Imagine Free Markets in Services

Notes can "get away" from me: they'll pile up quickly if I'm not careful, so I try to keep the ones actually sitting on my desk to a bare minimum. As I try to stash yet another "finished" group into a nearby folder, some "scribble" consolidation has to happen. So I sometimes have to remind myself to use the organization strategies an English teacher taught me several years ago. This time I found - in the chaos - a post which has been "suggesting" itself for at least a week. And...you thought this was easy, didn't you! (just kidding)

Some of the musings here are actually brought forward from my last post, in which I considered how people might eventually utilize online activities in more useful and beneficial ways. Ultimately, online time needs to count for more of what actually gets important things done. Also, it needs to account for better relations not just across nations, but for people who live across the street from one another, as well. In the present, such ideas remain a hindrance to many institutions who still try to go about their activities as though internet doesn't even exist in any practical sense. Doesn't that feel a bit odd?

Services of the present - bound as they are by the dictates of previous circumstance, often include some of the strangest default points imaginable for people to be enduring. Usually we don't give services a lot of thought until they impose upon - or perhaps some would say oppose - our daily reality. Generally our first reaction is to the inanity of the procedures we are expected to endure and the second reaction is...well there's no other way to overcome how this is going to be presented to us. Indeed the prevailing wisdom is: don't like this transaction where real human contact is not an option? Get used to it because there's more where that comes from tomorrow.

Readers may recall I was quite relieved that an automated procedure got me back online quickly when my internet connection was disrupted recently (although it doesn't usually go quite so smoothly). Some folk are so used to navigating automation procedures that they don't give them a second thought. When automation procedures take care of problems quickly, we'll take them any day over waiting 28 minutes for an actual person to actually pick up the phone. The problem comes in when we're calling with an issue that the ten "options" the automated system has, simply does not match up with. Searching online for answers helps sometimes, but not always. Do we really have to give up on solving what may be important issues re our ability to function well, when this is in fact the case?

In a sense, this is the same unfilled "hidden demand" that is the equivalent of the "hidden supply" problem of the present - i.e. the "not quite measured" unemployed who is weary of heading out the door for yet employment application drop off, because of the ZMP message he has already received several times over. We haven't quite figured out how to offer our skills sets in the present because our institutions have served to make them uneconomic. What's more, some of our "revered" institutions are presently fighting it out over who gets to "serve" us: the uproar over private and public school choice is running strong. By now the reader knows I don't think either one of these are workable in their present forms. We need the choice to provide services for one another on our own terms, in order to gain back our own humanity and self worth.

What do we want to accomplish - today, tomorrow, next year? In a practical sense or in a larger sense, institutions in their present forms are not structured to answer such questions. What interests us? Sometimes individuals create product which can reach over the "static" and provide something that does, but far more of us need to be able to do this regularly for one another, than is actually happening right now. There's the work we need to do for ourselves, the work we need to do for others, the learning we need to be able to take on for each. One of the first things we can do to imagine free markets in services is to calendar - and schedule - the possibilities we could try out in a local skills and knowledge use marketplace.

Over time, things that "call" to us for further learning and sharing can be placed into semi-formal, but not rigid, institutional structures. These interactions can be validated by recording more relevant aspects of the transactions - what we gain from sharing interests, responsibilities and their related activities. Each new semester can provide the excitement of placing our present offerings before the public to see if enough will respond to make it worth our time and effort to pursue that particular activity right now.

Also - by way of example - affirmation of collective worth beats the heck out of piano teachers (for instance) having to put up piano lesson posters (for prospective students) at street corners alongside get rich quick schemes and weight loss posters...or, getting disparaging glances for advertising said piano lessons in public, when one isn't practicing in the "right system" with a teaching job from public or private whatever. Since when did education become about creating extra-institutional worthless skills sets except for the lucky few?

What's more, our governments need value in use structures for everyone's survival, value in use structures that don't get taxed so that people lose the ability - yet again - to help themselves when they need help the most. Taxation here would destroy the incentive for people to consider common need as surely as too heavy taxation destroys the ability of economic access in all its possibilities. Life is good when everyone allows the knowledge prior to win (for once) and an ultimate degree of knowledge utilization becomes possible.

Again, imagine services. What makes them group oriented or individual to individual service oriented? What service and production sets can be presented through informal group settings? What does a community need to do for itself, and especially how can it utilize the skills its institutions don't have room for? How then can a community also come into better balance with technology, so that monetary equivalence is possible with simple base representation instead of ""floor" wages?

How can communities create more value from what their citizens already have, thereby creating more value for all? Never assume that the right to produce lies only outside ourselves, because when we do, we get entirely too confused as to what consumption is actually possible. When we realize the right to production exists within ourselves, we can also envision how to present the product that works in the now. When we try to vote for the redistribution of scarce resources, we are voting for the wrong thing. Vote for skills and services potential - for that is something we can all provide, in abundance.