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Sam. Saint Gonna change one. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children, those looming down the road, and those that Donald Trump has still not quite figured out, but will probably deliver soon. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and I currently teach at the New School University in New York City. I want to jump into our economic updates for today, but I want to first make a couple of announcements, if I may. The first has to do with the upcoming earth day on the 22nd of April. And I want to acknowledge the importance, probably more than ever, of dealing with the real climact, climatic, if you like, challenges that face our globe, our planet, the human race as a whole. Whether it's global warming, whether it's climate change, whether it's fossil fuel exhaustion, whatever the dimensions, they for a long time did not figure in our consciousness. For the history of capitalism over the last 300 years, we have an endless display of investments made without regard to the ecological consequences. Profits earned by companies only because they did not have to acknowledge and they did not have to pay to manage the waste they created, the ecological damage they they created. We now know that had we properly accounted for the costs of a whole host of investments done by capitalist enterprises over the last two centuries, we would never have done them or done them very, very differently. The problem with a climate damaged by an economic system is that it becomes absurd. Because to try to deal with the economic consequences and the ecological consequences without questioning the system out of which they come. Yes, other systems have done damage to the earth as well. But we live in a capitalist system. And we live in a capitalist system that has proudly proclaimed its technological revolution. It has the oil revolution revolution and the steel revolution and the atomic energy revolution. I could mention a whole lot more. But each of those revolutions of which capitalism boasts that lifted its technology, those incurred real biological ecological costs which we ignored at the peril we now face. All of this is simply an appeal that as we think about, as we celebrate Earth Day, let's not forget to question the economic system that has so much responsibility for the ecological disasters we now face. To try to solve them, to overcome them, without questioning or changing the system, is absurd given our history, and it should not be entertained by by folks that are serious about what this all means. My second announcement has to do with something else. We as an institution are always looking for friends who will help us, help us in a variety of ways. Mostly we request partners, people who can use this program by sharing it with others, people who can use information and analyses that we do on this program and share them with others. I want to underscore that we are looking for partners in all ways and that anyone listening, anyone watching this program who thinks he or she or an institution they're part of can partner with us. Please let us know. And the easiest way to do that is to make use of the two websites that we maintain partly for that purpose. The first one is democracyatwork.info that's all one word, democracyatwork.info and the second one is rdwolff with two Fs. Very simple. Use either of those websites to communicate to us that you are interested in partnering in whatever way you think might make sense from your perspective, and we will respond and see whether a good partnership can be developed. We've done that with many, I think, to our mutual benefits. We'd like to do it with you, too, but we need you to take the initiative of thinking of ways we could work together to advance the kinds of interests that this program represents. All right, let's jump in. The first update today talks about the movie industry. Hollywood. The United States became the powerful superpower economically, that it still is in large part because over the last hundred years, the United States was able to shape global culture in a very particular way. And that way is cinema, the movies. Hollywood became the center of a production of films whose quality, technically and otherwise, whose quantity even moreoverwhelmed the rest of the world, so that no matter where you went, an American film was likely playing in a theater near you. You could see it in the original English, you could see it dubbed, you could see it with subtitles, but it was there. And even if you didn't go, your children certainly did. And as they grew up, it meant both an adult and a child audience for what? For how Americans see the world. For how Americans see themselves. For how Americans understand what an economy should look like, how it should work, how we should relate to one another. These kinds of cultural shifts around the world were crucial, for example, in creating a demand for American style clothing, which was featured, of course, on the American films the world learned about. Blue jeans, dungarees, all of that. And guess where it learned about convertible automobiles that you could ride around near the surf on a California beach. Etc. Etc. The impact of all of this was to make the United States something of a magical place, a place to which people turned for all kinds of inspiration, even when they weren't aware of it. Why am I telling you this? Because the United States cinema industry is about to be eclipsed by another country's cinema industry. The country is the People's Republic of China. It has become a very wealthy country. Its large corporations have been buying into studios, distributors, movie theater chains in Hollywood for years now. Their presence is extremely important already in terms of their ownership of various parts of the movie industry. But perhaps most important is the fact that probably within the next two years, they will overtake the United States in the number of theaters in their country showing films compared to the number in the United States. Right now, China is number two and the United States is number one. But by most guesses, and the Wall street journal on the 19th of April carried a story, its prediction is by 2020, that's in three years, folks, the Chinese will be number one and the United States will be number two. Why is that important? Because Hollywood makes films to make money. And if the majority of places where you show the film are in China, that's going to shape how much money you earn in China, which is becoming the largest market for films. And that means those films have to be acceptable and interesting and okay, not just with the Chinese people, but with the Chinese government. That takes a lot of interest in the nature and quality of the films shown to their people. The world is changing, as we all know, but one of the places it's changing very dramatically is, is in the shaping of a culture by an economic system whose relentless logic is to move the center of gravity wherever the money points. Goods have been shipped to China to be produced, as we know here in the United States, in huge numbers. Now, the industry that produces cultural norms and patterns and tastes is also shifting its center of gravity. And I wanted to mention something about it. Second update has to do with a thorny topic that keeps coming up in the words of Donald Trump, but also in the words of many other commentators. So I thought to bring it home if I could on this program. It has to do with manufacturing, with those jobs in an economy you in which human beings literally use their brains and muscles to transform a piece of nature, say a tree, into a useful object, say a chair, manufacturing, industrial work back in 1980 in the United States. To get right to the point, a little over 18% of the total number of jobs in the United States were in manufacturing, making things. By now. By 2017, it is less than 8%. Let me do it again. 1980, 18% of jobs in the United States were in manufacturing in 201737 years later, it is less than 8% in historical time. That is an extraordinary collapse of the role of manufacturing in an economy. So let's first establish the simple. Manufacturing is shrinking fast as a share of the United States economy. One in 12 jobs is in manufacturing and the other 11 are not. They're in retail trade, they're in services of all kinds, they're in many other things, but not making things. Okay, next point. Why did this happen? And there are basically two reasons. First, something that always goes on in a capitalist system, namely capitalists trying to figure out how to save on labor costs, either to pay their workers less so that they have more profit, or to do the same work with less workers, because that's another way for them to have more profit. And capitalists are always looking for, for these opportunities. And there's a word in economics to describe when capitalists are able to reduce their labor costs, particularly by using new kinds of machinery or tools or equipment, and that word is automation. So one of the key reasons manufacturing jobs have declined is that capitalists have found ways to, to automate, to replace workers with machines or with new ways of organizing work. And the second way, which I've talked about on this program often has been to outsource, to export the jobs, to take advantage of the fact that over the last 300 years, as capitalism developed its industrial base in Western Europe, North America, Japan and a few other places, it consigned the rest of the world to a very secondary subordinate position, providing the raw materials, providing the food. And in most of those places, the wages, the standards of living were very low, leading those parts of the world, particularly in Asia, Africa and Latin America, to be desperate for better paying jobs of one kind or another. And so it was only a matter of time before their desperation would connect to capitalists looking to save on labor. To lead those capitalists to say, let's leave where we grew up, Western Europe, North America and Japan, and let's go to where we can get the work done by paying people much, much less. Moving from the United States to China to India to Brazil and so on, that has been going on particularly quickly over the last 30 to 40 years. Well, when you put together the export of jobs and the automation of jobs, you don't have a big problem. Understanding what happened to manufacturing, it was precisely because in manufacturing, labor unions had grown up in the last 200 years, organizations where workers collectively forced the capitalists to raise wages periodically to create livable working conditions at the workplace and so on. The very success of labor unions in manufacturing in Western Europe, North America and Japan. Their very success, in the perverse logic of capitalism, increased the incentive for capitalists to replace them, either by moving abroad where wages are low, or by automating them. The very success of workers in improving their conditions of work creates a greater and greater incentive for them to be fired and replaced by machines, or or by lower wage workers abroad. And that's what's happened, and that's why manufacturing has been so badly decimated. And given the efforts of the rest of the world that remains much poorer than the United States, Western Europe and Japan in most cases, this movement abroad is not about to change, is not about to go away, and all the rhetorical flourishes of politicians from Donald Trump on over are not in a position to change that. Let me turn finally to the automation part of the story. One of the key kinds of automation has to do with computers. An extension of that, robots. I don't want to get into the hyped narrative about how robots are taking all our jobs tomorrow. I do want to caution you, however, that when it comes to replacing workers with robots, the United States is rather behind the curve. Let me give you an example, and I'm going to use a statistic here from Reuters, the British news agency that I make use of quite often that had a story on the 18th of April. The number of multi purpose industrial robots per 10,000 employees in manufacturing. The country that is the most roboticized is the Republic of Korea. Nobody's even close to them. Number two, Singapore. Number three, Japan. Number four, Germany. Number five, Sweden. You notice what's missing? The United States. We have less robots per hundred thousand employees than many other countries, particularly countries with whom we have to compete for all kinds of productions. So there's a long way to go in the United States to install robots. So that will be another way. What's the punchline I'm getting at here? The way capitalism works, capitalists are incentivized, rewarded and enabled to move jobs out of the country and to replace workers with machines. A system that rewards them from doing that cannot be expected to do more than wave its hands when it gets the result that it is set up to produce. If you don't want to lose jobs through the export to low wages or through automation, it's the system that has to be changed because it's the system that produces the result. Simplest way to illustrate it, every technical invention that allows work to be done with fewer human labor hours than it used to take, which is what technology does every Such invention can be used in either of two ways or the ways can be shared. You can use the invention to fire the workers, save on paying them wages, and cash in on that saving as more corporate profits. Or you could shorten the workday. You could say, oh, we can get work done at six hours a day, not eight hours a day. Why? Because in six hours, with the new technology, we can get as much done as we used to require eight hours for. We don't fire anybody. We give our workforce more time off and we take advantage of the technical change that way. The latter way is what's good for the mass of working people. The former way is what's good for the capitalists who, who are a minority. We live in a system that enables the minority to use technical change for profit enhancement, not for shorter work weeks. And that's a systemic problem, not a technical one, and one we could have and should have addressed long ago. Finally, I'll have time to tell you a story from an unlikely place. It's a newspaper I look at from time to time as I prepare these programs. It's called the New Hampshire Union Leader. I don't look at it too often because its right wing editorial positions are really over the top and so not usually of great interest to me. But of course, what's on the editorial page and what actual reporters write are two very different things. And I came across a story recently on the 15th of April of this year by Mike Cote, C O T E. And it's a remarkable story about a cooperative. But it's a new kind of cooperative, or at least it's new in the sense we don't talk about it often on this program. These kinds of cooperatives are very old. In fact, it's called cca and I want to tell you about it. Sometimes it goes by the name CCA Global Partners. It's an idea developed by two businessmen in the United States some years ago who understood deeply the terrible conflict between small business and big business. If you understand how business works, the bigger you are, the better the deal you can negotiate. Whether you're buying pencils or you're buying electricity or you're selling your materials. The bigger the fish you are, the better the deal you can get. Which means that big companies have a leg up in competing with small ones because they're big. And this has always been very dangerous because what it has done is basically allowed the big companies to. To compete out of existence and eventually swallow the small ones. Which is why the typical history of an industry in Our country is one in which starts with many firms and then over time becomes fewer and fewer until literally three or four are left. We all know that the number of companies that make computers, the number of companies that make automobiles in each country, but even globally is shrinking all the time. These two gentlemen in the United States who started the CCA cooperative, CCA Global Partners, basically said to the small business universe, you need a cooperative. You need it because you won't survive otherwise. If all the little businesses got together as a co op, they would be able to buy inputs together with the big scale advantage that a large company has. They could negotiate with wholesalers and retailers who sell what they produce with much more clout because they are many gotten together in a cooperative way. It turns out cooperation has been stunningly successful with the CCA that has grown spectacularly. And because it's a cooperative, it is owned by all the little firms that make use of it. So if it makes money by charging each firm at the end of the year, the profit is returned back to all the little businesses that helped to form and create this co op. It's a cooperative. It's a proof of, of the power of the cooperative. It helps small businesses survive. But it goes one further. It demonstrates a superiority of the co op because as they enjoy pointing out, they were much less damaged by the collapse of 2008 than were all other kinds of companies, large and small, that didn't have a cooperative to help them get through the crisis. But they make a further point, which is the one I want to stress with you. When little businesses get together as a co op so they can compete with big businesses, they're still each little businesses. They have the personal involvement, the commitment of the people who work together, knowing one another, working together. This produces a better quality of service to the ultimate customer than the big impersonal corporations can, can ever achieve. So they can get the benefits of bigness by being a cooperative without losing the virtues of smallness, which in the kinds of businesses that get together is the make or break in terms of customer loyalty, the make or break in terms of being successful. It's another proof that cooperation among people, far from being a soft and cuddly nice idea, which it is, is also a very powerful political and economic strategy and therefore can succeed quite nicely, thank you, in competition with big corporations who, when they don't have that special scale advantage, have to live with the disadvantage of, of their large impersonal failures at servicing their customer, which anyone who deals with large corporations knows about. If you can take a look at CCA Global Partners for details about how small businesses and by the way, they're all over the world now. North America, New Zealand, Australia and New Zealand, as you'll learn shortly, is an important part of today's program. So they're everywhere. And it's an interesting study about how cooperation can exist not only among working people within an enterprise, which is what we talk about a lot and what the second half of today's program is going to be talking about as well, but also cooperation is a principle that has important values elsewhere in economic systems. All right, folks, we've come to the end of the first half of our program today. I want to thank you for listening. I want to remind you though, please to make use of our two websites, democracyatwork.info and rdwolf with two Fs.com make use of them to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and and Instagram. Make use of them to communicate what you like and don't about this program. Be a partner. As I spoke about a little bit earlier today, make use of what we update onto our websites, share it with other people. Become part of the team of Democracy at Work that produces this program and maintains those websites. Finally, remember, I am available to come to virtually any part of the United States to give talks. We are always looking for radio and television stations that might be interested in broadcasting this program in all of these ways. We are looking for partnerships with and from you. And please let us know if you have any thoughts about how to pursue such partnerships. Stay with us. After a very short interlude, we will be right back. Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us. And above us is only sky.
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Imagine all the people.
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Living for today.
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You.
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You may say that I'm a dreamer. Welcome back friends to the second half of today's Economic Update. I'm your host Richard Wolff and I am very pleased to welcome to our program today. Richard, another Richard beside myself, Richard D. Bartlett. He is one of the co founders of Lumio. And it's about Lumio that we're going to structure this interview. Lumio is an open source software tool for collective decision making. It arose out of the Occupy movement. We're going to be talking about that some more. But it is a company. It is a worker cooperative. We're going to explore that. And Richard is also a member of N Spiral, a decentralized network of people using the tools of business to pursue radical social change. His background is in creative activism. And do it yourself electronics. He's very passionate about co ownership, self management, collaborative governance and other ways of sneaking genuine democratic decision making into respectable places. He also has a good sense of humor. I've already learned that. And he writes@richdecibles.com okay, welcome to the program, Richard.
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Thank you so much for having me here.
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And Richard comes from New Zealand, so we've agreed that he's going to work doubly hard to make sure that slow folks like me can understand everything. Well, let's begin. Tell us in your own words, what is Lumio as a worker cooperative? What does it do and how does it work?
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Well, I guess I can explain the name. Lumio Loom is a weaving tool. So the idea of Lumio is that it's a, a way of weaving together all the different diverse perspectives that you have in a group to produce a coherent picture. So in practical terms, it's an online discussion forum like any other online discussion forum you may have seen. But the unique attribute of our discussion forum is that there is a decision making functionality so you can bring a discussion to a conclusion, which is kind of a breakthrough on many online discussions that you, you know, anyone in the group say it's your, maybe it's your co op or your arts collective or your political party, you can have a discussion on a topic, you know, what should our policy be about? Vacations. Everyone can share their views and then when someone senses that there may be enough agreement in the room, they can move a proposal. So they say, I propose the new policy is such and such. And that notifies all of the members of the group and says, what do you think of this proposal? So it's very, very simple. That's the extent of the technology. There's nothing more clever than that. It just is a way of saying, I think we should do this, what do you think? And it gets everybody's opinion. And then once you've got everyone's opinion, you can decide what you want to do with that information.
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Let me make a comment. I've been a part of countless groups in my life and I think this is extraordinary. I think that I cannot remember an example when a decision was not reached that left a significant number of people feeling their voice had never been heard or their perspective had never been part of the decision making process. This that you propose, which sounds so simple, could be an absolute make or break it for or institutions because folks who feel excluded tend to leave and that demoralizes everybody else. And then you have the sad history of the organization not functioning. So I would urge everyone to understand that your modesty should not hide how important this could be in building solid, self aware groups where everybody has a feeling that they're genuinely incorporated in some sense.
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I mean, I mean, modesty is maybe a New Zealand attribute, but it's also a tactic. You know, I have had my time doing the kind of activism where you're outside and you're yelling and you're waving signs. And this is another kind of activism which is more subtle. But our vision is a world where it's easy for anyone to participate in a decision that affects them, which is a gentle, subtle, modest little vision. But it stems from an analysis and an understanding of the world that most people are not involved in most of the decisions that affect them. And so we're just working on that one little piece of the struggle.
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So let me pick up on one point. You say that this grew out of Occupy, the Occupy movement here in the United States. The Occupy movement is often treated as though it were an ancient relic of a distant past, something that arose quickly but disappeared almost as quickly. Your statement that what you did grew out of it suggests that Occupy is not dead and that Occupy had all kinds of consequences that are ongoing. Tell us a little bit about the relationship between your development of this participatory democracy tool and the Occupy.
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So prior to Occupy, I was an engineer. And engineers have a particular way of thinking about the world, which basically my experience of engineering was you try and gather all the information you possibly can and make a high quality model of the world. And then I was doing electronics. So you build a circuit, you'd make a device, and it's all about how right you are. That's the essence of engineering, is being as right as you possibly can. I got involved with Occupy. I tried to be an observer. I went down just. This is interesting. And I don't really trust any media to report on it fairly. So I'm just going to go and observe this for myself. And within maybe 20 minutes, I was no longer an observer. I was a participant.
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This was in New Zealand.
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In New Zealand, yes. So it reached New Zealand on October 15, 2011. So it was a global day of solidarity that I participated in. And from that very first encounter, I started to. Well, you know, frankly, something in my identity shifted. And it was my first time, for instance, sitting in a circle with people. Just that, just being in the circle where everyone is looking at each other and listening. When one person speaks, everyone listens and everyone has equal access to speaking and everyone commits to listening to them. I hadn't done that. My experience had been there's a teacher at the front of the room, there's a boss that's in the front of the room, there's a parent, there's a preacher, whoever. But to sit in a circle was transformative on its own. But then the process that we were going through was to try and build consensus about, first of all, how are we going to organize ourselves. So in Wellington, we formed a little village. We stayed in that camp for about two months, a couple of hundred people eating, all these people coming and getting fed with no money, changing hands, education. So every day there was all kinds of different workshops, both amateurs and professionals coming and teaching, and we had a 247 hospitality service and a media service and all these sorts of activities that were all organized in this circular fashion, that there was no question of a hierarchy that's dictating this is what we're going to do, and this is who's going to do it and when and why. It just emerged from the interest and intelligence and resources of all the individuals. So that process of sitting in a circle and benefiting from the collective intelligence. So learning that I have one set of experiences, one history that's given me one perspective. So on any topic, I'm going to be looking at it from this side. Whereas you've got a different set of experiences, a different perspective, and if we can share our perspectives in a gentle way, we can both learn from each other. Whereas if I'm trying to demonstrate to you how right I am and use my clever language and battle you and debate you, then sure, I can win the argument on the day, but I don't actually learn anything from your perspective. So that's the positive, rosy side of Occupy. But as anyone who participated would know, it was also just a crushingly frustrating, devastating process to sit in a circle for four or five or six hours sometimes and not get to any conclusions. So this decision making process has a lot of shortcomings. So as our camp collapsed, like so many others in my subjective reading, I think half of the Occupy camps got crushed by the state and then the other half got crushed by consensus. Just the weight of trying to do this inclusive decision making without appropriate training, without the expertise, the understanding, there's a lot of shortcomings to this decision making model. So coming out the other side of that, me and a number of friends that were participating felt this calling, this mission. I don't have any other choice but to try and make that inclusive decision making process more accessible, more dynamic, more sustainable and bypass a lot of the shortcomings of time and space.
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So literally your project grew out of seeing a shortcoming of Occupy and setting yourself the task of solving it, of overcoming it. All right, expand on that a little bit. Tell us a little bit how Lumio works, how you draw in everybody, spell that out a little bit so everybody understands what's going on here and why particularly it can address the problem that was so vexing for Occupy.
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I think there's a couple of vexing problems for Occupy and I said time and space. So if you have to say you want to do collective decision making, basically that means you want to have a lot of meetings, that's what you're signing up for. And so if you always having to gather all of your people together to do your collective decision making, it severely limits what you can do. You've only got so much time that people can allot and there's plenty of people that can't make it. They're busy working or raising families or they have difficulty getting around. Just by taking that consensus model that many co ops and so on are familiar with and putting it in a digital space, you bypass those shortcomings of time and space. So you've got enough time. There's always because you're participating asynchronously, you've got enough time to give any decision the consideration that it needs and get the information that you need to hear and all the data and so on.
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Because it's all electronic means. If you're busy from nine to six, you'll do it after six or you'll do it before nine. And each person participates yet has his or her own schedule.
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When it suits them, they can participate and only on the topics that they're interested in. They don't have to sit through all of the random, long winded, tedious parts of the meeting that no one really wants to be. There's two people that are having there, you can just bypass that. I'm not really interested in the budget. I just want to talk about whatever your topic is because you don't have to go anywhere. You can participate in your own time when you're on the subway. I was just doing that on the way over here, having my input into a new policy that we're going to be using to govern ourselves as a team.
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And have you tried it?
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Yeah, a lot. So like I said, we're a workaround co op.
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We're going to get to that in a Minute I still want to make sure I have and that all our viewers and listeners have a sense of how this works. So an issue comes up, it is presented in some way and then all the folks that are in this whatever it is group make the decision whether or not they want input onto this subject, whether it interests them enough to do it. If they do, they then have a period, a large period of time during which to find the moment they can give to put in their process. And then this works then towards a decision that they vote on or how.
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Yeah, yeah. So you start with a group, a defined membership. So it's not like an open ended Facebook or a Twitter thing. It's like you have your group, so let's say it's a co op and you get them all into the space and then the Lumio group, you can think of it like a meeting room. So we go to the meeting room to have a particular kind of conversation. It's not what are you having for lunch, it's what are we going to do about the annual plan or what's the budget? So it's a place for a serious discussion and anyone in the group can start a discussion. So I might start the discussion. Okay, what are we going to do? What's that annual plan? What are the inputs? Okay, I need to hear from the product developers and the marketing people and what does the board think? And it's just a discussion for them and I bring the right people in and they share their perspective on a topic and then I play what's called a coordination role in our co op. So a lot of the work that I do is summarizing. I take all of these different inputs and I'll summarize it into a document and say, is this the annual plan? Can we all agree that this year our top three priorities are this number, that number and that number. So I put up a proposal that says can we agree this? And then everyone has their chance to participate. And so that participation at that point in the proposal we don't really talk about voting. I sort of cringe at the idea of voting, but you can state your position. So at the moment there's just one decision making model in Lumio and the positions are you can agree with it, this is great, you can abstain, which is quite a powerful thing to say. I don't care, I don't know, it's not my business, I'm just happy to go with the group. You can disagree, which means I think we can do something better than this. Or you can block, which means I have a very serious objection. And you know, we need to do something. I'm freaking out here.
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Okay.
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And so then that's all it does. You gather the input of all the group on this proposal. And so.
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So if you were the coordinator, for example, under those circumstances, you would then adjust the proposal to try to take account of what each person's view of it was.
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Yeah. So you hear concerns from people and you say, oh, look, you know, I think it would be better if, okay, well, let's update the proposal and then see what people think about that. So like I say, that's when you.
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Go through several steps and then finally reach something everybody can live with.
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Yes, yes. So that's. The iterative process should evolve the quality of the proposal. So you're treating dissent as a resource rather than as something to avoid and move out of the way as quickly as possible.
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Now I see better than I have in the past. And by the way, I should mention democracyatwork.info has a profile of the Lumio cooperative. So if you want to read up a little bit about it, it's a very nice done job. Go to our website democracyatwork.info profile Lumio and you will be able to learn more about this. It seems, if I understand you, that it almost has to be a co op, that if you had a typical capitalist hierarchical enterprise, then everybody's perspective wouldn't be in some sense equal because the, the president would have a different perspective than his or her secretary. All those hierarchical would at the very least deeply compromise this. So am I right that this really is. Lumio presumes a cooperative, and a cooperative needs Lumio to function.
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So the way it currently works, basically it only works for groups that are already trying to be inclusive. So whether they are legally a cooperative or they are just a slightly more enlightened capitalist firm that wants to include the workers in deciding how they're going to operate. Or like I said, an arts collective or a political party, lots of different groups have this commitment already to inclusive behavior. It's designed for those sorts of groups. And the next phase of our product development will be reaching into groups that don't already have that collaborative culture and gently pull them along to learn how to collaborate, to make it the sort of the most obvious choice. It's like we would like to make inclusion the convenient option. And so you don't even have to have a dogmatic position or an argument about should we be inclusive or not. It's just, well, it's most convenient, it's most quick, it's most efficient if we just hear from people before we make the decision.
- [47:21]
A
So, and how are you going to persuade people deeply raised in, committed to, unfamiliar with alternatives to hierarchical order, giving, taking, how are you going to do that?
- [47:35]
B
Well, it's not just us, you know, we're in the context of vast social movements that are announcing just a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo. More and more and more people understand that this kind of top down hierarchical command and control way of operating, it's just not as good as we could be. More and more people believe that we could do something better. And so all we're doing is providing one little, we're resourcing some of these social movements. And I don't expect that us and our little team are going to transform culture at a global scale, but we're going to be one, one little resource that helps with that cultural transformation.
- [48:18]
A
So that if there are, as you put it, and I agree with you, all kinds of signs of movement in that direction, you're facilitating that, you're giving them another tool to pursue a transition from hierarchy to cooperation that they didn't have before, to make shorter and better and fewer meetings and yet make everyone comfortable that they're part of a collective decision making process.
- [48:45]
B
Because it's all well and good. And this is one of the things we did at Occupy was insist that there must be a better way, there must be a better way than this crappy government system that we've got. There must be a better way than this crappy economic system than we've got. It's one thing to make that demand, but it's quite another to demonstrate that there's an alternative. Personally, I don't think there is a ready made alternative that we can just switch on. It's like if only we just used this kind of government and this kind of economy, everything would be fixed. I think we have to grow the alternative together. And so as these social movements keep waving, rolling over and over the planet, to my reading of them, and this is one of the benefits of living in New Zealand and having a very long range perspective on things. I see them attempting new structures and using new tools and, and each iteration, each successive movement, getting a new piece of the puzzle and learning a new piece of how on earth are we going to structure the society that's based on values of cooperation and inclusion?
- [49:46]
A
To expand on that last point, tell me how you imagine, and I understand this is always a mixture of Wish and insight. How do you see this growing, this movement of which you are a part? What's your hope? What's your sense of what you would like to see the rest of your life contribute to?
- [50:12]
B
Well, for one thing, I'd like to see it continue moving. I'd like the movement to keep moving. You know, when I said we were. We joined the Occupy movement in New Zealand. We joined in October 15, 2011. And at the time, I thought that was the Occupy Wall Street Day of Global action. It turns out it was the M15 global day of action. So the Latin American Spanish Indignados movement called for a global day of action and Occupy tuned into that. So it took me years to realize that that even had happened, that Occupy Wall street was actually the child of the Spanish movement that was already well underway six months prior. And since Occupy has faded from the headlines, the headlines, that movement has continued to pop up in different countries.
- [50:58]
A
Yes.
- [50:58]
B
So the movement in Spain has gone through many different iterations and it's taken some political power, institutional power, and then it's crumbled again and rearranged its strategy. Over on the other side of the world, you've got Taiwan. Just the most incredible developments in Taiwan directly inspired by Occupy.
- [51:17]
A
Tell me about that. Tell us about that. I don't think most of our people will know much.
- [51:21]
B
Most people do not know. It baffles me why the story is not more well known, because for me, it's so inspirational.
- [51:27]
A
Please.
- [51:28]
B
So 2014, you have the Taiwanese. Now, I think it's the Ministry of Economy or Finance or whatever. The thing is, they put out a short video. I can't do it justice. But the essence of the video was to say the Taiwanese economy is so incredibly complex, no one could possibly understand it. If you're just a citizen, just trust us. We've got it under control. That was the kind of underlying message of the video. And that, of course, triggered a certain amount of dissent in the populace. And one of the productive outputs of that dissent was a hackathon. So these software geeks came together and they said, actually, we can understand complexity because we're geeks and we use software to do this job all the time. And one of the things they did in this hackathon was produce a website. So you've got the budget.govTW, the Taiwanese budgeting website. They produced an alternative version of that, which is budget G0V instead of gov TW. So they call themselves gov zero, as in rethinking government from zero. And they produced this one Website, which was like a shadow of the official one. And all they did was take the officially available information and make it much more accessible and engaging. And you could say, what if we changed the taxes this way? What would be the outcome on the budget? What could we do? Just did some good. Just a nice bit of technology on top of some static old data. So that is a subculture, in a way, of these regular hackathons, where people are getting together and doing these creative, clever things with technology that's happening on one track. On the other track. Later on in the year, in 2014, there's a negotiation between Taiwan and mainland China about free trade. And because of the constitutional peculiarities of those two countries, that particular negotiation is horrendously undemocratic. Now, at this point, this is where the Occupy comes in. Directly inspired by the Occupy movement, there was a, first of all, a mass mobilization. I think 1 in 8 people from Taipei were in the streets surrounding the.
- [53:33]
A
Legislature where the negotiations were going on.
- [53:37]
B
And then led by a student activist group, they occupied the legislature and held the legislature for a month. And what they did while they were occupying, apart from keeping it immaculately clean, which was a nice touch, they demonstrated this is how we would negotiate a trade deal if we were a democracy. So they got all of the stakeholders into the room, they got some great facilitators, some experts in deliberation, and just hosted a deliberative process. And this is the negotiation. This is the different parties. This is their interest. What's an agreement we can come up with that suits the most number of people? And they broadcast all of this. So the reason they could broadcast it was because the gov0 people came in as kind of tech support. So this is, as far as I know, the only Occupy movement that had a dedicated fiber optic Internet line. So they were broadcasting all of the deliberations with all the parties, and they were transcribing them and then translating them into a dozen different languages to make them as accessible as possible. So after that occupation was complete and they'd made their point quite successfully and cleaned up the parliament on their way out, the government really at that point, having had more than half a million people in the street, and this demonstration had no choice but to admit a crisis of legitimacy. And the social movement had the moral high ground. And not just the moral high ground, but the practical, we know what we're doing high ground. And so since then, that was the sunflower movement in 2014. And since then, that's what it was.
- [55:08]
A
Called, the Sunflower movement.
- [55:10]
B
Since then there's been to my reading of it and I visited a few times, so my reading is obviously shallow, but to me it looks like basically a comprehensive rewrite of what government looks like in Taiwan. So there's a project called VTaiwan Virtual Taiwan. And they have both a set of tools and processes for doing large scale citizen direct democracy and a political strategy for deploying that effectively. So they went around all of the different departments in government and found who is the most likely suspect that's ready to do something radically inclusive, radically accessible, transparent. So on they found the Ministry of Transport, there were some soft people there, and so they hosted a deliberation with thousands of people on how are we going to govern Uber and other ride sharing apps. So they had a process that combined online technology and offline deliberations that were all broadcast to get all the decision makers into the room. And the end result was literally thousands of citizens participating directly in setting the policy. So they came up with seven or eight policy points about these are the sets of agreements we're going to use to govern Uber. And then the Ministry of Transport stamped it and that is now the law.
- [56:29]
A
So in other words, we have a concrete example of this social movement, Occupy, aided by some technological developments of the sort that Lumio is trying to add to showing it can be done, that masses of people can participate and that government holding it into itself and serving the few interests that control the government. That's not a necessary limit of how we live.
- [56:58]
B
And that was more than a year ago. And since then there's been dozens and dozens of these particular participatory projects all across Taiwan on many different topics. And obviously Uber is one that's a particularly. It's of interest to very tech savvy people that have got a lot of technology and so it's an easy place to start with this digital democracy thing, but they have been spreading further and further out away from the digital bubble.
- [57:20]
A
Richard, thank you very, very much for teaching us about a new way of doing things and showing us that it actually worked in a place like Taiwan, which I don't think so many Americans follow, and I hope they will from now on. We've come to the end of our program, folks. I hope you found it as interesting as I did. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis, for being our partner. And to remind you all, we are always looking for more partners for economic update. Let us know if you can be one. Thank you very much. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week, Sam.