At first glance, a statement of social entrepreneurship might sound grand and good, but when you scrutinize the concept you might come to the conclusion that “social” and “entrepreneur” is in fact nothing more than an oxymoron.

There is after all no entrepreneurship that at least on some level isn’t social.

Consider reversing the idea: What does “unsocial entrepreneurship” look like? There is no market without clients and no taxes when products or services aren’t produced. On the whole, this model has been working fairly well, granted the occasional depression. Mismatches between the factors are offset by means of adapting and leveraging fiscal policies. Standard Keynes stuff, as it were, and though many liberals disagree on it, that’s pretty much how the market (predominantly in the Western economies) operates.

So why add “social” to “entrepreneur” a critical individual might ask? Experience tells us whenever there are too many words to describe something, it is either about creating an image, outright lie, or something in between. A due course in an investigation might be asking the “social entrepreneur” as to what he (because it most often IS a he), or she, what the business is all about. At this point, things start to get rather unclear and one is likely to hear the most outrageously funny claims told with the most serious of faces (social entrepreneurs are probably excellent poker players – beware!).

Without mentioning any particularly odd examples, the conversation usually goes something along the lines of this: The individual, the “social entrepreneur”, feels (with emphasis on feeling, not thinking) that “something” is wrong with the world, and he or she would like to help. Usually, this help is restricted to creating some form of online presence, getting others to notice it (yes, that’s right, “social” media is of course involved), then… well, there usually won’t be a “then”, since the individual, or by such time often a group, will notice that market rules cannot, should not and will not apply to what it is they’re actually involved with – charity.

Charity, at its best, is a by-product of a market economy. Capital can and should be used to prevent social injustices, stimulate growth and be a tool for overcoming poverty and suffering.

Charity, however – is not a business. It is exactly what the word means: Charity. Business models do not apply to charities, and charitable organizations have their own tax laws, regulations and codes of conduct attached to them. It is, as it should be. Social entrepreneurship, by contrast – is a sort of bastard child who’s inherited the worst possible DNA from both parents. No matter how social entrepreneurs will struggle to call their audiences “clients”, the term client will always denote “choice”. It is as inevitable as dark clouds denote rain. A “client” for social entrepreneurs has no choice, he, she or it, is selected – often by way of committee – incidentally, a committee again being not very compatible with anything even vaguely entrepreneurial. And while we’re at it, we might as well mention the confusion and general disagreement on the term “entrepreneur” within the ranks of the socially entrepreneured. There are hard-liners who are claiming that the term is far too egocentric and focuses too much on the individual. What we are faced with is a quagmire of conflicts, subjectivity and unclear motives.

In effect, given the vague definition of social entrepreneurship, the lack of consensus within the field and the fact that the “business model” has some pretty serious theoretical flaws – not even mentioning what seedy Pandora’s box is likely to await the scholar who were to aim some serious research into the premises of social entrepreneurship – then what, in fact, are we looking at?

Given the charity-sector’s prevailing financial problems, it makes sense to re-brand from “charity” to “social entrepreneur”. Things are so much easier when contacting the bank, an conservative institution who’s likely to be very skeptical of too overtly leftist money-leaking schemes with little or no financial benefit, control or business plan. A ruse to camouflage terrible business from the eyes of bankers then? The explanation seems more than likely, given it’s recent popularity.

Not being able to define what it is you actually do can be made to work to your advantage, especially when your speaking partner isn’t paying attention (very useful in the case of seeking grants from “social” banks, the utterly derelict and morally corrupt European Union or any number of social divisions within State or Municipality). For instance, when confronted with facts, objects and figures, there’s the possibility of morphing the alleged “entrepreneurship” to a different place on the map, befuddling the question with a rhetorical pirouette consisting of a clever use of the word “social”, “responsibility” and “growth”. Ta-da, the money rattling machine says.

Money, usually generated by legitimate, often old-fashioned businesses. With business models, revenue strategies and actual people doing actual work. Money, made from engineering ingenuity, hard labor and clever market services. Money accumulated through charity – and taxes.

In this short text there is no place for a complete discourse on social responsibility of the corporate sector, and we will most fashionably forego to mention the other, perhaps tad more regulated branch: CSR (though be sure, also beset by critics, unsurprisingly often from the ranks of the “entrepreneurs” themselves). What is noteworthy, however, is that if there is any actual value to social entrepreneurs it is that in many cases it is a useful tool for hiding skyrocketing figures of youth unemployment – and some of the online efforts built by them are clever mass data collection units – even if they usually turn out to be complete conceptual failures.

Social entrepreneurs are obsessed with scale. This, they by and large share with actual businesses. It is not enough to “save” one client and operate one unit at a time. For social success (to whatever end stated) you need to be able to enlarge your operation. Even in a sustainable world, there needs to be some level of growth, even if it isn’t strictly marketable. Sadly, as most of the social ventures are based in online milieus, they are either one-off’s built on the image and work of individuals or simply impossible to migrate to the real, unrelenting, unforgiving world of actual problems, suffering and trauma.

Yet, the hype goes on and legions of social entrepreneurs, entrenched in modern offices – subsidized by tax payers or businesses that actually generate capital – continue to make small or no difference to real world problems, and are quite free to feel cosy about themselves contributing to some grand, esoteric goal.

Woe is he who would dare to question such lustrous visions. The highbrowism of contemporary social youth is almost as dangerous as it was of its punk counterpart, some two-three generations ago. Though, arguably – the Punks were less serious about the whole thing – and viewed themselves a lot less seriously. Today, it is not uncommon to encounter sect-like behavior, ostracizing of critical thought and other generally un-social behavior coming from the future saviors of the planet. Attitudes are however only just that – attitudes, and what prophets do not have their fallible days?

Or should the real business world tolerate such behavior? After all – it is this world and no other, that in the end finances these youthful antics. Perhaps we should expose social entrepreneurship for what it, at least for the moment, seems to be: Neo-communistic market-hating fetishism. Perhaps we need to see through all the imagery, the hype and outright lies; the cocky self-assertiveness of people who have achieved nothing, yet claim rights to the achievements of others. Perhaps we need to call social entrepreneurship by its rightful name: Theft.

Then, and only then, will we be able to put some serious, actual, hands-on, effort into correcting the injustices of this world. We cannot will the world into submission – regardless of how many “online startups” we finance. Only hard work, tears and blood will achieve that.

We need boots and hands on the ground: engineers, doctors, scientists and skilled individuals – not sect-minded-minded youth with their heads in clouds.

However, the immobilising period of infancy is what ensures our survival. For the most part, being born as a blank slate (disregarding personality and genetic traits as ultimately, these are of very little consequence to man kind in general) is an excellent opportunity for the caretakers to imprint the individual with lessons learned from previous generations, in the hope of said individual reaching maturity, adulthood and being able to compose coherent, interesting thoughts and processes of its own to further aid its community – or himself. This is, again, where humans differ from animals, as the latter have no significant process of transmitting or retaining knowledge to their young.

In theory, this works and ensures man kind to evolve, in spite of being an imperfect and wasteful process as most individuals to reach adulthood never really transcend a state beyond that of an imprinted clone; their thoughts actions and indeed entire lives, are inconsequential and from a strictly ecological point of view – a rather poor use of scarce resources.

Nevertheless, at a time when technology has improved human life expectancy and enabled man kind a historical breather, as it were – the cult of infancy, man’s way of celebrating our prolonged lives – has become the status quo for the modern, evolved homo sapien. We are, and long to be, children in all but physiology (even if there are trends, mainly in fashion, to revert to these states, too) well into what used to be considered mid-life.

The technological landscape of the past, twenty, thirty years, has laid ground for what is today popularly called social media. A global, interconnected market of opinions and user generated content instead of proprietary, individually produced matter. The main trouble with this new model is that it is by and large an un-paid effort of the masses that in exchange for free software consent to being spied upon. Disregarding the fact that the software in questions is poorly built and rather demeaning to humans, the main point is that originality has for all intents and purpose ceased to exist – both online but rather more worryingly, also in society.

Culture has ground to a resounding halt online. Mashups, remixes, debates about cultural icons of the last fifty odd years and regurgitated, stolen content (called “open”) is routinely spun in the online blender to the extent of becoming one of the major bandwidth sources. Looking at modern music is like looking into often skillful, but very unoriginal, copies of material from the 70′s and onwards. Something similar is taking place in photography (with applications mimicking the flaws of old camera lenses, for instance), literature, art and just about every major cultural branch. For the first time in decades – there is nothing modern and nothing truly challenging in culture, save the drone of the ever-debasing, ever-dropping standards of dignity and integrity.

Enter the Modern Child. As many are aware of, children demand attention and if unchecked, will develop fatal egocentricity. Social media is the perfect tool for the modern child. A way of notifying the entire world, at the speed of routing packets to online servers – of one’s needs, tastes and other generally dull information. Social media is a success partly because it is a near-perfect tool of human regression. It is also the perfect cover for the obvious fact modern humans seem to be less capable of focus and social evolution. This prolonged state of adult infancy, or digital neonatality is also, rather ironically, what prevents the young from exploring new ideas. If the parent is still online, pushing their stale tastes to the world – how is the child ever to truly debut its mind to the public? Some re-use is fair game, that goes for all culture – we all build on the shoulders of giants, but what happens if nothing significantly new is introduced into the system?

In rejecting the individual and his way of bringing into the world, original content – and rewarding him for it – we have also rejected any meaningful evolution.

Social media is imbecile media because it does not embrace the quality of the individual thinker but rather embraces the tastes and motives of the unthinking collective.

Social media proponents often speak of empowering the individual, yet inspected closely – the success stories of this new format, scale badly or not at all. One idea will work for a single person, or website – and thousands will follow in the very same track – with no yield at all. This is proof of a failed communication model. Social media proponents grasp at straws to prove the usefulness of the channel but the rhetoric is murky. The real winners of social media are the few that can aggregate data streams (or, “the cloud”), not those who remix the content of those streams. In the long run, such a model is untenable for the users who are not only actively stripped of individuality (while being convinced of the opposite) but also of any means or expectations of receiving monetary rewards for their efforts. Rewards online come in the form of traffic sources and digital badges, much like the rewards given to children in kindergartens.

It is worrisome, for instance, to witness the state of journalism after the effects of the social media. Few are prepared to pay for content, so the quality of the content has become terribly low. This is particularly true in smaller, even if on the surface labelled “democratic” countries, like Sweden, where the media has never really had a honest, analytical mind of its own but has rather been a vehicle for political manipulation pretty much since the beginning of the printed word.

While there certainly exist a small number of assertive individuals who can manipulate the vast online network to their own ends, the bulk of the Internet citizens face a losing proposition. The Internet, much like many countries in the middle east – lacks a stable and comfortingly situational aware, middle class.

On the Internet, nearly everyone is a pawn: an unpaid, unskilled apparatchik.

Societies work and operate on the premise that everyone, or nearly everyone, agrees that they should. Laws and rules are laid out and for the most part, people stick to them, simply because they recognise that everyone has the most to gain from following them rather then breaking them. A lock is easily picked. Yet most do not pick it because they wish to have their own property untouched, as well. The Internet, however, has become a zone where these rules are dictated by a precious few, and changed at will. Property isn’t property, and few, if any, boundaries exist. It is a free fire zone that humans are quite incapable of managing. Or at least haven’t yet learned to manage.

In the mean time, we have millions of adult children playing and remixing culture, much like toddlers that rip pages from books and stuff them in their mouths. Presumably, some day, at least some of these children might grow up, rather than be stuck in the sorry state of perpetual childhood. In what state will our jointly remixed-to-dead-culture be by then? And how long will this take? The owners of the cloud, the Google’s and the Facebook’s are more than happy to play the part of the buddy-parent and throw ever-more faux-advanced software toys to their digital kindergarten – and few seem to be able to ever graduate from that macabre place of smelly diapers and nonsensical drool.

Perhaps hope lies in the fact that we have it from reliable sources that childhood isn’t only about bullying other children but also about boundless, unrestricted vision, high altitudes and magical worlds?

But if so – where are these worlds to be found?

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Terre des Hommes (1939).

Crowdsourcing, or crowding, is the popular term for creating things together, usually with the net as hub. The process is mediated by the vast amount of collaborate, sociodynamically instituted tools available to the general public. Of late, we’re being led to believe that this process is the panaceum for all of those pesky creative ills we’ve all been waiting for.

And arguably, it really does have its uses. In the related world of open source software, for instance. Or fundraisning. Or any activitity with an altrustic motive or where distribution is concerned, it can perform wonders. I say open source software, because it is evident that the construction of software by means of working together and licensing the work to the general public has both yielded results that push the evolution forward where economy and intellectual property rights are concerned. Put simply, open source software works as a business model.

Another key aspect of the open source culture is the example of an independent project that finds completion of the missing pieces via the OS-framework; without necessarily sharing the entire contents of the whole thing. OS-communities are extremely useful for finding specialists that are willing to work towards a common goal, if set up in a way to flatter their resumé. Or need of pride of creation (for the participants and project owners alike). This relief from the restraint of deadlines, budgets or other organisational pitfalls are a bounty that exceeds any doubt towards of waiving the intellectual rights to the community. Thus follows that any sharing done with the community is done not out of an altruistic motive but rather out of an ego-driven need to accomplish a personal goal (whether that goal is to preserve the culture of the open source movement or simply tap the community for solutions makes no matter – it is still an egodriven process!).

The omenous signs begin collecting like dark clouds only when the open source process permutates into other fields than those of software engineering. It is a dangerous derivative because while the process of creating something collectively can at its best be wonderful in terms of project management, distribution and leadership, its downright abhorrent on a personal level. Thoughts belong to people on an individual level and function only inasmuch as one person can transmit this to another. The thought that sparks the action is the result of an individual process (even if it usually influenced by others). The process of transmission in a social collaborative has not only set aside but rather replaced the actual process of thinking.

The term open source is native to anyone below thirty. It is the natural, digital ecosystem of a public used to sharing playlists, random gossip (a petty process called “blogging”), participating in online scrapbooks (no names) or even more criminally vulgar matters of manipulating the scientific truth to suit personal needs and or tastes on Wikipedia. The open sourced crowd, paradoxically striving for an individual expression, loses any actual individuality when they hand over the concept of propriety to the general public. In short and in sharp contrary to popular belief, there is nothing personal in being public. The vast digital landscape becomes an endless real estate to be shared, repainted, remixed, re-told and re-sold – but never colonised. The cynic in me  is sure that Marx is laughing his pox-ridden ass off somewhere in a remote corner of Dantes Hell; because within all this seemingly gracious and utterly democratic landscape lies the ruin to any real creation. Even if the speed of distribution and sharing of ideas and thoughts has increased, these thoughts and processes still stem from one mind at a time. And the more selective and thorough this mind is, the better will the result be.

There is nothing wrong in asking for input (via any means, social or not) – but as we’ve seen online, there is seldom anything good to be said for letting strangers create it, haphazardly. The amount of work needed to control the crowd into creating anything useful might as well be put into the actual creation of it. The lack of decent content to match the outstanding technology of today is downright daunting. And it is that way because creating something truly individual is hard – but painting over a fleeting thought, publishing it online, adding photos to it and letting others comment it – is not: A bucket of crap, emptied in public will remain a bucket of crap, regardless of how many times it is re-shared, or remixed.

There is no escaping the fact that somewhere, at some point – some one will have to do some serious thinking.

(thanks to K.P)

Eventually.

In a nutshell, the project is all about producing, shooting and funding a crowdsourced horrorfilm. Given the changes that the movie industry is struggling with, these guys may have bet their money (or rather, are asking you to bet them) on the right horse. With roots in the web-native remixculture, collective cunning of the net population and overall willingness to share media – this very much seems like a viable way to (at least in parts) produce a decent film that will neither screw the audience nor the team out of fun and earnings.

The lowdown in links:

• The team recently launched a revamped site where you can participate in the project.
• Check out the team channel on YouTube. While there, make sure not to miss the kick-ass Animated Storyboard or the Concept Presentation.
• The project also has a Flickr site to show off  the gorgeous concept art.
• Eavesdrop on the team and fans via Twitter.
• Team page at Wreck A Movie.
• ThePact recieves initial research funding from MEDEA at Malmö University.
• Media coverage: Filmnyheterna writes about ThePact (Swedish).

Patient interview, 2008.