Psycapitalization: The Art Storefronts Model
A return to the roots, Productivity as the true source of wealth.
In a centrally managed system, everything is coordinated to benefit a top-down socio-economic order and promoted as a benefit for the masses, with whom the power elite barely interacts. Since the 70’s when the state central management of economies took root across the USA, the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer. Today the wealth divide is morphing into the ownership class-working class divide, and the new social structure, recognized by the state, is corporate feudalism, but the state’s tunnel vision is not the Eye of Providence, it fails to take in the wholistic picture.
In my role as a peer reviewer at Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, I observe the back end of the relationship between academia and the corporate world. Academic institutions develop language and psychologies to serve the purposes of the super corporation. Academia constructs new language terms, called newspeak in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four written at a time when 1984 was as distant a future as today it is the distant past. Newspeak reflects the constructs of a man-made totalitarian superstate.
By conventional definition, the superstate is formed by the union of several smaller countries or nations. Taking liberty with the standard definition, the term applies to the conglomeration of the public-private-for-profit-nonprofit sectors, united concentrated wealth, sectors of the economy once conceived of as separate, each serving its distinct purpose, but now they are one.
As the science fiction of the twentieth century has become today’s reality, the superstate incorporates all institutions into its ubiquitous grid while dwelling in a self-made cocoon, believing itself to rightfully control every aspect of human society and treating all it cannot control as nonexistent.
In Orwell’s novel, the resistance to the superstate was called the underground, but today’s resistance is not underground, it is out in the open. The resistance to corporate feudalism proliferates across social media as a self-organizing culture, growing stronger every day, but the plans of the superstate do not acknowledge the existence of that which does not serve the superstate’s purposes. Does the superstate intentionally ignore what is going on around it, or does the superstate truly not see?
A newly emergent term within the corporate academic complex is “informationalization” which means the process by which society is evolving from the age of industrialization into the age of information, instituting Big Data at the heart of all institutionalized social structures. When informationalization is incorporated into the educational system, education becomes vulnerable to becoming an instrument of indoctrination. All varieties of information from disinformation to rigorously verified information can be channeled into Big Data, and information can also be “disappeared”.
“Psychological ownership” and “psycap” are two concepts developed in academia to be implemented within corporate culture, both signifying psychological states of ownership. While psychological ownership is a targeted illusion, psycap is the intrinsic ownership by the self of an individual’s skills and creative capacities which corporate culture seeks to optimally cultivate within “the workforce”, a term that collectivizes individuals into a mass transformed into a business asset owned by the cooperation and its shareholders. In today’s ownership class-working class divide, “workforce” could also be called “slave-force” or ”serf-force” but that is not so copacetic a terminology.
There is an increasingly relevant disconnect between the superstate’s identification with the workforce and the individual workers within the workforce whose psycap the superstate seeks to mine for the benefit of its investor class. The superstate acts as if unaware as its sensors are not tuned in at the molecular level.
The superstate does not see individuals. it sees masses that can be used as instruments for its purposes. Therefore the superstate does not incorporate that the center of personal security is shifting location from the corporate culture to within the the individual and that this is happening collectively on a meaningful scale.
The system has been transferring wealth from the bottom to the top of the economy for decades, The illusions it manifested about serving the greater good can no longer reach across the abyss of the wealth divide. Outside the scope of the superstate’s view, the workers know where the path carved in the seventies is headed and they have been constructing alternate networking systems and innovating new pathways leading back toward a more heterogenous organization of human society..
Once a corporate job held a promise of a secure future but the rapid growth of technology disrupted job security, The new security must be anchored in the individual's ability to adapt in a rapidly evolving world.
Corporate culture seeks to develop psychological capital (Psycap) within the workforce, encouraging workers to innovate for the corporation, but psycap is all that the workers have left to own and they only rent their psycap to the corporation. Within a value exchange that has progressively diminished for the workers, the workers may not see merit in renting the entire house to the corporation, maybe a room, or perhaps a bunk bed, or a tent, the rest will be reserved for rebuilding the foundations of personal security.
Psycap is necessary to be an independent entrepreneur trading uncertain job security and exclusion from the material ownership class for a life lived on one’s own terms.
Productivity is the True Source of Wealth
The term “psycap” as a subset of “capital” takes us back to productivity as the source of wealth. Financial wealth can be used to motivate productivity, which in today’s world is increasingly identified as “innovative” productivity, but financial investment is secondary to the productivity sought after by the ownership classes within the working classes.
The corporate superstate is instituting artificial intelligence to replace humans in many job functions but artificial intelligence cannot innovate. Artificial intelligence mines what has already been created by human authors, reconfigures it, and throws it back. It is also secondary to human productivity.
The terms “workers” and “working classes” signify individuals who have their own lives. The term “workforce” is used by leadership signifying instruments, assets, and trading pawns useful to the superstate to advance its plans.
So it was that for many years I was hearing about the economic development resources of our community and state but it was like the proverbial water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. There are no resources to support entrepreneurs at the roots of society unless those entrepreneurs are in industries targeted by the superstate that controls the flow of capital in modern society, equivalent to controlling the flow of water in an agricultural society.
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Now there is a newly recognized form of capital. It is the innovative capacity of the workers within the workforce. It is called psycap. meaning psychological capital, the psychological state of mind that optimizes the innovative potential of the workers! In corporate culture “psychological ownership” is an encouraged illusion that can be used to optimize the worker’s willingness to use their innovative talents in service of the corporation and its shareholders.
Who controls the psycap? Really? Who ultimately controls the psycap?
While I was overwhelmed with all the messaging proliferating my world and promoted by the corporate state and its private pals, I didn’t know about the heterogeneous system being created by companies like Art Storefronts. Etsy was the largest bullhorn in the handmade sector, and rumor is that Etsy has been enshittified.
Art Storefronts was evolving at a modest pace in my social media stream until one day I was courted, not as Andersen Design, but as Mackenzie Andersen, artist photographer. I was receiving invitations from numerous Art Storefronts representatives promoting the organization.
And then I discovered that Art Storefront is a true heterogeneous organization of micro and small businesses in which originally sourced psycap is a significant capitalization mechanism for the growth and success of the network. Art Storefront is a foundational network similar to the network I envisioned for Andersen Design with many of the basic functions already in place, a framework that I can potentially work off of to develop my concepts for the new individually owned production facilities of Andersen Design.
By originally sourced, I mean, the individual’s individually owned psycap. My ability to create images is my psycap. My designs in turn generate business for the printers and merchandise providers and I do not have to have financial capital invested in the physical prints and merchandise, though I can optionally do that too. The Art Storefronts team provides excellent human support with extra services at an additional cost. I am particularly interested in Co-Pilot which is comparable to having a marketing team but I have to generate some financial capital for that:
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The small enterprise printers and the merchandise-providing companies are capitalized in traditional ways but their sales and marketing is capitalized by hundreds of micro-economy artists and designers. Art Storefronts is a heterogenous mutually supportive network in which the small companies capitalize the micro-economies ability to offer merchandise and in so doing the micro-economy generates revenue for itself and the small business economy.
My vision for Andersen Design has always been a chicken and egg puzzle with marketing being one of the factors in an interactive whole. At times one has to be receptive to the guidance of the universe to find answers. In my case marketing has emerged as the starting point for developing the other parts of the system, and Art Storefronts makes it possible.
We live in a world undergoing rapid transformation through the forces of technology, money, power, and nature. We need to contextualize our choices as interactive with larger systemic revolutions. Do we want the totalitarian hierarchical system to take over more and more aspects of our lives? or do we want to reverse that direction and return to a heterarchial system, or at least have valid options to options driven by the hierarchy?
Support the heterarchy. Art Storefront is cool! check out my store! Fill your home with large images and scattered pillows of nature! Wear your heart on your shirt! And endlessly impress by casually pulling out the coolest-looking cell phone your friends and acquaintances have ever seen! I’ve got it all! Check it out!