Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, May 17, 2004

The Business of Changing the World Need Not Be Business After All

Alex Steffen, over at WorldChanging, has posted a very useful critique of the whole constellation of assumptions and metaphors associated with “social entrepreneuship” as a way to think through what works and what needs to happen when we use new technologies to collaborate for social and political change. “[D]espite some real strengths,” he writes, “the idea of social entrepreneurship, like its symbiant ‘venture philanthropy,’ seems to act like a magnet for fuzzy thinking. Beyond the category error involved (social change is not a business, and philanthropy is not an investment, and taking these terms as more than analogies can lead to really poor decision-making -- points we'll come back to), the term "social entrepreneur" is being slapped on all sorts of people and efforts who are not in the slightest way innovative or dynamic leaders, much the way the ‘change agent’ or ‘catalyst’ were last decade.”

For over a decade a kind of Libertopian Blight has seemed to colonize the thinking, the arguments, even the tropes and figures through which technology workers and enthusiasts and theorists have made sense of social and political problems. The Blight has imposed the reductive assumptions of market fundamentalism onto every formulation of public life. And worse, it has imparted this awful hucksterizing sloganizing management-lit English to almost every expression of hopefulness about how new tools might be used to change the world in positive ways. And this Blight has seemed to exercise its influence on almost everybody who has spent time thinking seriously about technology and left that encounter with a feeling of hope rather than despair -- whether they were coming temperamentally from the left or from the right or from some inspired oscillation between the political poles.

But it would appear at last that the technophiles are rediscovering the political as a problem-space whose rationality is not reducible to straightfoward instrumental calculation. Much of this shift is attributable to the fact that the latest generation of technological radicals are emerging out of the context of social and environmental activism first, rather than as coders whose definitive encounter with the political was one of technically illiterate regulators trying to censor their networks without much awareness of their beauty or power. And certainly it would seem that living through the humiliations of the dot-bomb has curtailed the dot-bombast of many of the most egregious Randroid types at least.

In the comments section to Steffen’s piece, Paul Harrison points to the emerging significance of free software and open source as prompts for the more general shift away from Blight. “I think there's a fundamental difference between an open source leader and a traditional leader (or entrepreneur). A person like Linus Torvalds doesn't set bold plans, decide the next big thing, and so on. Instead what Linus does is review a great many patches and ideas, picking out the good ones for inclusion in Linux. Same sort of thing applies to web sites. The best people to run big web sites are probably the ones that are good at filtering and filing, not being original.” Less rugged individualism and more bricolage can only be a step in the right direction!

Steffen himself concentrates his attentions on the ways in which simply inhabiting networks re-acquaints us with the unique demands and promises of political rationality – which is never about just means and ends (and what later on he describes as an obsession with “performance metrics”), but working together toward ends that differ and that change in the attaining of them. “[C]hanging the world is all about changing the network,” he points out. “It's about playing well with others… [finding] willing allies and ready resources. And I would submit that these things far more often emerge from collaboration and networks than they spring from the foreheads of Fountainhead-style visionaries. When doing social change work, the strength and quality of the connections matters at least as much as the leadership zeal of any particular node. That being the case, business (at least business as it functioned in the 20th Century) is in fact exactly the wrong model for leadership development. You don't want to train a whole mess of egotists who excel at making funding pitches to boards.”

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