In my last post, I talked about how to save our world from a consumer standpoint. Today I’d like to talk about the other side - how we move forward as people who build and create things.
Between government layoffs and the tech sector ones, there are not enough IT jobs to absorb all of the firings over the last few years.
Again: there are not enough IT jobs in the U.S. to absorb all of the layoffs.
Most government workers are primarily some sort of information technology worker. The current U.S. Government layoffs - forced or otherwise - are just the latest in a long series, the result of corporate giants attempting to reduce staff to squeeze every remaining dollar in the economy into their own coffers. These companies have grown like a cancer across the economy, absorbing all available resources and bloating to a disgusting size.
The economy is falling into a recession as a result of this pestilence. Fewer jobs means less money to move back into the economy. All of the wealth is becoming captured and calcified at the top - in shareholder value and corporate profits. This capture has reduced the available choices of consumers - even small businesses are now beholden to companies like Meta and TikTok to spread the word of their products, and Etsy, Ebay, and Shopify for managing sales.
Moving away from the “modern” way of doing business cannot happen overnight, but is critical to save individuals from going bankrupt. As I covered in my Five Actions to Save Democracy, it is also critical to save the country itself.
No one is coming to save us. So what do we do? How do we move forward? As we children of the 80s learned from Labyrinth -
“Sometimes the way forward is the way back.”
Socialism isn’t realistic, so the best we can do is start building small companies that we want to exist. And, this is the important bit - we have to keep them small and focused on building up our communities. Rather than following the modern path of chasing growth, we can instead choose to stop growing at a certain size and be content.
At a certain size, all systems begin to fail - there are fundamental problems in scaling any organization or group. We’ve seen it in everything from coffee chains to social media to online shops. In the U.S. right now, we’re even seeing it with eggs! This is the primary reason that Mastodon might actually succeed - a million tiny local communities doing their own upkeep and moderation is infinitely more viable than a mega-site like Xitter. Growth and consolidation are fundamentally problematic for maintaining a stable and diverse ecosystem.
An alternative to chasing growth is to instead choose a franchise model. Rather than trying to diversify markets and grow beyond a reasonable size, a company can choose to spread operations by handing over control to new organizations. Sharing the secret sauce, so a larger group of folks can share the wealth. You build a company making widgets in Springfield, and when more folks start showing up from Shelbyville, instead of growing the business there, you help locals setup a new franchise instead.
We can build co-ops, we can build public benefit corporations. The only way you can truly stay customer-obsessed is by not becoming beholden to venture capital and shareholders in the first place. The benefit of the customer should always come before driving shareholder value - in the modern world, this is reversed, and worse for everyone. Don’t take the buy-out deal! Don’t chase rounds of private funding! Focus on the people. Focus on keeping money in your community. Tech unions are good, but better yet is for the employees to maintain ownership of the company itself. If they love the customers, they’ll generally do the right thing.
And any new tech companies will need to look closely at themselves to not make the problem worse. (1,2)
A flood of new tech companies won’t fix the real problem. We need to look to creating companies that actually build real things again - textiles, furniture, all variety of goods that people need. The recent tariff shenanigans have had a huge impact on global supply chains - and although the actual data behind them was fabricated nonsense, this does reveal a deep need for locally made and sourced quality goods.
Only a few short decades ago, you’d find every thrift store packed with old, good-quality, solid wood furniture made here in the U.S. Today, it’s almost impossible to find good quality wood furniture, now that we’ve outsourced almost all furniture manufacturing to China and lumber prices continue to skyrocket. Last year, I spent six months trying to find a solid wood, non-platform bed. There was not a single local furniture store that could sell me one. The online vendors all looked shady. I drove halfway across the state to one of the largest furniture distributors and came up empty. Eventually, I ordered one from a so-called “Amish furniture company” but it’s pretty clear most of these are not actually Amish-made - this is just a brand now. Still, I paid a fair price for a decent bed that should last me a lifetime.
These sorts of opportunities still exist for businesses to be built upon. It won’t be as easy as it was in the 70s and 80s, but it’s possible. We can bring back building furniture, we can bring back furniture stores. We can create a future where goods are built and sold locally.
Media will need to change as well.
I’m a child of the 80s, but my formative years were the 90s. Back then, the absolute worst thing an artist could do was to “sell out.” The early days of MTV was a commercial enterprise, but it felt very subversive and counterculture at the time - playing music by weirdos for weirdos. Of course this was largely marketing, not reality - as Maynard would tell us,
In the years thereafter, Disney would take its army of children and repackage them into pop stars, and selling out returned to being an acceptable - and praiseworthy - paradigm. Nowadays, nearly every commercial is backed by a song that was considered “alternative” or “indie” or “subversive” when it came out, and nearly every website is covered in layers of shady ads selling us all sorts of garbage - again, mostly cheap items made in foreign countries that will inevitably return as our trash to other countries.
As I’ve stated before, folks will need to get used to paying for their news and music and videos directly from the creators again, instead of through ad-supported platforms. There’s a big lack of independent platforms for small content creators. For creators with the know-how to setup their own website, some vendors provide a lower service fee for microtransactions - if you use Stripe or Paypal, you can request a lower fee be charged.
However, it remains best to pay cash for your media whenever possible! I’d love to see a return to mail-order, receiving oldschool checks in the mail and shipping out USB sticks to folks. I’ve effectively been running my sticker program this way for years, mailing out thousands of stickers, and it’s been very easy!
A lot of what I’ve talked about here falls into the philosophy of degrowth. But it’s also about building up our small communities - both local and virtual. It’s about finding the other weirdos and making a network of folks who care about their world.
There have been so many incredible political taglines in the last 20 years - Hope, Build Back Better, even the dreaded M-acronym. All of these target a simple concept that has resonated with a majority of people - that things need to change. For too long, change is something that has happened to us. It’s time for everyone to work together to make change.