Framing idea for introducing newcomers to concept of public goods

Clearing the Path
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Sometime, I’ll work through all these thoughts shared here and update our core wiki articles presenting the issues with FLO economics and so on. New points:

Everything is pattern, everything is about copying

So, as emphasized by various philosophical and scientific views: pattern is the basis of reality, there’s no fundamental matter. Like even core elements and molecules are patterns not fundamentally different stuff.

So, scarcity and rivalry are really just a matter of how costly/slow/challenging it is to copy and/or adapt things. In a sense, the universe “copies” the pattern of some elements, like the sun keeps making copies of the helium pattern, and it does it by adapting hydrogen.

The scarcity that our economy naturally values comes from copying being difficult. We can only turn out so many copies of apples via all the time and inputs to grow them on trees.

Making copying easier has only the main problem that it no longer works well with our economic system. We would love if making copies of apples was as trivial as copying text files on a computer. So, clearly this is a continuum across how difficult copying is. And instead of dealing with the economic challenge by forcing copying to be harder, we need a new economic system that supports creative progress without trying to artificially limit or frustrate copying.

There can be good reasons to make copying hard. It might be to enjoy the pure challenge, like enjoying a jigsaw puzzle, The other reason to make copying hard is if we actually want there to be less of something in the world. We want less diseases, make it harder for viruses to get copied. We want crazy conspiracy theories or hateful ideas to not spread everywhere, figure out how to add friction to their spread. In these cases, the value is in the friction of the copying itself, it doesn’t support the idea of adding friction in order to force the fit of an economic model.

All in all, this framing helps to see the whole of reality and recognize the patterns. We don’t need any hard line between digital vs other things or between hardware and software etc. We merely recognize that “how hard is it to copy?” is the operative question. And the follow up is “how hard do we want it to be?” And then we have the dilemma of how to support the cases where it’s hard but needs doing. Add in that it’s not just copying but also adapting / evolving / developing… but it’s all patterns and processes, deep-down none of it is just things.

NFT's etc?

Addendum: I suppose this brings up things to ponder around stuff like NFT’s. The whole point of them is about being effectively uncopyable and non-interchangeable (non-fungible). So, very clearly about maximizing the status on one end of the continuum of copying difficulty. That they are currently being used as pointers to the complete opposite end of of the continuum is notable. But they don’t have to point that way. Using my framing, what is it that we want less of that they could possibly relate to? I suppose personal identifiers… so we want less imposters. But my intuition with that is that we also don’t want personal identity to be something we trade and sell in economic exchanges. These thoughts are more half-baked.

ADDENDUM: I continued the discussion about this in a new topic where I got a bit farther on thinking this through Crypto commodification-ideology and techno-feudalism

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I think this is effectively solved by labeling the axis with “Freedom” (which is not hazy like Free) and to match it the other continuum would be labeled “Abundance”.

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I’ve been developing this whole topic for my talk tomorrow. LibrePlanet 2022 online March 19-20

I’ve thought about the language even since I last updated this topic here. I don’t think “freedom” works. It’s not an adjective Linguistically and culturally, it just doesn’t click in terms of people going around in the world and thinking, “oh, yeah, that road has freedom” or similar even pushed toward “I have freedom to use that road”. Most importantly, “freedom” doesn’t clarify the economic distinctions. I have freedom in how I use/adapt/share my chair, but it’s still a private good because the freedom is limited to the owner. We say that software is free-as-in-freedom even if it’s kept private and never shared, as long everyone who has it also has freedoms.

I decided that “shared” and “open” are both acceptable, but “open” is clearly the best term to discuss the economics.

This will all be in my talk, and the progress on this topic that the talk will cover will also be sometime written all out as a wiki page and maybe video or other media.

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You’re right it’s not an adjective - that’s why I deliberately modified the other axis label to be a noun as well (“abundance”). They are uncountable plurals - perfect for representing a continuum of “stuff”. An adjective is not necessary in that context, which is the only place I’m suggesting it.

I actually think this statement would “click” with people just fine – not sure why it wouldn’t. OTOH, “I am open to use that road” or something like “that is an open road” is far less clear. And nearly all roads are “shared” - even those that are shared by an exclusive club.

That would be just as awkward if “open” or “openness” were substituted there – OTOH, consider that people do very naturally say that a country has freedom, for example. And they mean it in exactly the right way. you could also say “that’s a free country” or “that’s a free road” with the adjective, which is actually less ambiguous for once than “open” (a freely accessible road through a city tunnel would fail the established definition of “open road”, for example).

Regardless, free and open are both too vague and abused, libre solves this, which I though was the point of coining FLO.

Agreed, though not sure how regressing to “open” is an improvement specifically for economics. But I look forward to your talk!

As a scarce asset, the chair did not pass the first test anyway, so of course it’s not a public good. As far as I understand, we’re not trying to capture all of “public good” with the word, only the spectrum of restrictions.

We also say that software is open source. It’s freedom-respecting, it’s libre, it’s open source. Nowadays they are definitionally equivalent, right? None of them have a say on whether the good/software is shared in practice. But that’s what the first test is for…

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Yes, but the key point is that it’s not a common good either. My private chair is scarce and exclusive. And we need to be able to describe things that are scarce but open. We can indeed say “scarcity + freedom” but again, freedom itself can be exclusive and still be freedom. “Freedom” is not the opposite of “Exclusivity”. Freedom is the opposite of Restriction.

So, we could indeed go with Restriction vs Freedom and Scarcity vs Abundance.

But I really think that Exclusive vs Open and Scarce vs Abundant is the superior framing. The adjectives are better, and these words are the most accessible to get people to think about the economic concepts instead of thinking about semantics (i.e. to not get into this discussion we’re having here).

Strictly, that’s right. But “open source” strongly implies being actually public where free software does less so. In terms of connotation, “open” implies public, and “free” implies not being restricted. They have different emphasis. We see a lot of stuff labeled “open” when it is restricted in various ways but publicly accessible, and we don’t see that with the word “free” except when it implies gratis.

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Hey everyone, over the past week, I was pushed to resolve most (maybe all) the outstanding tensions I had on this subject in order to give my LibrePlanet talk. I feel great about the updated framing. At some point, the video of the talk should be published. I will also try to consolidate all this into a wiki article or series of articles. It could also be an edited video not just live talk.

It would take too long here to express all the dozens of tweaks and angles I adjusted to get to the updated thinking. But the core points were to go past the single label for each question and instead making it about contrasting poles in the two dimensions. I also decided to specifically mention the standard jargon in order to explain what’s wrong with it (e.g. “rivalrousness” and “excludability” set certain default assumptions that go against public goods) and thus explain why we need the updated terms. So, here’s my tweak of the wonderful illustration from @mray

public-goods-grid
public-goods-grid600×562 28.4 KB

(side-note: I don’t know how he uploaded an SVG, I can’t seem to do it, I had to switch to PNG export)

I also decided to bring in the explicit mention of “goods and services” and contrast that to make it easy to look at projects and businesses and ask in what ways they are using a goods-based business model vs a service-based one and how that relates to public-goods funding. So, I’m arguing that there is no goods-based business model for public goods, and thus all the support of public goods should have a service framing.

Sometime I will also post somewhere my slides and the script for my talk.

Here’s the video recording: Why our economy fails public goods like free software — GNU MediaGoblin or via PeerTube at Why our economy fails public goods like free software - Framatube

The talk was written specifically for the LibrePlanet audience that knows free software, so it used software more often than I would for a generic talk, and it mentioned insider knowledge within the free software movement.

While there’s much to do from here, I feel like I finally have all the perspectives myself. The work is just about how/where/when to present and spread the ideas.

And I put up the slides and script in current condition, linked at Snowdrift Wiki - Past Presentations about Snowdrift.coop (I plan to develop this into wiki articles and maybe a more produced video eventually, so this is the first published version)

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Great talk.

Thank you for calling out the FSF and Stallman on the ND clause. I think Stallman did write somewhere that he saw that the science people were just doing CC BY without problems, so he might be open to change. The issues of fraud have no business being indirectly discouraged by modification restrictions.

Dismissing the problems of bootstrapping is definitely a mistake (are there people who genuinely trivialize it?), but I hope you are not implying that bootstrapping isn’t a thing. We see it all the time. Snowdrift is doing it, even, by being a member of its own service.

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Bootstrapping is NOT a thing. Self-funding is a thing. Don’t call it bootstrapping. Bootstrapping means something that is impossible. You can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps any more than you can chew your teeth or see your own eyes. Since the sarcasm has gotten lost, we need a new quip like “that poor mother doesn’t need food stamps, she can just drink her own milk”. The whole point of “bootstrap” reference originally was to mock the self-made-man myth and the view where people look at those with little resources and put all the onus on each individual for their lot in life.

Bootstrapping is impossible. But getting going without outside investment is extremely hard and unlikely to succeed, but it’s possible. And the bootstrap reference is about mocking those who think it’s a fair way to go.

Systematically, bootstrapping even in the lost-the-meaning way people use it today is a problem term. It has lost the sense of near-futility. That awareness should be more clear. It’s true that some great businesses self-fund with people who aren’t even wealthy to start with. But it’s also true that some people have won the lottery. If we are to understand the issues with our economy today, we need to be extra skeptical of some of the narratives and look at how things really work. The vast majority of projects that have become really successfully got their through significant capital investment, even if their initial spark started without that.

Maybe, I’ve seen him change his mind before. He’s adaptable. But I have had this argument with him in the past, and it ended with him saying that he appreciated the CC clauses that require derivatives to be modified and for associations with an earlier author to be removed upon request, but he still didn’t find those convincing enough to feel comfortable freeing his writings from the ND limitation.

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A derivative work is a modification, so I don’t quite understand what you are referring to here.

Sorry, but every dictionary and person I asked disagrees. I found no entries that said it meant something impossible. The original phrase certainly describes something impossible, and as an idiom I’m sure it’s been used that way, but I find that the word “bootstrapping” is seldom (if ever?) used that way.

When I’m talking about Snowdrift bootstrapping, it’s not about funding per se. I would not call simply earning net income bootstrapping. (That’s breaking even and profiting.) I would not call reaching the activation energy of a project bootstrapping either. (That’s kick starting.) What I’m referring to is the recursive nature of Snowdrift as a project about funding projects, of which it is itself now a part of, and how it will come to sustain itself. Now that is the epitome of the bootstrap. It’s the C compiler written in C. It’s git managing the git project repository. It’s developing Linux on a GNU/Linux system. When I say git is bootstrapped, I’m not talking about funding. Snowdrift’s bootstrap just happens to be funding because Snowdrift is a funding tool.

So I must disagree that bootstrapping is not a thing. It’s definitely a thing. I would agree that self-funding is not necessarily bootstrapping. Although, if it was wholly self-funded, that does fit a common meaning of the word. I find that you are refuting a meaning that is rather common (computers have been “booting” since the 50s, I hypothesize bootstrapping has been used in these ways decades before even then), so it doesn’t make much sense to deplore people who mean it that way.

If people underestimate the difficulty of starting a business, I am with you they should get a wake up call. Personally, I’ve not met anyone so naive, though. I’d say most would have no idea where to start.

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Oops, writing too fast. It required derivatives to be marked as modified.

On “bootstrapping”, the existence of the phrase is only due to the original idiom which is a sarcastic quip about something being impossible. I’m suggesting that the modern use of the term is unfortunate, I don’t like it, and I think we should get rid of it. I want to retrieve the sarcastic meaning of the original idiom because it is a useful idiom that way. I dislike and advocate against the modern use of the term “bootstrapping” in the same way that some people like Richard Stallman argue for certain specific language to be used with care because metaphors and ideas affect the way we think. A la Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

The current use of “bootstrapping” is unhelpful because it makes it harder to think about how projects get resources and capital by just lumping the idea of not having outside investors into this poorly understood term. What you are describing as “the recursive nature of Snowdrift as a project about funding projects” is not how “bootstrapping” is used today. The word most often used for your idea is “dogfooding” from “eat your own dogfood”. I’m not complaining about that term or concept.

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I think just like I set out scarce-vs-abundant and exclusive-vs-open, it would be good to have a broader clear antonym to “FLO”.

FLO is not merely synonymous with “public goods” though it’s mostly overlapping. And while the opposite of public goods is private goods, that’s not the emphasis we want opposing FLO.

“Proprietary” works in a sense, it relates to property and private, but it fails to emphasize the restricted / exclusive / limited language that I want.

Is “restricted” the best term? So FLO-vs-restricted?

FLO software vs restricted software? FLO educational resources vs restricted educational resources?

Go with “restricted”? Looking for thoughts and feedback

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Bump! Would still like discussion on that language thought ^

But posting to mention an extra thing: In the past, I’ve described a lot of the status-quo as a matter of power that comes from coordination. The supply side is coordinated (that’s what a corporation is!) while the demand side is uncoordinated when we’re talking about goods and services for regular citizens rather than for enterprises. So, the whole issue amounts to the need for demand-side organizing. Which means like a consumer’s union. Although the other angle is to have a cooperative approach where the demand-side gets included in the coordinated organization so that we end the supply-side vs demand-side separation.

And I was thinking (as I had noted learning this week about SponsorBlock) that adblocking which relies on crowdsourced block-lists is itself a robust form of demand-side coordination. Adblocking is a great example of what happens if the users coordinate! This might be about the best concrete example to mention. Publishers of club-goods push ads into everyone’s faces, and adblocking as a response is possible specifically because of effective coordination by readers and viewers. From that angle, the battle is obvious, and then we can talk about all the ways that organized power is mostly out of balance and about the prospect of a cooperative economy that gets past the battles by actually bringing everyone together.

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36

That point I made above is described very well in this post by Cory Doctorow on solidarity-among-the-wealthy. He doesn’t focus on solidarity as specifically within legal organizations like corporations (though he hints at it) but about plain human solidarity among the ultra-wealthy as individuals because there are few enough of them to make coordination easier.

This is key to what I was bringing up in meeting today (with @smichel17 @msiep @Salt and @Adroit ) when we were discussing the need to better focus our Mission. All of my emphasis was on the importance of widespread participation in public goods.

I don’t only want to see public goods funded well. I want to maximize the number of people switching from little or no use of public goods to lots of use and appreciation for public goods. I want to also maximize the number of public goods freeriders who switch to skin-in-the-game funders and volunteers. So, freeriding is bad only in comparison to chipping in. Freeriding is good in comparison to forgoing public goods.

Side-note: I’m sympathetic to the practicality of dollar-goals in projects doing crowdmatching, and I joked about purposely writing a mission statement that would lead to deciding on dollar-goals instead of crowd-size goals (i.e. doing it backwards: writing the mission so it gives a conclusion we want rather than getting the mission clear with our values and determining the decisions by deference to the mission), but it’s obvious by everything I said (which everyone in the meeting seemed to agree with) that it actually would put crowd-size as the priority. I might as well have said it that way: that we’re here for crowd-size not merely dollars. Of course, how the mechanism works is still a separate decision that must also account for what we can get the actual public to embrace and understand, and that’s for later.

Anyway, Cory’s writing helps further emphasize my feelings, we just take this solidarity framing and focus it on public goods. The public goods dilemma is tied into the issue of coordination and solidarity. I’ve been bringing up the organize-the-demand-side, consumers-union sort of language since the beginnings of Snowdrift.coop. And the way in which I see Snowdrift.coop as a model for stuff beyond our scope is that I see us as using the public-goods-funding case which we actually work on as a model for other forms of democratic power through public solidarity.

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