What can the ownership economy do for research?

When I was 19 I decided to go to Milan and to try to become a model or something like that. I wasn't enough slim, but I could still aspire to work show-business environment where you didn't have to be particularly slim. It was something so typical to all pretty (immigrants) girls in my age, I wandered a lot trying to find a way or at least figure out the world I was living in. I would notice that there were a lot girls who didn't know how to do anything in special except to show up their physical appearance and things like that and they would make a lot of money with a few efforts. I lied to myself that I would be able to try something like that and be very good at the university at the same time. At the end of my 'journey' I found out the truth about how such market works and what I had to do to reach some kind of success. It felt comforting because we don't usually know what we have to do to reach a certain outcome. I realized it was a lot about a form of occult prostitution, meaning that very much about it was to cover up a high-class prostitution. And everybody told me all you need to do is knock on the right doors and be submissive enough. I thought this is a really high price to pay for reaching a little success (because I was not super beautiful. In that case my chances would have been higher) and some easy money. I admit sometimes I did accept advances and tried to tell myself that this is fine, this is how it works, but I would realize that the more you climbed, the steeper the road would become, The managers would try to manipulate the girls in believing that this is the price to pay for wanting something 'so easy' (in the eyes of the other people), that if you didn't submit you were just a fool who doesn't understand opportunity and don't deserve anything. Or that you aren't just strong enough. I have to admit that it is very easy to fall for that kind of thinking, because it is normal to feel guilty for wanting to make money out of the fact that you are just born a bit better looking than the average. Therefore, it was very normal to believe that. But weren't the managers doing the same? Trying to make easy money through the body of young girls? At the time I couldn't realize that. I realized that I wasn't able to pay the price, not because I am close minded sexually or something like that, but because the point wasn't very much about sex as it was about submissiveness. The girls who made some success or money they made it not just because they would accept advances or something like that, but because they were liked by the right people at the right moment. I knew a guy who was a relatively famous actor in the environment and he told me that it is like a club where there are parties ect. If you happen to be likeable to (some important names) then you would made it. If instead, you would happen to make a bad impression, like for some reason they wouldn't like you, you were doomed to fail, no matter how pretty or good you were, no matter how hard you could try, some would stop you just for a reason like that.

I realized I had never understood what submissiveness really is and that it is far deeper than accepting to have sex with someone you don't like. An example I saw was seeing a very beautiful girl trying to convince a rich man to invest on her or something like that, she didn't just accept sexual favors, she would tell him that she was in love with him, that she was crazy about him and make him a lot of compliments and stuff like that. It was so terribly fake, especially because she was paid to be with him at the first time, how could he believe her? I guess he wasn't, he just liked her attention anyways. I had never understood this kind of behavior in men, but I got more convinced about it when I looked at escorts internet sites where they would underline the fact that they were kind and gently and lovely, that it was never just about sex. Another example was when I was at a party and there was an important guy and all the girls would behave ridiculously to attract his attention. I was so ashamed at realizing how fake people could be, the amount of ridiculousness they would do to be liked by the others. I understood that I would never be able to compete with something like that. How could I compete with people willing to be so fake and ridiculous just be likeable. I could never win a game like that, even if I had been far prettier and slimmer. It was just impossible.

Fortunately, from time to time, things changed, thanks to an important innovation such as the internet this reality changed. Now through personal blogs and social networks like Instagram many girls managed to become successful without having to depend on system so corrupted and centralized. I remember the first example in Italy that made a lot of noise is the case of Chiara Ferragni. A girl who doesn’t even have the body standards of a model or showgirl. But thanks to her grit and her determination she managed to become popular through a personal blog. Without having to go through the suffering that quite all the other successful girls in the field went through she managed to become an important influencer and even a millionaire. It was an unprecedent case in Italy. I remember at her beginnings she wasn’t liked by brands or powerful people in the system because first of all she wasn’t even a model, but brands had to hire her because of the visibility and popularity she gained through her blog. And afterwards, because of brands, showbusiness people had to hire her too. Now all over the world the system has changed, thanks to the internet. Thanks to the ‘ownership economy’. Now thanks to the internet we cannot say that for sure if a powerful person in the showbusiness field doesn’t like you your carrier is doomed to fail. Maybe exceptions can happen. This has probably happened in many other fields.

Therefore, during the university I realized that I wanted to be a researcher or something like that because I realized that it fitted a lot to my personality. At the beginning of my Master's degree I was super determined to study and work hard so that I could get a PhD despite being a bit late compared to others. I had a lot of ideas about papers I would write during my PhD, ideas about the economy, how it could be improved, and about other research issues. Some ideas were very interesting. I never wrote them because I was so focused and I thought I would remember. I thought it would be so cool to be a researcher and make research and write papers and things like that. I didn't care about prestige or money in the same way as I cared about such things. But I could also not understand that I was a big outlier in this: nobody else (at least nobody else around me) cared about something like making research and writing papers like I did. They were all super interested in the prestige and in the possibility of becoming a Professor. In Italy being an economics Professor is attached to a high prestige, it is not very different like it is for a young girl being a model in some way. So many people who had that in mind were willing to do anything to win a job like that. I realized that in the PhD competition would have become harsher and I was surrounded by people who were not like me: they didn't have so many ideas or cared about research but they were willing to do anything to be liked by the important and powerful people, in the same way as those girls in the party. I understood that I had no chances to compete with those people when I started to notice a strange pattern that was happening while I was there. I noticed that many professors didn't like me, I couldn't understand why, and they (for example) didn't also like other guy who liked to criticize and to express opinions and ideas their own as I could. The personality type of the guys who got the highest grades was just the submissive type who doesn't express any curiosity about the matter but just studied what they should and didn't try harder than that. I then realized that the most preferred were also part of sort of important cult or club and there were rumors saying that if you weren't part of it you couldn't succeed. That it is a silent rule that everyone knows that this cult is a very powerful one and many go into it because they know that it will help them succeed and get a good jobs in the city. And many Professors were also part of it. I tried to read some of the books of the leader of this cult and they were all about being submissive and humble with the strange contradiction that the leader itself believed to be a Saint, and could even compare himself with important philosophers well known in Western history. This is why watching many of those students joining the club and reading those ridiculous books and trying to look as serious as possible about that cult reminded me of the girls in the party: many of those students (maybe even the majority) didn’t really care about the values and the ideas of the cult, most people did join not because of the interest in the principles and topics, but because they expect to gain connections and opportunities, they were following it just because of the knowledge that it would give them more opportunities in life. They were willing to embrace certain values and ideas just for a pragmatic reason. I remember I thought that embracing a certain religion for opportunity isn’t very much different than the girls trying to get the attention of an important guy in a party. It is an insincere and hypocrite behavior, even ridiculous. Maybe this is something where I am different from most of people: I had poked around and learned about many different religions and cults during my life, changed my mind a lot of time, in order to find out the one that I believe its values are the best. Embracing values for me has always been a matter of research and reasoning. You reason with your own head to define what is right and what is wrong. But this doesn’t happen to anybody, maybe it is just my anomaly. I felt so disappointed at realizing that just studying hard, being curious and passionate and wanting to contribute in the research didn't matter that much. In fact, my professors themselves didn't care about research, they often would mention the fact of writing papers like it was some sort of fastidious obligation they had to do. And sometimes I would notice that they didn't care about the topic they were teaching neither. Therefore, asking them a lot of questions or being curious would just annoy them. I remember some painful moments when in a class I was so curious and the ones who gets all the answers right and everybody thinks that she must be a genius or something, but I didn't get a remarkable grade because I dared to challenge some questions that seemed too stupid, like too black and white questions. Or when I learned all the code by heart and I was the best one at coding but at the exam the professor surprisingly said that knowing coding by heart doesn't matter so everybody got a good grade by copying and I didn't get the best grade just because of a distraction, a mistake that didn't make sense the Professor understood that I it was just a distraction it didn't mean anything but he decided to downgrade my vote anyways. Or when at a subject we had to do some homework and it was so cool I worked so much and had interesting ideas, but at the end the professor said that the commission has decided that such homework don't matter for getting a better grade. I had just worked in vain. It was all so crazy, I shouldn't have tried so hard and put so much effort in it, it was something at a certain moment a Professor told to me while I was writing my dissertation, what you are doing doesn't matter that much. I realized it was all useless, for some reason I couldn't understand.  I decide to not study hard anymore and give up my dream of getting a PhD. I thought during the PhD curricula things would have gotten far worse, because I was finally waking up and understanding that the that world wasn't very different form the 'show-business' world. In order to succeed you just have to be submissive and to be liked by the right people at the right moment. I understood that in fact professors didn't care very much about the research they were doing, and it wasn't entirely wrong: most papers were just some kind of intellectual simulation, they didn't have any utility. And one reason why they didn't care about being meritocratic was really the fact that they didn't attach any importance to what they were doing.

One would say that's how the world works: there are powerful people and powerless people. And success depends on the fact that one understands the right power dynamics, like those ridiculous girls in the party did understand. In some sense, the guys willing to do anything to be likeable to get a PhD because they are obsessed by the prestige of it, not because they care about the research, are not different to the girls willing to be ridiculous to get the attention of an important guy. At least, this is how it seemed to me. But I couldn't understand that some people are just like that, it comes natural to them. They don't challenge anything because they don't have many opinions or ideas, they don't have anything to challenge. And because of their attitude and personality it comes easy to them to be likeable and submissive. Same for the girls who are able to fake affection because they are paid for. It is just a matter of personality types. 

But there is an important issue. If a certain girl doesn't succeed in the show business field because she was not likeable enough to some people that's something that doesn't really matter to the collective progress of our human civilization. Who cares that X didn't get a role in a movie but Y got it instead. Or that X didn't appear in an advertising but Y did. Our progress doesn’t depend on such outcomes (even though, such individuals can serve as inspiration, so yes, there is a little importance). But we cannot say the same thing for science and technology. What if X didn't get a PhD or didn't get a tenure at a university for a reason like that? That could have changed the course of the Universe. X could have made a lot of important scientific discoveries, but this didn't happen because of the way things currently work. The world is probably worse off, a lot of important discoveries have not been made, because selection in many universities is not very different from a casting of a modelling agency.

I need to add some important observations here. In my university what matters more to become a researcher or Professor is the role of the Professor, the role of the teacher. It is not an important university for research. If you want to do research you go somewhere else, someone can sponsor you to somewhere else (even though unfortunately sponsoring too does many often depend on likeability). For this reason, the type of personality to be a good professor is considered far more important than they type of personality to become a good researcher. Unfortunately, those are very different types: a good professor must be emphatic and likeable, a good researcher must be curious and question everything. But in many universities the first type of personality is more important. Only few universities care about creating researchers more than they care about creating professors. In some Universities the 2 have been be decoupled: you can choose if you want to be a professor or a researcher, you don’t have to do both. Personally, I think that it is very important that those 2 should be decoupled.

Another important observation is the issue of the field, not just the issue of the university. In some fields, like medicine, obedience, prudence and empathy is extremely important. A very curious and disagreeable person can very hardly survive the Italian medicine school, where discipline is everything and everything else is in the second plane. In fact, medicine is not progressing very fast. In my opinion it is a disaster. I sometime notice patterns through making research by myself that many different doctors I visited never noticed or understood. I often think ‘how can they be so close minded’? Then I remember that you should be at least a bit close minded to survive so many years of medical school. Maybe there are contexts in some countries where the work of a (medical field) researcher is decoupled from being a doctor. I don’t know very much about it. But I think to decouple the 2 is a very important issue since the personality of a good doctor is different from the personality of a good medical researcher. I think that we are missing a lot of innovation because of the fact that those 2 are not decoupled enough. I say decoupled because the personality of a researcher cannot become more important than the personality of a doctor: it is not acceptable for a system to have surgeons that are like ‘mad scientists’; they would be not disciplined and empathetic enough to take care about people in the right way.

What about the ownership economy? What can the ownership economy do for scientists and researchers? Unfortunately, not very much. There are fields where many manage to make it through it: one typical example is nutritionists and wellness consultants. Even when you don’t have very important credentials you can slowly gain the client’s trust through hard work and through using digital marketing through the internet. But for the most types of fields, this is not possible.

In many fields research isn’t consumer related, isn’t consumer-verifiable and needs a lot of funding, so it is not possible to rely on common people, and there are good reasons for it too. Because of the considerations I make here, I believe the unresolved issues I mention here should get more attention from the public and from scientific institutions and funders. The question "what can the ownership economy do for research?" remains unanswered, this essay is a call for reflection.