Poverty of Profit

7/29/2019 Poverty of Profit

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The Poverty of ProfitRay Podder_________________

Keep shopping. Everythings ne.

Until now, this mantra of our fair civilization revered the ringing of the registers as the

sure signs of prosperity for all. Perhaps the tiniest peeps against this theory of progress

were not obvious enough to be felt, and so "prots equal progress" has now become

the immutable wisdom du jour.

Cut to now.

By Ray Podder via GROW. www.thisisgrow.org
http://www.thisisgrow.org/http://www.thisisgrow.org/


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Today, hundreds of thousands of tons of food will be wasted while over twenty seven

thousand people will die of starvation. This week, the gallons of water poisoned or

wasted from activities like fracking and mass produced meat will be over three times

that of all of the water consumed on the planet, while nearly a billion people will

continue to not have access to safe drinking water. This month, we would have spent

ve times more fossil fuels than what could have extracted from the earth. This year,

there will be more homes than homeless people, more cars than owners to drive them,

and more products available on the market than people to buy them. Our nation states

will spend over a trillion dollars on defense while over half the planets population will

make less than two dollars a day...barely.

Still think prots equal progress?

Prots cannot exist without poverty, and poverty cannot exist without war.

All of the problems we are facing with resource distribution today has a systemic aw

at the core: Prot. Prots create poverty. Somebody has to su ffer for someone elses

gain.

However, modern economic successes are dened by gains from prots, margins,

usury or arbitrage. These activities are now heralded as aspirational, instead of the

inefficiencies to access and empowerment that they really are. Everyone who is

wealthy today, is so because theyve identied and leveraged an information or access

gap in the system and exploited it. Every margin everywhere is a gap in the ow, every

debt yet to be repaid a friction between need and greed.

The counter argument of course, is that without prots there is no incentive to createvalue. Really? How do we then explain continuous scientic and artistic breakthroughs

from people in perpetual debt, the long term sustainably statistics of co-operative and

co-creative commons based, resource optimizing enterprises, or the signicance of

open source distributed technologies behind most of the innovations we currently

enjoy as a society? What role did "prot" really play in the true power of the Internet?



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Yet, prots continue to be synonymous with power, as if power was a zero sum game.

It is not. Power, like information increases in value as we share it, not get diminished by

it, but the prot game has no room for that kind of empowerment distribution. These

gaps in the system continue to express themselves as power over others by means of

mental or physical domination. Domination expressed with propaganda, and sold to us

as healthy and positively persuasive branding campaigns.

This is the norm, not the exception.

Lack of direct access to any available resource create dependencies. The more di fficult

or limited the resource appears to be, the deeper the dependency on those who can

access and provide them to everyone else. The primary dependencies like food, water,

energy and the capital required to produce them are thus encouraged, promoted as

scarce, centralized with barriers to entry. Even though the increasing evidence for

making them directly accessible as distributed technology innovations continue to

create exponential e fficiencies to both reduce costs and increase benets.

Why?

So a few can benet at the cost everyone else and the ecological capital that is

supposed to be accessible as inalienable to all? Isn't that basically theft? To take

something from someone and waste that which is not useful to the thief? It is further

perpetuated by attaching this activity to an aspirational social position meme. We are

all embedded in it. So much so that most of us continue to think that a little bit of

stealing is OK. When we say "I got a deal"...that's essentially what we are subscribing

to.

This seems like promoting protability as progress, is nothing other than celebrating

theft at a global consciousness level.

It takes the memetic kernel of self preservation that is iterating at our cores to survive,

and then using an immature expression to manifest it. Resource scarcity is relative to



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context. Theft is an immature response to that contextual scarcity. Co-creating for

mutual benet is a mature one. Co-creation does not mean everyone is equal. It means

everyone has equal access to the common resources and opportunities to create

value.

A global economy based on prot cannot ever create equal opportunity. The

competitive paths to protability that is now the cornerstone of commerce may provide

the illusion of a power position to a few, but is the extinction path they are leading the

rest of us to worth the expense?

So what about social position through competitive natural selection?

While competition is essential to steward the access to any resource with natural limits,

it implies an even playing eld. The tragedy of the commons examples clearly show

that when no one has had to compete to take ownership of something, the resource

often gets misused, abused and wasted. This has major implications about its

distribution downstream. Theft, now legitimized and expressed in terms of protable

returns is counter to that equal access. It's not the ttest who steal in nature, it's the

unproductive, the parasites, whose only relevance is as food for interdependent critters

downstream.

Mature cultures promote collaboration, while immature cultures can't see past their

immediate gratication and steal without regard to what happens to the victims. Why is

there a 1st, 2nd and 3rd world on a single planet? Why is some life worth more than

others? This sounds like the immature selshness of parasites. Mature civilizations

should realize that the victims are interconnected to you, and stealing is just stealing

from yourself. This is part of a deep memetic theme that has been iterating for

thousands of years, and now it's reaching systemic limits.

We now celebrate theft on a global scale. Period.

Why else would we spend trillions on defense and not even a fraction of it to eliminate

poverty? Why do corporate executives earn more than all of their employees



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combined? Space colonization, or the new sophisticated political transition from

justifying grotesque defense spending is now the epitome of that waste and discard

expression. Governments like the US spend billions to design lunar habitats and space

elevators, while right now there are over 4 billion people living in slums worldwide.

The brilliant people who invent and develop these technologies and designs are

underpaid, manipulated and led to believe that their corporate masters will help them

extend their lives with augmented bionics and bio hacked genetic superiority, so that

they can go rst. You know, ahead of the uneducated masses on whose backs the

capital for their R&D came from...

The appearance of scarcity must exist to create unique positions or quality, but it does

not need to exist in the material provisioning realm. Anyone can Google to see that we

make more food than we need, we have more water than that which is wasted. All to

maintain this "prot" model of scarce energy based resources, while we have more and

more technologies to generate contextually resilient energy systems that no longer

requires centralized production and distribution.

None of this stu ff is going to change by more technology or activism.

The collective is a reection of ourselves individually. As long as we express our self-

preservation source code for living by sophisticated but immature expressions of theft

such as prots, usury, arbitrage, etc, then in the aggregate we will continue to have

winner-takes-all owners.

The "owners" today are simply better positioned nodes in the network who can game

the system in their favor to make each of us dependent on a new set of expressions to

describe why it's ok to steal.

Guess what? It's still theft.

There is no better world for most or inhabitable world for all if we don't GROW up and

realize that sustainability here (or on Mars) is dependent on interconnected systems.



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Create and share to facilitate the ow or implode and die. This is not opinion, it is the

empirical reality we are currently subscribed to.

How can we shift from prot to benet?

Can we reverse this? Reinvent it? What is the process to transform the marker of prot

to benet while maintaining our innate desire to seek social position relative to capacity

and contribution? No life form is equal to another in nature. None of us humans are

equal in ability or impact either. However, whether or not prot is the marker to

distinguish that di fference is not only questionable, it is proving to be systemically

detrimental for our survival as a species.

So how do we solve for the prot equals poverty dilemma, when the prevailing

modality for human industrial progress has been about prots equalling progress?

These are deeper topics with complex challenges. My work with the epic human

networks that give our GROW model and projects unique value is focused on

answering these complex challenges with simple and elegant solutions. The details are

forthcoming through platforms, apps, articles and stories to follow. For now, Id like to

share some of the insights from what is already happening on the ground to shift the

global conversation at the local, actionable level from stealing to sharing:

1. Expanding Economy : Lets grow the economy, not shrink it. This is the reason I

named our platform and incubator model GROW. Our current scientic traditions look

at inter-relationships in reductionist isolation from the whole, even though we

understand that everything is interconnected. Prot as a motivator within a production

context is not only useful, it has historically proven to be quite e ffective. However,

mapping human values to prot based value markers like monetary wealth expressed

in terms like GDP is not only foolish, its damaging to individual empowerment and selfworth.

New accounting tools now emerging from the networks to measure the contextual

impact value of expressions like truth, beauty, harmony, fairness, love and other

innately human experience qualities can now actually be made fungible in practice. In



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other words, we should be able to agree and exchange based on the accounting of

physical and digital expressions such as likes or shares. This allows for the

expansion of the economy to include more experiences we cannot ever share with the

limits of money and helps put prot in context.

Even money itself does not have to be limited to federally issued national currencies

bound the laws of currency ux dictated by foreign theft policies, it can usher in

boundless innovation in contextual currency design most relevant for the situation. It

becomes one of many measures relative to agenda, and expands or contracts relative

to impact within the larger context of human value exchange.

2. Transforming Transactions: The practice of prot creates contractual relationships

of exchange that are designed to leverage the information or experience gap between

both parties. This inevitably leads to disappointment when that gap or margin is made

visible to both sides. The vendor/vendee, employer/employee, client/contractor

relationships are daily examples of this in action. Both parties want to get more at the

others expense, and this is the behavior that is encouraged as good business in

todays failing system.

However, as we look at partnerships, collaboratives and co-creative value creationconstructs both on and o ffl ine, getting more advantage at the others expense

becomes less of an issue because all parties involved become stakeholders relative to

their respective contributions. Today, people form partnerships to prot at the expense

of their customers knowledge or access gap, but what if those partnerships extended

to every participant in the ecosystem including the customer?

Well, a new breed of co-creative impact enterprises are now sprouting up on the

horizon to do exactly that. From pre-sales eliminating capital costs and loyaltymarketing budgets for locally owned community businesses like Credibles, to donor

and network support for crowdfunding and crowdsourced open innovation platforms

like Kickstarter and Quirky, the lines between company and consumer are blurring.

Every context that reframes its transaction paradigm into a co-creative partnership



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regardless of how strong or weak the relationship is, is helping to transform a culture of

taking into a culture of sharing.

3. Gamifying Giving : The realization of the shift from independent to the

interdependent changes the game from rewarding the winner that takes all to the giver

that delivers value with their gifts. The sharing context determines the reward. For

example, no one paid me to write this article, and no one is paying me share it freely.

So why am I doing it, and what value am I receiving or providing in the process?

Anyone who is on a social network can readily tell you that here it is indeed better to

give than get. If I only troll the interwebs to collect content and connections and dont

share anything other than my own self-serving agenda, then I am e ffectively left out of

the essential streams of conversation. I must rst share before I can connect, and the

strength of my connections are directly dependent on the quality of what Im sharing.

Real world relationships actually work the same way. The more I give, and the more

grateful I am for the opportunity, the richer my life is.

The taking and hoarding only o ffers temporary satisfaction and then I spend more

energy protecting and being paranoid that people will nd out how much I gained at

their expense. As we design better ways to share and better ways to reward givers,either by the architecture of the social interaction design or by the positive ideas about

the benets of sharing that we think with, sharing becomes the real marker for

success, not stealing. In fact, what we are now seeing with gift economies like The

Burning Man Community or democratized allocation networks like crowdfunding

projects yet to produce value become the norm not the exception. When we ip the

script to reward sharing as the epitome of social position, it becomes the default rather

than the variable.

This is the new world emerging NOW.

As real-time collective intelligence moves future risks or unknowns into the present as

variables, information opacity will have to give way to radical transparency. Business

will cease to be anything but usual as margins and protability shrink to non-



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existence in light of clear views from both sides of the exchange. This is already

happening now, and it is being called disruption. My question is, disrupting what?

Inefficiency? Secrecy? Barriers to access? Exposing the the greed driving the

exclusivity of the interaction?

Some who have benetted from the selsh separatist worldview of prot equals

progres s, which required an ongoing abundant supply of the poor to feed the material

needs of the rich may be sorely disappointed, but evolution does not care about your

hurt f eelings. The friction is the ction. It always has been, but we just couldnt see it in

our regionally scarce view of reality. As the world connects everyone and everything to

make life easier for everyone, we all start to get the real picture of interdependence as

reality instead of a nice feel good idea.

Thats promising.

I hope enough of us can see and share it in time to extend that promise to the good

people of this beautiful planet of ours. Thank you in advance for participating in this

conversation.

_______

ZERO for more content leading to the co-creation of abundance for all

NOW to align with friends around the world to Solve here & Share Everywhere

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Poverty of Profit