I've been writing for weeks and weeks about co-ops, authentic exchange and commerce, the practice of openness and business models, and other related topics. Between the crashing economy, my ongoing contemplation of open source, and a new project that I'm almost ready to announce, thinking about the substance of economies and the power of economies to define other aspect of our social experience has seemed really appealing. And it has been.

I came across this article by Jason Stoddard a while back, and I've realized that I would be remiss in these posts, if I didn't somehow tie it into writing and science fiction, and Stoddard's post provides a great hook into this connection. He's also, basically spot on right.

Interestingly, the beginning of this series grew out of my experiences reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy," which spent a lot of time (particularly in the last two volumes) contemplating corporations and capitalism. Indeed, in the Mars books, Robinson posits what some readers (without careful examination) might think of as the typical "evil mega-corporations."

Though I think he succeeds at avoiding the traps of having as villains "scheming business people in suits," by making sure that none of the executives appear in the stories. The closest we get to having a "corporate villain," is a character who allies themselves with the corporations for personal advancement. The result is that, the corporations lumber around, always doing the wrong thing, always getting in the way of the main characters, but they never loose the extra-human nature of being corporations.

Maybe that's part of the problem with writing fiction about corporations. Fiction tends to revolve around people and social systems of comprehensible complexity and corporations are shaped and steered by a great number of people, and there's too much complexity in corporations to really capture accurately in fiction.

While Stoddard's argument (Corporations exist to make money, they're not evil by nature) is factually true and good advice to anyone writing 'corporate drama' fiction, I think writers (and the rest of us) might benefit from thinking about some other "nitty gritty" aspects of corporations. Just because corporations may be "generally a bad thing in the world," difficult to write about, and "not simply evil for the purposes of fiction" nonetheless I think it is important to think about the social/political effect corporations and to write about them in fiction.

The following list is rough, and incomplete, and I encourage you all to help me out in comments!

• Corporations have a few overriding drives: to grow, to make profit (both by minimizing expenses and by increasing revenue), and to continue to exist. All actions and strategies undertaken by corporations should make sense in context of one or more of these drives.

• Corporate cultures are largely self selecting, so "radicals" in corporate settings are really unlikely, either because they're likely to leave or because their self-interest eventually falls in line with the company's interest.

• Corporations employ huge numbers of people, but we can assume that the number of people at any given company doing things that support the main mission of a company but that aren't "the thing the company does." Phyisical Plant "things," clerical tasks, human resources, "infrastructure," operations/financial tasks, internal legal work, and so forth. Probably as much as a quarter or a third of the staff probably falls into one of these categories.

• Corporations are rarely unilateral. Ever. They have many operations, many projects, many divisions, and thus can be resilient to things changing "around them." This also means that coorporations are less likely to take umbrage at potentially threatening individuals and companies, than a single individual would in a similar situation.

• Career advancement, in companies or elsewhere, generally happens to some greater or lesser extent by moving horizontally between companies rather than "through the ranks."

• The bigger the corporation the more specialized the roles of the workforce would tend to be.

• For the most part, I think it safe to assume that most corporations don't have a great deal of "classified" information, or information that's heavily embargoed. This comes as a great blow to conspiracy theorists, but secrets are hard to keep with regards to projects that a lot of people need to know about, and if all the other things we know about corporations are true (size, attrition, etc.) "great secrets" are unlikely to remain great secrets for long.

In light of all these things I think there are a lot of opportunities for realistic story telling, but it's not always so straight forward.

In anycase, I look forward to thinking about this some more with you.

One element that has been largely missing from my ongoing rambling analysis of economies, corporations, co-ops, and institutions has been higher education and universities. Of course Universities are institutions, and function in many ways like large corporations, but, nostalgia notwithstanding, I don't think it's really possible to exempt Universities or dismiss them from this conversation.

Oh, and, there was this rather interesting--but remarkably mundane--article that I clipped recently about that addressed where universities are "going" in the next decade or two. I say mundane, because I think the "look there's new technology that's changing the rules game" is crappy futurism, and really fails to get at the core of what kinds of developments we may expect to see in the coming years.

Nevertheless... Shall we begin? I think so:

• The expansion of university in the last 60 years, or so, has been fueled by the GI-Bill and the expansion of the student-loan industry. With the "population bubble" changing, and the credit market changing, universities will have to change. How they change is of course up in the air.

• There aren't many alternatives to "liberal arts/general education" post-secondary education for people who don't want, need, or have the preparation for that kind of education at age 18. While I'm a big proponent (and product of) a liberal arts education, there are many paths to becoming a well rounded and well educated adult, and they don't all lead through traditional-four-year college educations (or equivalents, particularly at age 18.)

• Technology is changing higher education and scholarship, already, with all likelihood faster than technology has been and is changing other aspects of our culture (publishing, media production, civic engagement, etc.). Like all of these developments of culture, however, the changes in higher education are probably not as revolutionary as the article suggests.

• There will probably always be a way in which degree granting institutions will be a "useful" part of our society, but I think "The College," will probably change significantly, but I think forthcoming changes probably have less to do with education and the classroom, and more to do with the evolving role of the faculty.

• As part of the decline of tenure-systems, I expect that eventually we'll see a greater separation (but not total disconnect) between the institutions which employ and sponsor scholarship, and the institutions that educate students.

• It strikes me that most of the systems that universities use to convey education online (Blackboard, moodle, etc.,) are hopelessly flawed. Either by virtue of being difficult and "gawky" to use, or because they're proprietary systems, or that they're not designed for the task at hand, all of the systems that I'm aware of are as much roadblocks to the adoption of new technology in education as anything else.

• Although quality information (effectively presented, even) is increasingly available online for free, what makes this information valuable in the university setting, including interactivity, feedback on progress, individual attention, validation and certification of mastery, are all of the things that universities (particularly "research"-grade institutions) perform least successfully at.

• We've been seeing research and popular press stuff on the phenomena of "prolonged adolescence," where young people tend to have a period of several years post-graduation where they have to figure out "what next," sometimes there's graduate school, sometimes there's odd jobs. I've become convinced that in an effort to help fill the gap between "vocational education" and "liberal arts/gen ed." we've gotten to the point where we ask people who are 18 (and don't have a clue what they want to do with their lives, for the most part) to make decisions about their careers that are pretty absurd. Other kinds of educational options should exist, that might help resolve this issue.

Interestingly these thoughts didn't have very much to do with technology. I guess I mostly feel that the changes in technology are secondary to the larger economic forces likely to affect universities in the coming years. Unless the singularity comes first

Your thoughts, as always, are more than welcome.

I ran across this smear piece with regards to Ubuntu users from the perspective of a seasoned Linux user, which I think resonates both with the problem of treating your users like idiots and differently with the kerfuffle over ubuntu one, though this post is a direct sequel to neither post.

The article in question makes critique (sort of) that a little bit of knowledge is a terrible thing, and that by making Linux/Unix open to a less technical swath of users, that the quality of the discourse around the linux world has taken a nose dive. It's a sort of "grumble grumble get off my lawn, kid," sort of argument, and while the elitist approach is off-putting (but total par for the course in hacker communities,) I think the post does resonate with a couple of very real phenomena:

1. Ubuntu has led the way for Linux to become a viable option for advanced beginner and intermediate computer users. Particularly since the beginning of 2008 (eg. the 8.04 release). Ubuntu just works, and a lot of people who know their way around a keyboard and a mouse are and can be comfortable using Linux for most of their computing tasks. This necessarily changes the makeup of the typical "Linux User" quite a bit, and I think welcoming these people into the fold can be a challenge, particularly for the more advanced users who have come to expect something very different from the "Linux Community."

2. This is mostly Microsoft's fault, but people who started using--likely Windows powered--computers in the nineties (which is a huge portion of people out there), being an 'intermediate' means a much different kind of understanding that "old school" Linux users have.

Using a Windows machine effectively, and knowing how to use one of these systems, revolves around knowing what controls are where in the control panel, around being able to "guess" where various settings are within applications, knowing how to keep track of windows that aren't visible, understanding the hierarchy of the file system, and knowing to reboot early and often. By contrast, using a Linux Machine effectively revolves around understanding the user/group/file permissions system, understanding the architecture of the system/desktop stack, knowing your way around a command line window, and the package manager, and knowing how to edit configuration files if needed.

In short, skills aren't as transferable between operating systems as they may have once been.

Ubuntu, for it's flaws (tenuous relationship with the Debian Project, peculiar release cycle), seems to know what it takes to make a system usable with very little upfront cost: How the installer needs to work, how to provide and organize the graphical configuration tools, and how to provide a base installation that is familiar and functional to a broad swath of potential users.

While this does change the dynamic of the community, it's also the only way that linux on the desktop is going to grow. The transition between windows power user and linux user is not a direct one. (While arguably the transition between OS X and Linux is reasonably straight forward.) The new people who come to the linux desktop are by-and-large going to be users who are quite different from the folks who have historically used Linux.

At the same time, one of the magical things about free software is that the very act of using free software educates users about how their software works and how their machines work. The cause of this is partially intentional, partly by virtue of the fact that much free software is designed to be used by the people who wrote the software, and partly because of free software's adoptive home of UNIX-liken systems. Regardless of the reason however, we can expect that even the most "n00bish" of users to eventually become more skilled and knowledgeable.

Having said that, in direct response to the article in question, even though I'm a huge devote of a "real" text editor, might it be the case that the era of the "do everything text editor" may be coming to an end? My thought is not that emacs and vi are no longer applicable, but the truth is that building specialized domain specific editing applications is easy enough that building such editing applications inside of vi/emacs doesn't make the same sort of sense that it made a twenty or thirty years ago? Sure a class of programmers will probably always use emacs, or something like it, but I think the change of emacs being supplanted by things-that-aren't editors, say, is something that isn't too difficult to imagine.

If the singularity doesn't come first, that is.