If corporations founded by Stanford alumni were to form an independent nation, it would be the tenth largest economy in the world, with an annual revenue of $2.7 trillion
Crowdsourced
Andrew made a Tumblr for his forthcoming thesis. Sometimes he will get off topic though.
ac.preston86[at]gmail.com
twitter.com/ac_preston
ac.preston86[at]gmail.com
twitter.com/ac_preston
..our business plan didn’t involve us in any way - it was just a description of other people making and selling products. (via xkcd: Crowdsourcing)
Contrary to a commonly held view of crowdsourcing as a transfer of low-skill work to low cost locations, our analysis shows that more than half of all the crowdsourcing workers live in North America and Europe and workers are generally very well educated. Almost half have bachelor degree and only 5% are truly low skill workers with only an elementary education.
Work Without Jobs: A Trend For The Educated Elite →
The rapid shift to non-employment should concern us for a number of reasons. Routine employment data, which underpins economic optimism or pessimism, is unlikely to reflect the full range of opportunity that the economy is creating as we move away from jobs as a primary form of engagement with work. Add to that the fact that emerging types of work tend towards the extremes. They can be entrepreneurial, creative and full of opportunity but they can also be very low paid.
A troubling development is the drift to highly educated, low paid labor. That combination seems to be characteristic of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing has the potential to enable a new elasticity in the use of labor but it also has the capacity to drive income through the floor.
Introducing: Flathead Thomas Friedman
The awareness that we live in a system or, better, that our lives and livelihoods are articulated through systemic forces, does not need to lead us to despair. Knowledge of these forces does not make us weaker; on the contrary, it makes us stronger, because the system reveals its Achilles heel by showing what it must do in order to survive: it must promote enclosures and it must pit producers, both waged and unwaged, against each other, thus creating the appearance of abundance, but instead reproducing scarcity.
1 year ago | 12 notes | Reblog |
autonomist marxism, autonomist, marx, marxism, surplus, scarcity, enclosure,
autonomist marxism, autonomist, marx, marxism, surplus, scarcity, enclosure,
Everything has an end, except for history, which has many endings, since it ends every time a thinker on the continent is feeling particularly confident.
Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out.
As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment. Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out. Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.
The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social co-operation – has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge.
