For the past six months, my primary project quite separate from Wiki World Order-related experiments has been to evolve the web-based tools of my father’s business. The work in progress can now be found at BigDataLesko.com, and much of it will soon be duplicated in a mobile app. Given that I have slowly grown into voluntaryist (anarchist) concepts, and his work has historically focused on government money and programs, I want to share a few reconciling thoughts. I am speaking for myself, not my dad, Matthew Lesko.
His primary goals have always been focused on empowering people to do whatever they love doing, becoming their own boss, and turning work into play. Shifting from wage slavery to flexible control of your own life hours and trajectory, doing things you actually enjoy doing and hopefully truly care about. The passion in doing work you love improves your chances of success, even though failure is always a likelihood (so you might as well have fun in your attempts). Find something to do that you wouldn’t want to ‘retire’ from doing.
Until the past few years, the best/easiest way to start your own business was generally to take advantage of government money and programs for which we have already paid in, but tend to be used more by fat cats and their subsidiaries. But recently he (and the world) have increasingly focused on crowdfunding as a generally superior method to becoming an entrepreneur. Not only does this decentralize the process of raising money for your venture, but you can successfully prove the viability of your business by finding your first customers before even starting. This is truly a revolution in small business creation, blind-siding old models taught in business schools past.
I was excited about the Occupy Wall Street movement, because I had been calling for revolution here via Wiki World Order. I was pleased to see coalesced outrage spill over from the internet to the streets, and got involved despite its plentiful shortcomings, especially the lack of strategic union between Occupy and Tea Party, which could have more deeply changed history. But I began to picture what felt like a best~case scenario… perhaps nationwide strikes, pots and pans in the streets, and a full-blown peaceful revolution. And I had a serious realization that we had no system in place to replace the established one, whereas the establishment had spin-off systems B through Z waiting in the wings in the rare case of an [uncontrolled] revolution.
Every dollar which funds the established corporate-industrial complex comes from us…either directly through thoughtless purchases or through our tax dollars. Withholding our dollars from those machines which dominate the established system not only dis-empowers them, but empowers the less centralized alternative society we will need to build together. The corporate-industrial complex will not end because we destroy it, but because we outgrow it, make it obsolete, and [gradually] replace it…’revolution’ or not.
If maybe one-fifth or even one-tenth of people were running their own business, controlling their own lives while providing something valuable to the world, then mega-corporations (and their ownership of government) would literally not exist.
For some, the easiest way to get there might be to reclaim some of the government money (that otherwise tends to trickle up towards the 1%) to fund their piece of the decentralizing solutions. I do see this strategy as an aikido move against the established system. But I also think more entrepreneurs will find crowdfunding to be the superior strategy. Either way, we desperately need far more of us beautifully unique humans working for ourselves instead of tentacles of ‘the man’. We need to support and initiate solving more needs/problems while adhering not to quarterly shareholder profits, but to quadruple-bottom-lines: social, environmental, financial … and PASSION/LOVE/FUN!
Because of all this, I am happy to help technologically bring pops’ business into this decade. I can’t thank my parents enough for the values instilled in me, and am crazy lucky to love my family so much…even if they are [still] statists. ;-P