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The FringeWare Mission

My friend and former colleague Tiffany Lee Brown published an acknowledgement of FringeWare, Inc., a company that Paco Nathan and I cofounded in 1992. She includes the mission statement I wrote, which includes memes I still support. [Link]

Fringe Ware, Inc., is a small commercial enterprise dedicated to community development around a fringe marketplace, where the edges of diverse alternative cultures intersect. We feel that the Market is the core of any community, and sick markets mean sick communities… just look around.

FWI acknowledges the essential importance of trade, but our mission is to create a context for E. F. Schumacher's "Economics as if People Mattered."

What's in the Fringe Market? We focus on publications, events, and products that we find interesting, fun, and enlightening. We publish printed and electronic periodicals including Fringe Ware Review, TAZMedia, and Unshaved Truths; operate a retail bookstore and mail order service selling street tech, gizmos, wearable subversive memes, etc.; host an Internet mailing list for information from/about the cultural and technological fringes; and organize events with other organizations on the Fringes.

We're learning that people can survive quite nicely without huge corporations, huge governments, and huge dogmas pushing their lives. So here is the FWI alternative: start your own corporation. Trade with other like-minded people throughout the global village. Encourage innovation and promote entrepeneurship. Promote fair, cooperative business practices. Emphasize products that facilitate creativity, health, and play. Explore consciousness alternatives. Build community through advanced, available technologies, e.g. computer networks. Respect and consider the natural environment by promoting sustainable resource use. Have fun, be weird, and make what it takes to survive.

Welcome to the fringes of art, technology, and society. From here innovation emerges, and here survival, through cooperation and use of the unexpected, counts. --Thanx!

jon posted this at 2:39 AM
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