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Movement Building | Movement Building |
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In trying to explain why we're different in the way we choose projects and work with our clients, we're movement building with a corporation as the mechanism, rather than the end. Profitability as a means to provide more value, rather than an end. We are trying to build a global community of like minded individuals, with the shared central belief that there is enough to go around. That we don't need to be fighting all the time. One of the key ways that tribes throughout the ages, individual primates even, had of interacting was through the trade of goods and services. Controlling the mechanism by which that trade was recognized or mutually agreed to has been the problem. The invisible hand of the marketplace has never been invisible, and it generally comes wielding a club or a sword or a gun. In some ways, while I believe we could have evolved more peacefully, the fact that we haven't doesn't mean that peace is not inevitable. We will either learn to live in peace, or we will no longer learn. That fact makes peace inevitable, especially as we enter an age where warfare is farcical - the major armies and weapons really do represent mass destruction to the degree that major armies and nations are not only in detente, they are benefitting from freer and more transparent markets than ever before. And small insurgencies and guerrilla armies and despots simply do not and will not have the economic or technological means to wage large scale warfare. Theirs will forever be the realm of brutality, but a brutality that can be contained and over time eliminated, especially as other nations no longer set them up in power or impinge upon their evolution as a society. Invading countries just can't work anymore. It's always been problematic and costly, but with increased media exposure, a lot of it facilitated by the web, you have to be pretty deliberately ignorant to not get what war looks like. What poverty really is. It's coming at the public in the form of compelling media, entertainment as politically charged as ever. McCarthy helped prevent the U.S. from becoming a more sympathetic character in the evolution of the globe precisely by targeting entertainers. Poetics, whatever its form, has been a form of resistence and release for centuries. The story we believe is the story we create. Left Brain is trying to make the increased transparency of markets and media and increased ability to trade globally subvert the profit motive to the people, rather than people to the profit motive. If we can create a more and more transparent economy, of both money and ideas, the world will become flatter and flatter, until it feels as if the whole world is just a handshake away. This does not mean that money disappears, or that people don't have different qualities of life - I have many friends in the U.S. even who choose to live in very, very simple circumstances. But that money becomes more a form of transfer, less a commodity in itself, and less a concentratable asset. If more people are able to trade goods and services directly with one another, the apparatus, whether corporate or state, required to support major trade operations will diminish, realizing more of EF Schumacker's classic, Small in Beautiful, organically, using the greater transferability to create even more sustainable markets for intermediate technology. I believe the standard-based, open source software movement will have a direct impact on how other goods and services are bought and sold. Our own model of doing business is that we keep things small, we keep things fluid, we keep things constantly being measured as we go, but most importantly, that we work towards purchasing parity over time, recognizing that we need to move this along slowly, so not to create our own inflation. We will make less money over the short term as a business entity, and grow more slowly, but we will advance as the long tail of the internet makes it possible for more and more organizations to get their message out, find their constituents or customers, more effectively than ever. |


