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12/11/2006: "the death of America"

Hear me, people: We have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.
--Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference in 1877

The Powder River Conference ended just over one hundred and thirty years ago, but the old Chief’s baleful analysis of the White Man’s rape of the American continent was just as accurate then as it would be today if he came back from the dead and said it for the microphones on CNN.

The source of the disease, of course, is big business and its marketing apparatus. The "consumer" trap is carefully set both to ensnare and infect its victims, to ensure that the rich get richer and that power remains in the hands of the powerful. Corporate marketing specialists and are quite frank about their purpose: to generate profit by manipulating people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Marketing, in effect, attempts to turn people’s private lives into just another part of a grand production/consumption line. In short, the purpose of marketing is to perpetuate the capitalist system and its concomitant inequalities. Thus the source of the love of possession in the modern world is more like weaponized anthrax than it is smallpox virus. It does not readily spread from one individual to another, living freely in a population, as consumer culture theorists would have it. Rather, infection requires contact with a concentrated source that has been carefully engineered (in this case by the marketing minions of the capitalist class) for its malign purpose.

Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, caused lots of head-scratching Thursday as he tried to explain to a bunch of Wall Street types why his company is not interested in “monetizing” his ridiculously popular Web operation.
[...]
Larry Dignan, writing on Between the Lines blog at ZDNet, called Mr. Buckmaster “delightfully communist,” and described the audience as “confused capitalists wondering how a company can exist without the urge to maximize profits.

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Craigslist is hardly communist, consider all the transactions it has enabled! By removing the profit margin of the intermediary, Craigslist has expanded the number of participants in the market and increased the relative power of the individual. Milton Friedman would be proud.

Craigslist is the best example of businesses that are refusing to make money the only goal, or even the main goal.

This type of customer driven businesses run as a partner to society instead of an aggressor is the form of the future, truly Green Companies. They are hybrids of sorts, combining the best of for=profit and non-profits characteristics.

In another article in today’s NYT is the decision of Groupe Danone to build 50 fortified-yogurt plants in Bangladesh, manned not automated, with the goal of returning the only cost and 1% profit with the rest being re-invested.

This happened at the urging of Muhammad Yunus, the microcredit pioneer who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. The fortified yogurt plant project is financed through his micro lending bank.

Mr. Schachter and his cronies in the banking industry must recognize this potentially disruptie emerging market that flattens the opportunity while preserving the motivation. It is quite similar to the position that Microsoft finds itself in relation to the Free Software (but not Open Source) model.

And, in fact, this is where "Open Source" went wrong. Open Source was a re-branding effort to "make Free Software safe for business". It traded the social good of Software Freedom for increased profits. Its leaders were not careful enough and now Open Source has failed in front of the onslaught of the recent Microsoft - Novell deal, with its implicit threat of patent infringement suits.

Through this life I’ve learned to not mistake clear vision for short distance.

When you think of the needs of the second and third worlds it is clear the current model, as practiced in the Western world, doesn’t scale.

This new “benevolence baked in” business model looks like it may overcome the scaling problem and still provide enough compensation for people to live well, or perhaps, in the things that matter, maybe better than they do now.

But the rejection of marketing as a revenue stream absolutely delights me.

was never more true.