Subsistance-Sharing: Of the difficulty to let go
Why on earth is it so difficult to tell how organizations handle subsistence by sharing, K ponders. Organizations that come to mind - emergency relief operations, foundations, the Red Cross, the Church - are not entirely selfless, are they? K makes a little scratch list:
— commerce (stakeholders)
— commerce (foundation, privately owned)
— foundations
— church
— emergency relief
— United Way, Red Cross
What about art, and sport, where do they fit in? As he looked at the list for a while, but staying off the wine this time, K realized that the list has something to do with money. The higher up the list, the more obviously it was about money and payback - quite rightly so. You only get to use other people's money for commercial reason because you promise a return - you are then, as it should be, judged by that return. Even if there is a selfless service element, you lawyer and accountant will most likely advise you to downplay that.
The list begins to be a little useful, K thinks, because it explains why money matters are more and more despicable the further down the list you go. From indulgences sold by the church to misappropriation of funds collected for relief work to the high percentage some professional fund raisers of 'good causes' keep for themselves. It also explains why art and sport does not fit easily into the list. Art for art's sake, and sport for sport's sake would be low on the list, but especially in the sport world the huge sums sloshing around the system, be it the Olympics, or baseball, or soccer, drive it closer and closer to the commercial end of the list. Not surprisingly, some European soccer clubs have turned themselves into commercial businesses and issued shares.
K thought, and at last getting somewhat more into the spirit of the topic, is this then proof of selfish man, man a mere maker of deals? Or is it another example of the quixotic quest for what could be called the 'alcoholic personality syndrome' - at least K calls it that way. If you frown, hang in there a minute. In his youth, K had worked, peripherally, in the medical field studying alcoholism. In the history of treating alcoholism, there was a time when many folks were working hard to identify the personality that would succumb to the disease - in order, of course, to prevent this from happening. The logic that drove the quest seemed impeccable: all late stage alcoholics exhibit a remarkable narrow range of behaviors. The assumption was, therefore, that those behaviors were latently present even before the person started drinking and if one could identify in a 'pre-alcoholic' person those very traits, then one could treat that person in a focused, preventive and effective way.
Impeccable, yes, but still wrong. Because the causality, it turned out, was not from the latent traits to the alcoholic behavior, but instead from the alcohol drinking to the ever narrower range of behaviors. Just as drowning people fighting for their life have a remarkable narrow range of behaviors - namely to try desperately not to drown. It is not, in fact, that some people with a 'latent drowning behavior' seek out water to be able to act out their latency.
What does this little detour have to do with money, selflessness and sharing? Well, since you ask, could it not be, K wondered, that there is no 'latent deal making behavior' inherent in humans which, sooner rather than later, they will engage in, at the expense of almost all else? Could it not be, instead, that being relentless engaged in narrow economic deal making we start to believe it is our nature - and therefore do not even wait to be asked 'What is in it for me?' but preempt the question by developing elaborate answers beforehand. And in doing so, perpetuate the myth that that is all there is?
Always alert to the danger of splitting hairs, K asked himself that if, however, we do behave as narrow, selfish deal makers, does it really matter why we do so? The answer is yes, it does matter because if we do so out of inherent, perhaps genetic, traits we will of course continue do so no matter what the situation. Much like a fly trapped inside a room who merely seeks the shortest, most direct way out - even if the open window is on the other side of the room. On the other hand, if we act selfishly because that is the way the rules of the game have been set up, then when the rules change then the behavior changes as well.
If it is the latter, K went on with his monologue to himself, are there then any signals, even weak ones, that might, if not quite support the second hypothesis, at least contradict the first one?
A precondition for abundance, beyond material lack of want, is connectedness. Without it, even if we have materially much more than enough, we are constrained, by the lack of deep, rich and fast information, to bilateral deals which are inherently confrontational, because they are essentially a series of games of the Prisoner's dilemma, always we new players. So, K wondered, is there an example already today of commercial connectedness? Of course there is, the information and communication industries. The infrastructures of those industries, in the rich parts of the world, have indeed flipped: The consumer, rather than waiting, struggling, or begging to get access is now sitting in an ocean of access and content. If there are signs of handling subsistence needs through sharing, it is here. Let's start with Linux.
Linux is an operating system, the basic software, in other words, that runs your computer - like Microsoft Windows, or Mac OS. Whereas control over Windows - the code, the distribution and the licensing - is the basis for Microsoft's dominance of the software business, Linux was created by hundreds, if not thousands of volunteers in their spare time. This unpaid effort was coordinated for over ten years by Linus Torvald, a Finish programmer, also in his spare time. The product is free, you can download it from http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html. Some commercial entities are now distributing it and do charge for distribution and service. While Linux has not made a significant dent in the retail market, it is gaining significant market share at the industrial end of operating systems: in-house servers, web servers and e-mail servers. In recent years, heavyweights of the industry, like IBM, have not only decided to support Linux, but have also curtailed and in some cases completely stopped the development of their in-house rival systems.
Is Linux a special case? That's always a difficult question to decide when you have only one data point - extrapolation in any direction whatever is quite possible! But the fact that Linux and it's 'business model' of unpaid volunteer work does exist and has caught repeatedly the eye of the Economist does give pause, al least to K.
Another, less clear example - but, remember, we are talking about weak signals here - is telephony. It is rare these days that in any of the major markets you pay anything for the hardware, i.e. the phone. It is true that in order to get the phone you do need to sign up for a service contract of some sort, but the days having to 'choose' from the very to the extremely limited offering from your local phone company are over. Once you have the phone, the cost of using it is also very low compared to just a few years ago and more and more independent of distance. Forever, it seemed until only yesterday, the rule was that the further the call's destination, the higher the cost. The logic was that someone had to cover the cost of putting in the infrastructure in the first place - overseas cables, copper wire, international cost and revenue sharing agreements, etc. Since these costs were so high, only few people used the service, which meant costs were spread over few users, keeping in turn the costs per use exorbitantly high: a classic vicious cycle. That logic has been completely swept away in the last five years.
Extreme connectedness also leads to dramatic surprises: who would have predicted the extraordinary success of the short message service, better knows as SMS? Especially teenagers send millions of these messages per month, with a 'keyboard' that defies not only all ergonomic principles, but is not actually a keyboard at all! And who, on the other hand, would have predicted the failure of WAP (wireless application protocol) services after so much investment in them? Who would have predicted that the first could of 'third generation' (UTMS) bandwidth auctions would have generated billions of dollars in windfalls for a few national treasuries, but in the course of six month became an absolute embarrassment for the remaining ones?
Are any of these examples conclusive? Far from it, but as a systems tips over from one state to another, from scarcity to something else, the best we can hope for, K decides for himself, is to see early, and thus weak signals. And those, he feels, he has seen.