Didn’t @doctorow have ad-hoc communities (out of necessity) like this in Makers?
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It wasn’t my idea initially, but I had the skills to tie the last bits together and had the right priorities to at least get the framework right.
I’m just carrying the torch and worst case scenario I start it as a small business and work it from there. I’ve got one specific line of business that’s well tested, I have contacts in, and I just need to find a CEO/figurehead type for that I was going to start with (something that I can do in six months with very little help that HP is billing one State medicaid contract several million for, and they chopped off all the cool features).
I’ve honestly struggled like crazy to describe it properly. I’m more of a ‘show not tell’ sort and while I do have one more stab I’m taking at it, I’d kind of given up on explaining it. It was just that this was a fun topic to throw it in with. 
Here’s the draft so far… Franchising Civilization
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Yup, lots of fundamental similarities…though this concept is to actually exploit all the existing laws and create something powerful that contains a huge number of communities people can move between. So instead of necessity…choice.
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Aww, thanks! It needs work but I think the concept is really solid.
It’s really the same idea as min/maxing with a pen and paper role playing game, and by adjusting the points in the back you can nudge people into situations where they’re a lot happier while using far less resources.
The idea is to have the internal mini-corporation-societies compete for people by being more awesome, rather than what we have now (which is lame).
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I’m also a fan of RPGs and sims and can remember the pen-and-paper days. When I could still find time to play Civilization, I would often turn off the (boring) “combat” options.
I haven’t read through all of the Franchising Civilization material yet. Are there systems for modeling agreements for generating and distributing resources and deficits?
As fascinating as people are, the relationships and agreements (trust) between people are also fascinating. And the agreements also provide the substance of whether the community’s system is legitimate and fair in addition to awesome.
And RPGs are just getting bigger and bigger, so it’s a good niche to try to attract, right? Especially for the first wave where we want some tech friendly sorts. (geeks!)
Oh yeah, tons of them. And many of them could ‘bridge’ mini-communities without much work. I’ve also done some supply chain work so I’m aware of the complications, that’s actually part of why we’d be letting people distribute themselves geographically as well, to limit the amount of unneeded back and forth. Large corporations invariably have something like that in place (oh, the endless fight over resources!) as do countries like Iceland, and RBEs (Resource Based Economies) are a topic where such things are very heavily discussed.
Worker co-operatives in particular have lots of great examples, so places like Mondragon would probably be good starting points. There are also lots of discussions along those lines in planned communities but honestly I’m thinking we could be more advanced and we could let groups of communities (by agreement) handle their own distribution and have a group that’s specialized in such things to handle the overall issues.
I’m going to assume that there are better approaches that people wouldn’t really think of until things are in play though, so I’d treat everything we have right now as proofs of concept rather than something that we should cling to design wise.
Honestly, I’ve got nothing new in here, it’s just combining other people’s ideas. That’s kind of what I do for a living, too.
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It’s sort of a coincidence that you use RPGs to help organize your thinking about social justice work.
I also use a sort of game. The starting premise is that, basically, you’re dropped into an unjust social situation with basically nothing.
You can imagine antebellum Winston County, Alabama . . . pro-fascist Spain in 1938 . . . we can walk outside the doors of our offices. Whatever works and feels challenging.
During the game you will discover potential allies and knowledge, but you also have severely limited prospects of acquiring anything else with conventional value because injustice.
That’s enough to start. Ready? Go!
It’s been a helpful tool and interesting. And new ideas or insights can often be stress-tested in the context of my “real” work.
It’s great to e-meet someone else with that sort of interest.
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Agreed!
And it actually makes sense when you think about it. Interactive stories have been around for centuries and keep cropping up in tribal societies. They’re ways to help people learn and explore the world without taking so many risks, it’s arguable they’re a fundamental part of our culture. RPGs tend to formalize the ‘economic’ aspects of things but that’s actually in line with training for our current society’s functionality. Plus it’s fun, right?
We have a lot of allies conceptually, it’s just a matter of kickstarting this thing into motion, and you’ve got to admit nobody’s tried anything like what we’re talking about on any large scale. 
Jane can hit on some other points you’ll like!
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Wow! I had some time and watched. Amazing. I’ve thought of gaming as an example of dissociative, compensatory adaptations to traumas — small and large. Jane McGonigal made an explicit comparison to a maybe-imaginary civilization that saves itself by using gaming as a dissociative, compensatory adaptation to trauma (famine). Who knew?
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Yup, pretty clever, right? I wish Urgent Evoke would’ve gotten off the ground better, but maybe that’d be a task that we could pull off in the future!
Nice to run into somebody it clicks so fast with, usually people get seriously hung up on one aspect or another, that’s why I dug up so many examples of parts of the Venn diagram working. It’s really surprising what’s out there if you dig!
I know it’s an eccentric approach, but I’m a big fan of asymmetric combat, it’s been good to me in my career. Besides, the bar’s set pretty low on people’s options, I like the idea of giving everyone something better.
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Many people seem to assume that “power” means some mysterious “power over other people”, rather than simply power to organize or work towards goals. It has always seemed like a peculiar philosophy to me. I have heard of the essay you mentioned, and I suppose I should read it. I vaguely agree that structurelessness can seem to be a form of tyranny. What I find troublesome about it is that people who have leaders have no structure of their own, it’s all imposed on them. But it seems that it would be those who feel invested in having a hierarchy who would dismiss voluntary structure as being somehow lesser. As if some perceptual block makes it unintuitive that people’s various functions can simply be different, while no more or less significant than those of others.
Are social relationships really abstract? I think that spaces and services are social relationships, they are the formal basis which most current so-called social activity lacks. And this is where I get stuck in my daily life, with people’s frequent refusal to engage. Just “liking each other” doesn’t count for much if we don’t introduce some structural components, some formal social constructs, and people often literally panic about this, citing that the structure was all predetermined by “others”. Often others who they don’t like, trust, or agree with! But that they yet decide are somehow more valid than interactions with equals who they actually know. Why would your own parents, children, SO, or best friends decide that The State was deserving of more respect than our own voluntary relationships? I see this as ultimately being more of an interpersonal problem than anything else.
I don’t disagree, as such. But what you are saying seems to rely upon billions of people just happening to default to finding authoritarianism practical somehow. People often treat it like a default for social interaction, and this presumption I think is counter-productive. It seems like more of a psychological than political problem, that people just assume that some people have more or less power than others, and that this is then exploited. If people can’t get over that belief, they will simply (as they have done) replace one hierarchy with another.
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The Republic
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Can you share more about the context, objectives and outcomes of those organizing experiences? Is it Occupy and/or other work? And of course I understand if you don’t feel comfortable sharing about it in this sort of forum. It’s interesting to learn about practical efforts to get stuff done — especially from someone who’s also so interested in theory and the history of organizing.
And rejecting all hierarchy is sometimes a way for someone who acts impulsively or has trouble keeping commitments to avoid accountability to people sharing the work and/or the people who are supposed to benefit from the work.
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I’ll actually chime in in advance and agree with @Comrade that it’s a pretty common group dynamic. People gravitate towards roles that suit them naturally and many aspects of ‘leadership’ (motivation, guidance, vision, organization, mentorship, etc.) are always going to be useful. On the corporate side I’ve been part of an ungodly amount of fresh projects under a number of different structures and the various subroles tend to crop up all the time.
What’s not necessary is for the ‘leader’ to be somehow ‘more special’ than everyone else. There are a crazy amount of possible structures and not all of them grant anybody an inherent superiority…and many (the proper ones IMHO) resist the concept right out of the gates. (Read Valve’s Employee Handbook for a delightful example of dynamic leadership from a plenty successful little company)
Similarly, that’s a trend with the known remaining peaceful societies…if nobody thinks they’ve got some kind of mandate then they’re less likely to make themselves useless/disruptive.
In my experience, things generally work just fine when everybody believes they don’t have any inherent superiority over everyone else…it’s when hierarchical roles get institutionalized that things get lopsided and inefficient.
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A subtle problem with this I think is that it buys into the notion of exploitation as being inherently more powerful. Recognizing people’s right to organize might mean needing to accept when people choose to subordinate themselves to hierarchy, or subject themselves to exploitation. Those are, in themselves, a perverse sort of “freedom” if that’s how they prefer to organize. The pervasiveness is a huge problem, which I think is also addressed by this same recognition of people’s right to organize.
I don’t think so, such an atomistic outlook ignores ecology. But it’s precisely trying to work with neighbors where things can stall. I can easily find some freks netside who are happy to participate in society more directly. But people I speak with in daily life seem quite averse to getting involved, even when the default structures they take for granted are being destroyed from without. I can sort of understand why some of the more bourgeois elements feel invested in the status quo, but not why the masses of mostly disenfranchised defend it so fiercely.
I agree, in sentiment. But in practice, I think it’s paradoxical. It suggests that if all people don’t decide to be free, that others cannot be free themselves, and should perhaps not bother. Quite a few people discuss society as being somehow a monolithic whole where the same system, goals, and values can be applicable to all people. This does not seem realistic to me. On the flip side of that presumption, why should exploitation be recognized as the default now if we don’t all agree to that?
This is why I think it is more fair and realistic for groups to be free as the participants agree to be.
I appreciate the insights you share about the corporate context.
I work more in legal and nonprofit settings so, in some ways, you’re letting me share a different perspective than I’m used to hearing every day. New projects are usually zero or low budget. Successes frequently need to leverage other sources of value.
And there’s also emphasis on listening and figuring out how to engage and nurture trust with clients and/or community members . . . learn their goals — even if those goals do not always seem rational to me.
I recommend Dog, Eat, Dog for this. I’ve played it once. It is a game of colonization where one player is the colonizers and everyone else is the colonized and, let’s just say, the rules are not balanced or fair.
http://liwanagpress.com/dog-eat-dog/
http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/review-dog-eat-dog/
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That is totally amazing! @William_Holz — have you seen this game? Incorporating the extreme inequality seems like a really important component for making the game “about injustice” in some ways. And . . . it’s likely to make the game insanely hard if you’re playing as a colonized character. Was it a good game? The review makes it sound pretty interesting and fun — though on the bleak side maybe? I dunno.
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