Author: Tom Slee

Trying a Dark Theme

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I’m a chronic theme-fiddler, and I thought I’d try to use a version of the zenburn colour theme that I use in emacs and vim. It’s designed to be low-contrast, and easy on the eyes for extended use. Zenburn works well for me in Org mode (see here), so I thought I’d give it a go. If light-on-dark bothers you, or anything else come to that, let me know in the comments.

The WordPress theme is Parabola from cryout, which is fantastically customizable. The colour choices from the zenburn palette are my own.

Six Degrees of Omidyar

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Venture capital damages commons-based sharing, and one name appears time and time again…

[Update: a version of this post, re-edited in the light of the Omidyar/Greenwald news venture, is now at The New Inquiry: Charity Assets.]

Start with an old story. Back in 2006 the world of microfinance split between “pure do-gooders and profit-minded do-gooders”, between Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus and eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Yunus’s Grameen Bank had pioneered group-based credit for the impoverished, but had stayed away from making the Bank into a public company; Omidyar wanted to turn microfinance into a fully commercial, profit-making sector.

A few years later Hugh Sinclair, who spent several years working for microfinance institutions, compellingly described his disillusionment and anger at the way the industry was going in Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: as money flooded into the microfinance institutions, they became like the loan sharks they replaced. At the centre of the book is the Lift Above Poverty Organization (LAPO), a Nigerian microfinance institution (MFI). It charged deceptive and high interest rates, it was audited by the brother of the CEO, and it siphoned money into many already-wealthy pockets. As microfinance grew in scale it spawned a web of interacting operations: microfinance funds invest in microfinance institutions which are rated by microfinance rating agencies, and which make loans through other partners. Principal-agent problems become pervasive and, without a regulatory framework, there were incentives everywhere that not only enabled corruption but, Sinclair argues, pushed participants to keep a lid on stories of corruption—to try to fix them quietly rather than to risk the reputation of the broader industry. Taking a charity and turning it into a bank is, Sinclair says, a great way to build assets and then capitalize on them.

Beyond generally promoting the market-driven approach to microfinance, Omidyar Network was a big donor to Unitus, a microfinance fund embroiled in a 2010 scandal involving Indian MFI SKS. When SKS went public, raising $350m in its IPO, Unitus backed out of microfinance: “In charity circles, people wondered about the motives of the Unitus board members, at least four of whom had invested in SKS Microfinance themselves and thus would reap profits from the I.P.O.” More controversy followed in 2012 when it was revealed that over 200 poor, debt-ridden residents of Andhra Pradesh killed themselves in late 2010. The state blamed microfinance companies for fueling a frenzy of “overindebtedness and then pressuring borrowers so relentlessly that some took their own lives”.

Sinclair concludes that “Frankly, I think the only means to rein in these groups is to formally regulate them.” (p227) He also notes that “Impact Investing”, which is the Omidyar Network’s current emphasis, has similar problems: “I do not believe there are panaceas for poverty reduction – it is hard work and requires a number of tools used wisely and collaboratively” (p236).

A lesson of the story is that, as capital and social action have conflicting goals, using markets to scale up social action can destroy the very thing that made it special in the first place.

Microfinance operates at the border between charity and business. LAPO was for several years a major partner of Omidyar-funded “peer-to-peer” lender Kiva, until Kiva cut ties in 2010. The episode highlighted a fact that was worrying some observers, including David Roodman: “peer-to-peer” lending is not actually peer-to-peer, instead Kiva works with intermediary partners which in turn make loans which were not, as many thought, interest-free.

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Anyway, new topic. Last year I was reviewing a book on the reputation economy which included a chapter by the founders of GlobalGiving, an Omidyar-funded “Internet-based service focused on making international philanthropy more efficient and high impact”. GlobalGiving set out to use technology and capital to scale up charitable giving, just as Omidyar had set out to use capital and commerce to scale up microfinance. Believing in Omidyar’s vision of “market-based efforts that catalyze economic and social change”, GlobalGiving adopted a “hybrid model” involving a parallel company (ManyFutures) that provided a technology platform to support its charitable work. But ManyFutures never made money, so the funding transfer ended up going from GlobalGiving to ManyFutures rather than the other way round, and controversy ensued. As with microfinance, the idea that capital and sharing are natural complements went wrong.

The idea that bringing commerce to play can scale up nonprofit efforts has become commonplace in the technology world, and the Omidyar Network is the poster child for mixing profit and sharing. It’s a “philanthropic investment firm” that supports “market-based approaches with the potential for large-scale, catalytic impact”; it’s taken a lead in “impact investing”, and in “social enterprise”. The ideas of social entrepreneurship, Benefit Corporations or the closely-related B Corporation sound sunny—who doesn’t want to Do Well by Doing Good?—but capital has a way of eroding sharing-based initiatives. The hybrid charity and microfinance examples are two that I had come across, but it doesn’t stop there…

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So a little while ago, I wrote about the tensions between capital and commons in an essay called Open Wide, at The New Inquiry. As part of the research for that essay I looked at what had happened to travel community Couchsurfing, and wrote this:

In his book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky highlighted Couchsurfing, a site where young global travelers can arrange to visit and host each other, as a healthy digital commons. Couchsurfing started life as couchsurfing.org, not couchsurfing.com; even the code that ran the site was provided by the Couchsurfers themselves. But the site did have owners, and in August 2011, they incorporated and accepted $7.6 million in venture funding. As the company’s market value has grown, the Couchsurfing community has deteriorated. A long-time Couchsurfer laments the days of “art gatherings, bonfires, a weekly meet up at a bar, café gatherings, potlucks,” now lost.

The community’s former strength turned out to have little to do with technology. As a commenter at Quora writes:

“The old Couchsurfing thrived with a very haphazard and underfunded management structure precisely because local volunteers around the world believed they were part of a cause bigger than profit. Local collectives were highly tied to their local communities… The technical architecture of the new systems is much better, but paradoxically the ‘professional’ product development process fixes things that were broken on purpose. In other words, Couchsurfing evolved around certain quirks and inefficient processes that actually became critical to the health of the social trust platform.”

Over 5000 Couchsurfing members have joined the forum We are Against CS becoming a for-profit corporation.

Contrast Couchsurfing with Hostelling International, a venerable network of national youth hostelling organizations that has remained resolutely nonprofit. Over 100 years old, it is still going strong and “currently provides 35 million overnight stays a year through more than 4,000 hostels in over 80 countries.” Some people do support themselves through the commons of hostels — some work in the hosteling organizations, others are paid to run hostels themselves — but it’s orders of magnitude away from the sudden injection of millions of venture-capital dollars.

What I didn’t do was name the organization that funded Couchsurfing’s transition from nonprofit to profit-driven company. But you know what it is: it’s the Omidyar Network. Again, it saw markets and profit as a way to scale up a non-market operation, and again the profit motive is driving out the non-commercial effort that is needed to sustain a trusting community. Couchsurfing will not have the longevity of Hostelling International, just as GlobalGiving will not have the longevity of Oxfam.

Update (October 15 2013): Couchsurfing’s CEO just resigned and 40% of the staff was layed off. See here and the announcement here.

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Before writing Open Wide, I wrote some things about Open Government, including Seeing Like a Geek at the Crooked Timber group blog. Open Government Data is yet another area where commerce and sharing sound like they mix nicely, but where there are real problems. In short, one of the things that making data open does is to make it free. If action around open data is kept non-commercial, then it may form an alternative to profit-driven action, but if commercial use of open data becomes the predominant form then all that has happened is that one form of industry has been replaced by another, and as the new industry is technology-driven it is more likely to be an oligopoly than the industry it replaces.

No surprise, then, that as I was doing the research for that piece it turns out that the Omidyar Network is deeply involved in both the Open Government Partnership at the international level, in Code for America in the USA, and is the first major investor in the UK Open Data Institute. At Code for America, which describes itself as a new kind of public service, Omidyar has funded an Accelerator arm which invests in startups, conveniently augmenting the idea of “service” with the contradictory idea of “entrepreneurship” and blurring the boundaries between those who want to make money from government contracts and those who want to contribute to a stronger civic space. Unsurprisingly, the Open Data initiative has been colonized by major companies.

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And still we are not done. Here is one final case where the Omidyar Network’s vision of social enterprise leads to more enterprise, but less social. In 2012 Change.org joined Couchsurfing as a “.org” site with a for-profit motive–a misleading presentation of the organization’s mandate. Change.org changed its mandate from being a broadly progressive non-profit to a for-profit company, allowing “corporate advertising, Republican Party solicitations, astroturf campaigns, anti-abortion or anti-union ads and other controversial sponsorships”. In May 2013 it took venture capital from the Omidyar Network and others in order to scale up, and the nature of the organization changed. The change in mission was described by Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times and Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post.

The Omidyar/Change.org press release uses the standard language of social entrepreneurs: blandly inspirational and content-free.

“Social enterprises can play an instrumental role in solving some of the world’s biggest problems,” Rattray said. “This funding will help us continue to expand our empowerment tools internationally while innovating on new products with the potential for disruptive social impact.”

Every challenge is a problem, rather than a conflict. Who can disagree with phrases like this?

Omidyar Network was founded on the fundamental belief that every person has the power to make a difference. We create opportunity for people to realize that power and improve the quality of their lives. When people take the initiative to make life better for themselves, they can share the benefits with their families, become more active in their communities, and be a more positive force in society.

These failures demonstrate concretely what I have been arguing more generally: that the idea of a natural synergy between business and sharing, between capital and commons—encoded in the ideas of social enterprise, in the Apache flavours of open source license, and in the variant of open content licensing favoured by Omidyar-funded organizations—is fraught with tensions and contradictions. Also, I may be wrong, but from what I can see these repeated failures have not been addressed by Omidyar Network in a public way.

Impostor Syndrome

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This is a vivid and completely unsubtle dream I had in late July, or maybe early August. Offered for anyone who has similar ones: feel free to add your own.

I’m about to give a talk in Manchester, in a large crowded room that looks like a courtroom. I’ve given the talk the day before, in Liverpool, and it went well, but now I’m feeling nervous because I can’t find my notes anywhere. I’m sure they’re in a pocket, or a bag, but I just can’t find them and now the crowd is coming in.

The room is full and there are two young white men with dark hair who are my hosts. One stands up to introduce me. He starts with “Tom Slee spent …” and then looks for the background information, and then at the other young white man with dark hair. He thinks I come from somewhere impressive; that I have qualifications for the talk I am about to give; that I have credentials that will roll off the tongue and give the evening a stamp of prestige.

I don’t. It’s not like I’ve deceived anyone – the other host knows my background, it just doesn’t include anything impressive. The introducer looks to the other host and asks “where is he from?” and the other host says “Nowhere. He doesn’t have an affiliation.”

There is great embarrassment all around as everyone realizes that I am not the kind of speaker they were expecting, and this is not the kind of event they thought they were in for. Swiftly and quietly, everyone starts to leave.

My humiliation at this misunderstanding is matched only by my relief. I still haven’t found my notes. I have no idea what I could have spoken about.

“Hacking Society”: me at the Literary Review of Canada

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I am thrilled to have a long review of three “internet and society” books in the always-excellent Literary Review of Canada. It’s online at http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2013/09/hacking-society/.

Books covered are: Networked: The New Social Operating System by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman; Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert, and Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman.

Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t

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So a couple of months ago Douglas Atkin, head of Community and E-staff Member at AirBnB, took to the stage of the Le Web conference in London (video) to announce the formation of Peers: “a grassroots organization that supports the sharing economy movement.” I like grassroots organizations and I like the co-operative impulse, but this… Well here is his speech in its entirety (in italics) with comments from yours truly.

I joined AirBnB about four months ago, but I’m going to talk about a different organization.

He means Peers.

In fact I’d like to talk about a movement for the sharing economy. By “a movement” I mean exactly that. I mean huge numbers of people, with a shared identity, mobilized to take action to do two things: to grow the peer sharing economy, and to fight for their collective interests against unfair and unreasonable obstacles.

A grassroots organization with 40 corporate “partners”, with unspecified but significant funding, formed with guidance from a set of high-profile “thought leaders”, without local chapters, and with nothing much for the grassroots to do, but with an Executive Director on day one.

Andrew Leonard from Salon has been following the story, and tells us that funding comes from “mission-aligned independent donors”. So that’s wealthy backers with a financial interest in the sharing economy. This is not grassroots, it’s astroturf.

If there is one thing that makes me angry, it is people appropriating the language of collective and progressive politics for financial gain. And that’s one thread of what’s going on here. As we shall see. It does seem that Executive Director Natalie Foster’s heart is in the right place, but that’s one of the tragedies of the sharing economy: well-intentioned people end up contributing to immiseration and injustice when they think they are doing the opposite.

So what we’re talking about here is not just people sharing their skills, or their apartment, or their car, but also their collective power to expand the sharing economy together, and to stand up against entrenched interests who stand unfairly in their way. So “people power” if you like, or more accurately “peer power”.

And what we’re not talking about here is venture capital. Going through Crunchbase tells me that the total funding for the 40 partners is over $600M. AirBnB has received $120M, including funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Jeff Bezos, Ashton Kucher. You know, people standing up against entrenched interests.

At the end of this post I’ve added a table of what I could find. It tells us that almost all the funding is going to the Bay Area or New York. The non-profits in this organization are being taken for a ride by the appealing anti-establishment language of Silicon Valley . They need to take a look at who their bedfellows are and what the real agenda is.

Venture Capital funds are not interested in people power, they are interested in an investment with a good return. The fact that Douglas Atkin doesn’t once mention the financial motivations of the forces behind the sharing economy is either dishonest or unbelievably self-deceiving.

Now why would there be a need for such a thing? The sharing economy seems to be barrelling along pretty happily. Why do we need another organization? Well, firstly the opportunity. This was brought home to me a week ago in San Francisco where I attended a meeting of sharing economy participants. So there were drivers, passengers, hosts, guests, and tour guides from RelayRides, Lyft, AirBnB, Vayable and Sidecar, and they were literally bouncing up and down with enthusiasm about the opportunity to collaborate together — with each other.

So they were developing ideas — brilliant ideas actually — to share customers with each other, across verticals. One person even suggested that there could be a peer economy currency — maybe Bitcoin. Or even points to encourage people to cross verticals and recruit new people into this new economy.

The language changes, the mask slips. Participants become customers, sharing becomes buying. The phrase “across verticals” reminds us that Douglas Atkin is an advertising executive. Now the sharing economy is about loyalty programs and cross marketing? Not the kind of sharing I want to be part of. I don’t have a problem with commerce, but what I do object to is commerce wrapped up in, and appropriating, the language of solidarity.

These people were incredibly impressive, with their passion and their eagerness and creativity to work together locally to expand the sharing economy. So that was the opportunity. It was incredibly exciting to see that. And I did a couple more of these types of meetings, with people from different verticals in the sharing economy in New York, where the same thing happened. So there’s the opportunity.

The Peers organization came together, then, in San Francisco and New York – the well-heeled, well-funded districts of the sharing economy movement.

Secondly, though, there’s the challenges. It’s unlikely, I believe — and I believe this because I used to work for them — that the entrenched interests of the old economy are going to stand idly by as their business model of the past seventy years is challenged by the new economy.

Billion-dollar venture capital funds are out to undercut people who run licensed bed and breakfasts, and he’d have me believe that it’s the B&B owners who are the “entrenched interests”. If this is your idea of a revolution (and it is, unbelievably enough: that comes later) then brother don’t you know, you can count me out.

What’s more, outdated laws and new laws which have been badly conceived, with unintended consequences, really threaten the growth of this nascent new world economy.

The laws that he is talking about are licensing laws and other laws put in place to protect employees, customers, and neighbourhoods. These laws are not all perfect. But the sharing economy has nothing to replace them beyond magical thinking about “trust” (with little accountability).

How much better would it be if citizens banded together to grow and protect their interests in the sharing economy rather than companies wielding their power?

How about banding together to protest when a TaskRabbit customer posts a job to do four loads of laundry and it’s actually 10 or 15 loads covered in cat diarrhea? No: if you do that, you’re fired. The company (a partner of Peers.org, natch) also takes steps to prevent its TaskRabbits from meeting because “They don’t want us unionizing”. I’m sorry, what was that about citizens banding together against companies?

So I’m here to tell you about some plans which will enable people to create a member-driven movement for the sharing economy. If you like, a new kind of union for a new kind of economy. And I’m also here to ask for your support. So if you’re a platform: help your users create this organization and join it. If you’re a thought-leader, blogger, or conference speaker: champion it. And if you’ve got some ready cash, please help fund it.

A new kind of union? What, me and Peter Thiel, billionaire investor in TaskRabbit? Sorry, I won’t be handing over my cash any time soon.

Now why should you do this? Well it’s the right thing to do. We literally stand on the brink of a new, better kind of economic system, that delivers social as well as economic benefits. In fact, social and economic benefits that the old economy promised but failed to deliver. As Julia, an AirBnB host, told me just last night, “the sharing economy saved my arse”.

The sharing economy is not an alternative to capitalism, it’s the ultimate end point of capitalism in which we are all reduced to temporary labourers and expected to smile about it because we are interested in the experience not the money. Jobs become “extra money” just like women’s jobs used to be “extra money”, and like those jobs they don’t come with things like insurance protection, job security, benefits – none of that old economy stuff. But hey, you’re not an employee, you’re a micro-entrepreneur. And you’re not doing it for the money, you’re doing it for the experience. We just assume you’re making a living some other way.

The old economy has largely failed us. Most people are not experiencing the economic independence and the happiness that mass production and consumerism promised. Partly, in a way, because the old system centralizes production, wealth and control. That’s just the way it works. And in a sense, that’s largely to blame. The peer sharing economy is a new model, which distributes power, wealth, and control to everyone else. Best of all, the very things that have become the casualties of the old economy — things like economic independence, entrepreneurialism, community, individuality, happiness — are actually built in to the very structure of this new economy. You can’t do sharing without building community, without creating individualized experiences.

The sharing economy is the centralization of global casual labour. Investors invest because individual sharing economy companies have the potential for global reach, collecting a little from each of millions of transactions around the world, and funnelling it to California.

We’ve had this ridiculous debate for the past thirty years ago in this old economy about a work/life balance, because the honest truth is life gets squeezed out because of work. As Rachel says: doing jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need. But in this sharing economy, life is built in. So Etsy producers get to know their consumers and sell individualized goods. Whenever I take a Lyft or a Sidecar — which are ride-sharing organizations in San Francisco — I always ask them “So why are you doing this?” And their first response is “To interact and meet with new and interesting people”. And then secondly, the flexible hours and a bit of extra cash. It’s the community they are most interested in experiencing.

Trashing consumerism appeals to many environmentally-minded, social-justice oriented people. But if you displace taxi drivers and replace them with casual labour, you’re not improving the work/life balance of drivers, you’re making them poorer.

Fred Mazella was a genius when he named blablacar blablacar, because he’s actually naming what happens in the car. He named his organization not after the transaction, which is ridesharing, but because people communicate and go “bla bla bla” to each other in the car. He correctly identified what the real benefit of the sharing economy is, which is these other social and economic rewards.

You know, I talk to taxi drivers too. Some of them are interesting people. You should try it sometime.

So there’s a nascent organization which is about to bloom. It’s independent, it’s member-driven, it’s global, it’s not a trade association, it’s not a lobbying group. It will use peer power and collective action to grow the sharing economy and overcome unfair obstacles.

I don’t know if he’s lying or if he believes this stuff, but take a look at the website of Peers.org and tell me you believe it.

I personally want to see the sharing economy grow to become the dominant global economic model in the world, because of the social and economic benefits which are built-in, because of the distributed wealth, control, and power which it represents. It has the possibility of transforming the world for the better. So if you want that too, especially if you’d like to see members champion it for themselves, rather than the usual suspects, come and see me afterwards and I can tell you how you can help. Or talk to Leah, who is the founder of TaskRabbit and Fred from blablacar or Lisa Gansky. We can all tell you a little more about it.

So Vive La Revolution, and thank you very much.

When all jobs are Taskrabbit jobs, how does anyone earn a living?

Appendix

Here’s that table of Peers.org partners.

Company Funding ($US) Location Investors include…
AirBnB 120M San Francisco Andreessen Horowitz, a $2.5B fund
Airtasker — Sydney, AUS
Bay Share — —
Blablacar 10M Paris
Car Next Door — —
Carpooling.com 10M Munich Daimler
City Car Share non-profit San Francisco
Chegg 195M San Francisco (many)
Collaborative Fund (VC) New York
Collaborative Lab — — —
co:NYC — New York Members include AirBnB etc
Cookening — Paris
Divvy — Australia —
Farmigo 10M Palo Alto Sherbrooke Capital
General Assembly 14.3M New York Maveron, a $780M fund
Getaround 19M San Francisco Marissa Mayer
Green Spaces New York
The Hub — Vienna
ioby — New York
LiquidSpace 12.2M Palo Alto Greylock Partners, a $1.73B fund
Lyft 82.5M San Francisco Andreessen Horowitz, a $2.5B fund
Maker Media — San Francisco
Meetup 18.3M New York Omidyar Network
Mesh (book)
Mosaic 22M Oakland Spring Ventures
Open Shed — Australia
OuiShare non-profit France?
ParkAtMyHouse — UK BMW
RelayRides 13M San Francisco General Motors, Google Ventures
Scoot Networks 1.65M San Francisco Lisa Gansky
Shareable (magazine) San Francisco
Side.Cr (Sidecar) 10M San Francisco Lisa Gansky, Google Ventures
Skillshare 4.65M New York Union Square Ventures, a $200M fund
TaskRabbit 37.7M San Francisco Lightspeed Ventures, a $2B fund
TimeRepublik — South Africa?
Vayable — San Francisco SV Angel, an $89M fund
Yerdle — San Francisco
WeWork 6.85M New York
Zaarly 15.2M San Francisco Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Zookal 1.46M Sydney Filtro Private Equity

Testing org2blog

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I’ve been using the wonderful org mode more and more over the last year, but only now that org2blog has support for the new org-mode exporter am I trying it to blog with.

Many thanks to Puneeth Chaganti for org2blog, and the remarkable collection of developers who have turned org-mode into a swiss army knife of text tools without it becoming hideously deformed in the process.