(2015-10-02) Church Category Craft Vision

Michael O Church envisions a Culture like The Craft as an alternative to Silicon Valley/Venture Capital.

The fatal flaw of the California and, possibly, of the United States, is that it bought in fully to the market state and that it failed to reject. To make it clear, I’m not advocating the rejection of people, but of culture and of power.

an increasing number of talented young people are being drawn into that machine because of its false promises regarding professional autonomy, technical excellence, and the likelihood of life-changing wealth.

it has to die, because marketing experiments using technology have won the decade while the larger goal of improving the human condition has been forgotten

One could conceivably choose an affordable city like Chicago or Portland or Philadelphia and announce that that place is going to be where the Valley’s best go when they become adults and can’t stand the juvenile culture anymore, and maybe something would happen. To me, though, it seems that it’s going to take a lot more.

Why Israel is so entrepreneurial. The root concept is: culture of substance... Nordic nations, beset by frigid winters that force a person to reflect on one’s own mortality and, therefore, our interconnectedness through life and death, also have a culture of substance. (The issue, in many European countries, is a lack of capital.) The United States is very large and the country certainly has cultures of substance within it, but there is also a profound culture of commercialism and superficiality.

What we create, to replace Silicon Valley, will have to be geographically distributed. Membership is intended to be lifelong, while residence in one location rarely is. Moreover, while it will have to be very selective when it comes to values and merit, it will be ethnically, religiously, racially, and gender/gender-preference inclusive as a constitutional requirement.

We need to figure out how to develop a K-selective capitalism based not on rapid growth but on smart growth... Cultures of substance tend to be K-selective. They want to thrive, but not to grow at all costs... I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a “natural growth rate” to technical businesses. It’s industry-dependent and varies with scale, but I’d guess that it’s typically between 10 and 50 percent per year. Growth beyond the natural rate, however, seems to increase risk to a degree that most people find unacceptable.

There’s a spectrum of risk and expected growth, which are known to be positively correlated... Ethical breach exists not when the risks are “too high”, because that’s a subjective notion, but when people are misled about what risks exist... The “marks” in the new game are the people investing their careers in it: the software engineers. They move into one of the most inflated real estate markets on earth and throw down 90-hour work weeks, because they’ve been promised rapid career growth. Ten years later, they’re unemployable elsewhere, because getting one’s due in the Valley requires a job-hopping strategy that still retains a stigma everywhere else.

On the risk spectrum, the mid-risk/mid-growth space is undercapitalized... Mid-risk/mid-growth businesses shouldn’t be derided as “lifestyle businesses” (Life Style Company), and 35 percent annual growth is still quite fast.

Venture capital is, in fact, an underperforming asset class. It might be better to fund mid-risk/mid-growth companies than to try to hatch unicorn eggs. Portfolio performance would probably improve... VCs are optimizing for their careers, not for portfolio performance.

So what is the technologist’s ideology, and why is it so important? The critical tenet of the technologist ideology is that Scarcity is an enemy that we should be working to abolish. Additionally, it holds that social justice must be achieved and is more important than raw economic growth, and that human Freedom (not only from government power, but from corporate power) should be upheld along the way.

What can a person do that might have a faint shot at positive change? Another damn company? Another damn incubator? Another damn venture fund? I’m not seeing it... one needs to come up with something different.

That concept is: a Category.

Perhaps there is something that can be learned from the spirit of a kibbutz: the concept of an ethical, intellectual, and creative community that will have your back no matter what. Entrepreneurs could use that kind of support, and they’ll never get it in the current “kick ’em when they’re down” Silicon Valley. The core concept of a category is no more socialistic than existing capitalistic structures like unions, Trade Guild-s, and venture capital funds. It is different in its devotion to ethics and cultural integrity in addition to success in business.

Should a category be realized by, or dominated by, one company? No, I’m going to argue, fervently, that it shouldn’t. We can’t put all of our hope in one firm. That’s not realistic. Like Silicon Valley, it should be a postmodern, distributed organization that transcends specific firms, matching talent to opportunity at scale. In fact, if a category is created in the right way, there should only need to be one of them, the purpose of a category being to unify talent (against an anti-intellectual world with uncultured leadership) and to pool resources.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the most creative, intellectually curious, and cultured people comprise, or ought to, a new form of human group: not a tribe or a nation or a race or a religion or a social class, but something else entirely... I call the natural, optimal, elite of the human species The Category. It might comprise 1 to 2 percent of the population, for now, not necessarily because the natural ability is biologically scarce (it may be, or it may not be, and I lack the knowledge that would give me any authority on that topic) but because our species is at a low level of cultural evolution... The people in The Category are the natural pilots of the airplane that we call human civilization. The passengers are not less important or less deserving of good lives. They just don’t belong in the cockpit. It’s dangerous to all of us if we let them go there... My argument is that it already exists. It just has not developed a cohesive awareness. Intelligent, compassionate, creative and intellectually curious people are an oppressed minority in every society on earth, because anti-intellectualism, brutality, and authoritarianism rule the day everywhere.

The Category’s ultimate long-term aim is a post-scarcity society that eradicates the social and economic limitations that prevent people from reaching their full potential. (Well-Being)

I think that corporate capitalism is a good way to vote on businesses, insofar as it decides whether a search engine company should exist, but it doesn’t do a good job, at all, when it comes to voting on people... I can’t even say that organizational ascent selects those with bad values, because it’s not quite true: it tends to favor those with no values. (Sociopath)

To realize The Category, we’re going to need to create a new kind of elitist organization, here given the lower-case-c name of a "category".

Technology is the first industry that must be liberated and returned to The Category. After that conquest, there are more industries for it to go out and win.

A category ought to be a meeting place where creative, cultured, and curious people can share information, make introductions, and pool resources. In addition, it should have a powerful investment arm (CoOp), which backs its main business and cultural objective. Ultimately, a category ought to replace traditional venture capital as the mechanism for funding technology companies, but it should focus on mid-risk, mid-growth companies that can retain a positive culture, rather than the extreme high-risk gambits that the Valley currently funds.

The fundamental principle is that employees should be “founder quality”, thus preventing the gap in respect and compensation between “founder-grade” people and “employee-grade” peasants that is observed in Silicon Valley.

In addition to investing in businesses (which will be owned by the category and the founders, with the employees enjoying a ProfitSharing system more generous than Valley-style equity) the category will provide leads for jobs and consulting opportunities to its members.

Categories don’t oppose capitalism. They fix it... The goal of a category is to provide a kibbutz-like community focus and a creative Safety Net for the most talented and cultured people, while encouraging the companies that they build to engage with the market and allowing them to capture some of the value that they create.

What will categories deliver their members (in addition to venture funding) and to the world that currently isn’t available? First, I think that the creative risks that people can take when they have solid backing from a community are much greater than what they can try in a knives-out free-for-all like the modern corporate environment and especially Silicon Valley, where vendettas rule the day and people live in fear of influential venture capitalists. If a category will never expel a member who fails in good faith, that encourages creative risk and chutzpah. Second, a major goal behind the concept of a category is to revive the concept of community, without always requiring physical proximity. This is important because the technology ecosystem is presently dominated by people who may believe that one set of ethical principles applies to them outside of the office, and that another much weaker set of ethical rules applies inside the office. This willingness that executives show to divorce their work selves from their personal ethics is what enables them to do so many awful things at work. *

cf Mutualism, 2011-08-31-GuptaTemplarsOfEarth