stimulant

Progress is the problem

Illich was the first to point out to me the potentially toxic nature of the idea[l] of “progress.” And I have yet to come up with a satisfactory outlook on how to couch progress in a consistent, empowering, and safe way. I don’t want an asymptotic vision of progress that requires relinquishing our desire for scientific, technological, and artistic¹ development: while it’s clear that people should have the option of refusing the material trappings of progress to live alongside Walden Pond, it is also clear that I do not want to approach social engineering with that as a unifying vision.

I want a vision of progress that provides for its material trappings while stripping away its psychological baggage. This will be the topic I’ll explore this week,², but a provisional explanation follows.

What’s wrong with the world?

As I’ve tried to understand the overarching structure of those factors which make the world shittier, the need for a good definition of progress has appeared increasingly frequently.

If you consider the world’s problems, you can start backing out causes. Our judicial system is partly responsible for exacerbating many of society’s problems, ranging from drug crimes to corporate corruption. While fighting each problem is worthwhile, you are treating symptoms, not curing a disease.

As I trace the causes of the problems I see back further and further, I reach a relatively independent set of broken systems. “Independent” does not mean that they do not affect one another; it simply means they do not require one another. The judicial system is one example: even if the law affects our education system through its support for a litigious society, the law does not require schools to exist and botch other issues. Our approach to health care is another independent system. You could imagine compiling a list of these root problems, and then begin thinking about how to address them.

I’ve found that the several of the first-order solutions I dream up to these problems share a possible design defect: it is not clear to me why the current problems would not simply reappear, mediated by market pressures.

An example

To make this problem concrete, let’s consider consumerism and materialism. These words’ definitions are diluted; so, I want to begin our discussion with a constrained definition of consumerism: the placement of enough spiritual and emotional weight on the consumption of goods and services that the act of consumption and the products consumed become the primary modes to achieve “happiness.”

Now, even that definition suffers for a lack of precision — “happiness” is a slippery word — but it should be sufficient for our purposes. What if we break down consumerism into its constituents: what do people spend their money on? Food, housing, consumer electronics, entertainment media, appearance accouterments (clothing, makeup), etc. Each one of these pillars, holding up consumerism, seems like the right scale for a DIY revolution: it is on this scale that the technical concerns of making a set of activities and goods DIY-approachable converge. Furthermore — and perhaps, more importantly — it is on a scale at which social concerns also converge. If you wanted to popularize a set of tools and ideas in the DIY food and DIY science domains, you would suffer from a muddled message. The technical concerns involved in knocking down these pillars are straightforward. The social concerns are far more daunting. It seems that there is a proper scale: where you can both “stay on message” in hawking your solution and confront technical concerns cohesively. Independent of how convincing these broad strokes of a taxonomy are, if you are convinced that such a taxonomy exists, my uncertainty will be understandable.

Why is this a problem?

Division of labor evolved because of the productivity and quality gains it offered. This balkanization continues, with efficiency gains being eked out from further separation of concerns. Unfortunately, we passed long ago the scale of production at which individuals can derive personal satisfaction (a la “Shop Class as Soulcraft”): people often talk about how satisfying and empowering it is to cook one’s own food (much less farm it or make it from scratch). But at this point, we can have microwave dinners delivered to us. At some point along this spectrum of dependence, there is an efficiency sweet spot.

While there are plenty of savings to be made making and fixing things on your own, those savings come from trimming the fat that Main St. has slathered onto our existences by manufacturing demand. Here’s the real question: does DIY philosophy³ have as much of a place in an efficient, sustainable society as I hope?

Returning to the example of food: it is clear that making your own food is less sustainable than agribusiness could be (which is to say nothing of the industry’s current sins). What does this mean for where someone interested in revolutionizing how we approach food production and consumption should aim?

Assume DIY farming becomes mainstream. Even if DIY farming is empowering, market pressure will want to divide labor. And I don’t see⁴ how we can then avoid climbing back up the balkanization ladder — or even if there’s a reason to resist that ascent (other than avoiding our current situation).

No answers, yet

This specific example contains the seed of my problem: I don’t know how to reconcile my proclivity for DIY, decentralized solutions with market pressures. And this is why defining progress becomes important, and tricky. If we accept inefficiency, then this question is moot. Personally, as I said at the beginning of this post, I’m ambivalent. How do you reconcile a powerful desire for technological, scientific, and artistic development and exploration with an acceptable inefficiency?

I’ve painted an incomplete picture of these concerns, and as it stands, this concern doesn’t have any legs. Unfortunately, it will sprout some as the week goes on. But, please don’t let that prevent you from offering feedback of any sort!

1. And whatever modes you can fathom [↩]
2. See this post for more information on my writing schedule. [↩]
3. And yes, this is a poor phrase for a broad idea. I consistently have trouble characterizing this community — suggestions welcome! [↩]
4. Note that by “see” I really mean “imagine how you could guarantee:” I’m not suggesting that these enormously complicated systems will play out as I guess they will, but I think I can make statements about what seems like a bad possibility [↩]

Social reforms involving a minority¹ approach their task with a mixture of two strategies:

• Changing the way those in power perceive those whom you seek to help.
• Changing the way those whom you seek to help present themselves to those in power.

This is not as subtle a statement as I’ve made it seem² . There is the existing power structure and those who suffer within it. Myriad factors influence the minority’s situation; however, these factors penultimately terminate with how the empowered and disempowered relate. Deciding which tact to pursue is a process frequently fraught with unspoken judgments and assumptions about how self-reliant the minority is or could be. This builds into the foundation of many reform efforts a basic tension between the helpers and the helped.

Consider attempts to address racial inequality in the United States. Affirmative action attempts to force a dissonance between the way those in power see a minority and the way they are treated. Some contingents lash out at such efforts: Bill Cosby caught flak for his [in]famous “Pound Cake” speech, as well as plenty of accolades, split by exactly Rotter’s idea of a locus of control.

And with that, we skirt a linguistic quagmire: the way people differentiate blame, responsibility, guilt, and power. I’d like to sidestep the issue. What’s pertinent is not a careful analysis of causality³ , but an understanding of how people’s perception of the loci of control in a situation determine the character of suggested reforms.

Recent discussion about uncontacted tribes in the Amazon⁴ spurred the realization that deciding why we implement a reform is often a subtle value judgment wrapped up in facile rationalizations. It is taken for granted that the front lines of social reform are along the boundaries of basic, human rights: quality of life, equal representation, etc. But, consider the case of the uncontacted, Amazonian tribe: the rallying cry was to leave them be. Several people suggest that these uncontacted tribes should not be isolated, but at least offered the chance for integration. Ethnocentrism is far more frequently fingered as cause for concern, conflating many issues. For the purposes of this discussion, I just want to point out that if anyone in a city lived in the conditions under which these aborigines live, the call for aid and change would be unanimous. There is no discussion of winding industrialization back to preclude the need for isolation. So, when do we decide that it’s the majority that needs changing, and when do we decide that it’s the minority that needs to change?

The reasons offered supporting the isolation of the tribe range from complaints about the fundamentally toxic nature of the industrial world to claims of cultural terrorism. Underlying these judgments is the assumption that we have the power and right to make this decision for the people involved. And it is this thread that connects the discussion of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon to most attempts at social reform. While completely distributed social reform is nominally possible⁵ , historically reform has comprised the reformers, those on whose behalf reformers work, and everyone else. Even if the reformers and their beneficiaries are one and the same, there is rarely explicit approval of reform efforts⁶.

The fact that reform necessarily involves varying degrees of participation (and as such, varying degrees of control and power) means that those who are more active implicitly make decisions for those who are not. When society at large decides a reform is “necessary,” it is frequently cast in a disempowering light: the needy well, need us to help. And we know best how to do it. But history doesn’t bear that confidence out (from welfare to affirmative action, reforms begun at large scales, under the public eye, by an institution as a whole, founder more frequently than attempts at self-regulation).

Looking over historical reform efforts, it is clear that reformers’ decision to focus on the majority or the minority is consistently tinged by moral judgment. Deciding at whose feet to place blame is a different task than deciding who is best equipped to change the situation, but it is a conflation we often make. And it’s not clear to me that we can generalize the answer to that question: the “give a man a fish” line of thinking oversimplifies the situation. Figuring this out is at the core of many of my questions: while it is clear that empowerment is the long-term goal, can we say anything about the extent to which the ends can justify the means? Even this language is misleading — the effects of the means with which a group is empowered is coupled more strongly to the social norms surrounding those means than the means themselves. More concretely: the disempowering elements of welfare or affirmative action are not money or college admission, respectively. The set of social norms surrounding each are what we’re really interested in engineering. How can we think about how strongly means are coupled to the norms they evoke? What are tools for controlling social norms? Doesn’t this process have exactly those problems I’ve touched on already?

Confusion abounds. At the core of the various metrics we have used to decide reform’s necessity is the idea of progress. And I suspect that the complexity of resolving that definition (well-documented by Illich) is largely responsible for this confusion (even without considering the emotional and philosophical complexity of charity). There’s a lot more to say about this, but I’d like to do it in a different — less abstract — context, which will be provided by forthcoming posts. Stay tuned.

1. By minority I don’t mean minority in number, but in power. e.g. Women. Or students. [↩]
2. Despite this, I’ve found it increasingly helpful to think in these terms. It seems that I’m after a cause-agnostic language for thinking about reform. It’s not clear that generalization is helpful, but I’ve made unanticipated — and unfortunately, undocumented — progress in classifying mistakes made in social reform. And I remain convinced that successful social reform is less a matter of doing things well than a matter of not making predecessors’ mistakes. [↩]
3. What we even mean by that in social situations is unclear. [↩]
4. UPDATED 062408: They weren’t lost. [↩]
5. I have no good examples, and would be extremely interested in hearing about some. [↩]
6. Save highly structured efforts that occur in contexts like a union. [↩]

I hope that this instructable is portentous:

The stock cupholder tray between the front seats of the Honda Odyssey is a well-known spill hazard. It is possible to modify the stock cupholders to make them less prone to spill. This instructable gives you step-by-step instructions on how to do it.

Think about this: someone, dissatisfied with their Honda, wants to help other people who are also, inevitably, dissatisfied. They come up with a fix for their dissatisfaction. With whom do they share it? Instructables! Not Honda! That’s a stunning endorsement of the instructables community and a flagrant admission of disengagement from the technological establishment.

And this is not unique. Many of my daily thoughts begin with a complaint or note of potential improvement. Whenever I approach a door, I take note of the distribution of wear. If the paint or finish is worn away in a place other than the handle, you have concrete evidence friction between design and usage. Several months ago, while on the commuter rail, I noticed how poorly suited trains are for what many people use them: reading and sleeping. The impulse to tell a train designer what I wanted led to the vision of a company that makes public and advertises the physical design of its products. Even something as simple as being able to annotate images of products with suggestions would be fantastic. And if a company showed itself responsive to user input, and went out of its way to solicit input and capture it painlessly, you’d have the most sensitive (and well-targeted) industrial design team — or at least, quality assurance team — ever. Capturing customer input at the point of service is a thorny problem but an obviously fantastic investment.

I discovered the Smith-Hughes Act through “Shop Class as Soulcraft” (PDF)¹

The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 gave federal funding for manual training in two forms: as part of general education and as a separate vocational program. The invention of modern shop class thus serviced both cultural reflexes of the Arts and Crafts movement at once. The children of the managerial class could take shop as enrichment to the college-prep curriculum, making a bird-feeder to hang outside mom’s kitchen window, while the children of laborers would be socialized into the work ethic appropriate to their station through what was now called “industrial arts” education. The need for such socialization was not simply a matter of assimilating immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who lacked a Protestant work ethic.

This raises the chicken-or-egg question as to the origins of the connection between immigrants and the manual arts. I would have assumed that poverty (or at least, economics) and the social isolation of the manual arts is what made that connection. But even the assumption that the manual arts are socially isolating is predicated on my preconceptions built from the late 19th century. I’ve contacted Crawford to ask after more evidence, but it’s an interesting point in the history of pedagogy.

Consider the following,

Of the Smith-Hughes Act’s two rationales for shop class, vocational and general ed, only the latter emphasized the learning of aesthetic, mathematical, and physical principles through the manipulation of material things (Dewey’s “learning by doing”). […] The act’s dual educational scheme mirrored the assembly line’s severing of the cognitive aspects of manual work from its physical execution. Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of “white collar” versus “blue collar,” corresponding to mental versus manual. These seem to be the categories that inform the educational landscape even now, and this entails two big errors. First, it assumes that all blue collar work is as mindless as assembly line work, and second, that white collar work is still recognizably mental in character.

Paradoxically, the impetus behind hands-on, project-based learning as well as the constructivist and [especially!] constructionist philosophies is dependent upon the primacy and efficacy of the “manual.” Unfortunately, we don’t really have language for the physical that does not discount the mental. Circumventing this, the language of constructionism and constructivism relies on precisely the vocabulary Crawford uses in discussing the psychic value of manual work: engagement, empowerment, relevance, and social embeddedness. I suppose the next step is finding those source that provide the arguments for the denigration or separation of the manual and mental. Given how entrenched the stereotyping of vocational and technical education as second-class has become, I’m fascinated by this long-standing cultural oversight, unsupported by an institution as explicitly and carefully supported as education.²

1. Thanks again to Colleen Kaman for the link. [↩]
2. That is, I am less surprised by our societal blindness to the problems with our educational system, given the explicit infrastructure we’ve built around it. [↩]

Heard from a person talking into a cellphone. Emphasis hers.

G: He wants to become a high-powered hedge fund manager. That’s what everyone wants to do.

A strange juxtaposition from the Death and Taxes site for the budget graph, visualizing the relative proportions of the national budget by department and project:

It reminds me of the the first chapter of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, wherein Carnegie recounts the capture of infamous gunman, “Two Gun” Crowley. During the final shootout, Crowley penned a letter:

But how did “Two Gun” Crowley regard himself? We know, because while the police were firing into his apartment, he wrote a letter addressed “To whom it may concern.” And, as he wrote, the blood flowing from his wounds left a crimson trail on the paper. In his letter Crowley said: “Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one — one that would do nobody any harm.” A short time before this, Crowley had been having a necking party with his girl friend on a country road out on Long Island. Suddenly a policeman walked up to the car and said: “Let me see your license.” Without saying a word, Crowley drew his gun and cut the policeman down with a shower of lead. As the dying officer fell, Crowley leaped out of the car, grabbed the officer’s revolver, and fired another bullet into the prostrate body. And that was the killer who said: “Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one — one that would do nobody any harm.” Crowley was sentenced to the electric chair. When he arrived at the death house in Sing Sing, did he say, “This is what I get for killing people”? No, he said: “This is what I get for defending myself.”

Carnegie goes on to cite Al Capone, who said:

“I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.” That’s Al Capone speaking. Yes, America’s most notorious Public Enemy — the most sinister gang leader who ever shot up Chicago. Capone didn’t condemn himself. He actually regarded himself as a public benefactor — an unappreciated and misunderstood public benefactor.

The point being, of course, that most everyone tries to do what they see as right, most of the time (or at the very least, the end up believing that they do right). Including Kevin Marlowe. Note that I am not comparing Kevin’s job to Capone or Crowley’s deeds. I’m simply comparing the disparity between Vanessa and Kevin’s assessment of his work and our assessment of Capone and Crowley’s lives, versus their own. However, I would be remiss if I did not point out a fundamental weakness in Kevin’s claim: taking the budget as a literal quantification of voter trust is specious. In fact, this is much of what is wrong with politics: the power (even as roughly encoded by budgets) is not well-coupled to the people’s will. Thus, for instance, a genuinely unpopular war is possible.

I’m going to constrain the meanings of these words for this post. People bandy them about, but there are some essential differences that call for their distinction.

Opportunities are the chance to do something, the chance at something. Rights are guarantees that are (morally or ethically) inviolable. Privilege are opportunities accorded by virtue of your identity. Opportunities have nothing to do with power and everything to do with chance. Rights require power to enforce their guarantee, but they are guaranteed equally for everyone, so there is no disparity in power. Privileges are guaranteed precisely by the difference in the power held by the privileged (or their benefactors), and the unprivileged.¹

Obligations are external expectations that affect how bound to a course of action we feel. They are intrinsically normative (read: arbitrarily set by society). Responsibilities are obligations that accompany privileges or rights: they are the currency in which we pay for those guarantees. Frequently, we are not given a choice in assuming responsibilities. Duties are those things which our ethical or moral system suggest we do. The expectation of self-consistency then binds us to them.

Obligations, responsibilities, and duties tell us what we should and should not do. There is no guarantee intrinsic to any of them. If we want to behave consistently, if we want to try for Heaven, we can feel forced to do something. But those values are all external. That is, they require enforcement; they require power from somewhere else.

On the other hand, opportunities, rights, and privileges tell us what we can and can not² do. They require power to protect and guarantee, but not to provide. They extend the range of our free will, whereas obligations, responsibilities, and duties direct and constrain it.

Within this (admittedly narrow) framework, I would suggest that opportunities entail obligations, rights entail responsibilities, and privileges entail duties.

So, what does this have to do with education? These are all words that come around conversation about teachers and students and schools and parents. These are all words that are bandied about when people talk about education. And I’m frustrated by the ridiculous assumptions that get swept under the rug by our failure to distinguish between them.

“Education is a right,” some say. That may be, but that’s how we act. We act as though schooling were an obligation. Some say that education is an opportunity. While that’s certainly true in the vernacular use of the word, it’s not true here: education is not an option made available by chance. ³ Others say that education is a privilege. Does that mean that schooling is a duty? What are the duties of the educationally privileged?

At a talk by Noam Chomsky on the role of the universities in activism, he pointed that we (including him) were an exceptionally privileged group of people. And with that privilege, he said, came certain duties (namely, making the world better — or at least, not making it worse). In echoing the sentiment of noblesse oblige, Chomsky implied that our situation is one of privilege, distinct from the simple exercise of education. In part, it is exactly what and which schooling to which we have access that determines how privileged we are. The credential-laden culture of the industrial world guarantees that education cannot trump a lack of schooling; although, schooling can be enhanced by education. As such, I would not suggest that education is incapable of bestowing privilege. Unfortunately, it is not always clear what minimum level of schooling is necessary to provide for education’s pragmatic relevance. For instance, your undergraduate institution’s lackluster status can be counteracted and compensated for by a strong education: that is, by actually learning and doing something of substance. Despite this, a middle-school student educated to the level of a high-school student is still functionally stunted. They cannot partake of many of the advantages that a high-schooler enjoys, allegedly because of their education (e.g. easy college or job hunting). And while this continues to change, we are still at the point where a rush for credentials characterizes successful studenthood.

Peoople are generally comfortable couching education as an opportunity, right, or privilege, but not as an obligation, responsibility, or duty. But schooling is exactly the opposite, for most people! For most, school is something they are coerced to do. Keep in mind that this is separate from learning; while the option of homeschooling technically exists, for the overwhelming majority, it is a financial and logistical impossibility. If education is a right or a privilege or a responsibility, why is it so consistently and thoroughly forced upon us? Why are is there a police force — truant officers — to ensure our attendance? Why do we go out of our way to reinforce the power of college credentials, when this necessarily creates a class of have-nots? People have been convinced that a good education is an artificially scarce resource by being bullied into conflating learning with schooling, which is an arbitrarily scarce resource.

In the name of “providing” this opportunity/right/privilege to people, we even take from them other privileges, like the freedom of speech. The judicial standard for defining the constitutional rights of students was set in 1969 by the US Supreme Court Case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. As a result, we have the “Tinker test,” which tells us that:

free expression is guaranteed in the public schools where it (1) does not materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school, and (2) does not invade the rights of others.

Subsequent jurisprudence has not been kind to students. Even in 1969, Judge Abe Fortas commented that,

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Just to be clear, the US Supreme Court takes for granted that you must “shed [your] constitutional rights” at the schoolhouse gate. And this is to guarantee people the “right” to schooling — a right that is far more tenuously established than the right to free speech.

Not only are these assumptions about schooling and education implicit, but their consequences are never explicitly connected to these assumptions. Worse, the consequences (e.g. behavior problems in the classroom) are misinterpreted as causes of interference with people’s education as opposed to effects!

It’s essential to deconstruct this taxonomy of power in education to create not only the type of learning and creating environments we want, but the type of society we want. I don’t know if every activist feels this way, but to me, education seems like the prime mover in so many social ills.

And so I’m excited about fixing it. Start by speaking straightforwardly. Now, people use these words (i.e. opportunity, right, privilege; obligation, responsibility, duty) interchangeably. Try distinguishing between them when you talk and when you listen: I’ve been surprised by how radically different an impression of an argument can be had when you think carefully about which of these words people mean to use.

1. “Underprivileged” is such a shameful euphemism: it implies that everyone is entitled to same basic level of privilege. We conflate privilege and guarantee. [↩]
2. Note that I did not say “cannot!” This is essential. [↩]
3. Again, in the narrow framework I’ve constructed. I’m begging the question of whether the categories I’ve named guarantee collision-free categorization. That is, it is emphatically not clear at all that education or schooling (or anything else, for that matter) need fit well into this framework without requiring splitting or merging categories. [↩]

And that’s a pretty big idea.

Recently, I commented that one element of Ivan Illich’s work I really appreciate is his focus on infrastructure that addresses needs emergently, rather than focusing on one-step solutions to solving social problems. Too frequently, this one-step bias leads to treating symptoms and leaving causes unaddressed¹.

Among other things, this same, infrastructural focus makes microfinancing a really, really wonderful idea. I was surprised to discover that what I see as microfinancing’s primary strength (its focus on incrementally providing a sustainable infrastructure at the appropriate scale) is one of the most contentious elements in its implementation.

Apparently, there is a basic debate between what are termed the “welfarist” and “institutionist” approaches. The approaches differ in that, to cite Gary Woller:

The institutionist approach focuses on creating financial institutions to serve clients who either are not served or are underserved by the formal financial system. Emphasis lies on achieving financial self-sufficiency; breadth of outreach (meaning numbers of clients) takes precedence over depth of outreach (meaning the levels of poverty reached); and positive client impacts are assumed. The center of attention is the institution, and institutional success is generally gauged by the institution’s progress toward achieving financial self-sufficiency. […] Institutionists argue that a primary objective of microfinance is financial deepening, the creation of a separate system of “sustainable” financial intermediation for the poor. Theirs is a “financial systems” approach to microfinance, in which the future of microfinance is dominated by numerous large-scale, profit-seeking financial institutions that provide high quality financial services to large numbers of poor clients. Because of their insistence on financial self-sufficiency, institutionists eschew subsidies of any kind. […] Welfarists, on the other hand, emphasize depth of outreach. Welfarists are quite explicit in their focus on immediately improving the well-being of participants. They are less interested in banking per se than in using financial services as a means to alleviate directly the worst effects of deep poverty among participants and communities, even if some of these services require subsidies. Their objective tends to be self-employment of the poorer of the economically active poor, especially women, whose control of modest increases of income and savings is assumed to empower them to improve the conditions of life for themselves and their children.

To me, the welfarist approach is a much less exciting jump, conceptually and infrastructurally. It just seems like scaling those Christian commercials that ask you to fund a single child with ten pence a day up and out. Certainly, their work is laudable. But I think that charity is clearly not sustainable. Even charity designed to promote self-sufficiency (i.e. welfare).

It’s clear how closely aligned the institutionist approach to microfinance aligns with my own feelings about the importance of scale in problem solving and reform: problems should be addressed at the scale they occur, introducing solutions at inappropriate scales incurs organizational penalties that are often enough to undermine an entire effort. It’s this philosophical alignment that is so exciting, and when I finally heard about companies like Prosper, an online community allowing individuals to lend and borrow from each other, I was elated. The problems plaguing so many of America’s institutions stem precisely from this element of mismatched scale. Prosper recognized that all the overhead that banking incurs and the associated costs (both social and fiscal) of the current setup can be subverted and circumvented through technology. And now, Prosper is offering everyone the chance to loan and borrow, on a person to person level.

Similar epiphanies are awaiting exploitation in health care and law and education: the common theme is that all of the social systems we put in place are designed to connect people to resources they want and need, but that aren’t readily available, whether that is money on credit, legal advice, or knowledge. It sounds like a trivial statement, but matching people to resources is a fundamental problem. The internet makes it possible to push the scale at which this matching² happens down all the way to the person in need, and the person in possession of the resources that address that need.

eBay recently came out with their own P2P lending service, Microplace. The most interesting element of this development is that Microplace’s investments and loans are securitized, meaning they are potentially saleable and tradeable. Traditional financial markets are being recreated and rebuilt at the peer-to-peer level.

Or consider what the emergence of a company like tractis means for the legal sector. Tractis is an online, free database of templates for legal paperwork. Currently, it’s primarily contracts; however, I expect that domain to grow significantly. The reason that lawyers and legal advice are so expensive is that the profession is the opposite of self-documenting: as they narrow who is equipped to work in the sector, they narrow who is equipped to work in the sector. It’s a vicious cycle built upon vocabulary, personnel connections, money, and qualification. We lament that teacher certification is so trying and impossible. But what stands between someone and becoming a doctor or lawyer is even greater. The upshot is that its difficulty has incentivized it fiscally, with the unfortunate consequence that “expertise” has distanced us all from our bodies and our rights.

Imagine if people who have sizable expertise in a very, very narrow area of law — say, a teacher who has started up a summer camp — were made public and accessible, so that other teachers who started up summer camps could talk to them, easily share paper work and salient legal advice, and get connected. Or if people could make their medical experiences public, anonymously, so that you could search for someone with similar symptoms and history and find out what worked for them. And then, consider what the next step would be like if you had a public infrastructure of medical equipment and a network of qualified operators!

The point behind all of this is that microfinance is merely an instantiation of a much bigger theme that the internet has made real: user data is a community resource that is increasingly valuable, and more robust than the traditional institutions we’ve built. Putting in place infrastructures to take advantage of collective experience and expertise is a way to streamline, incentivize, and make affordable many of the solutions to our problems.

I wish this were more publicly acknowledged: just because this is a very general, fundamental principle does not mean that its various implementations are easy or simple. We’re at risk of getting caught implementing solutions at the wrong scale if we don’t realize we’re beating around the same body of knowledge with these various pursuits.

1. c.f. prison [↩]
2. Note that “this matching” is the fundamental mechanism in behind all market economics [↩]

This morning, I was taking a nap on the floor in a basement hallway. The steam pipes below ground warm the floor in certain areas; so when I’m cold, I often search out these hotspots.

About forty minutes later, an MIT Police officer woke me, asking for identification. He had received a call for a homeless person sleeping in the basement. I explained the situation to him, and went back to sleep. But, what if I had been homeless? Would that be so bad?

There’s so much empty, unused space at MIT. Homeless people could make use of it. There are associated safety and security concerns, but I think that a little thought could go a long way in developing a reasonable system connecting MIT and the homeless. Imagine setting up a program where homeless people checked out and returned sleeping bags after being assigned a room. They would sleep in the room, and MIT Police — or even better, members of the general MIT community — would be responsible for waking people and clearing the rooms in the morning. Anyone who ended up posing a threat or problem would have their privileges revoked.

Taking this line of thinking even further, I think that it’s possible to engineer a symbiotic solution. One problem I’m excited to confront in designing my own school is that of physical plant maintenance. What if MIT were to solicit homeless people, offer them nighttime housing (and install a few, communal facilities like showers and kitchens), and implement a rolling program of maintenance apprenticeship? Pair this with a small program aimed at encouraging re-assimilation (offering personal grooming, new clothes, interview training, English instruction, etc.), and you have the skeleton of a complete, rehabilitation workflow. MIT would take homeless applicants, screen them for mental illness¹, train them in various maintenance tasks, and then these people would work and provide low-cost labor to MIT. Of course, it would be necessary to implement a maximum term for involvement with the program: 60 days, maybe? That is, you don’t want MIT providing a career for homeless people: this would make the “low-cost labor” aspect pretty obnoxious. MIT would instead provide an easy opportunity for beginning the process of re-assimilation. Some marketable skills and experience are provided, and MIT would become a conduit between the homeless community and the “job force.”

Now, I’m interested in implementing a much more extensive version of this at my school: many homeless people have led really, really interesting lives, and many have acquired plenty of skills that it would be fantastic to provide to students. You could imagine a skill share cum soup kitchen², for instance.

But, I think I need to get more experience working with the homeless before I go too far in engineering that type of program. It’s clear that this idea isn’t fleshed out; I just wish I knew if thinking like this went on, at any level. I guess the point is just that good design involves intelligent, frugal use of available resources. By this definition, colleges are poorly designed. Even worse, MIT is missing out on a chance to do potentially significant, social good in the community.

Thoughts? Help me flesh the idea out.

1. Could MIT afford to subsidize or provide free mental health care and simple check ups? How many homeless people live in the immediate area? [↩]
2. or student-staffed hospital or maintenance training program, or…The idea is to combine empowering experiences with institutional assimilation [↩]

Or so said a friend of Nagle’s. He pointed out that Americans are often not only obsessed with things, but with the process of buying them. Being a “good shopper,” or “going shopping” are ideas that are significant independent of what is being bought. I’m not quite sure how this dovetails with the idea that historically, advertising’s role shifted from informing consumers to create desire from the raw material of need to its current incarnation of manipulating consumers to create the raw material of desire, and transform that into “need.”

The reason all this is on my mind is because of Saks Fifth Avenue’s new ad campaign:

It’s so fucking blatant. There’s no infomation at all, just the imperative to want. And it’s not that this is a big jump, culturally. As Philip Greenspun says,

Not being a materialist in the U.S. is kind of like not appreciating opera if you live in Milan or art if you live in Paris. We support materialism better than any other culture. Because retailing and distribution are so efficient here, stuff is cheaper than anywhere else in the world. And then we have huge houses in which to archive our stuff.

But something is undeniably off-putting about its self-consciousness, its smarmy flagrantness. So strange! I need to think more about this.