1/ "You Might Have Earned It, But Don’t Forget That Your Wealth Came from Society" Subtitle: To be human is to earn the right to share in the wealth generated by productive social institutions Thread 👇 evonomics.com/wealth-of-huma…
Earning wealth in the context of society and infrastructure
15 tweets · May 2019 · 118 likes · 6 retweets · read on Twitter
2/ This article helped me make sense of some internal confusion around what it means to have earned something. To me, it points at a beautiful way of thinking, beyond capitalism & communism (as ideologies) that recognizes the intertwingled nature of human life.
3/ Most of that came from this paragraph: Even if you make your money, however much, from your own enterprising, that necessitates a context to support that enterprise, including infrastructure (private or public) to feed & house a population to buy your products.
4/ I think about this myself, as the solo founder of an app (complice.co) that now basically runs itself and pays for me to work on whatever I want to:
5/ @CompliceGoals has created & continues to create lots of value in the world, & I managed to get it set up so I "capture" enough of that value to live on. Did I do it myself? In one sense yes. But I couldn't have done it without all of the existing technology I'm building on.
6/ I haven't made a Wardley Map for Complice but if I did it would include @Heroku, @Stripe, @MongoDB, @Angular, @NodeJS, #WebRTC & dozens of other programming modules. (and of course the entire electricity, computer, & internet platforms)
7/ The Complice philosophy could have been implemented a century ago, mostly on paper. And basically has been! Lots of goal-based planner notebooks. But I couldn't have "single-handedly" created this app and this business even a decade ago!
8/ Sometimes we have the crazy idea that we can create wealth out of nothing, but (like everything) it always exists in context. twitter.com/Austen/status/…
9/ This applies at all scales—to me, & to Bill Gates. What is possible is a function of context. Sometimes this is exciting: those I tagged above are all stoked I'm using their tech for my app—that's what it's for! 🚀💞 Other times... 😢
10/ Wealth is a kind of negentropy, & since entropy can't be destroyed, to create wealth I either need to dump my entropy elsewhere or get negentropy input. Part of the context of a lot of wealth creation has been by externalizing costs, onto other individuals or the context.
11/ "There is no away" is a slogan that's been used around environmentalism, instructing people to not throw things away, but it applies much more broadly. I can pretend, I can hide, but ultimately I am inalienably part of the system I am sending your externalities into.
12/ To be clear, this doesn't mean I should feel guilty. Guilt is a resource you can only play zero-sum or negative-sum games with, so as this thread talks about, it doesn't allow us to make more possible!
13/ On the contrary, if I think I should feel guilty about something, I'm ever the more likely to hide & pretend and not think about it! Or get defensive if I do. I need a stance beyond blame, that will allow me to be aware without getting defensive. codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/bla…
14/ One tool for staying out of blame: consciously reframe either/or thinking into both/and thinking. I earned my wealth AND I couldn't have done it alone. I care about myself AND I care about others. People are suffering AND people are in ecstatic flow.
Really really really vital corollary by @diviacaroline. Part of the both/and.