Social Enterprise Networks was recently awarded Social Innovation seed funding from RADIUS and Embark. This post is cross-posted from their website.
Social Enterprise Networks is a cutting edge initiative at Simon Fraser University that empowers social enterprises who are taking social welfare into the next post-capitalist era. By providing social enterprises with access to the software they need to maintain online social networks, we safeguard the passing of information and resources between social enterprises, helping them grow and maintain their presence.
Paul Mason, writing for The Guardian, hails the beginning of a new era of what he calls ‘post-capitalism’. This is rooted in a lesser known theory spun out by Marx about information sharing, as Paul writes, “Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a “general intellect” – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would “blow capitalism sky high”. Paul further writes, “by creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being”. Social Enterprise Networks is part of this info-capitalist revolution. It seeks to empower the ‘educated and connected human being’ that sits at the helm of a social enterprise, one click away from a vast sea of human social networks. This is with the aim of supporting a business model, social enterprise, that subverts capitalism using a method, networked communication, that further subverts capitalism.
There’s little doubt that a profound and subversive revolution is underway. Social Enterprise Networks recognizes this and seeks to position itself as a leader in providing basic technological assistance for social enterprises looking to plug into the network. More than this, however, are our longer term aims that seek to position social enterprises at the very forefront of the revolution in machine learning and networked ‘things’. We already provide our social enterprises access to an app that allows them to take advantage of machine learning so that they can create better, more targeted Tweets.
As part of our strategy to grow with post-capitalism we will continue to use radical world-changing sources of funding, such as Radical Ideas, Useful to Society (RADIUS).
