Tag Archives: tie dye

Work that turns into Work

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Today – and last week – I had two days where I really understood why outsourcing could be a good thing.

Gigi and I sell real tangible goods – tie-dye 2.0, also called mudmee tie-dye. Gigi is the part of our enterprise who creates the products and also takes them to art and craft shows. I just sit in the house and stretch out my feelers to potential customers through the internet.

For me, building the site and programming the entire inventory and order-handling were part of a self-assigned internship to learn how to work with the web. I also learned a lot about marketing, which I did not have to do much of when I was only dealing with very few clients in the high-tech and scientific programming, something I had done before venturing out into the new realm of the web.

These last two weekends, we added two new types of shirts that had already created good responses at shows, and now our mailing list responded very well. So, after the waves calmed down a bit, I was working till late into the night to process all those orders.

CollectionFlaredTShirts

Initially each and every order was met (by me) with big excitement and a quick trip to the paypal backed to print the shipping label and get those items out. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when there are so many orders that it takes me all night to get them ready for shipping – but I also understand why outsourcing can be a real good thing.

Yet before  I can even consider outsourcing I would probably have to ‘blackbox’ my system some more. As it was all handcrafted, there are still some elements in my system that are only obvious to me – because I built them – but not black-boxy enough, so that I  could just hire somebody and let him or her do the order processing.

In case you are a bit curious what this is all about – I am speaking about Mudmee Tie-dye at  JustZen.

When Loved-Ones Stop You

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ironweb

Larken Rose is one of the most prominent contemporary anarchists around. Maybe I should stop using that all too emotionally loaded word and better call him a voluntarist. It describes the same, but avoids the widespread misunderstanding of what anarchism really is.

A voluntarist is somebody with the philosophy and conviction that a free society must be built on the voluntary interaction of individuals instead of the initiation of force through a government apparatus.

When I learned about Mr. Rose and his ideas, they were fundamentally different than they are today, as, during that time, he actually took the government seriously and actually challenged them to show him where his interpretation of the law was wrong. He was certainly right about the law but very wrong in his assessment that somebody of the challenged cared. He got a time-out for a year, which he used, while fed and berthed by the federal government, to write. One of the results of that writing was a novel with the title The Iron Web. I report about this book in another article.

This book subjects the reader to the question “who owns you” and tries to give some hints on how this could be answered, and establishes a real-world iron web that is comprised of those people who fully consciously answered it with a resounding ‘I’ and act upon it. If you do own yourself, you do not owe allegiance to anybody, and certainly not to any government and its laws.

To signal this state of the mind, Larken Rose suggested the symbol at the top of this article, and I was immediately busy adding this symbol to a commercial website selling tie-dye that I run then, and that still operates today.

But if you have somebody in your space who has not had this change of mind, you have somebody who does not want to upset the powers, and the fear of breaking any of their ‘laws’ can be overwhelming and intimidating.

So, I actually received pressure for removing this symbol, not from the adversary but from my ally. I hate to call them adversaries, as that gives them power they don’t have intrinsically, but I am lacking a better word.

This is the system how it has been built, it uses indoctrination to make loved-ones the enforcers – that stinks but is a matter that has be be dealt with.