The Super-Rich Are More Rich than They Need to Be

Society is degenerating, partly because people who could be accumulating wealth if given the opportunity do not have the opportunity. This is because money is being syphoned to the super-rich, instead of growing among the poor and middle-class. The very wealthy accumulate wealth without regard for the greater good of the economy, which is becoming more and more suitable for small businesspeople.

However, part of the problem is the attitude of the poor and middle-class. Throughout my life, I've observed the attitude of others with regards to changing the world. With rare exception, everyone I've come across simply has no wish to change the world. I don't know if this is because public school beats it out of them, or if it is because of a hereditary attitude that has been promulgating itself since the time when people would be hanged, crucified, or burned for trying to change the world, or perhaps if it is just a personal lack of conviction in their own ideas. Whatever it is, I think it is a problem. Part of the reason the rich can get away with accumulating wealth that should've been ours is because 99% of people are at a loss for what to do with extra wealth when they get it. Maybe a new home theater system. A Winnebago. A trip to the Bahamas. Start a business? Make a film? No, no. That is for people who want to change the world.

The super-rich are going to become more meaningless over time, because our cultural consciousness and economy are becoming decentralized, making centralized wealth less important. But what will replace our major corporations if nobody wants to change the world? They will be replaced with a bunch of mindless sheep begging to be invaded by people with the chutzpah to actually do things. I hear complaints about how Americans aren't accumulating wealth like they used to. I complain about that, because I tend to get stuck in the economic doldrums spending all the money I get on rent and utilities. But I complain about it because I actually have ambitions to change the world, which cannot be realized without extra wealth. Unfortunately, I'm a minority. Most people could care less about accumulating extra wealth, because they are more concerned with living comfortably and quietly smothering themselves with their own down pillows.

I don't care if you want to be a follower rather than a leader. We need followers just as much as we need leaders. All I ask is that if you are going to be a follower, at least try to follow people who are changing the world, rather than just paying a salary. Follow people who challenge you. Follow people who reward enterprise and good decisions. Follow people with a conscience, and with vision. To survive, society needs to constantly change. And it won't change unless we change it. People who refuse to change the world, even if they're not natural leaders, aren't doing anyone any favors.

Cloud, Entrepreneur, Cloud

A couple of weeks ago, I started working at a place called Brick and Mortar, here in Moscow. Working not in the sense that I have a job, but in the actual sense of the word—I work here. Anything, including writing this post, which I consider "work," I tend to do here. Another kind of work I can do here, which I haven't yet done but which I intend to do, is contract through a service called oDesk.com. Both of these platforms—B&M and oDesk—are related in a deeply philosophical way, which I will examine below.

Let's start with Brick and Mortar. B&M is advertised as a community workspace, or a co-working space. But these concepts don't really get to the heart of the matter. "Community workspace" is especially far off. I might be able to see it as meaning that it is both a community and a workspace, but the lexico-grammatical meaning of the phrase seems to indicate that it is exactly what it says: a "community workspace," where "community" is an adjective and "workspace" is a noun. And "community" as an adjective indicating "this workspace is a community" is a very esoteric reading of the word indeed. More likely, it indicates that B&M is a workspace intended for use by the general community, which isn't quite right.

But even if the esoteric reading is correct, and B&M chooses to market themselves as a workspace which is a community, or workspace community, I still think this misses the mark. The library is a workspace community. The University of Idaho is a workspace community. Hell, every single business in America is a workspace community. It just doesn't seem to do the idea justice.

So I propose a new way of thinking about it.

B&M is not just a workspace community, but a specific kind of community. Now I'm going to draw my inspiration from one particular office here. It is a more or less typical office, of course, where a person named Jordan sits down and does his work. But it is not just an arm of B&M; it is an actual business, fully operational and (I assume) independent. A sign sits on the interior office window: "Palouse PC Computer Repair." A sign is a sure sign of independence.

The implication of this business within B&M is that B&M is the kind of place which independent businesses are intended to grow out of. In this way, it's much more like a business incubator than a workspace community. Yet it goes farther, because the full implications of the word "community" remain intact. It is the kind of place where "business incubator" and "workspace community" are fused inextricably together. This entirely new kind of concept, the likes of which I've never seen before, may represent a dramatic shift in the business dynamic of America.

There are three different phrases I've come up with to describe what B&M is. One is, "entrepreneurial bank." It's a bank, not of money, but of entrepreneurial spirit. Collected here at the workspace is a reserve of freelancing, independent, entrepreneurial spirit. See, Moscow is a young person's town, and a lot of college kids live here, many, if not most, of whom have an overabundance of entrepreneurial spirit. Some of that has found its way here, and so what we have is an excess of entrepreneurial spirit, which we then loan out to the world at large.

But the fact that it is gathered here in one place, in one specific building, is significant. It leads me to my next characterization: "non-academic university." In a university, each of the professors is pretty much independent, just like the workers here. Nevertheless, they organize themselves into co-working groups, which do research in teams for the purpose of furthering human knowledge. That is their goal. Strip out the "knowledge" part of that goal and replace it with the more general word "progress," and you basically have B&M—a non-academic university.

But my favorite phrase, because of its currency, involves the most groundbreaking human achievement of our age: the Internet. In this vein, B&M is an "entrepreneurial cloud." Just like Amazon's EC2 is a computing cloud, B&M is a cloud of entrepreneurs. But B&M hasn't yet realized what I believe is a serious groundbreaking prospect for this kind of place. An "entrepreneurial cloud," to be more like a "cloud computing platform," seems to indicate that the community at large here in Moscow, if they so choose, can upload specific limited-time requests to the cloud for the us to perform.

Say, for instance, that the Moscow Arts Commission, a wing of the Moscow City Government, decides they want to make Moscow, Idaho a national hub for the arts—just as, through the U of I's Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, the city is a national hub for jazz music. What they could do, if our workspace grew big enough, is contact B&M with a request for proposal. B&M then, as a community, could identify each individual entrepreneur or freelancer in the workspace who has any applicable skill, and if they agree to sign on, contract with them to fulfill the goals of the Arts Commission. Once the goals are fulfilled, just like Amazon's cloud computer, B&M will return to its natural state, ready for another project. All further gruntwork, if there is any, would be taken up by a dedicated entity—probably a wing of the Moscow City Government, or the local arts business community, or whatever.

Now this idea in itself is exciting enough. But there is yet another exciting prospect based on a simple fact: B&M is made up not of computers, but of people. And people can actually originate goals, rather than merely fulfill them. It's still like a cloud, but more like a storm cloud, which makes lightening of entrepreneurial inspiration. The end result may perhaps be that Moscow Idaho, or any other city which seriously entertains this approach, will become among the most interesting places on the planet.

As said earlier, this is an entirely new idea. And it has stunning and broad-reaching implications. Like the Internet, it may harken in a completely new era in business. See, on the Internet, there are websites like the afore-mentioned oDesk—cloud-compute inspired businesses. oDesk's innovation is called "homesourcing:" businesses, anywhere in the world, can "homesource" work to any individual anywhere in the world, practically instantly. Thus a budding fashion design shop can quickly assemble a team of customer service agents without setting up a physical call center, for example. One agent may be in India, another may be in Idaho; it doesn't matter because it's all done "on the cloud."

But oDesk is different from B&M. While B&M stresses entrepreneurial spirit, oDesk stresses contracted labor. When you work at oDesk, you are very much working for a boss at a (more or less) established firm. But when you work at B&M, the assumption is, generally, that you are the firm. This isn't a rule, of course; anyone here can work for whomever they choose. But the point is that B&M is a hub for entrepreneurial spirit, whereas oDesk is a platform for contracted labor.

And both companies say something profound about us in the United States. Taken together, oDesk and B&M represent a new way of thinking, a dual modality of American labor. The old way of thinking goes like this: Nathan Foster applies for a job at CostCo. The new way of thinking goes like this: America applies for a job at America. Places like B&M, across the country (and yes, there is more than one place like this), form entrepreneurial ideas, and contract out to places like oDesk. Thus we can all contribute to a vast cloud of "business happenings" everywhere around the world, simultaneously.

That's the vision, anyway. And I believe the new way of thinking, more accurately and concretely than any discourse I've yet seen, expresses the American concept of "honor." Honor, to me, is loyalty plus leadership. And while in the old way of thinking these two were completely separate (i.e. the job applicant has loyalty while the employer has leadership), in this new age each individual can have both qualities simultaneously. A person can simultaneously contract with oDesk and originate ideas in exactly the same space, among exactly the same people. I can come from the cloud, into entrepreneurship, and go back into the cloud, seamlessly. This is the fundamental innovation these two businesses represent, and needless to say, I'm excited about the prospects of both.