potlatch

advertising catchup

It's been a while since we caught up with the boys in the advertising studio loft pod.  Here's an update:

Rex: guys, there's a problem with the Egyptian Tourism Board gig

Ned: what is it? [sniff]

Rex: the focus group hasn't turned up.

Kris: So who are all those people outside?

Rex: oh, forget them - they're all morons

Ned: is that a problem? [snort]

Rex: no, believe me, they're proper morons. We can't use them.

Alix: But they can't be as stupid as the ones who told us to compare a photocopier to a footballer or the ones who persuaded us to convert Tower Bridge into an S&M display?

Rex: no, believe me, guys, these ones are worse

Interruption - Kevin Roberts sticks his head through the door

Kevin Roberts (for it is he): guys, can you get on and finish that Egypt stuff. I'm trying to machine gun a coca-cola vending machine next door.

The focus group goes ahead. Two weeks later, the boys gather again in the pod, to inspect the outcome

Rex: So, here it is.

Ned: She's fit [sniffle]

Rex: thanks.

Kris: what stones?

Rex: like, the parthenon and stuff

Loz: Rex, man, you can't start a sentence with the word 'and'. Don't you remember that from school?

Rex: No, you're missing the point. It's meant to sound weighty, old, primitive. Basically the focus group told us that Egypt was where the bible happened, so we thought we'd make it sound like that.

Loz: what and the bible is full of bad syntax?

Rex: yes, loads of it. "And Adam begat John and John begat Stephen. And he did this. And then he did that". We checked. 

Kris: Stones don't speak.

Rex: Ah, but the focus group also told us that Egypt was where Indiana Jones happens, so we thought we'd put in some speaking stones.

Ned: What else did the focus group know... [sneezes]... excuse me...  know about Egypt?

Rex: that was it. Where the Bible happened and where Indiana Jones happened. Oh, and that it was where humans come from. So we thought we'd riff on that with the strap-line further down, by playing on people's desire to go somewhere a bit more authentic, what with the recession and everything.

Pure genius. And now this poster is blanketed all over London's public transport system. Thanks, guys.

the economic sociology of receipts

When someone comes to write a cultural history of Britain, post-Thatcher, they should dedicate a chapter to data collection. The political arguments for and against surveillance are well rehearsed, with the Home Office on one side and Henry Porter on the other. The economic arguments for and against back office restructuring and knowledge management technologies are equally well rehearsed. But none of these analyses quite manages to explain why the production of data, evidence, a trace occupies such a prominent  place in our contemporary national psyche. This is a cultural issue.

This sign adorns the flapjack tray of Costa coffee in Paddington Station. The normalisation of receipts in the last two years is, frankly, an irritation. It introduces a new way of giving change, where the coins are placed in the customers hand on top of a small piece of paper, which is then unavoidably trapped there beneath the weight of the money. "Here's your money - and in case you're wondering, yes this did just happen".

I've developed an expert way of then withdrawing my hand with the money in it, but ejecting the receipt back onto the counter with my thumb (where it sits along with the dozens of other little data trails that customers have dumped there).

This trend's been growing for years, gradually engulfing newspapers, sandwiches, beer and all the various other sub £5 items that used to be traded less accountably. Costa appear to have now normalised it further. To bemoan this politically would be fairly absurd, but I'm not doing this (although I do wonder how much it is explicable in terms of management surveillance and distrust of staff: it becomes impossible to keep an order out of the till, if the customer is demanding a receipt).

No, it's the cultural aspects that are strange. We know all about the British love of CCTV, that since the Bulger murder of 1993 has grown from being an anti-crime strategy to something that is adopted as a matter of course. We know that CCTV has long since ceased to be a tool for policing, not least because it's so useless in achieving convictions. The latest London buses use CCTV in the weirdest way yet. A prominent screen on the lower deck constantly plays real time images being recorded by the five or six cameras dotted around the bus. If it were only showing the upper deck, then one could argue that it encourages people to feel safer when they go upstairs late at night; but it also plays back to them pictures of the viewers on the lower deck. The "syn-opticon" indeed. But why?

At a seminar on visualisation in InSIS last week I wondered whether one could analyse such things in terms of the multiple justifications on which they rest (a la this theoretical favourite of mine). When is something justified as 'surveillance', when as 'efficient', when as 'aesthetic', and when does it collapse into pure voyeurism? I suggested here that often there is slippage between one justification for digitisation and another, such that democratic and voyeuristic arguments for transparency can morph into one another.

Sometimes justification gives way to sheer existentialism. Maybe the British need their data-gatherers in the same way that Estrago and Vladimir need each other in Waiting for Godot: simply to prove that they still exist. Maybe there are some Costa customers who take comfort in the fact that their coffee at 10.21 06:09:2009 is a matter of record, not because it is an alibi for a crime or because it is tax deductible, but because it is something to cling to. And maybe those TVs on buses are simply there to say "look - here you are." (It could be a situationist prank, aimed at sending people on their way with a nauseous sense of the vacuity of urban life, which eventually spills over into riotting).

Culturally, I think the normalisation of receipts is a shame, insofar as it effects the character of urban commerce. In the language of Michel Callon, economic exchange always 'overflows' its calculative devices, of money and accounting. There is always something not entirely accounted for, which the economist calls an 'externality', and the rest of us call 'the social bit'. Buying a coffee is a messy business, because the pleasure (or pain) of interacting with a stranger in a cafe always exceeds the calculations at the heart of the exchange. One of the joys of New York, and of its bars in particular, is the very shakey attitude to calculation and accounting that goes on - the tills are ancient mechanical things, the tips pile up haphazardly all over the place, the drinks are not measured and the free ones not counted.  The effort to eliminate 'the social' from the calculated exchange is much less severe. 

By contrast, to normalise receipts in cafes or bars is to strive for the perfect, 'disembedded' clean exchange, of the liberal-economic imaginary. It depersonalises the interaction and substitutes data for memory. It declares the exchange over, with nothing more owed by either party. Frankly, this is futile, as exchanges always leak into society. Marcel Mauss's lesson is that the perfect, calculated market exchange is as unrealisable as the perfect, uncalculated gift - actual, lived economic experience sits on a spectrum between these two poles, with the uncalculated and the calcuated parts entangled. But receipts wrestle economistically against this fact, impoverishing both the producer and the consumer of a coffee.

'consumer-experts'

Thursday saw Tim Mitchell visit the LSE, to give a superb lecture on the politics of oil. I don't know of anyone who is so theoretically and empirically interesting, while at the same time impossible to place in terms of discipline. Following the politics of oil involved everything from the nature of money (dematerialised notions of economic growth that emerged in the 1930s implicitly assumed infinite energy resources), the impact of different energy forms on labour politics (coal requires greater manpower to extract and circulate, thereby empowering labour across society; oil undoes this), the status of geologists in oil companies (the importance of maintaining a split between 'above ground' politics and 'below ground' knowledge) and the nature of calculation (from measuring rate of flow, to measuring quantity of resource, to fundamental uncertainty of measurement). Some of it is contained in this Economy and Society article.

But the constant political question in all of this is that which underpins French science studies: who gets to represent nature, and how is it strategically excluded from the realm of politics? Mitchell's interest in energy and climate change lies in the fact that nature is becoming politicised (so the culture/nature split is dissolving) while authoritative knowledge claims are fracturing (so the expert/lay person split is dissolving). Challenged by a questioner that he was being unduly pessimistic in his analysis, Mitchell gave a resolutely Latourian response in saying that he welcomes the disintegration of the rigid boundaries that science typically builds to depoliticise things.

Which got me thinking again about this post on transparency and neo-liberalism, that has received record quantities of attention (believe me, that's not saying much), due to Bill Thompson picking up on it at the BBC.

I should be clear that my purpose in this post was to analyse and anticipate, and not particularly to bemoan or criticise. Using the term 'neo-liberalism' can be dangerous, as it is so frequently a term of abuse. But I like to flatter myself that I use it in a slightly more nuanced way - drawing on Mirowski, Foucault and my own reading of the Chicago School - than the likes of George Monbiot. Part of what I try to do in deconstructing neo-liberalism is (in this instance drawing on Weber and Boltanski) to understand how it functions and succeeds as a moral and political proposition. Even the harshest critic of Thatcher or Reagan might benefit from reading Hayek in an effort to sympathise with the particular paranoid, dystopian sensibilities that left him with nothing but the market for political comfort.

All of which is to say - neo-liberals needn't necessarily be embarrassed of what they believe in, although I appreciate that there is now scarcely anyone who identifies themselves as a 'neo-liberal'. There are compelling normative and political arguments against bureaucratic legitimacy founded on objective, efficient expert knowledge. It so happens, as I argued, that usually these arguments lead only to the substitution of one form of expert objectivity by another rival form; the rise of consultants in the public sector demonstrates this. The sheer hypocrisy of so much conservative anti-state stateism is one reason to oppose it. But the case for transparency of information is potentially more consistent than this.

Perhaps the promoters of government2.0 transparency should be more explicit in their criticisms of objective knowledge claims, as Hayek was. Mitchell, Andrew Barry and those applying science studies to the state have more than a whiff of Hayek in their work (which was got me thinking again about this). Their efforts to deconstruct governmental expertise are an effort to expand the sphere of democratic politics, such that facts, evidence and data are open to critical, political scrutiny. The case for government2.0 could be made on a very similar basis. To say that the 'post-bureaucratic state' would encounter legitimacy crises was intended as a descriptive analysis, not a criticism necessarily. Legitimacy is something states can either have or not have, but it's not intrinsically good and never beyond question. Maybe the argument against state legitimacy needs to be made explicitly.

In the meantime, I've already learnt of one new category that the transparency movement has mobilised to advance its claims. In this reply to me, Tony Bovaird makes the distinction between 'formally-validated expertise' and 'experience-based expertise'. In one sense, this is an abuse of the concept of 'expertise', as it implies that authority can be founded on the sheer possession of human consciousness ('experience' being something that is unavoidably accumulated). Andrew Keen's head would explode at the very suggestion. But it is an interesting and useful category for anyone wishing to challenge scientific or bureaucratic hierarchies.

I wonder if in time, we will see the rise of a related but subtly different category. OfCom and some other New Labour institutions speak of the 'citizen-consumer', to account for the public goods that can't be captured by the neo-classical definition of a public good. Might we soon see the rise of the 'consumer-expert'? Again, the concept could exist specifically to straddle economic and non-economic logics, in this instance regarding the nature of knowledge.

The economist assumes that the consumer is correct, but only with regard to their own preferences; they know what they want. Beyond this, information is partial, rationality is bounded, the nature of reality is disputed. Prices are about the closest we can get to objectivity. But the consumer who possesses this oxymoronic 'experience-based expertise' has slightly more than just a perspective. They have a form of scientific authority by virtue of their consumption. Every time they use or consume a public service, they are accumulating data. The age of 'permanent audit' makes every consumer also a social scientist, assessing and surveying as they consume. The formal division between the representative sample and the represented social reality gradually fades, in ways that the science studies brigade would probably celebrate.

defining 'political economy'

I got chatting to someone at a conference on Friday, and asked her what her research field was. "Political economy", she replied, "but I'm not a Marxist!"

Strange. What is political economy, if it requires this type of caveat applied to it? Something to do with the state or with macroeconomics? Someone else wandered over to our discussion, and offered the following: political economy is a field of study that refuses to separate politics from economics, but on the other hand does not believe that one can be collapsed into the other.

This would make Aristotle an example of a political economist (indeed the original one), but not Milton Friedman. Incidentally, many Marxists would also fail to match this definition.

the political economy of garden decking

It's time to hire a decent lawyer, because I think I just accused Jamie Oliver of bringing down the world economy. The Greek online magazine, Re-Public, has an edition out on 'representing crisis', and they asked me to develop these posts into an article, which I've duly done. Here's a chunk:

It is entirely appropriate that the world’s banks were crippled by an appetite for domestic ownership that had long-since taken leave of any economic rationality on the ground. Mortgage lending to low-income Americans may have been the tangible cause, but we British reclining in front of flickering images of another bathroom being repainted were clearly in a similar mood. The sheer scale of asset price inflation led, perversely, to collective suspension of orthodox economic reason. A more expansive, wasteful economic consciousness was at work, that renounced the petty bourgeois routines of exchange and saving. When it came to houses, the bubble signalled the truth in Georges Bataille’s claim that “it is not necessity, but its contrary, “luxury” that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problem”.

Something about the house successfully defied the supreme rationalising machine that was the global financial system. It is worth reminding ourselves that capitalism neared the brink of collapse, not due to class conflict or any crisis of over-production, but a primary drive for more shelter, more comforts, more privacy. IKEA’s advertising slogan “home is the most important place in the world” turned out to be correct, but few imagined the devastation that the world would suffer at the hands of this, its ‘most important place’.

See also the contribution by acclaimed economic anthropologist, Stephen Gudeman, and one by my Goldsmiths mate, Joe Deville, on debt collection.

what is the 'post-bureaucratic' state?

We know at least two things about the Tories, and they are probably connected. Firstly, they want to cut spending on public services substantially, even if this doesn't make a tremendous impact on Britain's budget deficit. And secondly, they want to amplify the 'power of information' that the internet can exert over government services and transparency. This Prospect article suggests that "The starting point will be to flood the public sector with information. No budget will be secret or hard to track down." Their capture of Tom Steinberg - "the coding man's Richard Dannatt" - confirms that they may be serious about rethinking some of the basic protocols of how government information is organised. I've speculated on what such 'conservatism 2.0' might look like in the past. 

The potential connection between public sector efficiency and liberating information works as follows. Bureaucratic inefficiency and under-performing public services become impossible to conceal. Government comes under the spotlight of (what I've heard Michael Power term) the permanent audit. Pressure from users of public services rises, as they are empowered to know how much better or more efficient the government could be. Presumably the media is expected to be a willing accomplice in this holding to account, although that will no doubt look like masochism within weeks of the Tories taking office

In principle, this means that conventional auditting could gradually wane, as this Demos report suggests. And in principle, this introduces a new phase for the neo-liberal state.

The paradox of the neo-liberal state has always been that it is managed by self-loathing bureaucrats. It has conducted a recurring rationalist critique of its own rationality, constantly restructuring, reinventing, reimagining its own loathed inefficiencies, but never being able to settle on anything that can be agreed on as efficient. Hence the endless present participles; it is constant work in progress. This paradox explains why attacks on 'middle management' and the public sector tend always to inflate both: the only means of criticising and stream-lining a bureaucracy is to hold it up to a bureaucratic critique. Decentralisation to 'the front line' requires ever greater centralisation of power to be enacted. 

The Tories now suggest we are entering the 'post-bureaucratic age', and promise a state suited to it. Up until now, neo-liberalism has been not so much a post-bureaucratic project, as a meta-bureaucratic one - it is a constant critique of the state, from a position of supposed neutral economic rationality.

For the Tories' claim to hold up in any way, the alleged power of decentralised information has to be realised. Lets assume, for the sake of argument, that consumer and media pressure is able to genuinely impact upon bad public services and wasteful government practices. And lets assume, for the sake of argument, that there are no class imbalances in the ability to convert information into power (i.e. that those dependent on social services simply need more information, in order to become the equivalent of the pushy middle class parent at the gates of the primary school). Then lets assume, for the sake of argument, that the piling of audit upon audit, of meta-analysis upon meta-analysis, could gradually go into decline, what sort of state would we have?

My instinct is that this would certainly deliver transparency, might offer a version of accountability, but would fail to achieve legitimacy. Here's why.

Our old friend Weber tells us that the legitimacy of the modern state lies chiefly in its capacity to know with some degree of objectivity and to process with some degree of efficiency. The neo-liberal attack on the state is an attack on the possibility of this centralised expert knowledge, based on Hayek's resolutely post-modern claim that objective knowledge is not only impossible, but a more dangerous ambition than the distributed opinion represented by the marketplace. The irony, of course, is that this critique is generally marshalled by alternative elites - central bankers, economists, consultants. But as Philip Mirowksi argues in his post-script to the magnificent new essay collection, The Road from Mont Pelerin, the consummation of neo-liberalism is in fact manifest in wikipedia, where a collective perspective on the world is the closest that we can get to knowledge.

But as Mirowksi also argues, Hayek was entirely unconcerned with the Weberian problem of state legitimacy. He had a Schmittian, nihilistic or Leninist zeal, which drove the neo-liberal project forward with no regard for its authority. Claims to authority were intrinsically suspect and a threat to liberty, which made initiating a legitimacy crisis a necessary political act. An illegitimate dictator who safeguarded economic freedoms was a safer bet than a legitimate state that claimed to know what was best. (The Chicago School involvement with the Pinochet regime is a case in point.)

So, following Mirowski, we might say that 'government 2.0' is the final realisation of the neo-liberal state. No auditors, no experts, no objective knowledge, no sense of the common good, just maximum freedom for individuals to form opinions and privately process information. As David Weinberger says in triumphant Hayekian style, "transparency is the new objectivity." In some instances, consumer perspectives may form the basis of action - demanding change if they're a prominent journalist or campaigner, selecting a different service supplier if they're a fortunate lay-person, or just mouthing off on facebook if they're not so lucky.

But siding with perspective over expertise cannot be the basis for legitimacy. Allowing people to express their frustration or disappointment, but without offering dialogue or improvement at the end of it, removes the security offered by expertise, but without offering anything in its place. Auditors act as the critics of experts, but they do so from some rival position of expertise; they damage legitimacy, but partly so as to then rebuild it. By contrast, a state laid bare only to the audit of general public dissatisfaction is surely heading towards a legitimacy crisis.

Of course there is a sunnier tradition of political thought than Weber's, in which democracy plays the central role in determining the legitimacy of the state. Lets not forget that Hannah Arendt also elevated opinion over expertise, as the necessary condition of politics. Perhaps, Tories might argue, this is not about knowledge and efficiency at all, but about participation. Perhaps. The fear is that, by forging a path between the instrumentalist Weberian defence of the state and the democratic Habermasian defence (a path manifest in the concept of 'civic hacking' that mySociety represents), that we get some hybrid of bureaucracy and democracy, that is neither quite as effective as the former, nor as empowering as the latter.

classical economic nostalgia

Consider the following three phenomena:

- Farmers' Markets: this petit bourgeois institution recreates a classic market scenario in a number of ways. Intermediaries (Tescos, banks, supply chains etc) are removed, to bring producer and customer into direct contact with each other. External authorities (regulators) are absent, meaning that the market is a form of 'co-opetition', a form of economic competition that is closely moderated and limited by the competitor's themselves. Efficiency is absent as a concern, which explains why these places are a) highly frustrating to anybody who has forgotten to dispense with their consumerist psychology and b) a total rip-off.

- New debates about pay: The economic crisis has served some political function in highlighting the remuneration practices in financial services firms. Although nobody quite knows what to do in response, the notion that a moderately clever, hard-working banker can earn the average UK salary in a week strikes many people as indefensible. The word 'earn' starts to weigh a little more heavily: did you really earn your bonus? Now just imagine the potentially radical implications of requiring all employers to publish all salaries in their organisation. Again the question would rise. Did my manager actually earn twice as much money as me for the day we've just done?

-Fair Trade: What is 'fair' about Fair Trade? The interesting aspect of this is that it is a resolutely pro-market agenda, but an anti-capitalist one. The very notion of fair trade implies that there is a right and a wrong way for price-based exchanges to be carried out. And where Fair Trade is concerned, the norm states that the producer should not be exploited by any intermediary who has not injected their own labour into the product. This is not 'fairness' as 'equity' or 'externality', as economists might suppose; it is fairness within the market exchange itself. In a sense, this is just an international version of the petit bourgeois farmers' market. It's a more rigorous, Braudellian attack on market power, that someone like Phillip Blond appears to hope for from anti-trust.

Each of these examples suggests that there is a correct and an incorrect price for something in a market. The correct price is the one that reflects the material value lodged in whatever is produced. Some labour produces more value than other labour, and prices should be set in correspondance to this. In short, these cases represent a yearning for the labour theory of value that underpinned classical economics (Smith, Ricardo, Marx).

I would go further and suggest that the yearning is born out of exasperation with the psychological theory of value that under-pins neo-classical economics. The only way a price can be 'wrong' from a neo-classical point of view is if a market failure is present (economists: please tear me to pieces on this in the comment field below). With no account of where value comes from, but only of how it is perceived, neo-classical economics introduces the tautology that a banker is 'worth' £28k a week because the 'customer' (i.e. the bank) is prepared to pay him this much. It also introduces the culture of consumption, in which the shopper scans the market, calculating whether a loaf of bread is 'worth' £1 only in terms of how much do I want it.

But eventually and ironically the consumer themselves starts to feel conned. With their desire treated as society's sole barometer of value, they soon find that they are being led into decisions and towards products that satisfy them in some phoney or damaging sense. The barometer itself is being strategically targetted by capital. Behavioural economics (now used by consumer protection authorities) senses the problem, but fails to break out of the solipsism in which value is only subjective. The nostalgia for a labour theory of value is a nostalgia for a world that exists independently of my own stance towards it.

Petit bourgeois critiques of capitalism (which I have much sympathy for, incidentally, Broadway Market not withstanding) are an effort to leap out of consumer solipsism, to remember that value is made and not just encountered. Once the infantile worldview of the price theorist is overcome, then mature political questions arise regarding earnings and exchange.

Just imagine if every employer had to publish every employee's pay. The questions that arose would not be normative in the way that neo-classical economists imagine (e.g. is it fair to pay this man only £10k a year when he has a family?). They would be deeper questions regarding the nature of value or, more accurately, of economic worth. For instance, in the overall ecology of this economic organisation, where effort, hours and commitment are evenly distributed, can Peter be worth two Simons? The answer may be yes, and this socially polluted version of economics may be messier than the consumerism + human capital theory of neo-classical economics. But at least the discussion occurs.

I stress that this is a yearning, a form of nostalgia, not the future. But it indicates something about our contemporary frustrations with capitalism. Unless, of course, you want to go further, and consider that the labour theory of value only fell by the wayside in the first place, because it led directly to a certain theory of surplus value extraction...

further news

Like the bits of Indiana Jones, where he clambers under a descending door then just remembers to grab his hat, I exited my viva yesterday afternoon, then immediately opened the paper to read 'Pointless' university studies to be weeded out by new government panel. Too late, suckers! I'm now technically a doctor. But please don't ask me to advise on anything that can go wrong.

Republicans at work

I have a piece published today in Open Democracy, on the back of my recent report, looking at the political or republican case for distributing power and ownership within firms. Note that this is analytically a separate issue from the economic case for doing so, and with potentially different practical implications. What we should be doing is looking for over-laps. That's what the article argues, as follows:

Perhaps, then, a more plausible political-economic agenda for the firm would be to define a concept of employee autonomy that could deliver or balance empowerment as both a political good and an economic good. New Labour's obsession with the ‘win-win' option has left many critics jaded, once it emerges that the interests of capital are never in practiced compromised. But there are sincere opportunities.

Various forms of mutualism and employee ownership deliver exactly this balance between political and economic goods. They demonstrate that a private sector organisation can be high-performing, well managed and profitable, while offering employees tangible forms of control over their working lives and environments. Ownership, as republicans frequently argue, brings with it political freedoms as well as economic rights. Virtuous circles are possible, in which the higher levels of deliberation and responsibility within companies spills over into higher levels of employee commitment and knowledge-sharing.

In an age when declarations that ‘our staff are our number one asset' are met with cynicism, a whole new ownership model is needed if workplace democracy is to be taken seriously once again.

See the work of Nien-He Hiseh and Stuart White, from where I draw much of this.

Update: Stuart White has now responded and elaborated on this issue at Next Left.

Clay Shirky, Ronald Coase and, err, me

Clay Shirky is a Coasian, and a very smart one at that. His analysis of emerging, internet-enabled social structures is based on the economic theory of transaction costs. My report on the nature and future of the firm is also Coasian up to a point, and yet I'm eager to take an exit from neo-classical economics, and to enter political sociology instead.

What I'm trying to stress, which I don't pick up from Shirky's work (and certainly not from the freakonomic Chicago-based followers of Coase), is that if non-market structures can be more efficient than market ones, then this makes political questions of authority, legitimacy, power and democracy (even more) unavoidable. The liberal economic attempt to entirely bracket questions of efficiency falters, once the very concept of efficiency becomes entangled with coercive or co-operative industrial structures.

This would then lead to a critique of Shirky, that I'd love to develop properly at some point. The seeds of it are actually contained in my Demos work. The section which the geekier amongst you may find interesting is entitled 'the future of co-operation?' and begins on p. 54. I take the following economic premise:

One might say that where mutuals have their value locked in to them, open networked collaboration practices make sure that value remains locked out of any private hands or organisation. If most firms seek to defend their intangible assets as a ‘private good’, and mutual societies do so as a ‘club good’, then open networked collaboration does so as a ‘public good’.

So far so Coasian. But then the political critique:

The problem these associations have is that they struggle to appoint decision makers or to overcome their defining feature, which is the freedom for people to exit and enter from one moment to the next. A mutual establishes a set of democratic rules that everyone then consents to. Power becomes centralised, but on the understanding that it is used within a constitutional structure. Open collaborative networks, on the other hand, have certain individuals who are more powerful than others (the highly connected, the initiators, the brokers) but little sense of legitimacy surrounding these individuals, and therefore little obligation for others to obey them. The bodies providing the ‘constitutions’ of the new associations tend to be private companies – Facebook, Google, Zopa etc – and their rules are currently established as they please. If a new democratic mutualism is to arise from any of this, and not merely a new informational mutualism, then this problem will have to be overcome.

My full Weberian rewrite of Here Comes Everybody will have to wait for another day.