Created to Be Dismissed: Rules of Engagement of the Dystopian Social Order
mackenzieandersen.substack.com
Special bonus! How to reverse the wealth divide!
When a writer composes a story, it helps to visualize the audience. When I wrote my last piece, I was speaking to two audiences, my base substack readership derived from my business Andersen Design, handmade ceramics since 1952, and the Etsy sellers who are striking.
My Substack readership is steady and consistent and for that audience, I am relating ideas in a serial format, posts building upon others. They are like the background audience. The Etsy strike seemed to be a complementary mission with a shared purpose with a large segment of Etsy sellers being handcrafters. Selling work that is made by hand was the original Etsy concept. The foreground of my last post was written specifically for the Etsy strikers.
The story came about after being invited to submit a story for the newly formed Etsy Sellers publication on Medium. After submitting my story and waiting a day, I left an online note in the message system that I had submitted the story immediately after our last conversation. However, after a day, I did not want to continue to wait for a response so I tried to leave the message that I am submitting the story elsewhere noting that my article links to the Etsy publication and will give the Etsy publication exposure, adding that I would like very much to have the article published on the Etsy Strike site.
However I could not post that message because the message system had a lock on it- so I posted the message in the comments. Later I went back and saw the message system was no longer locked. Maybe all of this was pure coincidence or maybe I was being intentionally locked out. Right now I am weighing in on intentionality. One can’t accidentally lock the notes. One has to go into settings to turn notes on and off.
I would still sign the petition, except for the fact that I saw open campaigning against alternatives to Etsy, and so the strike seems to mirror the corporate control that it protests.
I left a new message in the message system commenting that I had seen a message on the Etsy Strike website saying that alternatives to Etsy should be ignored. Perhaps that is why I am not receiving any response to my article, which proposes an alternative way of marketing. I find that the manner in which I was dealt to be very poor. I wrote my post specifically thinking about the Etsy sellers, craft-producers like myself, but now it seems like I am being stonewalled, which of course changes my feelings about the movement. The Etsy strikers want corporate Etsy to listen to them but they will not engage with others in the maker community who have a different view, specifically that negotiating with corporate is a false hope. I understand that the Etsy sellers may live in a different world than I where marketing on Etsy is all they know, but it is hard for me to understand why they would not want to develop alternative markets. No one is being forced to leave Etsy, and fewer vendors on Etsy would mean less competition for those who choose to stick with Etsy as their main stay. I can understand that corporate would want to discourage alternatives but alternatives benefit the sellers, so why are the Etsy Strikers taking a stand against alternatives?
But I am only assuming that the reason I was given the cold shoulder is that I advocated for an alternative and that is because there is no conversation to inform anything, only a notes section that mysteriously becomes locked and unlocked. That is the conversation. Imagine if this conversation were taking place in the metaverse. With a click of a mouse, I would be banished to the underground - the natural world. Yikes!
I had broken a cardinal rule of the social order in a dystopian society, as an unauthorized person, I had expressed an idea.
The corresponding cardinal rule for an authorized person: Do not engage with an unauthorized person who expresses an idea. Do not acknowledge that an idea has been said in the slightest way.
Today, I encounter the mechanisms of this cardinal rule everywhere that I attempt to engage with groups, groups that I imagine share a mutual cause. or not. The cardinal rule permeates everywhere throughout society. Only authorized persons can express ideas. This does not just apply to big ideas, it applies to any idea- even to an act of volunteering a recommendation of one service over another meets with a reaction that one has stepped over the line of speaking as an undesignated authority.
At times I have encountered this rule expressed so openly and blatantly that it is flabbergasting. Once our organization contacted one of the government services that purportedly exists to help small businesses. We were put in contact with a business consultant in the arts who is reputed to be high in the echelons. The first conversation, in which I was not involved, appeared to go well and we were given a work assignment which was quite helpful but once we sent it in we heard no further response from the consultant, paid for with our taxpayer dollars, despite numerous attempts to re-engage the conversation.
Finally, I gave up and contacted a different government department to continue the work that had been started. Thereafter we received an email from the original consultant to schedule a meeting. He stipulated that he would meet with only one person from our organization but by then I had had enough and said, No, we need for several of our organization to be included in the meeting.
When we arrived at the meeting the first thing the consultant asked me was why did I think we are here, and I said “to have a dialogue”, unaware at that point as to how audaciously I was violating the rules of social engagement and the power structure of the dystopian world order. The consultant immediately set me straight when he said “Do you know what I think a dialogue is? Me talking and no one else interrupting!” What refreshing honesty! No wonder he is so highly regarded!
And so he talked on and on about himself except when he couldn’t help himself from inappropriately gushing about the value of our product line and our brand, in that way that people who do not have full control of themselves have a tendency to do, and so he let the cat out of the bag. He said what no one in our State or Town leadership is supposed to say- That Andersen Design created something unique that has a value. Andersen Design is more than our product line it is also an idea! The brand is an idea! An unauthorized idea!
Andersen Design is unique in part because it is an independent system that incorporates every phase of bringing a product to the market from design to point of sale. The Andersen Design system was created in the days before the trade shows, before the internet, and before the take over of managing the economy as a single system by the government and its private partners in the1970s.
The Maine Technology Institute is authorized by the corporate state of Maine to do what Andersen Design did in the 1950s.
2. Purpose.The institute, through a public and private partnership, shall encourage, promote, stimulate and support research and development activity leading to the commercialization of new products and servicesin the State's technology-intensive industrial sectors to enhance the competitive position of those sectors and increase the likelihood that one or more of the sectors will support clusters of industrial activity and to create new jobs for Maine people. The institute is one element of the State's economic development strategy and will contribute to the long-term development of a statewide research, development and product deployment infrastructure. (emphasis by author to indicate the characteristics shared by Andersen Design)
MTI serves new tech and big money- which is seen in the use of “matching grants”, which means the more a company brings to the table, the more it receives.
Andersen Design is an innovator in ceramic technology, an ancient technology. The Andersen Design mission seeks to benefit grassroots entrepreneurs. We prefer the small over the large.
Since there has been no communication to inform my speculations, I am assuming that those leading the Etsy Strike would like to believe that they can change Corporate Etsy and make it work for the producers and second-hand dealers, but I grew up in a different world. I don’t see the corporate platform as the only means to the market or the organized Etsy Strike as the only show in town that can speak to a disillusioned community of makers, looking for a better way. I submit that there is an alternative way that does not need a mass market but to understand and develop niche markets, a direction which once would have been considered natural for hand-made products. I believe small can be successful and lead to a better life.
I started my study of Maine economic development policies, more or less, with the Longley Administration during which the corporate state and centrally managed economy was established, using as its rationalization, that Maine’s small business economy has a harder time finding capital than large corporations and so the State needed to step in to help them. That was just a political talking point. In reality, the corporate State of Maine was likely a response to a federal enactment The United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, Public Law 90–577i, providing that the federal government would centrally manage the economy through wealth redistribution to the States.
The real purpose, as evident in enacted policy, was not to help Maine’s small businesses but to attract larger businesses and wealthy individuals to the State. They succeeded. Now Maine has the largest number of unoccupied homes in the nation and a huge homeless problem, and the same actors that created this situation want to solve it by reducing land plot sizes and providing smaller and smaller spaces for the workforce, by which they continue to prosper as property ownership becomes unattainable to the masses.
Governor Longley’s Task Force of 1976 The Legislature finds that one of the limiting factors on the beneficial economic development of the State is the limited availability of capital for the long-term needs of Maine businesses and entrepreneurs. In particular, the lack of equity capital to finance new business ventures and the expansion or recapitalization of existing businesses is critical. This lack of equity capital may prevent worthwhile businesses from being established; it may also force businesses to use debt capital where equity capital would be more appropriate. This creates debt service demands which a new or expanding venture may not be able to meet successfully, causing the venture to fail because of the lack of availability of the appropriate kind of capital.(emphasis by author)
Since the 70s the wealth concentration and redistribution networks have been streamlined into a single mutually beneficial system, connecting the public and the private, the for-profit and the non-profit. Non-profit economic development organizations like Coastal Enterprises Incorporated create for-profit investment subsidiaries in which debt-free non-profit funds are merged with private investment funds that make lower interest loans, usually based on government programs, to small businesses- but the benefit to the small business entrepreneur is still debt capital, with the benefit of the debt-free capital raised through non-profit fundraising going to the for-profit subsidiary (Model L Fiscal Sponsorship).
It might be that the for-profit investment subsidiary also makes equity loans, as was opined to be better for small businesses by Longley’s board, but the board was entirely composed of the heads of the largest and wealthiest businesses in Maine in the 1970s- and so if the small business sector were asked, they might have had a different opinion- but they were not invited to the table for a discussion that was about them. Andersen Design was one of those small companies and would not have said that equity capital is better because it requires a transfer of ownership, and with that comes terms and exit strategies. Longley’s board did not even consider that ownership should be an issue, perhaps because the board was composed of the heads of large companies in the position to acquire the smaller ones if the smaller companies would agree.
Giorgio Armani was a much smaller company in the 1970s. I am impressed by his “essential value”:
So the way it works at present is that the small entrepreneur as part of the taxpaying base subsidizes large corporations through government programs. Large corporations (like Etsy) are traded on the stock market where the bottom line is profit for investors. The corporate CEOs make top-of-the-wealth-divide incomes while working for a living no longer allows enough for home ownership.
Etsy is an interesting example since it is so clear that Etsy makes its money on the small entrepreneurial community. Economic development leaders do not attribute value to the individual maker but collectively makers account for multiple billions of dollars in sales, exemplifying that an economy made up of smaller businesses can create a thriving economy that functions by a different values system than the corporate world. States would readily offer Etsy corporate headquarters attractive tax exemptions and subsidies but taken all together if Etsy were to include production, the location of its production are businesses in a home across the world. Meanwhile, many municipalities do not acknowledge businesses in a home as either an affordable housing solution or a significant contributor to economic development. If the maker loses their home, as we did, they also lose their production capabilities and so whether or not the maker wants to sell on Etsy or develop an alternative path, they ought to be interested in a Model A fiscal sponsorship program that is for designer craftsmen, as such a program can be used to establish a studio. They can also apply to Fractured Atlas but be careful not to use the word “production” on your application as I did to have the Fractured Atlas board tell me that production means one is only in it for the money. and so reject Andersen Design as a social enterprise.
Tax-payer subsidized BIG corporation makes a huge profit and starts a foundation that gives money to the non-taxpaying sector, perhaps to a nonprofit that in turn invests those dollars in its for-profit subsidiary that provides debt capital to the small business sector that pays taxes to subsidize BIG corporation.
Isn’t debt capital what Longley’s board said was oppressing the growth of the small business sector? That’s why Longley’s board said small businesses should use equity capital instead but in Longley’s day fiscal sponsorship had not developed to what it is today. Model A fiscal sponsorship would eliminate the middle man, the for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit which gets the benefit of the debt-free non-profit funding, In Model A fiscal sponsorship the maker would be enabled to apply directly for non-profit debt-free funding. This may prove to be difficult as from my experience the system seems to have a strong bias against the small entrepreneur but in greater numbers perhaps there is strength.
Regarding the wealth divide, the centrally controlled economy has long been set up to distribute opportunities to the top and living rations to the rest. It’s a master-slave mentality. The system wants to treat the workers well, more or less, but it doesn’t want to encourage the workers to have the opportunity to rise. The workforces are seen as the instrument of the large corporations, not themselves, but the workforces tend to have a strong work effort and are productive. Productivity creates wealth. We see that on Etsy. In 2021, roughly 7.5 million sellers sold goods through the Etsy platform, up from approximately 4.4 million active sellers in the previous year. According to a 2021 survey of Etsy sellers worldwide, it was found that 95 percent of respondents ran their Etsy shop from home.
Mackenzie Andersen's The Individual vs The Empire! is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Created to Be Dismissed: Rules of Engagement of the Dystopian Social Order
Created to Be Dismissed: Rules of Engagement of the Dystopian Social Order
Created to Be Dismissed: Rules of Engagement of the Dystopian Social Order
Special bonus! How to reverse the wealth divide!
When a writer composes a story, it helps to visualize the audience. When I wrote my last piece, I was speaking to two audiences, my base substack readership derived from my business Andersen Design, handmade ceramics since 1952, and the Etsy sellers who are striking.
My Substack readership is steady and consistent and for that audience, I am relating ideas in a serial format, posts building upon others. They are like the background audience. The Etsy strike seemed to be a complementary mission with a shared purpose with a large segment of Etsy sellers being handcrafters. Selling work that is made by hand was the original Etsy concept. The foreground of my last post was written specifically for the Etsy strikers.
The story came about after being invited to submit a story for the newly formed Etsy Sellers publication on Medium. After submitting my story and waiting a day, I left an online note in the message system that I had submitted the story immediately after our last conversation. However, after a day, I did not want to continue to wait for a response so I tried to leave the message that I am submitting the story elsewhere noting that my article links to the Etsy publication and will give the Etsy publication exposure, adding that I would like very much to have the article published on the Etsy Strike site.
However I could not post that message because the message system had a lock on it- so I posted the message in the comments. Later I went back and saw the message system was no longer locked. Maybe all of this was pure coincidence or maybe I was being intentionally locked out. Right now I am weighing in on intentionality. One can’t accidentally lock the notes. One has to go into settings to turn notes on and off.
I would still sign the petition, except for the fact that I saw open campaigning against alternatives to Etsy, and so the strike seems to mirror the corporate control that it protests.
I left a new message in the message system commenting that I had seen a message on the Etsy Strike website saying that alternatives to Etsy should be ignored. Perhaps that is why I am not receiving any response to my article, which proposes an alternative way of marketing. I find that the manner in which I was dealt to be very poor. I wrote my post specifically thinking about the Etsy sellers, craft-producers like myself, but now it seems like I am being stonewalled, which of course changes my feelings about the movement. The Etsy strikers want corporate Etsy to listen to them but they will not engage with others in the maker community who have a different view, specifically that negotiating with corporate is a false hope. I understand that the Etsy sellers may live in a different world than I where marketing on Etsy is all they know, but it is hard for me to understand why they would not want to develop alternative markets. No one is being forced to leave Etsy, and fewer vendors on Etsy would mean less competition for those who choose to stick with Etsy as their main stay. I can understand that corporate would want to discourage alternatives but alternatives benefit the sellers, so why are the Etsy Strikers taking a stand against alternatives?
But I am only assuming that the reason I was given the cold shoulder is that I advocated for an alternative and that is because there is no conversation to inform anything, only a notes section that mysteriously becomes locked and unlocked. That is the conversation. Imagine if this conversation were taking place in the metaverse. With a click of a mouse, I would be banished to the underground - the natural world. Yikes!
I had broken a cardinal rule of the social order in a dystopian society, as an unauthorized person, I had expressed an idea.
The corresponding cardinal rule for an authorized person: Do not engage with an unauthorized person who expresses an idea. Do not acknowledge that an idea has been said in the slightest way.
Today, I encounter the mechanisms of this cardinal rule everywhere that I attempt to engage with groups, groups that I imagine share a mutual cause. or not. The cardinal rule permeates everywhere throughout society. Only authorized persons can express ideas. This does not just apply to big ideas, it applies to any idea- even to an act of volunteering a recommendation of one service over another meets with a reaction that one has stepped over the line of speaking as an undesignated authority.
Share
At times I have encountered this rule expressed so openly and blatantly that it is flabbergasting. Once our organization contacted one of the government services that purportedly exists to help small businesses. We were put in contact with a business consultant in the arts who is reputed to be high in the echelons. The first conversation, in which I was not involved, appeared to go well and we were given a work assignment which was quite helpful but once we sent it in we heard no further response from the consultant, paid for with our taxpayer dollars, despite numerous attempts to re-engage the conversation.
Finally, I gave up and contacted a different government department to continue the work that had been started. Thereafter we received an email from the original consultant to schedule a meeting. He stipulated that he would meet with only one person from our organization but by then I had had enough and said, No, we need for several of our organization to be included in the meeting.
When we arrived at the meeting the first thing the consultant asked me was why did I think we are here, and I said “to have a dialogue”, unaware at that point as to how audaciously I was violating the rules of social engagement and the power structure of the dystopian world order. The consultant immediately set me straight when he said “Do you know what I think a dialogue is? Me talking and no one else interrupting!” What refreshing honesty! No wonder he is so highly regarded!
And so he talked on and on about himself except when he couldn’t help himself from inappropriately gushing about the value of our product line and our brand, in that way that people who do not have full control of themselves have a tendency to do, and so he let the cat out of the bag. He said what no one in our State or Town leadership is supposed to say- That Andersen Design created something unique that has a value. Andersen Design is more than our product line it is also an idea! The brand is an idea! An unauthorized idea!
Andersen Design is unique in part because it is an independent system that incorporates every phase of bringing a product to the market from design to point of sale. The Andersen Design system was created in the days before the trade shows, before the internet, and before the take over of managing the economy as a single system by the government and its private partners in the1970s.
The Maine Technology Institute is authorized by the corporate state of Maine to do what Andersen Design did in the 1950s.
MTI serves new tech and big money- which is seen in the use of “matching grants”, which means the more a company brings to the table, the more it receives.
Andersen Design is an innovator in ceramic technology, an ancient technology. The Andersen Design mission seeks to benefit grassroots entrepreneurs. We prefer the small over the large.
Since there has been no communication to inform my speculations, I am assuming that those leading the Etsy Strike would like to believe that they can change Corporate Etsy and make it work for the producers and second-hand dealers, but I grew up in a different world. I don’t see the corporate platform as the only means to the market or the organized Etsy Strike as the only show in town that can speak to a disillusioned community of makers, looking for a better way. I submit that there is an alternative way that does not need a mass market but to understand and develop niche markets, a direction which once would have been considered natural for hand-made products. I believe small can be successful and lead to a better life.
Share
I started my study of Maine economic development policies, more or less, with the Longley Administration during which the corporate state and centrally managed economy was established, using as its rationalization, that Maine’s small business economy has a harder time finding capital than large corporations and so the State needed to step in to help them. That was just a political talking point. In reality, the corporate State of Maine was likely a response to a federal enactment The United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, Public Law 90–577i, providing that the federal government would centrally manage the economy through wealth redistribution to the States.
The real purpose, as evident in enacted policy, was not to help Maine’s small businesses but to attract larger businesses and wealthy individuals to the State. They succeeded. Now Maine has the largest number of unoccupied homes in the nation and a huge homeless problem, and the same actors that created this situation want to solve it by reducing land plot sizes and providing smaller and smaller spaces for the workforce, by which they continue to prosper as property ownership becomes unattainable to the masses.
Since the 70s the wealth concentration and redistribution networks have been streamlined into a single mutually beneficial system, connecting the public and the private, the for-profit and the non-profit. Non-profit economic development organizations like Coastal Enterprises Incorporated create for-profit investment subsidiaries in which debt-free non-profit funds are merged with private investment funds that make lower interest loans, usually based on government programs, to small businesses- but the benefit to the small business entrepreneur is still debt capital, with the benefit of the debt-free capital raised through non-profit fundraising going to the for-profit subsidiary (Model L Fiscal Sponsorship).
It might be that the for-profit investment subsidiary also makes equity loans, as was opined to be better for small businesses by Longley’s board, but the board was entirely composed of the heads of the largest and wealthiest businesses in Maine in the 1970s- and so if the small business sector were asked, they might have had a different opinion- but they were not invited to the table for a discussion that was about them. Andersen Design was one of those small companies and would not have said that equity capital is better because it requires a transfer of ownership, and with that comes terms and exit strategies. Longley’s board did not even consider that ownership should be an issue, perhaps because the board was composed of the heads of large companies in the position to acquire the smaller ones if the smaller companies would agree.
Giorgio Armani was a much smaller company in the 1970s. I am impressed by his “essential value”:
So the way it works at present is that the small entrepreneur as part of the taxpaying base subsidizes large corporations through government programs. Large corporations (like Etsy) are traded on the stock market where the bottom line is profit for investors. The corporate CEOs make top-of-the-wealth-divide incomes while working for a living no longer allows enough for home ownership.
Etsy is an interesting example since it is so clear that Etsy makes its money on the small entrepreneurial community. Economic development leaders do not attribute value to the individual maker but collectively makers account for multiple billions of dollars in sales, exemplifying that an economy made up of smaller businesses can create a thriving economy that functions by a different values system than the corporate world. States would readily offer Etsy corporate headquarters attractive tax exemptions and subsidies but taken all together if Etsy were to include production, the location of its production are businesses in a home across the world. Meanwhile, many municipalities do not acknowledge businesses in a home as either an affordable housing solution or a significant contributor to economic development. If the maker loses their home, as we did, they also lose their production capabilities and so whether or not the maker wants to sell on Etsy or develop an alternative path, they ought to be interested in a Model A fiscal sponsorship program that is for designer craftsmen, as such a program can be used to establish a studio. They can also apply to Fractured Atlas but be careful not to use the word “production” on your application as I did to have the Fractured Atlas board tell me that production means one is only in it for the money. and so reject Andersen Design as a social enterprise.
Tax-payer subsidized BIG corporation makes a huge profit and starts a foundation that gives money to the non-taxpaying sector, perhaps to a nonprofit that in turn invests those dollars in its for-profit subsidiary that provides debt capital to the small business sector that pays taxes to subsidize BIG corporation.
Isn’t debt capital what Longley’s board said was oppressing the growth of the small business sector? That’s why Longley’s board said small businesses should use equity capital instead but in Longley’s day fiscal sponsorship had not developed to what it is today. Model A fiscal sponsorship would eliminate the middle man, the for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit which gets the benefit of the debt-free non-profit funding, In Model A fiscal sponsorship the maker would be enabled to apply directly for non-profit debt-free funding. This may prove to be difficult as from my experience the system seems to have a strong bias against the small entrepreneur but in greater numbers perhaps there is strength.
Regarding the wealth divide, the centrally controlled economy has long been set up to distribute opportunities to the top and living rations to the rest. It’s a master-slave mentality. The system wants to treat the workers well, more or less, but it doesn’t want to encourage the workers to have the opportunity to rise. The workforces are seen as the instrument of the large corporations, not themselves, but the workforces tend to have a strong work effort and are productive. Productivity creates wealth. We see that on Etsy. In 2021, roughly 7.5 million sellers sold goods through the Etsy platform, up from approximately 4.4 million active sellers in the previous year. According to a 2021 survey of Etsy sellers worldwide, it was found that 95 percent of respondents ran their Etsy shop from home.
Mackenzie Andersen's The Individual vs The Empire! is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Also Published on Data Driven Investor on Medium 5/16/2022 10:25 PM