Ruminating over business, entrepreneurship, economy, capital and social forces.

2. Blam Kpow Kaboom
Don’t go into business, it’s ugly! More than ten years ago the
guy from Jupitermedia Research said at the lecture at the
NYU, “it is a baseball bat business”, regarding the music
industry. The thing I have learned as a so called entrepreneur
is, any business is a baseball bat business. So if you are not
prepared to get hurt or vice verse, fall on your ass so many
times or feel Sartrian nausea, don’t do it!
However, since entrepreneurship became a huge trend there
is a slight chance liberalization of socio-economic forces as
well as its infrastructure could occur, however I sincerely doubt
such development is possible since the change has to be
fundamental and profound, bearing the deconstruction of
historic materialism and even more so, delivering idiosyncratic
(social) system.

3. “CRACKING THE CODE OF BUSINESS”
The internet is full of pseudo experts cracking the codes of business, SME
interpreters, self righteous opinion shapers and thought leaders as well as
postindustrial apologists and cohorts. This torrent of verbal diarrhea is just like a
biblical flood; however it is not, since there is nothing significant, shattering or
groundbreaking about it, au contraire, and more abundant it becomes it grows
less significant.
God forbid someone would actually seek for the truth; well I don’t blame them
since anyone trying to do that was merrily bonfired, crucified, decapitated or at
least marginalized. Furthermore, in this social hyperreal environment, where the
references collapsed in the reality they refer to (Baudrillard at large) it is
impossible to seek for the truth, the same as this article is probably going to end
up as just one shitty drop in the same torrent. As prof. Velimir
Abramović, biggest expert on Tesla’s work and life and huge erudite and
pundit, would point out;- now the housewives with the doctorates from the MIT
are engaged in thinking, which is quite absurd, to be able to think on the level of
ontology or gnoseology you have to develop all your spiritual, intellectual and
other entities, to be a holly man or a woman. As far as I am concerned anyone
has a potential to become a thinker, to develop unprecedented intuition, tap into
collective consciousness; however, paradoxically Academia is the first to
program people not to do so.

4. “CRACKING THE CODE OF BUSINESS”
As for the business, media, technology and similar “though
gurus” what they really do is repackaging, paraphrasing and
serving the useless platitudes. They are rather far from the real
thought and introspection thus far-flung from the truth.
Furthermore they are rather good servants of the hyperreal
society, promoting value zero.
Since my mission is to find the truth I am reluctant to let go
the search, even if I get bonfired. The fact is; economy is still
deeply rooted in Marx’s historic materialism; a capital is a
god, the fact which is obscured in simulational social
hyperreality if we refer to Baudrillard and extremely more
deviant if we take into equation the financial market(s).

5. This is an example of what I am arguing. Notice how there is always a
number of things you should do or don’t do, which clearly conveys
conditioning and programming. In the next analysis I am going to
conduct discourse and semiotic analysis on some of these texts.
“CRACKING THE CODE OF BUSINESS”

6. Rigid Infrastructure vs. Arbitrariness
“If it sells, it’s creative”; another idiotic and deviant argument obscuring
the truth or railroading the searching for one. It sells if someone has
means of production, invested millions in manufacturing (in the third
world countries most likely), and of course billions in marketing, has a
political back-up etc., still the product and the business could never the
less fail. Laws of the market are random and arbitrary and instead of
making it work for the small or micro entrepreneur who can use the
same arbitrariness to gain advantage against the big business, the same
entrepreneur resorts to rigid historic materialism, as well as falls for the
same propaganda and conditioning, and fails.
If we ought to perceive and analyze the markets, buyer, behavior or
anything else pertaining to business and economy we will always find
patterns, trends and phenomena in our data and in our analysis;
however what we should rather look for is a (standard) deviation.
Deviation or digression in the data opens an entire new outlook on a
problem, shows some future trends and most important reveals a new
and incredible complex system and its properties (chaos theory, liquid
dynamics, neural systems etc.)

7. Branding the Soul
The other day I have found a presentation on SlideShare; “How to Make
a Shitty Brand”, scaring the people not to make mistakes in creating a
brand. What the hell is that all about? So let’s say you make a perfect
brand, but still you have no clients, nobody knows about the brand and
you have no money for advertising/marketing, you do soc net marketing
but still you are not getting any results. Sure, because you need, yet
again, the capital, and 10-15 years of sweat, blood and tears, to build you
company and your brand, so what the hell are that morons babbling
about. I understand they need to sell their product/service, but the thing
is they (advertisers and marketers) are to blame for hiding the truth
about the correlation between labor, means of production, profit etc.,
which means obscuring the true nature of the capital.
To make things more absurd the same people selling you the story of
creativity would, if you push them hard enough, admit it is not about
creativity it is about media buying (the same admits the main character
of the Mad Man series in one episode). Yet again we have the same
equation which is blurred by the marketers, advertisers and similar sorry
bunch, and that is, capital is flowing towards capital.

8. The Innovation Myth
Be innovative, be creative, and you will succeed, “capital dances with the
talented”, and bullshit like that. It is a blatant lie!; a vicious propaganda, a
tool for programming. Ok, so I have swallowed the same propaganda and
started with my innovative ideas, some were over the top and some were
for my standards contemporary and market ready. However, I was not able
to get any capital for developing neither one of them. Nonetheless, my
solution is to put the highest price tag on my ideas, solutions etc. to appear
as surreal as well as to constantly raise the price. As for the ideas that are
over the top, even my closest friend says; nobody frigin understands what
you are J.R.R Talkin’ about, try something more commercially viable, or
something the masses can swallow.
Ok, even if you have an invention that could be commercialized, you would
need shitload of money and hordes of attorneys to register the patent, and
still you can get robbed by the corporations, because they own army of
attorneys. If by any chance your Seed or Start-up gets funded you gonna get
ripped off first by Angel investors, then by Venture capitalist.
Furthermore, the question is what is really innovative. If we follow Einstein’s
premise: if the idea is not a bit absurd there is no chance for it; and surely if
the idea is a bit absurd, over the top or rather progressive it is not
economically viable ergo innovation and business do not go together.

9. Idiocracy
Analogously to the story of the innovation myth goes the story of idiocracy. It is the same
plan of the elites to keep people from the truth, the value, and the cognition, to keep them
in the indolent and juvenile state of blissful unawareness. They are succeeding and it is
getting worse and worse. When I presented my friend the idea of The Game, in which there
are no winners, in which the environment is created by the players decisions, and every
decision impacts the game on the system level (determining the full accountability of the
player for the each and every decision), creating the system which could generate its own
intelligence; he was fascinated. However, he was certain that I would not have an
audience, even if I come up with the framework in which such a game could be executed;
and the capital of course to develop it.
“This is from another galaxy, find something stupid and banal that millions would buy”, he
shouted. And, he resumed, please watch the movie Idiocracy, because then you will
comprehend what kind of people could be your audience. However, it is hard to switch from
one mindset to another, plus I cannot let go of my belief that only the most brilliant ideas
are the one that can generate the most value or create idiosyncratic system, which has a
potential to overrun social reality.
Packaging my theories into presentations, even designing every slide in Photoshop makes
me the victim of the same phenomenon of idiocracy and marketers conspiracy. The channel
is an entity; although confined by the constraints of a medium and the tech
infrastructure, it is striving to release itself and achieve self actualization. It is a
paradox, however the same paradox can work for us if we are able to understand the value
and have the cognition of the new system and its properties.

10. Superstructures
Every capitalism is “crony capitalism”, whether it is Chinese or Canadian, because not
only that we live in a neoliberalism or corporatocracy, but to use Marxian lingo
superstructures exchanged their place with basic infrastructures and furthermore
they are constantly exchanging their places in a system without center or
margin, moving in eccentric manner, to end the premise in Baudrillard’s fashion. The
thing is, with every new eccentric spin the cancerous cells of the capitalism are
growing wilder and stronger.
If we look at the historic actuality, the elites per se or the dictatorship are not always a
bad thing, Neumann (at large) contends that dictatorship can consolidate the state
and socio-economic forces and then the peoples have a responsibility to generate
democracy or some other humanist political infrastructure. However, Maurice
Duverger (1972) claims democracy is an illusion in which the elites are exchanging and
giving to peoples (through elections and some other political institutions) an illusion
that they have a power to change political and social reality. As I see it, Demiurgian
actualization of the peoples is not possible since we are already late in an
evolutionary context for such a political realization. Social contract is an impotent and
outdated system, which developed or mutated into utter travesty. The same mutation
is a key for collapsing the social contract and for uploading an idiosyncratic
system, without any recollection to the previous one (social contract) in the collective
consciousness, respectively rendering absolute actualization of the individual
potential.

11. Musical Chairs or Why
Shouldn’t We All Win?
The Zeitgeist movie brought the idea of capitalism resembling the game of
musical chairs; somebody always has to lose (the chair). And it has nothing to do
with branding or not being innovative enough, or not following start-up dos and
don’ts, or similar bullcrap, it is just a nature of the deviant game of capitalism
directly in cahoots with social reality of social
adaptation, parasitism, manufactured need and a synthetic phenomenon of
competition. So many stories I am hearing these days is about people going bust
with their companies. They invested 20 years of work, bunch of money, their
product is economically viable, branding is ok, but they went bust. Now, there is
something terribly wrong here. To invest 20 years of labor, capital etc. in
something, anything, should bring you some reward, at least not be in debt and
to be able to support your basic needs. But no, one has to go under like a
criminal.
So the only conclusion is that it is the basic infrastructure of the game called
capitalism or “the musical chairs”, in which big capital, financial markets, and
world movers and shakers are playing with micro entrepreneurs and SMEs (even
with big businesses) as well as with the social forces or entities in general, like
with the puppets. If they have managed to generate Wall Street crash in the 30-
ties, remove Gaddafi (whose capital btw built Hypo Alpe Adria Bank, and was
also in Unicredit group bank and some other banks), as well as froze 30 billion
US$ of assets of Gaddafi’s wife, just imagine what they could do to you and me.
However, it is not about money or assets it is always about the power.

12. Capital is a Disease
Marx regarded capital as an entity and as something cancerous. If the capital is an entity then it
has a potential or it is self aware. If that is a case then the entire economy and all its infrastructures
and institutions are the product or a mutation of the capital, not only the basic relation and
codependence between labor-means of production-profit but even more so as parent of the
deviant financial market and the disease that tears the very social fiber.
Respectively capital as an entity produced or mutated the biggest travesty in our socio-economic
(hyper)reality and that is financial industry. To go into explaining the travesty of producing or
mutating bonds, derivatives, securities and creating quadrillions of dollars that doesn’t really exist,
which are not in relation to any (real) value, it is redundant. I have spent 2 years explaining to the
bankers at the Croatian Bank for Reconstruction and Development that fixed assets could also be
custom code, web portal, software etc., not solely factories, vehicles, herds and plantations. I did
succeed, but still they are insisting on deploying separations of different kind of capital
distribution and allocation, which is absurd.
One more example of the same travesty is the EU and the currency Euro, nobody in their right
mind would create a single currency for the thirty-something states, all at the different stage of
industrial and social development, which basically robbed national currencies of any autonomous
fiscal regulative, like depreciation etc. Furthermore, the system of so many states under one
constitution, government and economy is cumbersome, slow, has enormous bureaucratic
apparatus, and at the end it is simply retarded. The system should be swift, flexible, and instantly
adaptable to any new social trends or change. Only sane conclusion on that matter is one had to
have some hidden agendas and some other plans to create single currency and the Union, like
colonizing and robbing resources of less developed states, force-feeding their markets with goods
consequently selling them financial products to be able to finance consumption, creating a crisis
by crushing the euro, which is good for controlling the masses and the states; or even generating
war, which is always good for the business and mutating more non-existent cash.

13. The Properties
As earlier mentioned, like in the game of musical chairs, someone
always loses its chair. The breakdown is inevitable for the most of the
players of the business game since it is the nature of the same
game, ruthless and cutthroat. The game per se has an extremely rigid
infrastructure: for the one to win the other has to lose. If we would all
win the system would collapse. Furthermore, the infrastructure is
paradoxically on one side rigid and on the other arbitrary.
However instead of capitalizing on the same paradox and arbitrariness
the social forces are shoving the arbitrariness into a rigid infrastructure
helping in creating the malignant system that could benefit only the
few. The deeper insight into properties of the mentioned system would
give an opportunity to generate superior system which could overrun
the existing one. My proposal of the system which I am still working on
is Cornucopia (instead of Economy), as well as the game with a self
actualizing intelligence.

14. Partners
Ohh yeah, that is certainly a special chapter. There is an old Croatian proverb: partners’ mare sits
in a mud. The examples are many, however I will mention just a few. “We are community, we are
partners, we fight for the same cause”…, that was the mantra of my first partnership. However,
when money finally started to come in there were no more community, partnership, nor fighting
for the same cause, it was every man or a woman for himself or herself. When my first business
partner and a friend stabbed me in the back, instead of bitch-slapping him and taking control of
the company, I had tears in my eyes, wrote him a long letter, because I was so shocked that I was
unable to speak and finally withdrew from the company. Of course he ruined the company and
made a debt, which resides on my name as well as reputation as a manager and businesswoman,
although I had nothing to do with it. Maybe I am not cut-out for the business, maybe I was too
young. However, I am sure I don’t like business routine and have a pretty clear vision about the
business I would like to conduct, and the keyword would be Gallant, and that is rather far from the
baseball bat business provenience we are dealing with. The other situation when somebody who
was suppose to do the business with me, totally disregarded me as a person, a professional and an
expert, went into negotiation with the world’s biggest media company and failed. For me
mentioned examples are fundamental lack of basic human decency and lack of values.
They say love and business do not go together. However, it doesn’t have to be love per se, but the
loyalty and inclination toward a friend and partner or simply respect for another human being.
Nevertheless, that is utterly unacceptable in the ugly business of business. My perception of
business was always: gentlemen’s agreement. Contracts, sure, yeah, but if somebody wants to
hustle or destroy you one will do it with or without a contract. People always think first of
themselves, their needs, and regard another human being or a community as irrelevant, as well as
they seldom look at the big picture; which brings us to one of the most important paradigms and
that is a power struggle.

15. The Power Struggle
Being honest and not a player in business is equivalent to a suicide. One has to
play, manipulate, distort facts and fight in order to achieve anything because
that is not only a social reality (or hyperreality) it is a system behind our stage of
evolution. To make things worse, if the big bang theory is true (and vast others)
conflict is the basis of the universe. Consequently power
struggle, dominance, parasitism is in our not only social programming but in our
fiber per se. So there is power struggle instead of mutually supportive entities.
My theory is that there was no big bang; it was an idea of the universe that
became cognizant of self thus the phenomenon of power struggle is conditioned
by the contemporary perception of the universe and the social programming.
However, the axiom that the atoms constantly collide has nothing to do with our
deviant social reality and the phenomenology of the herd.
I like to play, not that I do not, but in my game everybody wins, or there are no
winners, depends on a perspective, which is opposite to predominant social and
evolutionary paradigm. The theory of Foucault proposes that the power is not in
the hands of the chosen few, but it is a network spread across the social reality.
However, since it is constantly being exchanged…if that is so, then the power is
in the possession of the system per se, the system which metastasizes, and
becomes more and more unstable.

16. Business Plan on a Post-it
The question of labor and value, for Marx is not in question. He proposes value theory of
labor in explaining the capitalism and correlation means of production-labor-profit. I hate
putting a price tag on the value of my work, which cost me a great deal. However, when I do
put a price tag, it is always too steep for the client. Well, if I am selling myself I am not
selling myself short, au contraire. I did some business consultancy for the foreign client. In
the purchase offer we agreed on a friendly price, since that was a current relationship
between me and the person who ordered the job. However, the number of working hours
was also low. To my surprise there was no project documentation, so I worked my ass of, to
create partial project documentation (which wasn’t my job) in order to understand the
project and its development, spent more than three times more working hours, spend
money to travel abroad and they asked to do more job for the same price (a miserable as it
is) than agreed or a little bit more. I have elevated the projects price, value and investment
and turned it into something grandiose, however they were intimidated by it. They rejected
my vision but at the same time they were unable to tell me what their project and
investment should be, so I was anyhow unable to finish my job.
They also started to play against me, which was preposterous and absurd. My best friend
said: for that amount of money (and the work you already did) you can send them business
and financial plan on a post-it. I have tried to communicate the problem via letters, but
there was no response. Respectively they received an invoice 1000% higher than agreed in
order to be aware of what the real cost of such work and consultancy would be. As my
friend metaphorically said, they wanted a kebab stand and you brought them a chain of
luxury restaurants, what do you expect?; they got scared… So the one word for them would
be: peanuts. And yet again, paradoxically, my belief is; nobody is a peanut.

17. The Heritage
My ancestors have a curse, although they were building from
hospitals, social realities to states they were all humanists; working on a
betterment of the society as well as the individual. Although my great
(great) uncle was a high ranked free mason; he took the idea of masonry
literally, as striving for the excellence of the individual, as well as working on
a constant progress of the society; just one example: he saved around
hundred people from a political prosecution, hiding them in his hospital and
providing money and papers to go across the border.
My theory is that there is socio-political reality or something that is
historically or socio-politically determined and at the same time there is an
individual resolve, which could generate significant social impact. The same
curse genetically transferred to me. Even though I experienced extreme
personal and professional breakdowns, I refuse to stop believing in human
potential and evolutionary quantum leap. My ideas of the future society
include new syntax/(supra)system, Cornucopia system instead of
economy, brain stock exchange, self actualizing intelligence etc.
(presentations and documentations of the ideas could be found on the
Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/soric1) as well as on my company’s
webpage http://oneofthree.biz).

18. The Shiny Moments
Of course there were some shiny moments in
business, especially when my client was buying a biggest
textile factory in the region. We had 20 days to come up with
20 million Kunas (around 3 million Euros) for the bankrupt
factory. One day we were late for the meeting at the
bank, driving like mad through the rush-hour in a
Porsche, phones ringing off the hook, the other partner
waiting for us at the bank; that was a cozy as well as dreamy
sensation.
I was also ecstatic when I finally managed to launch my pet
project after 4,5 years of difficult struggle. However, those
moments were so meager; subsequently I think it was not
worth going into entrepreneurship at all. Conversely, I finally
realized: I am not an entrepreneur at all, I am who I am, and if I
need to define it, it would be, a visionary.

19. The Gentleman
Accepting business relying primary on gentlemen’s agreement, a
handshake, a smile, single malt and a cigar, it’s an illusion.
Thinking about it now, as well as having the communications
background I could have realized that the same idiom gentleman
is semantically programmed for male dominance which could be
extended to the capital in the same manner of programmed
dominance, arguing as well that the male is not the issue here
but the dominance per se.
Perhaps the change of the syntagm gentlemen’s agreement into
something else would cancel the dominance, which is
programming the social reality and change the infrastructure of
capital(ism) and the society; or to be more to the point canceling
the programming by parasitic discourse and actualizing
idiosyncratic syntax and absolute cognition.

20. The World Leader
The way the elites are controlling masses include generating crisis, intimidation and
creating state of fear, economic slavery, brainwashing via media, data-mining, social
stratification, impotent social system etc. The social system based on a social contract is
impotent since it disables any actualization of the individual (freedom), as well as social
advancement and creation of the new social reality, because it exist solely for the sake of its
very own existence without any hope of leaving this powerless loop in which social forces
have actually no power to change social reality since they have surrendered their integrity
to the social contract. This loop is even more so perceptive in the society flattened by
hyperproduction of media, its convergence not only in the context of technology but as a
convergence or an implosion of social institutions.
Social travesty in which value equals zero (Baudrillard at large) is either generated by the
proprietors of the system, or the system managed to mutate and escaped the control of the
proprietors. Anyhow even if the system escaped proprietors’ control they are still or even
more able to capitalize on the same mutation of the social contract. Any instability of the
system, if that is the case, with the social contract gives the opportunity to collapse
it, which gives the social forces an unprecedented opportunity. However, they would need
to be aware of the social contract, its weaknesses as a system, as well as to be aware of the
new system, a superior one, one that could be uploaded into collective conciseness. My
premise is; the next thing in allocation of resources, creating value and generating social
reality is a mind as the only viable capital.