In the first part of the series "The Quest for New Value(s)", I argued that the collaborative economy was a convenient “catch-all” concept, utterly insufficient to create a new paradigm shift all by itself. Yet we fiercely need a paradigm shift. My take is that the true paradigm shifter we are looking for is less the collaborative economy than its indirect impact on our social organization and our culture. Although less visible, they have the power to profoundly upset the current social order and are the key to what, at OuiShare, we call a collaborative society. It’s time to explore what this collaborative society we started talking about a few months ago is. The consequence of this adventure is quite obviously the end of consensus: there is no guarantee that the social visions each one of cherishes are one and the same. The "collaborative economy" and "collaborative society" approaches are peculiarly different: the latter is prescriptive while the former is descriptive. Having the ambition to build a collaborative society implies that we have at least a set of principles, values, beliefs, wishes, in one word, an affirmative vision for which we could fight for. Some would call it an ideology. I am certain most of you would prefer to avoid to talk about ideology altogether because of its heavy historical burden. But thinking about society exclusively in economic terms is actually the most hidden and perfidious form of ideology, and it’s called neoliberalism. This ideology’s biggest asset consists in disguising its set of values and beliefs under alleged rational and scientific terms. Maybe talking openly about the ideology associated to a collaborative society is more honest, yet more dangerous.

The discourse will become political whether we want it or not. Actually, it already has and we should be happy about this. Refuse to mess with politics and your vision will stay in your kitchen. Even the supposedly apolitical Silicon Valley guyshave long understood this.

Anthropology and politics, take one

The first step is to acknowledge that thecollaborative economy says something special about the way we understand the human being.

Economics are not ideologically neutral. For instance, classical economics are built on the principle that men could be represented as rational and individualistic agents whose main goal is to maximise their own utility. The rest - affects, altruism, human relations, social norms - is conveniently summed up under the end-of-paragraph hypothesis “all things being equal”. In philosophical terms, this posture is utterly utilitarian.

On the contrary, the collaborative approach of economics implies that men are social animals willing to engage in all kinds of activities that create tight relationships.

They can do so out of all kind of reasons, which are not necessarily linked to their utility and may even be contrary to one’s immediate interest, according to their specific motivations, the environment they are immersed in, their culture, personal history, etc. It says that men should be apprehended according to what they are and how they behave in this real world, and not following a perfect drawing made by autistic economists. What motivates people, it suggests, is not limited to money (and power and sex) and has primarily something to do with our tendency to constitute ourselves in human communities. I believe Daniel Kahneman’s behavioural economics and Michel Aglietta’s regulation school could be used as basis to understand models underlying the collaborative economy.

What do we mean by the term “collaborative society”?

A collaborative society is a community that has the power to rule itself (city, state, territory, country, etc.) where people are encouraged to cooperate rather than compete with and/or command each other, both on individual and collective levels, under a strict respect of one’s freedom and civic liberties. A collaborative society is based on a human economy.

More specifically:

1. People’s contributions to the community are valued in a fair way (what fair means having been agreed upon by the community) and in such a way that they are not prevented from acting for collective utility (see homo reciprocans)
2. Such a society strives to reduce the inequality of capabilities (this approach encompasses economic inequalities and inequalities of opportunities)
3. The political system is organised in such a way that people are able to rule for themselves and therefore strive on a plurality of social and economic models and roles

Are the collaborative models we observe today all in line with these principles? Certainly not. They look like imperfect, partial, small scale, unregulated, dirty laboratories where experiments have a bunch of unintended consequences that at first sight, one tends to ignore. But these side effect, sometimes brilliant, sometimes flawed, offer something that could help us to engage in a transition to such a society. To understand what that is, one needs to consider them from a non-economic point of view. To return again to the useful analogy with technology, only a non technocentric standpoint could shed light on the deepest impact of technological shift of our societies. It’s the same with economy.

From a statutory to a role-based society

Their main side effect is one that offers people the possibility to have several roles and switch roles. This has the power to deeply upset the social order we ended up with in the end of the 20th century. In increasingly stratified and polarized societies, the collaborative models open the door to something that is blatantly lacking from our lives: social fluidity and meritocracy. It’s no big news that the collaborative economy thrived because of the collapse of our market economies, the rising inequalities, the dramatically falling economic position of the middle class and other micro- and macro-economic factors. The collaborative economy is undoubtedly the child of an unprecedented breeding between the economic crisis and the Internet, but it’s certainly not limited to it. Yet what interests me here are less the direct effects of the crisis on our systems’ regrettable drift towards a stratified order, where growing economic inequalities and the increasing importance of heritage tend to transform a mere social differentiation into an ossified pyramid. The 20th century left us in an utterly status-based society. French society, for instance, looks increasingly like a cast-based order. Every person is “entitled” with a status based on various specific factors such the college they attended, their job, the dinners and salons they organise, now the "ecosystem" they belong to, etc. The social reproduction and the prevalence of class determinism, meanwhile, grow stronger. Such evolution appears to be common to a great number of economies in the Western world. And financial capital and heritage are playing a key part in this socialdeterminism

. It’s now impossible to miss the gap between the official ideology - meritocracy - and the reality - widening and unescapable inequalities.

Most importantly, Millennials’ aspirations (especially the urban educated ones) starkly diverge from the conservative logic of this status- and capital-based achievement model, both on theeconomicandprofessionalfronts.

It is now obvious that not only our market economies are unable to generate enough value so that everyone who contributed to its creation could benefit from it - namely employees and the middle class - but it also failed to socially value aspirations that differ from the model inherited from the 20th century. In plain words, it values only the contributions and aspirations of a continually thinning elite, who in turn detains the power to impose its value system upon the rest of the population. The promises of the “order society”, in which economic prosperity was supposed to buy the obedience of the middle class to social norms and the respect of status hierarchy, turned out to be illusory. And while its mechanisms were unveiled during the crisis through the shameless bailout of private interests by citizens’ money, there was nothing in our backpacks to replace this old order with.

The cognitive dissonance between an ossified society and the new network-based logic conveyed by new models has produced anger and disappointment.

This anger has been contained for a long time, because the young and the middle class simply had no access to decision-making positions, fearlessly protected by an army of elite warriors that ensured that the elite’s interests - public, private, personal - would always be sharply aligned. But as it often happens with kings, they become blind. The old world sitting on the top of the pyramid did not expect that the contestation would not take place on the streets with pitchforks, but online, where communities organized themselves around what appeared first as a new way of doing business.

A new kind of social capital

Collaborative models (most of them) work following a different logic. First, because they strive towards cooperation and creation of social relationships, they are role- and

reputation-based. The information that is necessary for your peers to be able to trust you is information about your past behaviour, your relationships with others - in other words your on- and offline social capital. Contrary to the class-based social capital described by Bourdieu, your online social capital could in theory be built from scratch, independently from the wealth you possess and your social position inherited from your parents. Due to the fact that the middle class is increasingly suffering from wealth, class and revenue inequality, it welcomes this kind of social currency as an opportunity to value immaterial and material contributions, even if this evaluation is not monetary (and this is actually the chief challenge with online contributions).

The second biggest asset of collaborative models is that they are based on the veryprinciple of plurality.

You have one identity but the number of roles you can play is countless. Actually, roles work a little bit as masks in Greek Tragedy: you are not your mask and you may have several ones. This feature is in stark opposition to the idea of one single status that defined most of us in the past century. For example, nothing prevents you from being both a FabLab customer and a coworking space owner that you have launched following a successful crowdfunding campaign. To take an example, in a status-based world, you are unlikely to work as a cleaner in a luxury hotel while being able to afford a suite in a luxury hotel for your spring break. Roles are plural and fluid, and people are progressively no longer defining themselves and their peers by their job.

Boom

The wind of change has not come from demonstrations, revolutions, contestations, but from the unintended side effects of economic models. OuiShare has repeatedly stated that our times are not merely a crisis, but the beginning of something new. This statement remained neglected or misunderstood for some time and was often considered as being a beautiful and naive hope of still innocent young adults. The truth is this statement has nothing to do with idealism and, on the contrary, is highly pragmatic: we are taking the opportunity of economic downturn to start building something utterly non economic. Now that the decision-makers are starting to grasp the broader non-economic consequences of “crisis-born collaborative models”, it’s too late to stop them. These models offer another landscape, anti-hierarchical, non statutory, fluid and allowing to value the contributions that were simply left out of the traditional economic system. It’s no surprise they gained people’s enthusiasm.

And despite all their failures and flaws, they did the job of breaking the wall of the statutory order and introducing its users to what could be another economic system: pluralistic and based on a human economy.

A new value system: the shift towards a human economy

I believe these features could be seen as sparks of a new economic and social paradigm.Take this one: they encourage the emergence of relationship-based systems that have the liberty (in theory) to state their own rules and values.

This is the strength of the collaborative economy as a profoundly heterogeneous reality: it does not impose one single social model upon everyone. The “one-size-fits-all” rule is over. It leaves enough room for direct action and auto-management. For example, it could be a system based on gift, or on an alternative currency, or on capital, or on commons, and they could all coexist in a plural society that allows for people to choose the type of micro-system and governance that suits best their need. This leads me to say that the collaborative society is first and foremost a society based on a human economy, which encompasses and allows for a plurality of smaller models as long as they have been agreed on by humans and are focused on humans rather that on a “transcendent order”, independent from what we as individuals and citizens want. As Lisa Gansky wrote it in her piece, “peers are paramount”. Of course, this vision does not accurately reflect what is happening now in the collaborative economy field, which is why the terms I use are “side effects” and “sparks” rather than “core values” and “rules”. The path will be long from these premises to what I described as being the pillars of collaborative societies and, to be honest, nothing seems to indicate that this will be the path we will be taking anytime soon. The conditions necessary to take this path rather than another one will most probably be the main subject of the next OuiShare Fest 2015 which is dedicated - surprise! - to the idea of transition. It will be also - very humbly - the subject of the next and last part of this series. Featured image: Ambrogio Lorenzetti [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons