Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Commerce and Corporations to Come

Another snippet of the conversation I had with Jose Garcia a few weeks ago has been published over at Meme Therapy today. One of the pleasures of the interview with Jose was that half the questions he asked me weren't really questions I was expecting at all. The question this time was: The corporation is ubiquitous in future visions of commerce. Do you envisage any novel types of commercial organizations emerging in the first part of the 21st century? Here's what I said:
This isn't really my subject, but it seems to me that there are a lot of social forms that can be called commerce, a lot of forms that can be called corporations[ --] after all workers co-operatives are often limited liability corporations as well. Similarly, a lot of the things that are rightly criticized by anti-corporatist politics could very well be ameliorated in a world that still had legible corporations in it.

The provision of a global basic income guarantee would, among other good things, provide all workers with a kind of permanent strike fund to ensure they could bargain collectively for better work conditions and pay without the threat of economic catastrophe to constrain them. Global fair-trade, labor, and environmental standards, empowered regulatory bodies, and international courts would, among other good things, provide balance to the current market regime that unfairly and relentlessly privileges rich nations over struggling ones. Focus on these reforms, institute public financing of election campaigns and rethink the decision that money is speech and I won't much care after that if the legal fiction of corporate personhood might not be the best or only way to protect the social benefits that attach to limited liability for some commercial associations.

Peer-to-peer networks facilitate co-operation by rendering it incomparably less costly. Like distributed renewable energy technologies, these p2p networks can be radically decentralizing. Who knows what the impact of genetic engineering will ultimately be on agriculture, or of molecular manufacturing on consumer goods?

The constant re-eruption of inevitably dashed dreams of direct participatory democracy in the workplace as well as civic life attests to an apparently ineradicable ideal, as does the repeated re-emergence of the dream of a high-tech gift economy. If the political will is there to demand it, technodevelopment may well render negligible sooner rather than later the real costs that hitherto have kept these democratic dreams woolly and wild. It may be technoprogressives who finally manage to bring home the force of the quintessential slogan of 68: Be realistic, demand the impossible!
Definitely follow the link to check out the other responses to Jose's question, as well as for his own interesting comments on the topic.

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