The nature of social capital is to be invisible
The reward of being at the center of the circle is only picking up the empty beer bottles in the morning.
I learned 20 years ago that a network of specialists was the form hyper-empowered by the internet; in the 1990s it was mailing lists.
Over the years I’ve sunk maybe a third of my life into building and maintaining networks. I do that (and have the time to do that) largely because I didn’t build a nuclear family - no kids hauling on my arm when I’m trying to nerd something. I didn’t choose to do this instead but it’s something that was available to me because I didn’t have kids.
The vast majority of that captital is rightly invisible. It’s the ability to mail any one of two dozen people and get £500 or £5000 worth of specialized professional advice because we have history, and because over time they’ve started to understand the difference between a scene where I’m present, and one where I am absent. A very substantial chunk of ER’s culture, and most of the core team, come from the work I did as an engagement manager on the first ER project. Because I’d filled my life with people who get things done and have the potential to do more, when that network integrated into ER it became a very substantial part of the infrastructure of the project.
But the nature of this kind of work is to be kind of thankless and invisible, because the reward is the caliber of people you get to spend your time with.
It cannot be monetized, lionized or rewarded because then the field becomes contaminated with people who are doing it for the money or the power - political actors - rather than the genuine conviviality which Ivan Illich is such a fan of. It has to be done for the love of it, and the love of it has to be its own reward.
I have taken money for running networks three times, for Hub Westminster, Limewharf, and EdgeRyders. In each case, it bought me a slab of time to spend with my friends, and a chance to make enough noise to meet some new friends - I owe Limewharf a permanent debt of gratitude for being the venue where Leo D. showed up, for example - we’ve all greatly benefitted from that, but me most of all because I made a new friend.
But the price of running as a largely demonetized actor is that, while you have the integrity to act, you don’t have much money. If we were a real wealth-and-power network, we’d never know if the people trying to get close to us wanted to be our friends, or wanted to be in the loop of people we faciliate access to money for. We’d treat each-other as people treat each-other in Hollywood, or in finance. Now I am not against money, indeed I’m a little fonder of the stuff than I probably should be, even if I’m not willing to compromise for access to it. But I do think a lot of the equality and integrity of the EdgeRyders space comes from our relatively limited access to funds: you can do this work because you love it, but (so far) it’s not easy to maintain a middle class standard of living doing it. Everybody involved is either too poor or too busy, and mostly both.
The conclusion I draw from that is this: EdgeRyders as a company is really hard work. EdgeRyders as a community is a lot easier, but then we all have to go and get day jobs, rather than getting posted to exotic locations to help out the UN 
The strength of EdgeRyders.com (vs. EdgeRyders.org) has always been that EdgeRyders.org motivates people to get involved, to resolve their differences constructively, to cooperate rather than defect in the long-iterated version of prisoner’s dilemma which is so often a part of life in business. Because of the community feeling (which there are much better words for in Dutch, German and Swedish than English!) we’re incentivised to keep everybody in the boat, even when we feel like throwing them overboard.
Business and business decision-making eats social capital, the fabric of community, like a harsh abrasive. That’s why we need to pay people so much to work in areas like finance, or Hollywood - those lives are lives dominated by distrust, power-gaming and unfair rewards for throwing your compatriots under a bus. For this reason, and amid all the pressure we have to make Matera an event which helps to ensure that ER has the ability to pay people to keep the show going, I want us to remember that the only real asset WE have is the community, our social fabric. There is no money to speak of - there’s just enough potential to make it seem like careers and world changing projects might start here. But there is a very real and special thing, and we need to be aware of it - only celebration really gets to the heart of what makes this space of ours special.
If success finds us, we must not become TED. We must not become like the Theatre, with its star system. Some will be famous, some may be rich, but if we lose what we have in the process, we’ll all be so much poorer. And there’s the paradox: to be paid for social captial creation changes our motivations in ways which tend to kill real, authentic social capital.
I think we can find a way through this, but it’s next year’s task, the thing to work on after Matera, when we know roughly where the big moves are. Does that make sense?
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