Lessons from the Virus

Number one:

The world does not come screeching to a halt any time you get out of the squirrel cage.

Number two: 

The world does not come screeching to a halt even if hords of people decide to take a health break all at once.

Number three:

Well, number three is controversial, so maybe I shouldn't post it.

Uhm, okay, I'll post it anyway.

Too much running on the treadmill makes everyone sick.

You don't believe me.

Where do the viruses come from?

They make the jump in places where too many people are packed too tightly with pigs and other small cattle, without enough time or room to keep things clean, without enough nutrition, without enough rest.

If you have the means to be reading this little rant, you probably aren't poor enough to have been where the mutated virus made the jump this time.

But essential parts of whatever device you're reading this rant on were made by people in such conditions, and the ones you've thrown away are being recycled crudely, with few-to-no safety precautions, by people in such conditions.

-- because recycling is perceived to have no clear connection to monetary value.

And your hyper-competitve economy is being driven by the race to see who can move the centers of production down the farthest in the economic pecking order.

-- race-to-the-bottom.

I don't think I really have to spell this out for you. I'm sure you know it already. But you're too scared to get off the treadmill because there are guys in fancy suits who tell you the only way to make that money is to work that treadmill hard.

And you believe them. After all, they are working that treadmill hard, too, right? Crossing the street on a red light is safe if you have lots of company?

Those guys in the fancy suits, those are the guys who want to make money telling you how to make money by working too hard.

Think about that for a minute. They make their money by convincing you to -- voluntarily, no less -- keep on that treadmill.

What is money?

Money is at best a proxy for value. At best.

But it's a rough proxy. And it's a captive proxy in our current economy, requiring you to go to the masters of converting value into money -- those guys in the fancy suits -- for the conversion.

What is the most valuable thing when there's no food?

Food.

What about when there's no housing or food?

Food.

What about when there are no clothes or food?

Well, that's a tough one, but, when it comes right down to it, food.

What about when there are no books or food?

Food. (Yeah, even 'though I'm an author. Maybe because I am a technically unpublished author.)

Medicine? Yeah, but if the medicine cures you or fails to cure you, if there's nothing to eat after you take the medicine, it's the same end: Food.

And so on.

A house is valuable, and so is food. But their value is different. Books are valuable, too. But the value is different. Medicine, clothes, everything that has value has value in its own dimension. 

Prices are the ratio of value to money for different kinds of value. This is similar to the projection onto a single axis of vectors in a plane or a space. Money is one-dimensional. Value is multidimensional. Let's take a look at something easy, like nutrition:

Here it's quite clear that value has more than one dimension.

This is true in other dimensions than nutrition, as well -- health, education, rest and relaxation, etc., each of those categories with subcategories, each of those dimensions with sub-dimensions.

There is not much that is more valuable than food, but, in our society, food prices are one thing that inflation cannot be allowed to touch. Why?

Pretty simple.

People who produce food tend to not mind sharing.

Sharing food undermines the power of those guys in the fancy suits to control prices.

Why do we allow them to control prices?

Well, there's a lot of history, sociology, religion, and other stuff mixed in the reasons we allow them to control prices. Even though, in most modern, ostensibly free countries they are not the government themselves, they have entangled themselves in the government in ways such that it is rather destructive to simply boot them out.

They are the marketers. Their job, their value to society, is to guide products to markets. (Even if the market is the market of political discourse. Especially if the market is the market of political discourse.)

Without them, we would mostly be satisfied to have enough product for our own needs, today. With them, we can see that other people need what we make, so we make more than we ourselves need.

When they do their job well, they help us be sure there is mostly enough to go around, even in emergencies.

When they start syphoning off some of that value to make their suits fancier, there isn't enough to go around, and the segments of the population that have needs grow.

And the larger those needy segments grow, the more destructive the inevitable disasters and emergencies become, because the needy segments are the least able to prepare, protect, or defend themselves.

Unfortunately, some of those fancy suits have convinced themselves that it is the fanciness of their suits that motivates us. So they think they have to syphon off more money to make fancier suits. And that seems to become their excuse to think they have to control what we are doing. The marketers become marketeers and power-mongers.

(Skipping a lot of stuff about scarcity economics here because I know it sounds to some people like conspiracy theory.)

Otherwise, as they seem to think, society will fall apart.

One thing I have learned from the Libre Software movement, there is nothing further from the truth.

Open Source is not true Free-as-in-Freedom, but it is close.

In both Open Source and Libre technologies, the origin of innovation is a personal itch.

Somebody needed something for themselves.

In the metaphor, they had an itch and they scratched it. In scratching their itch, they found something of value they could share. They perceived value in sharing, so they worked out how to make that something-of-value available to others.

The scratching was not work, but the next step was. But no money was involved.

In other words, they work to make their creations available without requiring others to scratch and work so much.

Then others find that if they scratch a little, invest a little of their own work, the something-of-value can be improved. And value comes back to the original creator who shared.

No money is involved until the something-of-value becomes productized. Turning it into a product that the general public can use requires a lot of mundane work of the sort we call grunt-work. Why? Somebody has to advertise. Somebody has to handle feedback from people who don't want to know how to get their hands under the covers, or don't have time to do so. Etc.

And this is where the people in the fancy suits got brought into the loop.

I'm not sure it's a bad thing, in and of itself, to have marketing involved.

But I want to note something here. If we each could-and-would take the time to understand how to use the things we share with each other, we wouldn't need people who are paid to do nothing but guide product to market. We could produce what we need locally and be done with it, except for extreme cases.

And I think we would be happier, because there is satisfaction in making things that work.

If we did this, what would the marketers do for work? Well, on the one hand, I think they could find something other than marketing to do.

On the other, what they do is not wrong, just done too much and in the wrong way right now. What they facilitate is communication, and communication is necessary.

No, we aren't going to get beyond the need to move some products from the place they are produced to the place they are needed. Or, when we do, we will have solved the hardest social problems already, and, yes, there will be other work that the marketers can do.

For now, what we need to know is that every minute we spend on the treadmill is a minute we could have spent scratching other itches that matter and thereby contributing to society in ways that are presently going wanting.

And every minute we spend on the treadmill is another minute making us more vulnerable to things like the virus.