The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity from Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs

Clay, Alexa; Phillips, Kyra Maya

ISBN 10 : 1494513420 ISBN 13 : 9781494513429

Editeur : Tantor Media Inc, 2015

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The Misfit Economy Chapter 1

THE MISFIT PHILOSOPHY

URBAN EXPERIMENT (THE UX), A clandestine hacker group we met in France, has a mission to undertake positive collective experiments. Some of its members, among other activities, spend a lot of their time using the unauthorized sections of the underground tunnel system in Paris to break into buildings and restore national artifacts that have, in their opinion, been neglected by the traditional institutions of the French state. Known as the Untergunther, this subgroup of the UX is infamous for breaking into the Panthéon in Paris repeatedly over a year to restore a neglected nineteenth-century clock, much to the chagrin of French authorities. Author and journalist Jon Lackman asked them: “Why do you do it?” Lazar Kunstmann, the group’s spokesperson, responded with a simple question: “Do you have plants in your home? Do you water them every day?” For the UX, fixing is second nature. They see themselves as fulfilling a higher duty to “take care of the forgotten artifacts of French civilization.”1

Why break in? you may wonder. Why not forge a legitimate business providing these services? When we spoke to Kunstmann, it became clear to us that the UX works faster, leaner, and in a more focused way than any of the bureaucratic institutions charged with the care and preservation of these artifacts of French history and culture. The UX feels a responsibility for preserving them. So they make it happen, on their own terms.

THE UX IS A BAND of misfits. They shake things up—they question authority, provoke, and experiment.

Who are the other misfits around us?

They are the rogues who threaten the stability of business as usual. The renegades who work against the grain of their organization or community. The nonconformists who are more excited by ambiguity, uncertainty, and possibility than reality. The rebels who break the rules and challenge the perspectives of others. The eccentrics who wrestle with their deepest motivations, embracing their own oddities. The mavericks who aren’t afraid to build on others’ ideas and freely share their own, no matter how utopian or far-fetched.

BORN IN 1887, BRITISH DOCTOR Helena Wright broke barriers as a woman entering the medical profession and was an early advocate for sex education and family planning services, as well as a key matchmaker in helping to broker adoptions.2 While adoption today is a mainstream practice (and a $13 billion industry in the United States), Wright was a pioneer of the service. Through her clinics, she matched women seeking abortions or unable to care for their offspring with women in want of children. Wright was a radical figure at the time, challenging societal modesty by offering contraception and sex education for the purposes of family planning.

Wright went on to help form the National Birth Control Association and the International Committee on Planned Parenthood. In her book Sex and Society (1968), she argued that individuals should develop their sexual expression beyond parenthood. She was a pioneer of the “sex positive” attitude, arguing that sex shouldn’t be regarded with guilt or as a “dirty” act.

In her personal life, Wright was also a bit of a misfit, participating in an open marriage, carrying out séances from her home, and holding interests in astrology and life after death. She believed that today’s cranks were tomorrow’s prophets and faced opposition throughout her career from the medical establishment, social workers, and a legal system that struggled to keep up with her innovations.

Misfits such as Helena Wright display remarkable ingenuity in solving problems many are afraid to touch, let alone acknowledge. Misfits fundamentally challenge the established practices of incumbent institutions, pushing boundaries and exploring opportunities that others might be too risk-averse or traditional to pursue. They provoke new mind-sets and attitudes, catalyzing big societal conversations about issues like sexuality, violence, human rights, equality, and education. True misfits don’t just seek to provide a substitution for an existing service; they question whether the service is necessary in the first place.

Take the education industry, where misfit disrupters have, rather than proposing alternatives to four-year college or university, questioned the basis for formal schooling altogether (through the unschooling movement) and sought to radically transform the practice of learning itself.

In her book Don’t Go Back to School, independent learning advocate Kio Stark profiles a number of misfits who have found alternatives to formal education. In Stark’s words, “My goal was the opposite of reform . . . not about fixing school [but] about transforming learning—and making traditional school one among many options rather than the only option.” Stark dropped out of her Ph.D. program because she found it too constricting. She writes, “People who forgo school build their own infrastructures. They borrow and reinvent the best that formal schooling has to offer.”

Another misfit education innovator, Dale Stephens, founded UnCollege, which aims to offer curricula for self-directed learning. Stephens dropped out of school when he was twelve. He decided that rather than be taught by teachers in classrooms, he would seek out mentors who could teach him what he wanted to learn. Today, thanks in part to misfits such as Stark and Stephens, alternative education is fast becoming a growing marketplace, with online platforms like Skillshare and Coursera providing alternatives to traditional degrees. Mattan Griffel, a former instructor on Skillshare and now a founder of his own start-up, One Month, taught himself code and wanted to make the learning process easier and more intuitive for others.

These instincts are also at work in health care. We spoke to Stephen Friend, who has developed a novel way of working with disease-related research, fighting the current traditionally reward-based, closed academic approach.3 Through his non-profit Sage Bionetworks, he built a community of genomic and biomedical scientists committed to sharing ways to find treatments and cures. The pharmaceutical company Merck was one of the first to contribute clinical and genomic data that cost them $100 million to develop. Friend is working to convince more pharmaceutical companies to donate pre-competitive data. He has raised mixed funding from government, industry, and foundations. Top laboratories from academic institutions including Columbia; Stanford; the University of California, San Francisco; and the University of California, San Diego, are also participating.

Rather than working to protect their data and ideas, Friend is convincing researchers to collaborate and build upon one another’s advances in the field. Launched in 2009, Sage Bionetworks lives online as an open repository of data and models, which Friend hopes will become a sort of Wikipedia for life sciences. Friend isn’t just offering a new service. He is transforming research and development.
WHAT MOTIVATES A MISFIT?

The pursuit of reputation and esteem is one of the primary motivators underscoring all economic life. It is what Adam Smith termed the “impartial spectator,” which drives us to act in order to accrue the esteem of others. And it is a force that is just as powerful in the black markets as in the formal economy.

Those in the mainstream feel good about themselves when others approve of or acknowledge their work, often with bonuses, raises, and promotions. Misfits aren’t entirely dissimilar; many do care about their reputations. Graffiti artists try to impress one another by tagging risky locations. Hackers are constantly showing off their skills and commitment, posting their victories online for others to see. An Occupy Wall Street protestor may be just as interested in branding himself as an agitator and seeking out recognition from the community of protestors as he is in societal transformation. In fact, even within the Occupy movement, there was a certain status hierarchy at play. Those who had been with the movement since the beginning were known as “Day 1 occupiers.” Protestors earned kudos from their peers based on how long they had been associated with the movement, whether they had slept in the park, and whether they had been arrested. While it may not be an MBA from Harvard Business School, misfit innovation runs on the social currency that one can receive only from peers.

The prospect of financial gain is another of the great motivating forces in the formal economy. So it is, too, in the Misfit Economy, where such gain frequently comes with recognition and respect. One innovator we met made over two thousand dollars a day selling drugs. He said he pursued that life because it brought him street cred and financial security: “I was respected among my peers and even among the grown men in my neighborhood. At the age of nineteen, I had a nice car, a beautiful apartment, and no financial worries.”

Some of the other misfits profiled in this book aren’t so driven by the pursuit of money. Many of the characters we encountered are motivated by creative expression, the need to fix a problem, the steady mastery of a craft or skill, the urge to protect and defend their communities, or the thrill of getting away with something. Many a misfit would agree with artist and writer Kahlil Gibran, who said, “They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.”

These words offer insight into a kind of double consciousness—to borrow a phrase from W. E. B. DuBois—experienced by most misfits. Most have an acute sense of “us” and “them.” They are able to understand, parrot, and tap into the values of the formal system when needed, but also maintain a separate awareness.

While it may be counterintuitive, there are often altruistic motivations and justifications at work in the Misfit Economy. Speaking to author and activist Andrew Feinstein, we learned that even arms dealers sometimes believe they are supporting the underdog or empowering the oppressed by delivering a social benefit. Feinstein told us that it wouldn’t be out of character for an arms dealer to think, “I’m arming the powerless to bring peace.” The con artist also possesses a twisted morality. One identity fraudster we spoke with made it clear that he would never go after someone he thought “couldn’t take the hit.”

In other cases, the motivations of misfit innovators are much more straightforward: They center on survival, as well as the need to protect and defend family, friends, community, or one’s livelihood.

ONE OF THE FORMER SOMALI pirates we spoke with, Abdi Hasan, is a thirty-three-year-old man from Galkayo, a city in north central Somalia. Today he resides in Hargeisa Prison, an institution situated in Somaliland (an enclave that became independent of Somalia in 1991) that houses pirates convicted of hijacking ships off the Horn of Africa.

Hasan decided to become a pirate one night after returning home from his job at a hotel in Galkayo. He was then twenty-eight. “I was an orphan boy,” he told us in broken but intelligible English. His parents perished during the Somali civil war, and as the oldest, he was left to support his six younger siblings. Day in and day out in his work at the hotel, he told us, he had observed pirates enjoying higher incomes, allowing them to buy houses for their families, purchase cars, and sustain their khat-chewing habit. Hungry and desperate to provide a better life for his family, he decided to join a pirate gang.

Hasan was a foot soldier throughout his piracy career, boarding and guarding the ships that were targeted and then attacked for ransom. His life as a pirate spanned five years, during which he participated in eight missions, two of which resulted in the successful receipt of ransom money. He was captured—after unsuccessfully attempting escape—by a European Union Naval Force Somalia fleet, also known as Operation Atalanta.

We asked Hasan what it was like to be a pirate. “It was terrible,” he responded. He elaborated, telling us that it was traumatic to see people on the hijacked ships crying, wondering whether they would live or die. “Do you feel guilty?” we asked. He said, “Absolutely. But I was hungry.” He continued to explain, via our Somali interpreter, that the hunger surpassed the guilt.

While Abdi Hasan spoke of the need to provide for his family, other former pirates indicated that the lines can blur between financial gain on the one hand and the desire to defend and support their community on the other.

In these conversations, two factors were cited repeatedly for the origin of piracy in Somalia: the lack of sustainable employment and a history of foreign encroachment on Somali fishing stock.

The Somali government’s collapse in 1991 had turned the country into a fragile state unable to ensure the security, health, and prosperity of the majority of its inhabitants. Simultaneously, its navy and coastal policing bodies crumbled, meaning that fishermen working along the Somali coast lost protection from foreign ships illegally fishing in Somalia’s waters. Unable to find alternative employment, some fishermen turned to attacking foreign fishing vessels along the Gulf of Aden, which forms part of the Suez Canal waterway, linking the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.

This narrative—the poor, unemployed, distressed fisherman who is merely taking back what was illegally taken from him—is a strong one. While the lure of money was and continues to be the primary reason Somalis turn to piracy, this story breathes life into the movement and provides an appealing rationalization for engaging in illegal and often violent behavior.

We spoke to Jay Bahadur, an author (The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World) and journalist who has spent a significant amount of time in Somalia. He told us that Somali piracy in the mid-1990s was indeed primarily a business of ex-fishermen and others attacking foreign trawlers that stayed close to Somali shores. The movement’s early leaders, Bahadur said, were being genuine about the fact that they felt their fishing waters were being encroached. To them, this was a redemption movement whereby they were applying fines to illegal activity. These initial gangs then started teaching the methods to other people, and the movement spread throughout Somalia.

However, since those early days, most of Somalia’s pirates have lacked a history in fishing. Fishing is a marginal activity in Somalia; it isn’t traditionally Somali, and according to Bahadur, it is looked down upon by many Somalis as a way of making a living. This story, then, is presented to journalists and authors by many pirates as a way to justify their behavior. “Beyond a few aggrieved fishermen in the early days,” Bahadur told us, “it doesn’t really hold true.”

Piracy in Somalia really took off in early 2008, when the government of Puntland experienced a collapse of sorts. Unable to pay its soldiers, the country experienced a surplus of young, armed, and unemployed men. They joined pirate gangs as a way to earn income. The Puntland coast guard even trained some of the early pirates in how to conduct boarding operations and navigate. It was this combination—a semi-collapsed government, coupled with a high monetary incentive, low risk, and the geographical location of Puntland (straddling the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean)—that can be considered the catalyst for the explosion of the piracy m...

Revue de presse

“This imaginative, provocative book reveals that if we want to overcome barriers, we can find surprisingly valuable lessons underground. I never expected to learn so much about entrepreneurship and innovation from pirates and gangsters.” (Adam Grant, Wharton professor and author of GIVE AND TAKE)

"What do Somali pirates, Amish camel-milkers, and gang leaders have in common? They're all innovative—and successful—misfits in today's global economy. Think you can't learn anything from outlaws and provocateurs? This book will make you think again with engaging stories and insightful analysis of how people operating on the fringes create unique business models, and in the process transform the culture around them." (Daniel H. Pink, author of TO SELL IS HUMAN and DRIVE)

"The Misfit Economy helps us to understand the lives of those men and women who have had to depend on illegal enterprise just to get by. In this book you'll learn how the misfit economies can bring meaning to those who are hopeless, jobless, and hungry for more than a handout. You'll meet people who are just like everyone else in searching for freedom and opportunity, but aren't afraid to bend the rules of the system." (King Tone, Former Leader of the Latin Kings, a hispanic street gang)

"If you want to learn what Somali pirates have in common with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, read this book. It's a colourful guide on how to shine a light on the ingenuity that often lies in the dark depths of all types organisations." (Rachel Botsman, co-author of What's Mine is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live)

“For those wanting a fresh perspective on business practices or working lives, this is a snappy introduction to a new way of thinking.” (Financial Times)

A well-paced read about a unique perspective on supply and demand and those who create it. For anyone interested in business or economics—especially those who hustle. (Library Journal)

 "Lively and insightful."—The Economist 

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Tantor Media Inc
• Date d'édition: 2015
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1494513420
• ISBN 13: 9781494513429
• Reliure: CD
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible