Rural Entrepreneurship - how can I help ?
Milton Mukhopadhyaya
Dad talked about ruralization of economy: a very interesting concept, worthy of researching in Harvard Business School; in that context he wanted to know if I could help him with some ideas on how technology could help such an endeavour. When I started thinking about the problem, I realized technology by itself is quite dumb, it becomes powerful only when put it in the 'human mix'.
Unless we are talking about totally changing the current economic structure, we must understand ruralization means developing entrepreneurship in rural environment. At the moment rural environment primary consists of farmlands, one of the essential ways mankind learnt to exploit nature. Farmlands use economy of scale and has predictive goals like a factory(*). If we intend to achieve ruralization of 'capitalistic economy', our first goal has to be ruralization of innovation, ruralization of 'creative destruction'.
Marketing:
The next phase would consist of marketing of rural economic outputs. Here we all could probably help with the Internet infrastructure. Now we know the reason why we buy a product is not only because of its essential objective utility but its symbolic utility as well. Consumers buy certain cars because they are 'status symbols', they buy Gucci products for its brand prestige etc. Though we crib about these things from time to time, it is a source of great hope. "Brands exist in consumer's mind.": This phenomenon makes us special. You dont sell products, you sell stories and myths. The objective is to create a symbolic reality with a set of shared symbols.
Implementation:
We can start a blog just for this specific purpose ( along with a facebook group, a myspace group, and possibly an Orkut group). Contributers in the field would supply a semi-fictional seed story about a specific product created by rural entrepreneurs. All other members would create something with the seed narratives that is publishable on the web : pictures, audios, stories, poems etc . We may follow guildelines such as :
> Each seed narrative may contain a photograph of the product
> Each such secondary narrative must contain a reference ( probably name and photo) to the original product.
> There should be some element of fact in the semi-fictional seed.
> Dont sell 'sympathy'.
There has to be one essential copying rule : anybody can modify, recreate and re-publish these stories/poems/pictures/multimedia as long as they keep the reference to the original product.
(I remember reading about some economic experiment conducted by some economic research institute, where they invited writers to write story about 'junk' products and then sell them on ebay along with the story to check the economic value of narratives. Could not find the reference now. )
Notes :
(*) I am aware of a lot of prejudice attached to the fact that farms are 'closer to nature' etc, but in that case all the metals and minerals of a factory are as natural and as earthly as anything else. ( On the other hand trees may have a different kind of intelligence that might influence men.)
""Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?"
And the angel said unto me,
"These are the cries of the carrots,
The cries of the carrots.
You see, reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day
And to them it is the holocaust."
- Lyrics from a song called Disgustipated by Tool.
