Ed's take on this

[Teddie Goldenberg]

FWD: This was Ed's response after reading the FAQ. By request I've
reposted it. -Teddie
-----------
I very much liked the ethic espoused at the end of the FAQ. I am very
much a believer in the Hacker Ethic and the Play Ethic, as opposed to
the Work Ethic. Currently I have been loosely in support of two
movements which I have found promising for abolishing work.

The first is Resilient Communities, which are self-sufficient when it
comes to basic needs via self-replicating open source technologies,
but interconnected via the Internet.

http://www.openfarmtech.org

The other is my sort of fallback option, the Basic Income. Obviously
the state-controlled administration of such a program is very
corruptible, though the Alaskan Permanent Fund model has worked pretty
well so far.

http://www.usbig.net


Your idea sounds very much like Technocracy and Energy Accounting, but
without the dangerous centralized aspects as it seems to imply usage
of distributed computing and so forth. I'm just not all that sure
about how it would actually function. Is the idea to just allow people
to freely decide which incentives their currency is pushing for...
whether carbon-reduction, education, or basic income distribution?

The idea seems pretty complex and I think you'd need a small scale
working model, perhaps a video game, to show how it would work. It
sort of reminds me of Cory Doctorow's idea of Whuffie, but from the
description it didn't really seem like a reputation system.

By the way, someone coded an open source distributed whuffie system.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitchun/

Overall though, my suspicion is that such a system would need quite a
lot of tweaking to reach an equilibrium state, and even still it could
be susceptible to malicious hacking or simple power grabbing.... of
course that seems to be why you advocate spawning many currencies.

We must also factor in the potential for this new unprecedented level
of control to allow an even greater centralization of wealth and
power. Or at least, like with the transition from feudalism to
capitalism, an ever widening gap between rich and poor despite the
fact that the rich extract a smaller portion of the surplus value.

Feel free to post all this on the google group once you accept my
membership. Or not.... whichever.

[Teddie Goldenberg]

I'm going to respond to a few parts of this:

http://www.openfarmtech.org

Very cool stuff on that site, especially the Open Source Fab-Lab. At some point I hope my hackerspace pumpinstationone.org will have all the fabrication equipment necessary to make whatever we want out of raw/recycled materials.

 

http://www.usbig.net

 

Looking through that site, I don't think it's ever going to happen. By inventing our own trading system, we circumvent the necessity of State intervention/sponsorship.

 

 

Is the idea to just allow people
to freely decide which incentives their currency is pushing for...
whether carbon-reduction, education, or basic income distribution?

 

Some incentives are built into the system by simply the way it operates. For instance, the effect of having all labor accounted for in units of time levels incentivises people to seek out the occupation they most desire. One part of the work I hope to do with this group is to figure out all the incentives that the OFCS creates, and how it addresses problems of the $$ system, as well as problems of the Labor-currency and local currency systems.

 

Overall though, my suspicion is that such a system would need quite a
lot of tweaking to reach an equilibrium state, and even still it could
be susceptible to malicious hacking or simple power grabbing.... of
course that seems to be why you advocate spawning many currencies.

Yes, and by allowing users to create their own administrative/regulatory structures and procedures, we're basically creating another market factor; joining a particular credit system might be contingent on how it's managed (democratic vs. hierarchical, for instance).

 

We must also factor in the potential for this new unprecedented level
of control to allow an even greater centralization of wealth and
power. Or at least, like with the transition from feudalism to
capitalism, an ever widening gap between rich and poor despite the
fact that the rich extract a smaller portion of the surplus value.

 

Since credit cannot be transferred from an individual to another, wealth discrepancies will only accumulate to ratios in the single digits, rather than triple or quadruple digits. I mean, one person could only be credited with 24 hours of working-time in a day, no matter what. This is the easiest rule to secure, since all blocks of credit have a definite beginning and ending time-stamp.

 

_Teddie

[Edward Miller]

Wouldn't such a time-stamp approach negate almost any sort of pursuit
of economies of scale? I am aware of the mutualist critique of
economies of scale, but still there are returns from large-scale
enterprises... and even medium-scale. If all the credits evaporate in
24 hours, how could one build up a large sized business?

I agree having a built-in ceiling for how big businesses can get is
appealing, but ultimately if the goods produced by this system cannot
reach the efficiency of the current system, I doubt it will take off.
The likelihood of such a credit system being widely adopted would be
very low, since it would be cheaper to buy from the large corporations
using dollars. Of course coercing people to use the credits might
work, but that isn't exactly a nice thing to do.

[ro...@azone.org]

Cool, I'll step in on this. I think what Teddie meant by the 24 hours is
that the maximum amount of time someone could work would be 24 hours a day,
obviously not on a regular basis, not that all credit would evaporate
within 24 hours.

My biggest question for this effort at this point, or at least the thoughts
that entered my head after gestating on the factor e farm in Missouri was
how do we get it so that people can pay their rent/mortgage via the OFCS.
This is the largest obstacle in my initial thinking about it, what can give
something enough traction to enable people to live with out $ in the
traditional sense. If you can demonstrate this in a way that doesn't
require everyone to either be homeless squatters or packed into existing
houses tight as sardines, and you can provide people enough food to survive
then it has a chance of attracting some people to participate in it.

I'm not sure if this is really where OFCS is at this point, but perhaps
it'll work. It also seems to be leapfrogging the complementary currencies
just at the time that these are gaining traction, if it's really a better
technology for recording and allowing for cooperation than we need to
demonstrate this.

Also have we done a comparison to traditional economics point by point
attempting to refute the standard validation of the marketplace via the
"science" of economics, or is this something that still sits as an
intention waiting for someone whose taken more economics classes than I
have. Honestly it just came to mind as a discussion of economics I had
earlier today, sometimes it works to be able to integrate the dominant
jargon and turn it on itself in order to move beyond it.

There has been a lot happening here in Arawak City with our reimagining
economics summit and I'm hoping we can get some more info on OFCS ready for
our next summit on May 30th. Teddie would you be available to come to that,
if not we'll have to wait until July. It's basically just a sit down and
converse about ideas kind of thing, actually inspired by the shadow
economics summit that was done back in 2003.

Not sure if I e-mailed this out yet, but there is a guy working on a drupal
module to facilitate complementary currencies see
http://drupal.org/project/marketplace He also has a non-profit up at
http://www.communityforge.net/ promoting this module.

I'm a big user of Drupal and I had planned on creating something akin to an
advanced freecycle or sporecycle module for it to work with these ideas.

Ok, a couple of more links to share that I haven't really fully
read/digested myself but seem relevant.

Here's Rushkoff talking about Diy Currencies, getting quoted in Conde Nasts
portfolio
http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/dual-perspectives/2009/04/13/DIY-Currencies
Ok, that article lacks content beyond the suggestion of Craigbucks. It
has gotten enough traction to pop up in a few different places and perhaps
rushkoff.com would be a person to at least e-mail about OFCS.

The biggest challenge we have is to make it so that we are not simply
vaporware, to become a integral part of peoples lives and a useful tool for
accomplishing tasks, that can multiply and replace capitalism before
market-based reduction externalizes our survival.

Robbt

[Aindilis]

I haven't had time to review all the links. They are very cool
though. I just wanted to chime in about what I am interested in doing
with relation to OFCS and programming and the like.

I wanted to address the issue of "paying rent with OFCS". While that
would be nice, it is not one of my initial goals because I see the
existing monetary system as being enforced by the military (forgive my
paranoid fantasies), and obviously a military solution is not in
order. So, as I see it, I want to establish a somewhat cancerous
(cancer is so effective) growth that exists on the system, that short-
circuits capitalism at a local level and allows people, especially
programmers, to collaborate without the need for dependence on the
dollar or other currencies.

I will certainly admit to being a novice in economics, I think I
actually failed it but that was because the required class was too
pedantic for me to waste my time going. I do have a good perhaps
graduate level background in mathematics, (although game theory and
statistics and chaos theory are the three subjects I never broached).
I actually don't understand the economic details of OFCS. But I
understand the afore mentioned need for a virtualized economy. So I'm
approaching this project from a requirements engineering methodology.
For every concern, we need to clearly define the solution and then
debate it. But we also need to analyze which features we want and so
forth. As I understand it, OFCS is a modular system so it will
benefits from exactly this kind of open source requirements
engineering. Perhaps it needs to be fair and envy-free, impossible to
game, etc. That is where an axiomatic method (which also avoids the
ambiguity in language that has us talking past each other) specifying
the exact mathematical properties of the system will be very useful.
Perhaps we should even embed proofs of various properties in the
requirements matrix.

As for software engineering, todays software landscape is so varied
that all we can hope to do is write a good basic system and hope that
others will extend it. My development is Perl, sorry that's what I
know, am pretty handy with it.

I remember OFCS contains very accurate "normative" credit, that is, it
record the actual costs in scientific terms. To me, having a non-
scalar or (non real valued) system of representing work fits very
naturally with the FRDCSA's work on value systems and priority
systems. We have AI planning systems that need a way to represent
which world states are preferable to others, and an entire complex
calculus relating world state/position with actions, goals, etc. This
is what POSI is working towards. (http://posithon.org). I see
tremendous application for the tools I have already developed to form
the basis of this system. These tools are very alpha. We will have a
hard time attracting programmers, this is just my experience (maybe if
we have good marketing, or POSI succeeds, that won't be the case).
The tools are heavily based on semantic web technologies.

We should invite Paul Grignon (film maker of Money as Debt) to the
newsgroup, as he can help with the marketing if he is interested.

pgri...@island.net

Okay I apologize for the ranting form of this letter, but it is just a
very direct representation of the issues I am thinking about.

There was one other important point which I cannot remember. Oh!
Check out we.riseup.net they will have lots of people that would work
on this kind of stuff.

To see the various AI systems mentioned, that will may be involved (if
we are to do the valuation system/normative credit), check here:

http://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/writings/semweb.odp

http://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/writings/flourish-2009.odp

As far as this system allowing capitalist exploitation, let's hope
not! Hopefully in this system there are no predators and no prey.

Teddie mentioned writing a simulation. That would be just a nother
module which used the API in creative ways. Developing intelligent
agents for it would be a problem though.