The Bigger Leap - An Ethics of NextCapitalism

Chapter 1: NextCapitalism – responds to Frederic Jameson’s analysis of the post-modern subject being negated, co-opted, oppressed and wasted by the accelerating forces of late capitalism. In his epic text, Post Modernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson inspires our agenda for radical change with his naming of the situation within which we find ourselves in space and time, history’s map – 

“I take such spatial peculiarities of postmodernism as symptoms and expressions of a new and historically original dilemma, one that involves our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose frames range from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life all the way to the unimaginable decentering of global capital itself.” 
Jameson, Post Modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991 

Like Jameson, our critique and imagined ethics are grounded in culture-as-economics. NextCapitalism becomes our utopic battle-cry towards a prefigurative agenda for transitioning towards post-capitalist world. A machinery of generative desire intended to lead across a huge abyss towards some kind of possible world your grandkids might thank you for someday. 

Chapter 2: Kill the Buddha – suggests a logic and process for dissolving the internal apparatus of control your dad, your teachers (including me, lol…), your priests and rabbis, all your bosses, the corporate media and of course the police installed to keep you in line. For me – and for many of us - this is a fucking massive lift. It’s got to be worth it… 

We take our opening into an emergent iconoclasm inspired by Sheldon B Kopps’ insight from his 1972 work If You Meet the Buddha on the Road Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy, where he suggests – 

"This admonition points up that no meaning that comes from the outside of ourselves is real. The Buddhahood of each of us has already been obtained. We need only recognize it. Philosophy, religion, patriotism, all are empty idols. The only meaning in our lives is what we each bring to them. Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying hope that anyone outside ourselves can be our master. No one is bigger than anyone else." 
Sheldon B Kopp, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! 1972 

Our unlikely mix of cases ranges from the Berrigan Brothers to Luther, to Simone de Beauvoir and a set piece chapter-ending explosion of the transgressive materiality of wild iconoclastic desire of Glee, the TV musical-drama. 

Chapter 3: Battle for the Commons – Our revolutionary work becomes an opportunistic response to the extraordinary problematic of enclosure. The chapter suggests a genealogy of the privatization and monetization of property from the Pilgrims of the 17th century to the surveillance platformers of the 21st century. Against the totalizing effects of the settler-colonizer ethics of shareholder capitalism, we offer inspirational cases from startups like Burgeon Outdoor to oldskool retailers like IKEA. 

The big idea is that there is a latent commoner within us all – and we can choose, together, to follow the triggering insights of culture ethicists and tech activists ranging from Aaron Swarz, to Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Frost.

Mapping out our insurgent strategies across these reclaimed shared territories of an emergent commons, reveals this space of becoming commoners within us. We offer an action framework of Collaboration, Liberation, Infiltration and Circulation as both ways and means for instigating regenerative threads of human rhizomes engaged in value making – the desiring machines of commoners in the ethically productive act of commoning. 

Chapter 4: We’re All Out Here Together – If the cases and insights explored and applied in chapter 3 concern a rethinking of our response to the deadening effects of enclosure, in We’re all out here together we blast open the revolutionary potential for solidarities of desiring production in active resistance to the inside of the oppressive forces of late capitalism. We imagine what a joyfully productive escape to the outside of neoliberalism as deathstar might look, feel and act like. 

Starting with a 2019 OECD report’s unlikely name-checking of mid-century economist Kenneth Boulding’s 1966 essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth “, with his concept of iconospheres, we assemble a range of cases and insights to inspire our insurgent work. 

Demonstration cases range fron an Innovation Lab student project solving for homelessness to a Midcoast Maine laundromat’s equable applied principles of weird abundance. Leaning heavily on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization, we trace productive lines escape to the outside where the work of our 99% of ragtag ethicists can flourish beyond the killer gravity of the always-reterritorializing 1%ers. 

Key to our explorations of this new work is a re-imagined understanding of desire itself when shared. Our fundamental pivot pushes off from the reactionary script of Lacan and Zizek which holds desire as negation and lack, as in the paranoiacs alienating - “desire is always the desire of the other”. Instead, we bring in the insights from Malinowski via Mauss about the kula, a communal, reciprocal and longitudinal shared system of desire. Understanding the practical potential of working with the kula as an ethical bonding agent for amplifying our work together in the ‘out here‘ of the do-or-die 21st century crucible of NextCapitalism. 

And thus our praxis is predicated on the mandate to move from the default killing fields of suspiciously paranoid desire as lack, to the imaginable mutual dream of shared productive desire. A reversal of the defensive logic of “what do you (the other) want of me” into something voiced as “what do we owe each other”. 

Chapter 5: Everything Happens at Once – When Gil Scott-Heron preached The Revolution Will Not Be Televised he set out the reverse terms for the conditions to be met in determining when the moment of radical change was upon us. His litanizing of products within their sacramental context of advertising was aimed at blowing holes through the deadening edifice of the marketworld --- holes just big enough for us to climb through together when the time was right. 

Suggestions for the when of our creative insurgencies are laid out by Walter Benjamin’s in his last work, On the Concept of History. The short, dense text was written in the final weeks of Benjamin’s life, running from his Nazi pursuers trying to escape from occupied France. Benjamin lands our chapter’s killer insight with his concept of now-time, or jetztzeit. We understand and embrace Benjamin’s now-time as the burst of awakening from history’s permanent state of terror - its stultifying dream of occupation and its absolute usurpation of our shared productive desire. 

We interrogate Deleuze’s insights into Bergson’s writings on duration for further practical applications for determining the when of our work. We bring in a range of cases and radical thinkers of time to explore the opportunistic applications of acting in now-time – Agamben, Derrida, Thoreau and, again, Patagonia’s Yves Chouinard, our ever-present CEO/founder as radical thinker and doer of now-time in the context of an emergent NextCapitalism. 

Everything happens at once is both the lightning bolt of an epiphany and the escaping beautiful gas of our shared desire. It posits this always-already-immanent moment of action which dissolves the illusion of an us as subject to the force and voice of a multiplicity. It understands its everything to presume an anywhere, its site not fixed, as it is a pure becoming. Benjamin’s now-time is the only permission we need to give and take as we stop the clock of the oppressor’s chase of history long enough to start building real shit for real people that, maybe, ends up really mattering and meaning something. 

Chapter 6: Sometimes, Say Nothing – I’ve spent the past sixty of my sixty-eight years on this plane trying one way or another to create contents meant to persuade, or entertain, even teach other people. From school plays to rock and roll frontman, from DJ and radio poet to agency pitchman, from strategy consultant to adjunct professor, I’ve made a life of not shutting up. 

This chapter is about what I’ve learned is possible when I do. 

Once more we call on Deleuze early to ignite our agenda, plucking from his Negotiations –
“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.” 
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990 

The sweetly ironic, almost absurd challenge we have with this insight is how to apply it meaningfully and ethically within the work of business and communications arts within whose domain many of our readers comrade make our livings. 

Our research builds upon insights from linguists like Michal Ephratt whose 2008 book The function of silence identifies expressions of eloquent silence, moments of emotive function, or rather “acting out and acting in”. 

We learn much about unsilence from John Cage’s infamous piece 4’33” – a musical score with no notations except its suggested length, and from the surfeit of contents provoked by Dadaist readymades. From our indigenous comrades we pick up and take with us the tool of the talking stick as determinant for the order of speech and the impactful moments of silence and gapful pauses connected with its passing.

The essential tool of the meme becomes our key strategy for maximizing the revolutionary potential of our fulsome moments of seeming silence. The meme as a frame, a container, which comes with a latent yet already-expressed cultural for code. 

The code is the frame – and the text, personalized markings, the words, the customized sounds which, again, aim us towards fresh contents of new abundance. An abundance of meaning which bursts from its frame through shared moments of recognition, of affirmation, of creation which accrues when memes complete the moments mere speech fails at filling. 

Chapter 7: The Flaneur’s Apprentice – As we say in the text, our brief is to ‘become empathic apprentices of desiring production, all within the extraordinarily specific geographies of the socius where our work finds its meaning amongst its intended kindred.’ These might be our students, our customers, our investors, our partners and co-conspirators, our allies and the audiences for and contributors to our art-making. 

The chapter sources both likely and unlikely candidates for inspiring our work as emergent apprentices of desiring production. Perhaps the foundation insight comes from Walter Benjamin via Seal’s essay in Psychogeoraphic Review –
 
“For Benjamin, the flâneur is the primary tool for interpreting modern culture. He is the observer, the witness, the stroller of the commodity-obsessed marketplace. He synchronises himself with the shock experience of modern life. He does not, however, challenge that system. The point of the flâneur, argues Benjamin, is to lead us toward an ‘awakening’ – the moment at which the past and present recognise each other; to erfahrung. His tool for achieving this is einfühlung – empathy: Empathy with the commodity is fundamentally empathy with the exchange value itself. The flâneur is the virtuoso of this empathy. 
Psychogeographic Review, Bobby Seal 

Along the way we explore models from Baudelaire’s anti-dandy, to Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and critically, the great work of Guy Debord and the Situationists. Our hero case for analysis is Maine B-Corp Androscoggin Bank, where we hack strategies for applying Debord’s terms, détournment and dérivistes, with some fairly provocative but hopefully actionable recommendations. 

Chapter 8: The Glorious Spend – Here we take precise and hopefully annihilating aim at the nemesis of value-making in the world of business – advertising itself. We posit bon fires over funnels and organic content co-creation over measured media-fueled advertising. 

Our research leads us to leverage the human inclination towards mutually advantaged valuemaking not through the zero-sum lens of competitive promises of exclusivity and scarcity, but through the ancient DNA-embedded practices of a general economy. 

Pulling from social scientists like Georges Bataille’s epic The Accursed Share we understand the rules of a general economy concerning abundance, consumption, expenditure, waste and sharing can be applied to new type of marketing as ethical business behavior.

The ‘glorious spend’ becomes the real new media of NextCapitalism. It becomes the new paradigm for our framework of INSIGHTS + ETHICS = IMPACT, and we offer an actionable replacement formula for traditional media planning - ( BI + HI ) * ( BE + HE ) = NS/SV based upon our principle theory guiding our work for several years, which is that Insight + Ethics = Impact. We take a speculative stab at applying the formula by reverse-engineering two business cases – Zappos and Amazon. 

Our hero case is Red Bull Music Academy and we go deep in applying our formula as a way of demonstrating how – as we say in marketing - this shit works. 

Chapter 9: Desire is a Communism – Our use of the still-too-loaded term of “a communism” will startle some students of new world making at first. We think once you immerse yourself in the journey of building cases, you will come to see what we see – desire is everything when it’s shared. Especially in the service of imagining, making, enabling and amplifying the desiringmachines of production we are called to create in our journeys of NextCapitalism. 

Our cases demonstration how all this might work as career, business and life strategies range from John Coltrane, critiquing the nature and contents of his epic work of co-creation Ascension, to the Highwaymen African-American painters selling their work as an imaginarium on the sides of mid-century Florida. We take as our core inspiration to a new world-making Audre Lorde’s instruction to the insurgent justice warrior – 

"What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.” 
Audre Lord, (1983), The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House 

A key concept which we develop calls for the radical act of losing ourselves, or the step of desubjectification required if we’re to humbly connect at the level of desire with not just humans, but all species and active elements of the world. 

We take immense insight from Suzanne Simard’s work on mapping the non-human networks of care at work in the forest and go back to Rachel Carson’s work in her trilogy of books on the sea for similar humbling insights and inspiration towards a multi-species worlding as the work of our desiring communisms. 

We suggest a method for planning and activating our desire is a communism insight using a tool which allows us to analyze discrete forces of desire in their ability to enable and empower stakeholder agency, while setting the terms of mutually rewarding exchange. 

We test our tool by applying it in the development of strategic support for Mars and their brave commitment to own the net carbon reduction goals of their entire value chain. 

Our final case is Donna Haraway’s study of the Navajo nation’s Dine tribe. Her analysis, insights and reporting on the hundred-and-fifty-year struggle of an indigenous nomad people, their animals and inhabited lands to thrive as a complex desiring machine in the face of settler and neo-colonial pressure gives us hope for the revolutionary power of shared desire in staying with the trouble of our ethical world-making.