyone also loves it when they can afford a car that starts first time on a frosty morning. It’s crucial to be honest with ourselves about this. Can these ideas really outcompete the status quo?
Once again, I’m optimistic! You like that about me don’t you? Go on, admit it! Here’s why—the finely tuned efficiency of today’s global mega-systems is complete bullshit. Central control is vastly overrated. Read some Dilbert; that’s the reality. In the next post or two I’m going to unpack this claim in quite some detail. I much prefer writing about solutions than problems, but we do need to go there I’m afraid. So there’s a bit of a downer on its way. But don’t worry we’ll get past it!
🐘