Just the other day, I was having a discussion with a friend over whether she was anti-capitalist or post-capitalist. The latest issue of Adbusters comes to the rescue with a feature by Peter Barnes, author of Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. His use of a software metaphor for a social institution had me at hello.

The features begins with a seemingly inspiring question...

Can we turn capitalism into an open source design project and make it more sustainable and responsible to our and future generation's needs?

... And then becomes a version history of sorts, beginning with 1.0 (Shortage Capitalism) and ending with 4.0 (Sustainable Capitalism). I would link to the article itself but Adbusters is a bit exclusive with their content, so I'll just recap it here.

Shortage Capitalism (1.0) is the capitalism we all learned about in high school. People have needs, businesses make products to fill them. If demand exceeds supply, prices go up. If supply exceeds demand, prices go down. Everyone acts in their own best interest and "the market" does the rest. It's easy enough to understand, but capitalism hasn't really functioned like this for a long time.

Next came Surplus Capitalism (2.0). Resource extraction and manufacturing are exported to the Third World, lowering costs but sending externalities skyrocketing. With a wealth of goods, supply far exceeds demand—but corporations have learned how to prevent that from translating into lower prices. Advertising becomes the new business of business. To pay for all the things they don't need, consumers turn to credit and go into debt. This is the most current version... and it has a lot of bugs.

Commons Capitalism (3.0) is Barnes' proposed next update. Inspired by Garret Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, he envisions a capitalism that includes a commons transformed from a victim to a market force of its own. Nature (including air, water, or even DNA), along with communities and culture, would have representation via a trust tasked with defending and preserving the commons and paying dividends to the collective shareholders.

The essence is to fix capitalism's operating system by adding virtuous feedback loops and proxies for unrepresented stakeholders.

Finally, Adbusters imagines Sustainable Capitalism (4.0). This conglomeration of existing ideologies like True Cost Markets, Ecological Economics, the Tobin Tax, and Corporate Social Responsibility come together to create a model of capitalism that could evolve beyond the EOLed version we have now.

I have two major responses to the article. The first is that, while the metaphor of capitalism as open source software is a great one, power over corporations and their "operating system" is already in the hands of civil society; we just keep forgetting. It is dangerous to objectize "Capitalism" as something not fundamentally controlled by humans. At the end of the day, we are the programmers and the responsibility for providing tech support (in the form of patches, updates, and new features) falls squarely at our feet.

Second, and this comes back to my friend trying to decide if she is an anti-capitalist or post-capitalist, I want to caution anyone thinking that merely having a roadmap to 4.0 secures its inevitability. Every oil worker kidnapped or brick through a Starbucks window is a bug report reminding us that the current product is not working. Put more fancily, the Hegelian synthesis requires conflict between actual and potential ideologies in order to manifest progress.

Finally, can we all take a moment to appreciate how incredibly clever I am to have put the Web 2.0 reflection under the Monopoly Guy?