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7/29/2019 Poverty of Profit
1/9
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/7/29/2019 Poverty of Profit
2/9
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?
By Ray Podder via GROW. www.thisisgrow.org
http://www.thisisgrow.org/http://www.thisisgrow.org/7/29/2019 Poverty of Profit
3/9
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
By Ray Podder via GROW. www.thisisgrow.org
http://www.thisisgrow.org/http://www.thisisgrow.org/7/29/2019 Poverty of Profit
4/9
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
By Ray Podder via GROW. www.thisisgrow.org
http://www.thisisgrow.org/http://www.thisisgrow.org/7/29/2019 Poverty of Profit
5/9
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.
By Ray Podder via GROW. www.thisisgrow.org
http://www.thisisgrow.org/http://www.thisisgrow.org/7/29/2019 Poverty of Profit
6/9
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
By Ray Podder via GROW. www.thisisgrow.org
http://www.thisisgrow.org/http://www.thisisgrow.org/7/29/2019 Poverty of Profit
7/9
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
By Ray Podder via GROW. www.thisisgrow.org
http://www.thisisgrow.org/http://www.thisisgrow.org/7/29/2019 Poverty of Profit
8/9
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-
By Ray Podder via GROW. www.thisisgrow.org
http://www.thisisgrow.org/http://www.thisisgrow.org/7/29/2019 Poverty of Profit
9/9
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
GROW for updates to the next tools and processes
By Ray Podder via GROW. www.thisisgrow.org
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