Following Reboot08

I'm attending the Reboot08 conference in Copenhagen.

Here is an abstract of my talk.

Crafter Economics
(= Some thoughts about a set of rules that seem to emerge among people who make stuff and publish that on the Internet)

Accoring to the classical notion of market,
1) profit motivates exchange
2) exchange is based on money
3) price determines the value of objects
4) demand can be purchased (stimulated through marketing).
I will argue for a different crafter economics, where objects are exchanged but the goal is not to profit; money does not always exchange hands; and friends can't be bought.

Here are my slides

Comments

[heyotwell]

You might be interested in Jane Jacobs' book "The Nature of Economies." She examines the behavior of economies as if they were ecologies, and argues as well for something like an "emergent" economics that shares some of the attributes of your craft economy idea.

[York]

It sounds very interesting. Will we be able to get details of your presentation?

[vac]

Ulla,

you may also have a look into Hannah Arendt'S "the human condition".

[james]

Sounds like what you are discussing is what yochai benkler calls 'peer production' while others, collaborative production. Yuo might like reading Yochai Benkler's book, "Wealth of Networks" or read 'introductory essay' article on our blog to read more about peer production as distinct from the market in general. I wish i was there at Reboot, enjoy:)
j

[Ulla-Maaria]

Thanks for the references! I should also mention that some time ago Usman Haque reminded me about Gandhi's concept of Swadeshi, the economics of permanence.

At the conference, Malcolm J Matson commented that for making my point about the principles of crafter exhange I was terribly unfair to classical economics. He was of course quite right. Also, what I could have mentioned, is that I owe a lot to reading The Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and Theses on Feuerbach, which comprise an early formulation of Marx’s political economy.

Note that Marx's economic theory is based on analyzing the nature of human activity and work. For example, in the Manuscripts (p.142) he wrote that an active orientation of man to himself as a “species being” is only possible by utilization of his own powers as objects. In other words, man creates himself as a species through production. This idea is the first point of my Crafter manifesto.

Marx wrote that the “history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man's essential powers”, because he saw that the products of industry (productive activity) are the objectified “essential powers” of man, in the form of “sensuous, alien, useful objects”. I especially like the idea that by unraveling an object of human labour and tracking its complex social and societal relations, one can make visible the structure of the economic system.

Now (and I realize I'm going too far in this comment), as the point in my presentation was that towards the end of the Long Tail market, the rules and practices of exchange transform, I also mean to say that it is very difficult to analyze those rules and practices without a conceptualization of human activity and its motives as the basis of an economical theory. Crafting and craft blogging as modes of production is an interesting area of research, because to some extent it seem to connect with other alternative models of production, such as open source software development. My colleagues Jussi Silvonen, Stephanie Freeman, and Juha K Siltala) are studying this area.

[daniel]

At the risk of being a drone on the book recommendations you probly already know about, The Gift by Lewis Hyde is an excellent work in this area.

[vac]

Ulla,

sorry for sounding a bit impertinent here but you just added some thoughts that make me reiterate my reference to Arendt's book from ca. 1958 on the human condition.

quote:
"Note that Marx's economic theory is based on analyzing the nature of human activity and work."
...
"it is very difficult to analyze those rules and practices without a conceptualization of human activity and its motives as the basis of an economical theory."

If I interpret the direction correctly which you are indicating in these comments you might find Arendt's analysis to be sort of a "missing link" between Marx and the postmodern "plateau" of unstructured and indistinguishable "multitudes" of approaches and vocabularies.

In my view Arendt was not only a political thinker but a very original philosophical and more importantly "practical" thinker who sketched here own way into the 21st century, completely unimpressed by "male domains" of the time such as logics, mathematics, cybernetics and the like.

So what happens if a woman who witnessed the unfolding of the Shoa short-circuits Plato's writings with an outlook on post-human society?

Find out!

[vac]

a little translation ( I apologize again ;-)

The Vita Activa:
Labor
Crafting/Creation/Research/Engineering/Invention/Art
and
Freedom to speak and act (as an individual or as a group)

[vac]

I think it would be awful if the "craft economy" approach got also tangled up in the "wisdom-of-the-crowds" trap that is so dominant in web-2.0-circles these days:

a word of caution by Jaron Lanier:

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html