Digital Distributism

Part II: From Artisans to Employees

This is the second part of an essay for the Equitable Enterprise Initiative at Institute for the Future. Part I is here.

For a happy couple of centuries before industrialism and the modern era, the business landscape looked something like Burning Man, the famous desert festival for digital artisans. The military campaigns of the Crusades had opened new trade routes throughout Europe and beyond. Soldiers were returning from faraway places after having been exposed to all sorts of new crafts and techniques for building and farming. They even copied a market they had observed in the Middle East — the bazaar — where people could exchange not only their goods but also their ideas, leading to innovations in milling, fabrication, and finance.

The bazaar was a peer-to-peer economy, something along the lines of eBay or Etsy, where attention to human relationships and reputations promoted better business. There was no middleman, no central platform through which exchanges were conducted, except for the appointed time and place of the bazaar itself. Since people transacted back and forth, all sorts of interdependencies developed that in turn fostered more and better commerce. This was a bound community of commerce, where transactions were informed by a multiplicity of values.