The Way Forward is Around

We live in interesting times. They are not sustainable.

We must do better or things are going to get a lot worse. This post addresses to simple realities:

1. It is not practical, and may not even be possible, to go “backward.” Past arrangements were not just and we do not want to lose gains in quality of life, place, and work achieved in recent history.

2. Solutions are not going to come from corporations or government agencies. They do not operate in our interest but for the gain of those who control them at our expense.

How did we get here?

Much of our current reality has been, for better and worse, is the result of how we use technology. Not the tech itself, mind you, but how we use it and who owns it. Many of the systems that enable modern life required massive amounts of capital to build and maintain. They are inherently, physically large, like dams, freeways, and global networks. Many of our systems, like agriculture, distribution, and software, have economies of scale — they get cheaper per unit as they get bigger — at least for producers.

ANY technology can be scaled up economically by definition: a technology is means to reliably extend or increase the impact of human action, a replicable solution to a problem. The instance of a technology is difficult and expensive to build and inconsistent. The copies get cheaper — and better. General solutions tend to be more replicable as well as more widely applicable or useful.

This is because technologies are ideas. Once an idea is shared, it can be practically impossible to contain. When an idea is realized, a physical action or object comes from it, so that others see and experience it, it becomes culture and is no longer fully owned by the creator(s). The spoils of technology go to those who replicate and scale it, not necessarily to those who invented it.

Our current really includes many beneficial, valuable applications of a wide range of technologies. They enable us to live better, more comfortably and safer. Even if we could get rid of technologies, which is doubtful, which ones would it be? How far back do we want to go?

The simple reality is there is no going back.

There is no way to eliminate technologies short of draconian socioeconomic intervention. It is doubtful that even that would work. We cannot put the proverbial genie back in the bottle. We must go forward through our technology. But how? In which direction, under what force do we move forward? How do we even define or know if we are “moving forward”?

Choices about (and executed via) tech are not necessarily rationale. People act ad hoc with limited information, follow the crowd, make decisions randomly, and often don’t even know what we want from or to do with tech. Here are some basic principles, based on simple realities, that can help:

• Build on the past for the future. We have built amazing things. We can improve the situation and increase the opportunities for the next generation by using our tech differently. We must not foreclose options, particularly by degrading natural resources.

• Focus on the great goods: liberty, prosperity, and wellness; freedom from coercion and oppression, exploitation and privation, and disease and harm, respectively. These are essential to humanity. Tech must enable and support them, not erode or threaten them.

• It is harmful and immoral to treat people as means. Treating tech, which includes things like corporations and institutions, as ends is invariably detrimental to people. People are their own purpose. Technology is ONLY means to human ends.

• People are fundamentally motivated by desire for autonomy, belonging, and competence. Good technology empowers people by affording these things. Bad technology undermines individual agency, tries to replace interpersonal relationships, and makes people less capable.

Back to reality:

Corporations and public institutions and agencies cannot be relied on to improve our reality. Those who control them have every reason to benefit themselves at the expense of others and no real reason to benefit others. Therefore, we must assume they will use technology to undermine liberty, prosperity, and wellness. We must exercise our personal agency and work together via means we create for ourselves.

Organization is a general purpose technology that involves creating and using more specific technologies for some purpose, to function, grow, and perpetuate. People within such social arrangements tend to identify with and personify those arrangements, conceptually transforming them from abstract things into means to ends — an entity to serve a purpose. That purpose evolves into ends that are served by people. The results are too often antisocial, downright immoral behaviors and uses of technology.

It’s not the tech. It’s who owns it… and how they use it.

When people use tech for organization as an end in and of itself, other people are invariably harmed. Of course, organizations and other forms of technology can be means to empowerment if that is their essential purpose. Technology affords liberty, prosperity, and wellness when it accommodates, enables, and facilitates autonomy, belonging, and competence.

Fortunately, due to the nature of technological evolution, this is the case with digital technologies.

All technologies begin in isolation, set in a particular context outside current practices. Large amounts of capital are required to deploy and develop them. Early versions are monolithic, difficult to access, maintain, and use. As the idea spreads, people find ways to imitate and replicate it, refining and improving the tech in the process. Costs and difficulty decreases, the monoliths erode. Use become more widely distributed and diverse.

Eventually, the tech disappears into common practices. It does not go away. It becomes transparent and integral to human activities. That is where we are with digital technology today.

The way forward is around.

So, we have a real issue: We can’t go back but we can't move forward through corporations or institutions. The practical reality is that, if you do not own your tech, it owns you. It is now realistic and increasingly practical to fully own our digital assets. This allows us to get and use them for our own purposes by going around corporations and institutions.

Up to now, costs to get and use digital tech have been prohibitively high. Today, it costs almost nothing to duplicate software and hardware continues to offer more capacity for less cost. The major costs of digital assets come from controlling them, limiting their use, and using them. The tech has reached the point that scarcity must be created by limiting access and locking in users to extract value, which can be difficult and expensive. Why would we do that unnecessarily?

Technologists have realized this and recognized that once software is created, the best way to create value is to help people use it. Software has become a form of expression. Ideas that were once difficult to express — the web, the cloud, data itself — are now so widely accepted and implemented that they have become infrastructure. The way forward is through this infrastructure but around organizations established for other purposes.

Purposeful action that enables autonomy, facilitates belonging, and fosters competence with digital tech required to increase liberty, prosperity, and wellness. This is quite practical because digital technology deals with information, is now incorporated into most every aspect of human existence, and has relatively cheap and easy to get and use, .

I’ll address how in future posts but leave you with two general models.

Reduce transaction costs.

Transaction costs are the expenditures required to for products and services — from consumer staples to elected officials — in addition to the direct cost. They are hard, monetary costs and soft time and attention costs. There are three types of transaction costs*:

1. Search costs come from finding and processing information, providing the basis for making a decision, based on some desire, goal, need, or want.

2. Bargaining costs are created by need for agreement about the terms of a transaction, once a product or service has been identified as an option.

3. Enforcement costs arise after an agreement is reach and a transaction initiated, as all parties involved must ensure others act as agreed.

Information reduces transaction costs. Digital technology processes information. Therefore, use of digital technologies fundamental economic value comes from reducing transaction costs.

Develop digitally.

Cost reduction is the starting point for digital development. Automating processes with info tech reduces need for facilities, labor, and materials. Use of IT creates slack resources and generates data. Adding context and structure to data processes it into information. That’s the first step of digital development.

The second step is to use information and slack resources to increase revenue. Serve larger, more diverse, and/or more specialized markets by modifying processes and products based on information. Digital tech makes this economical as it strengthens customer relationships, providing deeper insights into interests and needs.

Deploying innovative, valuable products and services with no substitutes via digital tech based on insights is the third step. The new reality is that such products and services are now very cheap to provide thanks to AI, no code frameworks, and open source. The insights from relationships built on data are the key to success.

Avoid switching costs.

The common approach for tech companies is to provide a step one solution for finding information. They suck up the slack resources by inserting themselves in bargaining and other relationship building activities. We pay rent to them in the forms of our attention, data, and money and become dependent on them for our relationships. They own and control our data so we get locked into their solutions. Switching costs become insurmountable. The company ends up owning the innovation in step three.

Effective tech strategy avoids lock in by requiring openness and transparency. Data must be separate from code. Both should be accessible in total, especially the former. Standards are critical for this, allowing data to be moved from one app or service to another.

Let’s go!

The way forward through technology is to work around corporations or institutions for our information solutions. The tech to do this is readily available. We just have to get it, own it, and use it for our own purposes rather than the purposes of tech companies. Who’s ready?

Going forward, I’ll publish general concepts and practices for getting and using talent and technology to increase liberty, prosperity, and wellness, including case studies, on this blog. Blog posts about specific tactics and tools, particularly software, will be on Chattanooga.Digital. Both will be published via Making the Connection on Substack and cross posted to Facebook and Linked In, for what those are worth.

*See https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/business-and-management/transaction-cost-theory