Category: Economies

Could AI Break Capitalism?

About a year ago, the US Copyright Office ruled that AI-generated ‘expressive works’ were not covered by US Copyright law.

“Based on the Office’s understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output. For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare’s style. But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.”

As we shift into a world where expressive work, in terms of sheer volume, is more often than not produced by AI, we can imagine interesting breakdowns in the nature of ownership itself.

Just a few years ago, we were in an almost diametrically opposed conversation about technology and expressive work, when the advent of NFTs gave artists the idea that they might be able to have ‘more ownership’ of their work and so finally make bank. While that promise proved to be somewhere between overly hopeful and deceptive, it also seemed to be an extension of the capitalist sense that everything should be possible to commodify and people who were thus far left out of the dream of wild money-making, namely unknown artists, were suddenly going to be initiated. Such a vision had nothing to do with changing the system, only about who got to be admitted to the extraction part of the equation.

The emergence of AI-everywhere has taken the questions conceptual artists of the last decades have been investigating (not to mention Orson Welles) and made them into regular people conversational chatter. What is art, in fact, and who is it for? Is art about expression, a creative process, a compelling product? Is art about the artist or about the image? Does art come from an idea or an expression of an idea? Does art happen when it’s intentional or by accident? And who “should” own art?

In the 20th Century, art became something that could be part of an investment portfolio. Though the move toward art for money’s sake began before digital was a thing (Jeff Koons on the high-end, decor-art on the mass produced side), creative work became far more product-ized in the turn of the century as ‘creators’ gained access to metrics and feedback about what potential buyers responded to, and the platforms for whom scale was at utmost value instilled the idea of “meeting market demand” into creators through its incentive structures and designs. You could make money being a “creator” from platform ad revenue if you could reach a mass audience (that good ole mobility myth again).

Next generation tools began to re-instate the niche opportunities for creators with tools like Patreon, Substack, and even Etsy, brands began realizing the power of “micro influencers,” but for nearly all creative people, their platform income was not going to cover rent or even groceries. Meanwhile, the promise of the ‘creator economy’ as a cultural phenomenon meant that all of us were writing newsletters or pimping ourselves somewhere to get attention and sometimes money, and like with any MLM, there’s a point at which you look around and realize there’s no one left who hasn’t already been pitched the oils or bought the leggings.

When streaming or really, Napster, emerged- we saw that recordings lost value, and artists could only make “real” money through offering an experience (live show) or a tangible good, and those are much harder to scale. That’s now the reality for anyone who was seduced by the idea of making a living through creative work.

The world of “marketing” as we knew it for the past 20 years is about to implode. There’s little incentive for platforms to ‘protect’ people and their ‘intellectual property’ when it’s far less legally onerous to host unprotected content that can be produced in ever more volume and variation tailored to the whims of individuals (while, if the last several years are any indication, will also work to erase some elements of individual taste in favour of promoting an advertising-driven ‘us against them’ tribalism).

That all sounds kind of horrible, but it also has promise. While people have proven very easy for platforms to manipulate, we are still fundamentally built to value cooperative, embodied, process-driven experiences. Most of us actually are aware that being with each other has an unmonetizable value, even with the rise of commodification of our relationships and so-called communities.

If most art we experience is impossible to own, then might we begin to question owning things at all? Or at least, things that are virtual. What feels radical about the USCO decision is that instead of, as in the past, corporations getting to extract from artists through publishing rights, there’s no owner at all for AI-created work, and how will we even be able to know something is not AI-created, if it’s digital?

Whether this means more power to the technocracy or not remains to be seen. Right now, AI models are very dependent on huge compute and lots of venture money, but presumably there will be motion towards locally-running models as well as cross-pollination of different systems that make it hard to fully control using the legal mechanisms we have now.

Maybe we are not going to abandon ownership but we’ll be more apt to return to analogue approaches. Charles Eisenstein proposes investing in a typewriter factory. I still have this fantasy of a recursive AI system in which absolutely everything digital is AI driven and managed, giving people no choice other than to return to the tactile and small-scale, unless they wish to be a product themselves in more ways than just their attention to advertisers.

Maybe embodiment itself is undergoing a kind of system-commodification that happens to most dangerous ideas. Mostly it seems that we’re in a hyper-denial of our bodies, either because we’re thinkers or because social media has amplified our story about what parts of our physical selves are unacceptable. I think of the chapter in Hospicing Modernity about shit, how much the toilet is the metaphor for life in the anthropocene. We produce waste in pristine rooms, poop into clean water, and send it away to be dealt with by someone else. We don’t take responsibility for our waste and we also don’t see the value of this part of our collective metabolic system.

We are going to have to go back to buckets and compost to find out what making things is about, what a fools errand it was to own our work or to protect our ideas, and especially to trade our creativity for the crumbs of a surveillance system’s profits. We are only mammals, in the end, dreaming of being stars.

Goodbye, Capitalism

How I will long for your halcyon days

What if capitalism, in any way that an encyclopedia or economics 101 class might describe it, is over? That’s the hypothesis of the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Veroufakis, who argues that we’re entering into something worse: what he calls Technofeudalism.

If you, like me, have had this sneaking thought like, ‘well, obviously the platforms now have more power than governments,’ then Veroufakis’s argument won’t come out of nowhere, but it’s a bleak picture of how we’ve ceded our economic systems to purely extractive rent-seeking, in ways that have little recourse for rebellion, given that this autocracy does little to directly govern. We don’t vote for these leaders, they don’t provide our necessary physical infrastuctures, though they own a lot of fiber and servers. They leech off of the systems ‘citizens’ pay for and then determine what else we can buy or pay attention to, how we can communicate, and increasingly, what systemic resources we ourselves can access.

Obviously terrorism is a fail in my eyes, but you can’t help but think a little wistfully about the underlying hope in Ted Kaczynski‘s attempts to bring attention to technology’s negative impacts and his desire to get the hell out and off the grid. But I don’t have a shack in the woods future without a catastrophe. I’m about as incompetent at living off the land as one could be (aside from a successful attempt to grow kale). Instead, I am here participating in making myself a serf, a sharecropper of this system.

We’ve been living in a pretty obvious tipping point with ‘creators’ and AI and ‘the sharing economy’ for some time, and now it’s here.

The only antidote I can propose, with even a shred of reason, is to really re-focus on re-wilding ourselves in some way through the practice of practice. We can learn to be with each other, suffer the messiness and frustration that will always be a part of connection and collaboration, and then perhaps start to build tools to support trust-sized networks that can start to provide infrastructure alternatives to the cloud- keeping in mind that we are not in a position to abandon our feudal overlords wholesale yet. (Yes, tech things like mesh networks, private authentications, alternative financial systems that are not about solving trustlessness at scale, but non-tech things are probably more important).

In this lifetime, we’re only going to sow possibility, and won’t taste the fruit of our labours. And so, it will be quite tempting to just say, ‘but I need that thing from Amazon’ or “it’s fine if I just look at social media a little bit.” I mean, these are just the most obvious things that I still do on the regular. As an advantaged western person, I’m not only choosing my own serfdom, I’m basically forcing it on other people who thus far haven’t even had the option of purchasing Prime.

What will happen about war, or other old-school dominance activities? It’s an interesting question. Surely to innovate in the manner in which technology lords depend, there will need to be enough sense of personal autonomy to be creative, and creativity breeds subversion, as a rule. But we’ve invented these excellent policing technologies such as AI, blockchain, and social media, so perhaps any of our efforts to resist will simply be co-opted into fun memes or lead to banishment.

For a much more entertaining read, while also unhopeful, I recommend The Immortal King Rao, which breezed into the top spot of Novels I Read Last Year That Basically Support and Annihilate My Worldview Simultaneously. No spoilers, but one theme of the book centres around what happens when the algorithm rules us, like, officially. It’s very nearly nonfiction.

Public Spending

Can buying be in service?

Everywhere I go, there are countless discussions about making money. There are just straight up “winning is the ultimate goal” kinds of conversations, “how can we make money doing good” speculations, or “how can I do what I want and get paid” aspiration. Whether we we’re trying to make millions or make ends meet, making money seems to be the primary focus of public discourse around personal finances.

What about spending money, though?

I’m curious about the idea of spending in service. Of looking at what I’m spending money on, even being transparent about what I’m spending on, and asking myself if that spending serves my purpose.

I think it might be interesting to discover my judgements about my own and others’ spending. Even without knowing about other people’s incomes, their spending is so interesting. I can find myself wondering, “can they afford that?” Either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ yields possible judgements that tell me something about me.

What’s more, I think we’re very trained in our current context to regard spending money as a balm, as therapeutic. It’s seen as self-deprivation when we don’t buy things we want, ‘if we have the money.’ There’s incredible amounts of compare-and-despair when we hear someone spent money “on themselves”.

So-called “consumer spending” in the US is rising. On the other hand, there are downward trends in giving money to charity.

There are megatons of trash resulting from all our packaged products, disposables, and fast fashions. Nearly all our food now contains plastics. Manufacturing and transporting stuff accounts for incredible amounts of energy depletion and environmental pollution. No amount of recycling could offset all the stuff we’re buying and throwing away.

I look around and see all the tangible things accumulating in the places where I dwell. Some things have not involved in transactions at all, like rocks I picked up on a beach. Some of those things I didn’t pay for, but someone did. Mostly though, these are things I purchased, and it can be surprising to think of all that buying and time considering purchases, not to mention the truckloads (literally) of things I have taken to thrift stores, in all my various moves. At the moment, we have a somewhat limited landfill contribution (less than a bin every four weeks) but over the course of a lifetime, my gracious, my pile of trash must be house-sized.

I have work to do here. I have moved in a more intentional direction over time, but perhaps I can incorporate more accountability. Not to say ‘spending less’ per se, but instead, being aware and intentional with the things I spend on. Maybe even begin a collaborative practice.

What are the questions I want to ask about spending money?

  1. Will the money I’m spending go to support people and purposes that matter to me?
  2. Is this the best alternative or am I sacrificing my values in some way for convenience?
  3. How much waste will I be contributing to by spending on this thing? (Including intangeables like energy use).
  4. Would I be OK to share that I am spending on this with my friends, family, or colleagues? (Of course, this might turn out to be more of a reflection on who I am involved with, or residual shame, rather than what I’m buying.)
  5. What would happen if I didn’t spend on this? Is there something I could do with this money that would fuel my purpose?

I’m not advocating being totally public about spending, since we’re living in a context where such information will only be weaponised to shame or to sell us more things. We already give corporations with vested interests in our spending transparency in pretty self-defeating ways. But I wonder what would happen if a few of us came together and accounted for our spending (and even time) with one another, purely with curiosity and wonder. Not like “I shouldn’t have done this” but more like “what can I learn about myself through what I’m putting money into.”

Some of the ways this kind of thinking can manifest can be precious or privleged. But I think these questions allow me to consider my intentions regardless of the options at hand. I will never be without compromise or escape complicity as I spend money. Things are just too interdependent. If I were to do this in a group, there would be interesting ways to practice my powerlessness over other people’s choices. I think we would need to agree that whatever we share about our spending, it’s no one else’s job to police, judge, or take a holier-than-thou attitude.

Despite feeling a strong sense of purpose, I am still reserving brain space for things like, “I need a pair of black pants that look good but can be machine washed” and “I want to eat at that fancy restaurant at least once.” It seems I’m always needing this or that at some low level of awareness. What if I had that time back to dance, write, design, walk, call a friend, or read a poem? When I was struggling with an eating disorder in my 20s, I used to think, ‘if I just thought about it as much as I do about my thighs, the problem of nuclear fusion might be solved.’ What brilliance could emerge if I stopped thinking about wanting things?

For today, perhaps I will just start tracking the things I spend on and the time I spend thinking about spending on something, especially the terrible morass of trying to research purchases that are fairly irrelevant anyway. (The best minds of my generation have read way too many Wirecutter articles). Maybe we’ll make a club. Money, in its most pure and wonderful form, is merely a mechanism of collaboration, and I want to make things together.

Recent Media

Money for nothing

I haven’t ever really gotten into video games post-Atari, but I used to joke that eBay was my favourite video game. There’s something game-like about searching through its huge market for treasures, finding things that seem like good deals, and adding those things to my Watchlist. Then eBay gamifies it even more, sending notifications to say, ‘oh, you’re running out of time,’ and I quickly decide whether or not the item is really what I want (usually not). It’s pretty fun.

But sometimes I’ll be in a certain mood, or have a story that I ‘need’ something more urgently, or the deal just seems so compelling from a ‘level of discount’ perspective and I go and snipe the auction, only to realize once the item arrives that it was not actually necessary at all. Like when I bought a dress shirt (designer! only $20!), thinking, I’d really like to wear more dress shirts and blazers, only to come back into reality and realise that I live in Portland and mostly only am seen by people other than my family on dog walks or Zoom calls, neither of which necessitate the wearing of items that require professional dry cleaning, ironing, or for that matter, even frequent washing.

But eBay is not the only vector of my aspirational shopping. I fantasized for a while about a reMarkable tablet before buying the second generation when it came out, only to have it end up in a drawer. I own socks that are still attached to their little plastic sock hanger.

There are many things I honestly thought I needed (NEEDED!) that barely saw use once they arrived at my doorstep.

And another interesting thing about me, I guess, is that in fact if I buy something that I like a little less, something less special, like items from Portland’s infamous Goodwill bins, I will often use them much more than the great deals on fancy things I’ve found elsewhere, because I don’t want to ‘use up’ the nice things. I have a gallery of ‘nice things’ and an actual experience of items that are good enough.

I have a general policy about buying most things used, or sometimes new from individuals who never used the items, as a way of living without directly encouraging sweatshops and the overproduction of discretionary items (food is an exception, and let’s face it, I still use Amazon to buy some things). But this policy doesn’t really protect me from my own games, the idea that some additional item will enhance my life in some way, that there are rational reasons for purchasing something that fundamentally implies that right now things really aren’t good enough.

I don’t think I am alone here.

We are producing so many things, so much of which is bound for landfills, so much of which comes with this idea that material goods can ease our discomfort, so much of which we really just don’t need.

I notice that there’s a sense of security I am seeking with this kind of behaviour, being able to have new versions of things that are still functional, having clothing options, keeping backup supplies of things we ‘might need’, or buying groceries that are good deals but don’t get used before the best-by dates (accelerated by my proclivity to shop at Grocery Outlet, or grossout as it is known in my household).

Then there are these moments where Marie Kondo shows up and is like “what if you only keep things that spark joy?” And then we purge all the extra stuff, leaving so much room for additional things to refill our home, because homes in North America are really built for stuff more than for people.

Enough already

Let’s start thinking about what is enough. Let’s start thinking about what it means to have everything we need.

To do this, we can consider some basic questions:

  • What matters?
  • What would the world be like if everyone had what we think is enough for ourselves?
  • What is sustainable?
  • What if there’s no security? What if no money or possessions can protect us?

Everywhere around us, we are being sold the idea of needing more. We need new clothes, appliances, cars, phones, things long before our old ones wear out. If we have abundance, we can satisfy our whims to travel or to eat out at restaurants or just buy things because shopping is pleasurable. We can have treatments to make us more beautiful.

So often I hear the idea that spending money on yourself equates to caring for yourself, that when things are challenging, just ‘do something nice for yourself,’ suggesting you can buy your own self love.

Scarcity isn’t a mindset

It’s no fun to live in a state where basic needs can’t be met because of our lack of resources. I’ve been in a situation where I ran out of money. I depended on public assistance to eat, and even couldn’t get to work or interviews for work without scrounging for change for the transit fare. This experience was transformational because it happened at a time when I had been beginning to invest in practices of self-growth and collective practice. I experienced the fear of what would happen as I ran out of money and the awe at realizing I was OK because other people cared about me and were willing to help me get through a rough time.

Without community support, the panic response and elevated stress of survival mode lead to degraded decision-making and mental and emotional exhaustion. Children living in this situation have lifelong effects. 10-15% of people worldwide and in the US live in this state.

People live with the effects of our overconsumption globally: pollution, war, climate-related famine, and other kinds of stress-inducing situations to contend with, much of which is made invisible to affluent people whose neighbourhoods are situated away from landfills, Superfund sites, and areas of direct conflict. In my own neighbourhood, for example, there are nearby encampments that are regularly cleared out, making it seem as though public spaces are “really” owned by only people who also can purchase land around them.

Let’s stop celebrating the idea of abundance.

Having everything we need feels different than abundance. Abundance can be infinite. Access to more wealth and privilege expands one’s idea of what abundance might be. Having what we need is more definable, collective, and possible.

This is not a communist polemic. I don’t think everyone has to have the same things. I am skeptical of the blunt ideas of equality or fairness, which tend to disregard the beauty of difference. I don’t think we can have a world where everyone has what they need through a state-enforced program.

As a reflective practice, though, I think it’s very helpful to feel into what enough looks like. To start to notice when wanting more is more an addiction than an genuine longing or need.

How I spend my time and money have consequences. Most purchasable items involve some level of complicity in systems of extraction and dominance. I can’t extricate myself from this but I can participate less and operate with more awareness.

When I buy something new, I wonder, what am I actually trying to obtain with this purchase? Am I imagining I will be more attractive, have more peace of mind, more fun, more sense of being accepted? This applies to the little purchases as well as the big ones. What’s more, a lot of my purchases are just things I need because I bought some other thing I need, when the need itself was always an illusion.

But what about them?

There are always people with more wealth and more conspicuous consumption around to use as a fake barometer of our own behaviour.

It’s not useful to police or to call out people who are, by virtue of factors including luck and effort, able to own property or properties, to accumulate wealth, to travel as tourists, to buy expensive items, to eat at restaurants that charge hundreds of dollars per meal, or take advantage of other kinds of ‘luxuries.’

And, it’s fair to say that most luxuries come at a cost to others. It’s fair to say that most means of acquiring wealth come with some exploitation of others. It’s fair to say that Western people’s ideas of enough or abundance are pretty weird, and that we’re often imagining something for ourselves that would be inconceivable to a large percentage of the world, if we hadn’t invented social media and streaming media to let everyone know about the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

How can we open a discussion about what enough looks like, that doesn’t lead to pointing fingers, resentments, or ignoring blind spots or areas of conflict?

What can I do to be honest with myself about the ways my earning and spending money impact others?

Money doesn’t care about us

Money is a stand-in for many relationships in our culture. We measure love in the cost of gifts (two months salary, for example). We pay people to do care work, such as child care, elder care, and health care. We hire and fire caregivers, making care something we think is a result of spending rather than relationship. Les and less do we invest in reciprocal caring.

We feel isolated though we have more people around us than ever in human history. We have to pay others to listen to us, to take care of our kids, to make us food. And when we pay people to do things that are associated with care, we necessarily make care transactional, we don’t feel like we have to care in return. Think of the day care centres who tried charging extra to mitigate the tendency of parents arriving late, making staff work longer than they were meant to, only to find that it made the problem worse. “I’m paying for this service so now I deserve to get what I paid for,” completely divorcing themselves from the human consequences.

My sense of why many paid forms of community are strange is something like, ‘you can’t pay someone to be your friend,’ but even that truism is being tested now, whether by paying actual people to perform friendship, or with new forms of technology or drugs that are supposed to replace the need for actual humans to care for us.

Delusional currency

We see money as a sign of our worth. And we see other people’s worth in terms of money. But we’re fond of stories that upend this paradigm. “Greed is good,” goes the Gordon Gekko memetic mantra, but in the end of Wall Street, Gekko has fallen. We are in this weird shame cycle of wanting money, power, recognition while recognising we’d be much happier investing in our communities, relationships, health, and skill-development.

In one study, when participants watched a video of a child talking a test, those who were told the child comes from a wealthy family rated the child as smarter, more capable, and the test more challenging than when the same video is shown to people who’ve been told the child comes from a low-income family. We truly believe people with money are better, despite the widespread evidence that wealth and power often lead to less empathy and more bias and irrational thinking.

When the conversation about what it might look like to live without the aim of making a lot of money, many people I’ve talked to seem to regard the whole idea as fanciful and misguided. Some are dismissive entirely, some retort with some version of the ‘do good to do well’ concept of finding ways to be “good” and still make a lot of money. It’s not money itself that is the problem, of course, but every argument in favour of wealth accumulation I’ve heard involves bypass and contortion. Yes, it may be that my accumulation comes at others’ expense, but I’ll do good things with the money, or I will be able to stop doing terrible things and commit my time to collective good once I have enough money for my own security, or I don’t want to live with scarcity mindset.

Real scarcity mindset is a belief that money can offer meaning, acceptance, or security. We are most likely to live longer, have good health, and feel our life has meaning when we’re integrated in contexts of interdependence and care, where we feel loved and where we’re not vastly unequal in resources to those around us. When we think of money in terms of a practice of cooperation and collaboration, where we create value with other people, and can then pass along resources to those creating value for us, where we by and large know the people we’re creating value with and for as well as those who are creating value for us, we can understand money as simply a metaphor for our connection.

It’s the system, baby

It’s interesting that so many of the destructive materialisms we’re engaged with are subsidized by taxes and seen as beneficial to ‘our economy’.

Our current economic strategies rely on people buying stuff (or traveling, or eating junk, or pursuing wealth accumulation or whatever) in lieu of being satisfied, and anti-social patterns work in service of those strategies.

It’s economically advantageous, at least for corporations, to have people living apart from one another and needing to buy individual versions of everything, to pay for care, to be fined into prison. In theory, we’d have governments (meaning, a group that we’ve selected to ensure our collective wellbeing) looking to more of a holistic measure of economic benefit. This would involve holding corporations accountable for the economic costs growth strategies involve, such as environmental damage, heath care costs, even things like crime (though punishment is simply another corporate-benefit industry without accountability). We’ve stopped regarding government in this light especially in the US (or, for example, in more universally accepted as despotic regimes).

I have to suspect that people who have learned how to live with fewer financial resources and more community will be in a better position as things collapse, whether due to war, climate, or other scarcity-inducing situations. Whether that will be ‘enough’ is hard to say, but there’s no downside I can think of to learning to share resources, support each another, and recognise how deeply satisfied I can be with all my needs being met.

Our Work and Our Worth

“Money is like water. It can be a conduit for commitment, a currency of love. Money moving in the direction of our highest commitments nourishes our world and ourselves. What you appreciate appreciates. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands. Collaboration creates prosperity. True abundance flows from enough; never from more. Money carries our intention. If we use it with integrity, then it carries integrity forward. Know the flow—take responsibility for the way your money moves in the world. Let your soul inform your money and your money express your soul. Access your assets—not only money but also your own character and capabilities, your relationships and other nonmoney resources.”

― Lynne Twist

“We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.”

― David Graeber

It’s hard to reason about money when it has a kind of theological position in our culture. My old stories about money fall into a few categories. Maybe you have entertained some of these ideas yourself.

Being liked or accepted

  • If I seem to have money, I will be subtly ostracized or mistrusted by others
  • If I appear to have a low income (or even an ‘average’ income) I will not seem credible as a consultant/job candidate/human
  • If I speak of struggling with money, people may believe (or find out) shameful things about me, like I am dealing with emotional struggles or I was fired from a job
  • If I charge for my time at a rate that reflects my worth, I will be rejected or seen as greedy

Fairness

  • If I receive less money than other people with similar levels of education/experience/power/hierarchical role, it’s not fair
  • If I speak about struggling with money, I am being insensitive to people with more systemic disadvantages than mine
  • I have had many advantages so I should make a lot of money
  • I have had many challenges so I’ve been kept from making money
  • Fair pay is the same thing as getting what other people get for the work
  • Non-male founders get ridiculously little investment

Worth

  • If I receive more money than other people with similar levels of education/experience/power/hierarchical role, it’s a sign of my worth or negotiating prowess
  • My personal work is not valuable enough, not good enough
  • How much money I can raise is a reflection of the potential of my startup’s success

Safety

  • I should always be in an upward earning trajectory
  • If I don’t make enough money, my life will fall apart
  • You need at least a million dollars to be able to retire
  • Having a job, a house, a retirement account makes you safe
  • I can’t afford to take time off
  • I can’t have a vacation if I’m not working

Identity

  • I should be doing things for money that reflect ‘who I am.’
  • What’s holding me back from doing what I love is that it’s not a good way to make money
  • Finding a way to make money and do what I love is difficult or impossible
  • If people see all my sides then I will be too something to be hired
  • The person who I’m in relationship with should make enough money
  • Good people don’t care about money
  • Good people don’t neglect their responsibilities by being financially unstable
  • If I were a ‘real’ founder I would be making a product that investors were lining up to fund
  • I can’t do creative work without having enough money to take the time to do it full-time

Competence

  • If I worked harder I would make more money
  • If I made more money, my life would be better
  • I need to find a benefactor
  • I don’t have the credentials to make money
  • All I need to do is get over my fear of being visible and I will make money
  • I can’t find a job even when I lower my standards
  • I shouldn’t pay someone to do something for me if I could do it myself
  • It’s naive to think you could make money without sacrificing your principles
  • Great founders fundraise and bring in large capital investments as a result of their storytelling skills and clear business acumen

It took many years to wrangle with all of these stories and to realize I was operating with faulty priors in the first place.

When it comes to money, there are many ways to get out of right relation with myself and with others. As with any wisdom I have discovered, there are lots of ways to refute what might feel true to me, lots of ways to prove that the wisdom is wrong because there are people for whom the wisdom doesn’t apply.

Wisdom that speaks to me continues speaking, often in layers, often with my own objections layered on.

Wisdom related to money tends to activate me and other people and leads to many objections. Money often proxies for value among us, even in situations that such a metaphor doesn’t hold up well.

In conversation with Peter Limberg from the Stoa / Less Foolish we’ve explored the idea of Alivelihood, framed as “How to make money while doing what makes you come alive?“

Right now I believe that at some point a choice is required to commit to aliveness. For me, any kind of strategising doesn’t support this, it only gets in the way. In other words, aliveness as I experience it starts in the body, in the choice to listen to what is there for me in the interplay of breath, blood, being. The truth rests and abides. It doesn’t need to lead to making money. It does need the conditions to be able to be nourished, literally and spiritually. At times I hear people say having this nourishment is a privilege or a right. To me, it is a choice.

There are a lot of ways this can feel unskillful to express. Do I think it’s easy for people who are financially struggling to make this choice? No. But it’s also, at least from what I’ve observed, quite hard, at least as hard, for people who do have resources.

Making this choice doesn’t mean, “now I am alive all the time in everything I do.” Very few people I have met get to even 50% aliveness without making many choices, without being constantly in the practice of choice, without bumping up against all the deadening we are culturally conditioned to.

What I’m experiencing is that being alive, listening to the body, being willing to be slow leads to more discernment about opportunities. There are certainly people who have found material success by grinding and hustling, and sometimes it feels very alive for me to work hard, to work a lot, to press up against exhaustion. But it does not feel alive to be in fear about the repercussions of not making enough money. It seems more like a situation where, when I keep returning, keep doing the things that feel like they have a positive impact on the world, ways of supporting that show up.

In the conversation with Peter, I came up with a list of heuristics or ways of approaching money that emerged from a time when I went through the (unintentional) experience of having no money, no housing, and no income. I had an amazing transformation when I saw that I remained loved and cared for and that my main job was surrender.

How to be alive while making money

Taking action

  • Know my worth isn’t about money
  • Act from love, not fear
  • Know that I’m OK, loved, where I need to be
  • Believe that it’s possible to have what I need without having to be something that isn’t aligned
  • Welcome fear as an opportunity to see where faith is leaky
  • Ship things – get things out into the world not just in my head
  • Know that I am going to die no matter how much money I have
  • Welcome the possibilities in uncertainty
  • Be willing to live without convenience or comfort if doing so makes aliveness possible
  • Put connection first, be in right relation

Letting go

  • If opportunities to make money arise that align with my values, don’t turn them down
  • Don’t under-charge for my work or discount myself
  • Don’t prioritize free work over paid work
  • Put my full self into the paid work I do, even if it’s small or not ‘important’
  • Don’t let ego get in the way of being honest about my needs and my availability
  • Don’t spend my free time sucked into things that don’t create value for me, i.e. scrolling, shopping, or participating in social media except as very necessary (but still have fun and read and take in information that feels valuable or thought-provoking)
  • Notice when I want to blame, make excuses, or get into grievance
  • Address any dishonesty, mistakes, or dis-compassion
  • Amend situations where my actions impede others’ opportunities to live in their fullness

Any prescription that says, ‘this is how you make money’ feels like it takes me in a direction away from my source of aliveness.

Instead, the more I can feel into the interconnectedness of everything, the more it feels like my best bet is to be in trust, neither trying nor resisting earning money. There’s an underlying abundance that only gets distorted by trying to claim some of it as “mine.” As a tech person, I love the metaphor of open source, of cascading open-ness. The world is not headed in a direction that has any security other than what I can find in my own body and my connection to the world and the people with whom I’m in relationship.

AI and the Myth of the Creator Economy

Once upon a time, I wrote poems. And I sing to myself quite often, so I had this kind of typical random thought, ‘maybe I should learn some easy musical software thing and write some songs.’

And then I thought, oh, well, what would be the point of that? AI will certainly get better at writing songs before I ever will. That self-defeating thought did spark a little bit of insight, though. What am I creative for?

One way to see it: creative practice is for oneself. For example, people learn woodworking or other crafts to make things that would likely look better, take less time and energy, and be cheaper if they just bought a product from an industrial producer.

If you become good at your craft, you might be a maker. You can go out to craft fairs and sell your items, but chances are, you’ll be operating at a loss when materials and labour are factored in. When you start woodworking, you are not thinking, “now maybe I can be rich and famous.”

Even before AI began inducing a mass pearl-clutching about artists’ rights, being a ‘creator’ was a pretty unlikely path to wealth.

Some kinds of creative work seemed like they might lead to a big payout: the ‘artistic’ careers that fell under a lottery system. The lottery system was always primarily one of overall exploitation and extraction.

Making music is an example. Right now there are so many people making music, perhaps more publicly and intentionally than ever before. Platform algorithms primarily drive discovery and popularity, and those things reinforce the patterns that were already in place. In other words, things that are like other things are most likely to surface. And once something does surface, it benefits from network effects- there’s great research that indicates that people listen to things because they think other people like them far more than as a result of their own individual tastes.

Few artists even make much money from the platforms. Even before there were algorithms, there was the corporate consolidation of the music business, which meant that just a few corporations owned nearly all of the sizable record labels and many of the small ones as well, so homogenization had already begun. And from the beginning, stars of the recording industry made little in comparison to their record labels.

This pattern is true in general for creative or generative work. We went from a pre-industrialized situation where ‘artists’ were mostly wealthy or beholden to the wealthy but there were plenty of people practicing creative crafts for themselves or a few people in their community, to a time when companies began to profit from the distribution of other people’s creative work. Within that system, there have been small companies that were not as extractive, but as time has gone on, the direction has been one of ever-increasing disparities between the creators and the distributors in terms of relative individual profit.

We recently went through a kind of collective delusion with the proliferation of creator platforms and the so-called Creator Economy. Many people were called to put out their ideas, art, and creative work as products. As the wave of industrialization-employment has ebbed due to automation, and because industrialization, media, and the internet have created this sense of global scale on which to market ourselves, we found ourselves looking for ways of expressing ourselves for money. And we were seduced by the corporations who distribute creative work into thinking that ‘owning’ the work was the path to protecting creators (had this ever have been true, these companies largely would not have existed, since they are the primary predators).

But many ‘creators’ were willing to buy into creator economies and copyright, perhaps because they thought they might be the exception. (Does this remind you of other delusions of social mobility that have led to many collective positions that reinforce the benefits for wealthy people against non-wealthy people’s own self-interest?) We were willing to believe that platforms ‘allowed’ creators to make a living being creative, when they would have otherwise laboured in penniless obscurity. (In fact, artists can be streamed millions of times on Spotify and not receive enough money to pay for two months of a Spotify subscription (on the individual plan, mind you). And most people don’t garner millions of streams).

Many years ago, I wrote about the idea that creators might be best served thinking about making a living much the way one might by having a shoe repair business. It could be possible to create enough direct relationships with people who like your work to get by, and that would be a remarkable success- you’d have a basic income, be in your creative practice, and not have a boss telling you what to do or what to make. Instead, I’ve seen people trying to negotiate the systems by learning how to ‘make more of what people want,’ and creating a glut of sameness, which honestly makes it that much easier for AI to step in and be as ‘good.’

Now, we’re perhaps confronting something that could be transformational to the whole notion of art-as-commerce. It might be that the only real value in being creative is in the practice itself. In the learning, experimenting, doing of the thing, not in the marketing of the product. It might be that we value human-made things because we are part of the process, because the creative output has meaning.

Perhaps we’re headed into a farmer’s market model of ideas, songs, or art. There was a moment when it seemed like NFTs were a version of this (only if you squinted) but Open Sea showed that mostly the money was in applying the same kind of platform economics that the streaming platforms have. Extraction for the few. And so, you may ask, where does that leave creators for making a real living?

Well, right. Corporate capitalism evolves to take more out and leave less for most people. And this is where I think (being fairly ignorant about political science) I don’t resonate with Marx when I think about what’s next. Because “workers” seems to me like a function of industrialization itself, and what’s happening is that we won’t have work. This may seem kind of nice for those people with enough advantage to enjoy leisure and minimally-paid creative pursuits. There will likely still be work for those who sell access to their own status for a time, and perhaps people at the upper echelons of corporations will still be needed to formulate strategies or be figureheads for a time.

There are still low-wage jobs and service providers who are more challenging to replace, but industry is plugging away at making them dispensable too. From my life on the edge of Silicon Valley I see that there are ideas to automate everything from drivers to service workers to doctors, lawyers, and therapists.

If we keep going down this path without alternatives, most of this displacement will come without alternatives for ‘making a living.’ Capitalism is a vacuum hose trying to suck every particle of wealth and power out of the earth and its inhabitants. In the US, the top 1% have more wealth than the bottom 90%. Even with supposedly more access to investing with the advent of platforms like Robin Hood, the top 1% own more than half of all stocks. Access to wealth overall is decreasing, with the top 10% owning about 90% of all stocks, and every year the gap widening. A group of 725 individual people have more wealth than a collective 50% of Americans, and that doesn’t even factor in global disparities.

I can see why cryptocurrency seems attractive as a solution. If we just had a way to create capitalism for ourselves! seems to be the idea. I mean, was capitalism a good thing, leading to post-scarcity where, once we find a collective way to revolution our way out of disparity, we can all live in a happy place where we have all our needs met and can just play and be creative and garden and get on up in the Maslow’s hierarchy? (Or a more appropriate framing.) Hmm. As we experience massive climate upheaval, intense scarcities in housing, pandemics, and all the other things that in the short term, money can still largely mitigate, I don’t know if post-scarcity looks imminent.

And yet. We are darn resistant beings. If we can resist the commodification of post-capitalism itself (not a joke- capitalism is cunning, baffling, and powerful!) we might discover this truth- that it really is all about practice. That if we give up the idea that our identities, relationships, and creative process are all really products, we might find out that there’s a lot of power in our collective and interdependent practice. Doing that practice gives us the opportunity to find new ways to collaborate and contradict the idea that it’s just naive to find an alternative to states, corporations, or other systems of control.

AI is not benign. We can regard it with curiosity and wonder, and also recognise that the vast majority of the energy around it right now is focused on figuring out how to make more money and add it to the arsenal of corporate domination. Creative hackers may find ways to use it as a tool of subversion as well. But the general idea that it’s going to put artists out of business implies that artists were in business in the first place, and that’s something we can see through without any help from GPT.

Freedom might not be free

Free sounds great. Who doesn’t love free stuff? Who can say how many random and unnecessary calories I’ve consumed at parties or at those in-store sample stands. Goodness knows I have wasted a lot of hours online that never would have happened if I had to assess the value I was getting from it. (Of course, someone made money from that time I contributed).

But free is never free, it’s only subsidised, whether that’s by others, by ourselves indirectly, or even by the earth. In a system of capitalism, free things made with someone’s labour lead to unsustainability and poor motive alignment, even if they result from the best intentions. Instead, we could think about products as either coming from collective investment with collective and equitable ownership, like public goods, or we should have models in which there is value exchange, even if we eliminate some of the regressive nature of flat pricing models. If we’re taking things from the earth, we might imagine how we can reciprocate, not just take and use.

With tech, we’re making products that are intangible, but they still require labour to produce. When we make them “free,” we are in a situation where we’re going to be dependent on money that isn’t tied to the value we’re creating for the people who use our products. And yet, we’re working in a context where many companies, especially in the social tech world, make their products free.

Free feels like it’s generous, until you’re out of funding. Free suggests there’s no needs among the people who are working on the product. And free feels like it’s a commitment to some kind of ethical stance and cooperation (see Open Source philosophies) but Open Source is rife with abandoned projects, projects with only one real contributor, and tools that mostly just serve developers. It leaves out creating the kind of relationships that emerge when people exchange energy for value. It leaves out creating systems of mutual benefit.

I’ve worked on products where we offered free versions. It’s great for growth and for giving people a sense of what value they might find by making a commitment. There’s room for free, but something interesting to me is how much less responsibility people felt when using the product for free. They often didn’t value the work of the people making the product at all, and were more antisocial in their communications with the company.

There’s a real and interesting tension in how to approach charging for technology, especially social tech. As a person who does lean to the cheapskate side, I like to ask myself, for the products I pay for, what are my feelings versus free products? Much of my thinking has to do with user experience, especially collective user experience. It makes sense to me to pay for things that allow me to extend a good experience to others. I suspect that there needs to be a re-norming if we want to create sustainable companies around social and collaborative technologies. For now, most of these make money by offering a business product. Perhaps that’s the right transitional path, as long as we don’t lose our missions along the way.