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Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!
First, a parable:

Imagine you and I are two young, educated Europeans in the late 17th century, right at the dawn of the Enlightenment. We are up to date on some of the new philosophy, where talk of "human rights" has dominated the intellectual discussion of what an ideal society looks like. We have also witnessed the new sciences start to develop, only to be quashed by the oppressive power of the Church. We feel like we are on the brink of major social revolution, a fundamental reconception of human life and society, but the power of the Church and of the Kings and Lords is incredibly strong, and the future is uncertain.

Imagine in that scenario, I come to you in hushed tones. "I fear that we may never live out the ideals of our Enlightenment," I say, "because I do not believe such an ideal society is possible under the oppressive rule of the Church. The Church will never recognize a conception of Human Rights that challenges their absolute authority."

"Nonsense!" you reply. "The ideal of Human Rights and a Liberal Society is a noble goal, and one worth pursuing for the good of all people. But the Church is a fact of life, and it has been this way for generations, back to Constantine himself. However we choose to realize the ideal state, we must do it while acknowledging the power and authority of the Church. Only by cooperating with the Church and its wishes will we be able to advance our cause. That's how it has always been, that's how it always will be."

I object again, explaining how the ideal of individual liberty cannot be realized within a theocratic state. I say that, in order to realize our ideal state, we must have a secular society, that the road to Human Rights requires bringing down the Church and its monopoly on power. You silence me, and give me a look like I'm a lunatic.

"Enough! Even if I agree that a secular society would be ideal, it will never happen! Religion is part of human nature, and we will always structure our societies on the basis of our religious beliefs. Maybe intellectuals like us can daydream about secular societies, but for hoi paloi in the fields, they need their Church to make their lives meaningful. How could we possibly manage without the Church? The very idea is so far-fetched, it is not worth considering. Any plans for a new society that include secularization are simply unrealistic."

And yet here we are, a few hundred years later, most of us in states that are quite explicitly secular. Religion is still a powerful force in society, but it is no longer an organizing principle. Secularism is not only commonplace, but assumed as part of the basic institutional framework that structures the social lives of most of the people in the world. At the dawn of the Enlightenment, such an idea would easily be considered so outlandish as to be not worth entertaining, but today we take it for granted.

___________________

Now in this spirit, I want to talk in this thread about replacing our current economic system entirely, with the ultimate goal of a cashless, trade-less society, post-scarcity society. Impossible, you say! Well, I think it is demanded by the onset of the Digital Age. Our current technological situation has presented us with tremendous challenges and amazing opportunities to reevaluate the basic infrastructure that runs our global society, and at the moment money is the blood that keeps it all running. So I say let's put it on the chopping block and see if anything is worth salvaging or if there is some better alternative. If we can take the Church down a few pegs over the last few hundred years, let's see if we can't do the same for the Almighty Dollar.

For context, we currently have the production capability to feed and clothe and house every human being alive, and to provide them with basic medical care and education. I take these to be minimal obligations owed to all people, and yet we are not satisfying these obligations, with over a billion people living in poverty who cannot meet even these basic requirements. The flow of capital has not adequately directed the resources where they need to go, and we are left with incredible waste and human suffering. We can do better, we must do better, to create a sustainable alternative.

A post-scarcity society won't just happen. We must build it together. And that means talking seriously about alternatives. So let's use this thread for that. Let's not use this thread to talk about BitCoins or Fiat Money or anything like that. Those are alternative currencies, and I'm talking about alternative economies. Like, for instance, a Participatory Economy.

I'll post my own ideas later, but I want to start with this article from about a year back.

quote:

The second economy
24 October 2011 | W. Brian Arthur, guest contributor

Digitization is creating a second economy that’s vast, automatic, and invisible— thereby bringing the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution.

In 1850, a decade before the Civil War, the United States’ economy was small – it wasn’t much bigger than Italy’s. Forty years later, it was the largest economy in the world. What happened in between was the railroads. They linked the east of the country to the west, and the interior to both. They gave access to the east’s industrial goods; they made possible economies of scale; they stimulated steel and manufacturing – and the economy was never the same.

Deep changes like this are not unusual. Every so often – every 60 years or so – a body of technology comes along and over several decades, quietly, almost unnoticeably, transforms the economy: it brings new social classes to the fore and creates a different world for business. Can such a transformation – deep and slow and silent – be happening today?

We could look for one in the genetic technologies, or in nanotech, but their time hasn’t fully come. But I want to argue that something deep is going on with information technology, something that goes well beyond the use of computers, social media, and commerce on the Internet. Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically. They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. On the surface, this shift doesn’t seem particularly consequential – it’s almost something we take for granted. But I believe it is causing a revolution no less important and dramatic than that of the railroads. It is quietly creating a second economy, a digital one.

Let me begin with two examples. Twenty years ago, if you went into an airport you would walk up to a counter and present paper tickets to a human being. That person would register you on a computer, notify the flight you’d arrived, and check your luggage in. All this was done by humans. Today, you walk into an airport and look for a machine. You put in a frequent-flier card or credit card, and it takes just three or four seconds to get back a boarding pass, receipt, and luggage tag. What interests me is what happens in those three or four seconds. The moment the card goes in, you are starting a huge conversation conducted entirely among machines. Once your name is recognized, computers are checking your flight status with the airlines, your past travel history, your name with the TSA (and possibly also with the National Security Agency). They are checking your seat choice, your frequent-flier status, and your access to lounges. This unseen, underground conversation is happening among multiple servers talking to other servers, talking to satellites that are talking to computers (possibly in London, where you’re going), and checking with passport control, with foreign immigration, with ongoing connecting flights. And to make sure the aircraft’s weight distribution is fine, the machines are also starting to adjust the passenger count and seating according to whether the fuselage is loaded more heavily at the front or back.

These large and fairly complicated conversations that you’ve triggered occur entirely among things remotely talking to other things: servers, switches, routers, and other Internet and telecommunications devices, updating and shuttling information back and forth. All of this occurs in the few seconds it takes to get your boarding pass back. And even after that happens, if you could see these conversations as flashing lights, they’d still be flashing all over the country for some time, perhaps talking to the flight controllers – starting to say that the flight’s getting ready for departure and to prepare for that.

Now consider a second example, from supply chain management. Twenty years ago, if you were shipping freight through Rotterdam into the center of Europe, people with clipboards would be registering arrival, checking manifests, filling out paperwork, and telephoning for- ward destinations to let other people know. Now such shipments go through an RFID2 portal where they are scanned, digitally captured, and automatically dispatched. The RFID portal is in conversation digitally with the originating shipper, other depots, other suppliers, and destinations along the route, all keeping track, keeping control, and reconfiguring routing if necessary to optimize things along the way. What used to be done by humans is now executed as a series of conversations among remotely located servers.

In both these examples, and all across economies in the developed world, processes in the physical economy are being entered into the digital economy, where they are “speaking to” other processes in the digital economy, in a constant conversation among multiple servers and multiple semi-intelligent nodes that are updating things, querying things, checking things off, readjusting things, and eventually connecting back with processes and humans in the physical economy.

So we can say that another economy – a second economy – of all of these digitized business processes conversing, executing, and triggering further actions is silently forming alongside the physical economy.

Aspen root systems

If I were to look for adjectives to describe this second economy, I’d say it is vast, silent, connected, unseen, and autonomous (meaning that human beings may design it but are not directly involved in running it). It is remotely executing and global, always on, and endlessly configurable. It is concurrent – a great computer expression – which means that everything happens in parallel. It is self-configuring, meaning it constantly reconfigures itself on the fly, and increasingly it is also self-organizing, self-architecting, and self-healing.

These last descriptors sound biological – and they are. In fact, I’m beginning to think of this second economy, which is under the surface of the physical economy, as a huge interconnected root system, very much like the root system for aspen trees. For every acre of aspen trees above the ground, there’s about ten miles of roots underneath, all interconnected with one another, “communicating” with each other.

The metaphor isn’t perfect: this emerging second-economy root system is more complicated than any aspen system, since it’s also making new connections and new configurations on the fly. But the aspen metaphor is useful for capturing the reality that the observable physical world of aspen trees hides an unseen underground root system just as large or even larger. How large is the unseen second economy? By a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation, in about two decades the digital economy will reach the same size as the physical economy. It’s as if there will be another American economy anchored off San Francisco (or, more in keeping with my metaphor, slipped in underneath the original economy) and growing all the while.

Now this second, digital economy isn’t producing anything tangible. It’s not making my bed in a hotel, or bringing me orange juice in the morning. But it is running an awful lot of the economy. It’s helping architects design buildings, it’s tracking sales and inventory, getting goods from here to there, executing trades and banking operations, controlling manufacturing equipment, making design calculations, billing clients, navigating aircraft, helping diagnose patients, and guiding laparoscopic surgeries. Such operations grow slowly and take time to form. In any deep transformation, industries do not so much adopt the new body of technology as encounter it, and as they do so they create new ways to profit from its possibilities.

The deep transformation I am describing is happening not just in the United States but in all advanced economies, especially in Europe and Japan. And its revolutionary scale can only be grasped if we go beyond my aspen metaphor to another analogy.

A neural system for the economy

Recall that in the digital conversations I was describing, something that occurs in the physical economy is sensed by the second economy – which then gives back an appropriate response. A truck passes its load through an RFID sensor or you check in at the airport, a lot of recomputation takes place, and appropriate physical actions are triggered.

There’s a parallel in this with how biologists think of intelligence. I’m not talking about human intelligence or anything that would qualify as conscious intelligence. Biologists tell us that an organism is intelligent if it senses something, changes its internal state, and reacts appropriately. If you put an E. coli bacterium into an uneven concentration of glucose, it does the appropriate thing by swimming toward where the glucose is more concentrated. Biologists would call this intelligent behavior. The bacterium senses something, “computes” something (although we may not know exactly how), and returns an appropriate response.

No brain need be involved. A primitive jellyfish doesn’t have a central nervous system or brain. What it has is a kind of neural layer or nerve net that lets it sense and react appropriately. I’m arguing that all these aspen roots – this vast global digital network that is sensing, “computing”, and reacting appropriately – are starting to constitute a neural layer for the economy. The second economy constitutes a neural layer for the physical economy. Just what sort of change is this qualitatively?

Think of it this way. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution – roughly from the 1760s, when Watt’s steam engine appeared, through around 1850 and beyond – the economy developed a muscular system in the form of machine power. Now it is developing a neural system. This may sound grandiose, but actually I think the metaphor is valid. Around 1990, computers started seriously to talk to each other, and all these connections started to happen. The individual machines — servers — are like neurons, and the axons and synapses are the communication pathways and linkages that enable them to be in conversation with each other and to take appropriate action.

Is this the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution? Well, without sticking my neck out too much, I believe so. In fact, I think it may well be the biggest change ever in the economy. It is a deep qualitative change that is bringing intelligent, automatic response to the economy. There’s no upper limit to this, no place where it has to end. Now, I’m not interested in science fiction, or predicting the singularity, or talking about cyborgs. None of that interests me. What I am saying is that it would be easy to underestimate the degree to which this is going to make a difference.

I think that for the rest of this century, barring wars and pestilence, a lot of the story will be the building out of this second economy, an unseen underground economy that basically is giving us intelligent reactions to what we do above the ground. For example, if I’m driving in Los Angeles in 15 years’ time, likely it’ll be a driverless car in a flow of traffic where my car’s in a conversation with the cars around it that are in conversation with general traffic and with my car. The second economy is creating for us – slowly, quietly, and steadily – a different world.

A downside

Of course, as with most changes, there is a downside. I am concerned that there is an adverse impact on jobs. Productivity increasing, say, at 2.4 percent in a given year means either that the same number of people can produce 2.4 percent more output or that we can get the same output with 2.4 percent fewer people. Both of these are happening. We are getting more output for each person in the economy, but over- all output, nationally, requires fewer people to produce it. Nowadays, fewer people are required behind the desk of an airline. Much of the work is still physical – someone still has to take your luggage and put it on the belt – but much has vanished into the digital world of sensing, digital communication, and intelligent response.

Physical jobs are disappearing into the second economy, and I believe this effect is dwarfing the much more publicized effect of jobs disappearing to places like India and China.

How fast is the second economy growing? Here’s a very rough estimate. Since 1995, when digitization really started to kick in, labor productivity (output per hours worked) in the United States has grown at some 2.5 to 3 percent annually, with ups and downs along the way. No one knows precisely how much of this growth is a result of the uses of information technology (some economists think that standard measurements underestimate this); but pretty good studies assign some 65 to 100 percent of productivity growth to digitization. Assume, then, that in the long term the second economy will be responsible for roughly a 2.4 percent annual increase in the productivity of the overall economy. If we hold the labor force constant, this means output grows at this rate, too. An economy that grows at 2.4 percent doubles every 30 years; so if things continue, in 2025 the second economy will be as large as the 1995 physical economy. The precise figures here can be disputed, but that misses the point. What’s important is that the second economy is not a small add-on to the physical economy. In two to three decades, it will surpass the physical economy in size.

There are parallels with what has happened before. In the early 20th century, farm jobs became mechanized and there was less need for farm labor, and some decades later manufacturing jobs became mechanized and there was less need for factory labor. Now business processes—many in the service sector—are becoming “mechanized” and fewer people are needed, and this is exerting systematic downward pressure on jobs. We don’t have paralegals in the numbers we used to. Or draftsmen, telephone operators, typists, or bookkeeping people. A lot of that work is now done digitally. We do have police and teachers and doctors; where there’s a need for human judgment and human interaction, we still have that. But the primary cause of all of the downsizing we’ve had since the mid-1990s is that a lot of human jobs are disappearing into the second economy. Not to reappear.

Seeing things this way, it’s not surprising we are still working our way out of the bad 2008-09 recession with a great deal of joblessness.

There’s a larger lesson to be drawn from this. The second economy will certainly be the engine of growth and the provider of prosperity for the rest of this century and beyond, but it may not provide jobs, so there may be prosperity without full access for many. This suggests to me that the main challenge of the economy is shifting from prosperity to distributing prosperity. The second economy will produce wealth no matter what we do; distributing that wealth has become the main problem. For centuries, wealth has traditionally been apportioned in the West through jobs, and jobs have always been forthcoming. When farm jobs disappeared, we still had manufacturing jobs, and when these disappeared we migrated to service jobs. With this digital transformation, this last repository of jobs is shrinking – fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs – and we face a problem.

The system will adjust of course, though I can’t yet say exactly how. Perhaps some new part of the economy will come forward and generate a whole new set of jobs. Perhaps we will have short workweeks and long vacations so there will be more jobs to go around. Perhaps we will have to subsidize job creation. Perhaps the very idea of a job and of being productive will change over the next two or three decades. The problem is by no means insoluble. The good news is that if we do solve it, we may at last have the freedom to invest our energies in creative acts.

Economic possibilities for our grandchildren

In 1930, Keynes wrote a famous essay, “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”. Reading it now, in the era of those grandchildren, I am surprised just how accurate it is. Keynes predicts that “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day.” He rightly warns of “technological unemployment”, but dares to surmise that “the economic problem [of producing enough goods] may be solved”. If we had asked him and his contemporaries how all this might come about, they might have imagined lots of factories with lots of machines, possibly even with robots, with the workers in these factories gradually being replaced by machines and by individual robots.

That is not quite how things have developed. We do have sophisticated machines, but in the place of personal automation (robots) we have a collective automation. Underneath the physical economy, with its physical people and physical tasks, lies a second economy that is automatic and neurally intelligent, with no upper limit to its buildout. The prosperity we enjoy and the difficulties with jobs would not have surprised Keynes, but the means of achieving that prosperity would have.

This second economy that is silently forming – vast, interconnected, and extraordinarily productive – is creating for us a new economic world. How we will fare in this world, how we will adapt to it, how we will profit from it and share its benefits, is very much up to us.

One possible way that a cashless society developed is by just giving all the money to the robots and letting them deal with it. A world where the economy is entirely automated is a world where money is effectively invisible, and that's probably just as good as getting rid of it entirely.

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Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Jackie 4Chan posted:

Why talk about a post-scarcity economy when scarcity of livable land, oil, electricity, water, and more are all in our near future. Maybe you could make this case seriously if you completely ignore the current economic meltdown and the effects of global warming, which are only just beginning to ramp up. Alternate economic systems chat is interesting, but any system based in post-scarcity fantasy land is not worth discussing.

I actually prefer the term "false scarcity", as Naomi Kline described it at OWS:

quote:

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite–fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful–the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society–while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.

You are right that some things are scarce. But the things we actually need aren't scarce (we have enough food, etc), they are just poorly used and inefficiently distributed, because the incentive structure right now is not towards sustainability, but towards profit. In other words, the apparent scarcity we see is an artifact of our economic models. Adjusting economic models will reveal that what appears scarce may actually be abundant.

The technology really is getting to the point where certain kinds of objects will be so abundant that it can't be handled by our economic models anyway. We are facing these problems in IP because information is so abundant that controlling its flow is harder than measuring a neutrino.

Soon objects will see the same sort of abundance. The Pirate Bay just opened a new category of torrents: Physibles. This is specifically in anticipation of the spread (and piracy) of plans and blueprints for 3D Printers. If you haven't been keeping up with replicator technology, prepare to be blown away. This poo poo is happening, and it is happening real soon, and if we don't prepare our economic models to deal with it properly, then the next few decades is going to be really rough.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!
It is worth noting that "unemployment" (as if people should be employed) is really just a sign of underproduction. We have the capacity to produce far, far more than we produce right now. There are hundreds of factories that have closed shop not because the goods they could produce aren't needed, but because there is no money in it. There are millions of workers who want a job, but cannot be sustained in the current economic situation. The problem of need and want we experience in the world is real, but is it not because we are running up against fundamental limits in our capacity to produce. It is because the current social organization does not seek to maximize efficiency or sustainability, but only seeks to maximize profits for the Robber Barons who "own" all of the stuff.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!
Allow me to introduce the Attention Economy.

This is basically my pet theory about what an alternative economic system looks like. I don't want the whole thread to be about my crazy theories, so please discuss other alternative economies in this thread. But I've done a lot of thinking about Attention Economy, so I'd like to explain it as best I can.

First, the notion of an attention economy is not original to me, I just have a particular take on it. But before I let my crazy out, let's get some neutral definitions of the way.

The term is currently trendy in marketing and design circles, where the question of how to attract attention is always important. In these contexts, Attention Economy is usually about managing the audience's attention, on a web page for instance, or in an advertisement. When web designers ask questions like "what are users looking for, and how do I best arrange the site so they will find it quickly", the techniques for doing this are sometimes categorized under the term "Attention Economy". In this sense, Attention Economy is not meant as an alternative economy in the sense of this thread, but just as a framework for dealing information management in terms of the user's experience. Although this is not completely unrelated to my purposes, it is a different sort of thing.

The idea of Attention Economy originally comes from Herbert Simon:

quote:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it"

The idea is that in the Digital Age, attention is the only scarce resource that I actually have to manage, and so the social order is arranged in such a way as to facilitate my management of that attention.

Attention is defined by Davenport and Beck as:

quote:

Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.

So the idea of an Attention Economy would be to have the flow and management of Attention replace the flow of Capital as the blood that runs society.

Traditional economies take the transaction as a basic unit of economic activity. A transaction is essential a contract between two people to trade something of value. In other words, it is an abstract, formal relation. In an attention economy, the basic unit of activity is attending, which is an action, and instead of having formal or abstract consequences, it has practical consequences.

I "pay" attention, and though my attention is a finite resource and can only be split so many ways, it is also a resource that I produce constantly, simply in virtue of being conscious. I never lack attention, but I can have difficulty paying attention or keeping my attention focused on some particular thing, so managing my attention is no trivial task. But it is a task that all people are always engaged in, naturally, as part of the work required to be alive.

When I pay attention, all I get in return is whatever value has come from the attention paid. When I watch a movie, I get its entertainment in return. When I build a chair, I get the chair I built. I can't lose attention, or go broke by paying too much attention; there is no debt in an attention economy. However, that doesn't mean that my attention is not valuable. What I lose by paying attention to X is the time spent paying attention, which is an Opportunity Cost, since it is time not spent doing Y or Z. As I have only a limited amount of time to spend my attention, I must learn to spend that attention wisely. But that's not a huge deal, so paying attention (and participating in the society) is relatively effortless. My ability to participate in the society is not a question for me. The only question is what should I pay attention to. But apart from the experience and wisdom gained from paying attention, I get nothing else in return.

I have a lot more to say, but it is late and this is already a wall of text. I'll continue tomorrow.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Quasimango posted:

Well, that is an economy in the sense that our attention is a scarce resource we can allocate, but how exactly is it an 'alternative' economy?

Good question! My idea for an Attention Economy is that the distribution of resources should be a function of the flow of attention. Right now, resources are allocated not on the basis of need or usefulness, but on the basis of money. One dollar can be exchanged for one cheeseburger, so the cheeseburgers end up where the dollars are. But cheeseburgers are needed where empty stomachs exist, and there is no guarantee that wherever an empty stomach exists there will be a dollar to exchange for that cheeseburger. Often, dollars are completely absent where resources are needed most, and so a dollar-based economy may not even recognize the failure of distribution at all. The alternative is to distribute resources based on the flow of attention; since attention can't be faked, there will be less room for these kinds of oversights and inefficiencies. An person with an empty stomach can still pay attention, so if we can track where the attention is flowing we have a better shot of making sure the cheeseburgers get there. I don't expect that attention is a perfect indicator of value, but my view is that it will be a hell of a lot more accurate than money.

So how would this work? Bear with me, because things are about to get wonky.

Imagine that every human being alive straps a little box on their foreheads. These little boxes shoot out tiny invisible marbles at some constant rate, say 10 marbles a minute. It shoots these marbles out at the objects you happen to be looking at, which are equipped with other boxes to absorb those incoming marbles. These marbles are a crude approximation of the attention you pay. Every time you pay attention to some object, it gets bombarded with your marbles.

Of course, this will all be done digitally without little boxes strapped to anyone's head. And where a person is looking is a terrible indicator of attention; to do this properly we'd need to retina-tracking hardware or sophisticated real-time brain scanners. But leave these technical details aside for the moment. I want to give you the big picture of what the Attention Economy looks like. So boxes on foreheads with marbles shooting out at a constant rate and getting absorbed by other objects. Still with me?

Now here's the trick: you can't store marbles. You can't stockpile attention or reserve a bank of attention-units. Just as there is no debt in an attention economy, there are no "attention reserves" and there can be no surplus of attention. Attention must always be paid as it is produced or acquired. So when people pay attention to me, and thus I am absorbing their incoming marbles, I don't put those marbles in a jar for a rainy day.

Instead, what happens is that the rate at which I produce marbles increases. Say that, for every 10 people paying attention to me, the rate at which I produce marbles increases by one marble a minute. The more attention I get, the more marbles I produce per unit time, and the faster they get shot out of the little box on my forehead. In other words, the more attention paid to me, the more influence I have over the flow of marbles through the network.

In other words, I claim that the inverse of attention is influence. When you "pay" attention to something, you are effectively trading attention for influence. The movie I pay attention to, for at least the time I am paying attention to it, has some degree of influence over my thoughts, experiences, desires, and interests. When I pay attention to my work, I have influence over anyone who benefits or interacts with the products of my labor. The more influence I have, the more control I have, at least locally, of how resources get distributed, and how those resources are taken up and used by the wider society. If I have the last pound of sugar in town, then I have a lot of influence over who gets access to that sugar, and I will therefore be getting a lot of attention from anyone who wants sugar. This dynamic of attention and influence generates competition and the dynamics usually associated with capitalism, but without money serving as a mediating value structure to augment and distort the distribution of those resources.

Ok. So how does this generate an real economic alternative? We need to describe how the flow of attention informs the distribution of resources. I'll take another break to go teach, but I'll continue shortly.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Michaelos posted:

It doesn't matter how beautiful the design of your economic engine is if you lack the resources to bring it online.

I love the dialogue :)

I'll say that my point here isn't to Rally the Troops to start a New Economy! Given the history of Goon Projects I don't think anything like that has a shot.

Instead, I'm trying to articulate what a different economy might look like, really just in an effort to start proposing different economic models, to start talking and thinking about them publicly, if for no other reason than to try to get the creative juices flowing. I'm not claiming that I've found THE ONE SOLUTION TO RULE ALL PEOPLE. Instead, I think I've just found another consistent model that can do the work we want an economy to do (to distribute resources), and I think we need to at least be thinking about alternatives because the one we have doesn't work. I do strongly believe that money as a medium of exchange is an unworkable system that has perpetuated itself through oppression, and not through well-functioning. I do believe we can do better, and almost nowhere do I see discussions of serious alternatives; indeed, most people take the very idea that money is optional to be a nonstarter. The claim it in the name of "realism", but it strikes me a pure dogmatic convention with no support to justify its continued use except that its how things have always worked (see my parable above). I honestly believe that, if we are going to be serious about the problems we face, then we have to be willing to question fundamental aspects of our existing institutions. Money is a universal and incredibly problematic feature of our fundamental social order, but I don't think it is sacred, and I think that if we can do better than money, than we should try to do it. And the problems we face are immense and incredibly real, and the timeframe we have for dealing with them is shrinking by the minute.

Look, Attention Economy is insane. The marble poo poo is deliberately designed for you to not take it seriously. But I think that once I lay out the system in detail sufficient enough to see how it works, then it will be absolutely clear that an Attention Economy is far better suited to handle these problems than our current system, which is categorically and systematically incapable of solving them. And this is just some stupid theory an idiot like me came up with that involves marbles shooting from people's foreheads. If I can develop such theory, then the truly great minds of our generation can surely do much better. But they have to know its possible, and at the moment I fear that too many people take the existence of money for granted so deeply that they might never even consider the possibility at all. And that's a tragedy. I'm thinking about what things look like on the other side of a great paradigm shift that most people still don't recognize is coming, and though it will look insane from this side of the shift I see no choice but to press on.

But now I'm just waxing revolution. Let me get back to the theory.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Helsing posted:

1. If you actually manage to prevent people from accumulating savings and/or debt then you're not going to end up with anything resembling a capitalist economy. Honestly I'm not sure how you'll have any sort of functioning economy with no viable way of transferring wealth or property into the future.

Good! I think the idea of accumulating and storing wealth for its own sake is one of the fundamental problems with capital. When you let the medium (money) stand as a proxy for value, it is then possible to sequester that value and restrict its use. I think an object that is not used (in that it is not the recipient of attention paid) is culturally valueless, but the presence of capital distorts that value against the standard of the medium. I think this distortion is one of the basic corruptions of money; value no longer becomes tied to how the item gets taken up by the crowd.

The idea of attention economy is that value just is what the crowd takes up, and there is no way to sequester or restrict value apart from letting the crowd take it up, because it is in the taking up of culture that it comes to have value. There's no middle man to clog the flow of culture, as money does now.

quote:

2. A society geared around tracking every movement of every human being's retina sounds like the most utterly horrific dystopia imaginable. I think I'd take 1984 or Brave New World over such a place.

There are definitely going to be privacy issues in my system. I completely sympathize with your point, and I want to in good faith take up this challenge in more depth a bit later on. But I'll say that it is clear to me that the system will gain functionality the more information flows freely, and that will certainly include what we consider to be "private" information today. Part of the challenge, then, is restructuring our values about what we consider private.

And, of course, whether we like it or not, a tremendous restructuring of privacy values is already undergoing a significant generational shift, with the first generation raised entirely in the shadow of Internet now in college and on Facebook, where corporate access to what was once "private" information has sparked an explosion in advertising and marketing that now values Facebook, which produces literally no content and whose service is complete poo poo, at close to a hundred billion dollars.

Right this second we are living through an incredible and largely voluntary erosion of privacy, being carried out in the name of private profit. This is saying nothing to do with the extensive (and probably unconstitutional but we'll never know because they have immunity) wiretapping and surveillance campaigns that the NSA carries out in conjunction with the telephone companies. So there are serious privacy concerns about the existing system too.

I think that Attention Economy will give us elegant ways of handling these problems, which are horribly thorny and tangled in the current system because of the complication and overwhelming attraction of money. I'm thinking of the example of Google Navigation, which ultimately wants to track the data of all the cars on the road (or at least a statistically significant sampling), in order to determine flows of traffic patterns. If you know where the cars are, you can route them along the roads in a way that maximizes the usefulness of roads. Seems like a hell of a good thing if you want to address the traffic problem (and all the inefficiencies therein) but it means you have to give your location to Google, and that might rub you the wrong way.

But there are ways to make this palatable. I think you can make a lot of the information anonymous in ways that don't link information back to some particular individual. I think this is how all the marbles get tracked: it doesn't matter who shot the marble at you, all that matters is that you got an extra marble. I also think you make that (anonymous) information entirely public. It wouldn't be the private property of a business trying to make profit, nor would it be the top secret database stored by an oppressive government, but it would be information open to the crowd, so they can all see how it works, and tinker with it, and optimize it so we can improve that system.

And that's really the point. Right now there is some official person who is paid to handle issues of traffic control as a state bureaucrat, and that person is engulfed political and social and economic system that makes it very difficult to actually seriously address the problem of traffic in any meaningful way. Solutions proposed within this system tend to be slipshod, good-enough-for-now operations with no larger perspective or eye to sustainability. These kinds of massive problems are simply too big and complicated, and involve too many factors, to trust a top-down organization, with all the limitations that entails, to adequately address it.

But the crowd has lots of time on their hands, and a far more diverse skill set and background, and they are more than willing to go over that information in exquisite detail to optimize formulas and tinker with alternatives and otherwise map out the solution space. You just have to make it available for them to work with, and they will. Its what they do best.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

archangelwar posted:

Don't worry, he posts this same copy/paste every few months and then yells at everyone who "doesn't get it."

I have posted about this twice.

Here's one. That was written for that thread alone and not copied from anywhere else. No one said anything about it in that thread, which was a little silly anyway, and I didn't yell at anyone for "not getting it". I have copied one paragraph from that post in this thread; otherwise, everything in this thread is original.

I know I've posted the "marbles from foreheads" thing, but it is probably in the archives because I can't find it in search. It was not an original thread of mine, but a one off description of the idea in another thread about something else, and got almost no response, much like the post above.

I had this idea about 4 years ago, and while I admit that I have tried to post the idea on the forums before, I never felt confident enough with the idea to commit to writing about it at length. It certainly isn't a copy/paste I bring out "every few months". I've wanted to write it out, but I always buried it in some other thread and watched it sink without a ripple.

But now I'm totally doing this poo poo live.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Helsing posted:

You do realize that many different societies have independently come up with the idea of money, right? If you want to come up with an alternative system then you should go for but you'd have to be insanely ignorant of basic history and anthropology - not to mention political economy - to think that the only reason people use money is force of habit or irrational reverence for how things were done in the past. You're in such a rush to come up with a better system that you haven't spent enough time thinking about why we developed the system we have. If you're going to make a critique of the existing economy then it really needs to be an intelligent and thoughtful one.

I'm in the process of writing out the idea in this thread, but I've given it a lot of thought. I'm trying to take it seriously. But it is also a Really Big Idea, and I know I'm not capable of handling it on my own, and I really don't give a poo poo if the forums see me slip and fall a few times while I'm trying to put it together.

It's not like I'm trying to make money off the idea.

Yes, money has appeared independently in many different societies. Dennett calls it a "Good Trick" of evolution, like flying or vision, which also arose independently several times in the history of species. I've struggled with the idea that it is a "good" trick, but it is certainly a successful trick and one that has been incredibly important for human society for thousands of years.

I don't want to take that history lightly. But I also don't want to take it for granted. The human species has spent the vast majority of our history without money. Wikipedia tells me that commodity money is roughly five thousand years old, and we've been so-called "Behaviorally Modern Humans" for roughly fifty thousand years, so we are talking around 10% of our history as Modern Humans, and closer to 1% of our history as Homo Sapiens.

It is quite reasonable to think that money is an efficient way of handling social transactions in societies with a certain kind of organization. Hunter-Gathers don't need commodity money, but if you are in an Agricultural society or an Industrial society where the need for specialization and division of labor is high then commodity money is a Good Trick for handling the problems of social coordination. In such a situation, it isn't surprising that the trick gets invented (or discovered) multiple times independently by cultures facing the same basic coordination problem.

And that's perfectly compatible with the claim that a Digital society can find other ways of dealing with the problem of coordination. In fact we should expect that a deeply networked society operating on a global scale would need new solutions to the coordination problem. The internet is a Good Trick too, and I think it can solve a lot of the coordination problems that money was used for in other contexts.

Someone more moderate than I would probably try to argue that the future will have some contexts where money still is the best solution to the coordination problem- probably in contexts where things are rare, or luxury items, or otherwise "expensive" and hard to get. But perhaps we should divorce those contexts from the contexts of basic human living- the food and shelter and education and medicine that can be supplied to all people without the pretense of expense or luxury, but must be carried out in the name of humanity. Right now these contexts suffer under the centrality of money, and if we can even just shrink the scope of its influence on the coordination problem, it will be a major human victory.

quote:

You also really need to address why you think it's better to have an economy with no savings and how / why people in this economy will invest in plant and machinery.

That's easy. The only thing you have to invest with is you attention, and the only thing that costs you is time. So if you are willing to take the time to build a factory, then do it. If your factory really helps optimize the coordination problem, then I'm sure others will help.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!
^^ No, but it sounds like a fun thread.

DiscipleoftheClaw posted:

your suggested time period is after the Protestant Reformation drove the Catholic Church out of a large portion of Europe, and irreversibly effected its political power in what countries remained Catholic. (Which isn't to say that the Church had no power in those countries, because it obviously did/does.)

They threw Galileo in prison over a hundred years after the Reformation began, which is explicitly part of the context of the parable.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

archangelwar posted:

Honestly, I don't see why you find this concept so fascinating in light of more well researched ideas in post scarcity socioeconomics.

Do you have something specific in mind?

The closest thing I know is The Venus Project, but in all honesty I haven't looking into it much beyond knowing of its existence. But there is an air of Scientology to it that makes me uncomfortable. I know that's a complete knee-jerk reaction, but its association with Zeitgeist leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so I haven't looked to get involved or do any more research.

My idea was arrived at independently, and I didn't learn about TVP until I started doing research. I don't want to influence it too much by reading what they are doing because if they are a bunch of tinfoil insane types I don't want even the appearance of an association. My ideas are crazy, but they are my crazy ideas, and I don't want to get swept up in a cult because of it.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

DiscipleoftheClaw posted:

And again, no one is saying the Church had no political power or influence. It did. But we are confused about what that parable is supposed to be, and why you think that the Church had more to do with the state of European affairs than, well, the State did.

It is a parable. The church represents a sacred and unquestioned authority. The point of the parable was not to address some fact about the church's absolute power, but instead to address the taboo against conceiving of a society without that power. I could have easily referred to the State as well (I do refer to "Kings and Lords"), but this wouldn't have captured the "taboo" aspect of the parable as well, especially to a largely American audience that is quite accustomed to questioning political authority.

You are right that the Church was by no means an absolute and unquestioned authority at the dawn of the Enlightenment. But intellectual elites at that time (and well after) did very much live in fear of speaking about atheism or a secular society, and hid or adjusted their works to prevent persecution from the Church, despite its waning power. Both Hobbes and Hume use forms of circumlocution to avoid the appearance of directly questioning the centrality of religion, and they don't even have to worry about the Vatican. So the idea that two young kids at the time would speak in hushed tones about secularism isn't so horribly outlandish.

But dude, seriously, its a loving parable. I know its easy to rip on the guy who puts in the effort instead of contributing your own, but you are trying to point out anachronisms in a loving fable. Grow up.

edit: In 100 years, people will point to the late 20th and early 21st century as the beginning of the Digital Age that ushered in the cashless society. But I'm in here right now posting to blank stares and accusations of incoherence.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Maxwell Lord posted:

Except then there's food.

Look, there are the basic needs we've established- food, water, shelter. They're the bottom of the pyramid. Post-scarcity generally means making sure these things are taken care of no matter what. Food is something where there's a hard minimum we need and a relative maximum- there's only so much you can stuff yourself before you need the vomitorium. Water's the same, there's a minimum of it and a maximum. Shelter's a bit more flexible, but it works differently.

To be truly post-scarcity, you can't have anyone on the globe starving or unable to get food. You have to establish a basic level of food security for the entire world.

Now, I'm sort of an idealist, I like to think we aren't living in the end of days, maybe we could actually achieve this. But that's what any new economic model has to address- how people get the essentials of life. Take care of that before we get into attention economies or bitcoinage.

This is a Good Post.

Attention Economy is meant precisely to address this problem, without appealing to some top-down bureaucratic institution with a monopoly on planning. Instead, it appeals to the bottom-up Digital paradigm of open access, universal participation, and crowd-sourced management and improvement. It is a distributed solution to the coordination problem.

I've used the phrase a few times, so let me be specific:

The Coordination Problem is the problem of coordinating global human activity to produce and distribute resources in order to satisfy global human need.

The Basic Coordination Problem is the problem of coordination global human activity to produce and distribute basic human resources to satisfy basic global human needs. I take the basic human needs to include food, water, shelter, medical care, and education.

Since we already meet those levels of production, I think we have a minimal ethical imperative to solve at least the basic coordination problem and work out the method of distribution.

One thing I hope we can all agree on is that our current system, what I like to call The Existing Order of Things, although it has been instrumental in solving the production problem, has not solved the distribution problem, and will be in no position to do so for the foreseeable future.

Why don't we have a solution to the distribution problem right now? There are all sorts of complex sociohistorical reasons for how we got here, but what prevents a solution? Right now the solution to the distribution problem currently rests on the flow of (commodity) money, and as long as there is no profit in solving the basic coordination problem money can't properly direct the resources where they are needed. Even significant amounts of charity and aid work to patch the problems at best. If we take money for granted, the only potential solutions is to wait for all developing nations to rise up and eventually enter into more significant trade relations within our current global economic system. But not only this process is slow and mired in the sociopolitical realities of the global economy, but the end goal is clearly unsustainable and frankly doesn't have much to say for itself other than that it seems to be the only cards on the table, and no one is coming up with any better solutions.

So Attention Economy is meant to be that solution. The idea is to track attention as an indicator of value, not as an abstract and neutral medium of exchange, but as a direct empirical indicator of what people do in fact value. My claim is that as we get better at collecting data about what people actually pay attention to, the better we will be able to solve the distribution problem. As is becoming increasingly clear, the problems of complex networks is tackled with mountains and mountains of data, and I'm trying to argue that the data we want to be tracking for solving the economy is attention. I am so confident of this that I'm willing to push ahead with the theory despite the mocking in this thread.

I have a bunch of examples, but my favorites are the ones dealing with highways. Here's a basic rule of thumb: the road that is traveled most often is the road that should receive the most resources and upkeep to ensure that it is operating most effectively. In general, a road should be able to marshal the resources required to maintain its use, and in proportion to the amount that it is used.

That seems like a fair principle, and one that settles the basic algorithm for distributing road-constructing resources among all the roads. Apart from one major objection discussed below, this is a pretty clear case where questions about the distribution of resources is settled directly by questions of use. Tracking attention just is tracking use, so my argument is that an attention-based system for distributing resources is going to produce better results (more efficient use of resources) than other methods. It will definitely be superior to the way things work now, where the most profitable road to repair gets repairs, while others languish despite use.

So that works for roads, I think, and my idea is to apply it widely. Where do the resources for maintaining those roads come from? Well, track how much asphalt and tar and whatever is used, and distribute those resources as anticipated by those patterns of use. Apply the same pattern down the chain, and horizontally across domains, and you have the basic model for a new and sustainable economy. This seems deceptively simply, I know. The important thing to recognize is not that my idea is right, but that this isn't how we do it now. The way we do things now is to distribute resources based on maximizing profit. Sometimes solving the coordination problem maximizes profit, and then we get examples of where the current system works. But for lots of resources and for lots of people, solving the coordination profit doesn't maximize this external goal of profit maximization, and so the system just fails. My idea is to reorganize this so that our systems of value have direct implications for the coordination problem, and I'm proposing that attention is precisely the mechanism for doing this.

The road example also highlights one important feature about attention economy: everyone is a participant in the economy, including our objects. I can pay attention to the road just as much as I can pay attention to other people, and that attention paid needs to be tracked by the system.

This is where the marble analogy comes in handy. I haven't laid the full view out yet, so let me explain more how it works. Remember, an individual's rate of marble production is a function of the rate of marble absorption plus some base rate. Every human being will produce a constant base rate of marbles (in virtue of being conscious) which they effortlessly divide among the various things they pay attention to as they go about their day. The marbles are shooting out of their head automatically, so they don't need to think about where they are going, and they certainly aren't 'exchanging' them for anything. They are just producing them, unconsciously, like beats of their heart.

I can't change that base rate of marbles. But I can change my rate of marble absorption, and thereby increase the rate at which I produce marbles. I change this by attracting attention. Anyone who pays attention to me or the things I do will ultimately (and unconsciously) be shooting marbles at me, and every marble I get will increase my rate of marble production by some small fraction. The more attention I get, the faster my rate of marble production.

A few key points:

1) Nothing that I do on a daily basis will depend on my rate of marble production. I will not be limited from access to any public goods and services based on my rate of marble production. So there is no pressure on me to attract attention. If I want to be completely anonymous and not have anyone bother to notice me, I will still be fully capable of participating in public life.

2) By "pay attention to me", I mean both my self (my body and personality and whatever) but also the things I do. So for instance, if I create some invention or write a book (paging Insanite), the book is labeled as mine in some essential way, such that when anyone who pays attention to that book (and thereby, shoots that book with their marbles), I received some percentage of the marbles shot at that book. I won't receive all the marbles; some will go to the book's manufacture and advertiser and whoever else participated in its creation. But I will be acknowledged for that work with a boost in my marble production rate.

It is fundamental to this system that Real People get Real Credit for the work they do, and the credit they get is directly tied to is usefulness within the system. So the same thing will work for the road construction. The road is receiving a certain amount of marbles based on its use, and at least some of those marbles get redirected to the construction crew who put their time and effort into maintaining its use.

But again, don't think of this like getting paid to do the work. First of all, if anyone "pays" you it isn't going to be your 'boss', or the managers who are helping coordinate the task. The thing "paying" you is the road itself, the thing you actually worked on. But this isn't "paying" in the old commodity money sense, because a) you don't get any wealth from it, in the form of goods or currency, all you get is a boost to your rate of production, and b) the boost to your rate of production will entirely depend on the use of the thing you produced (that is, how much attention it gets), and not on the work you put into it.

3) The why care if your rate of production goes up? If my ability to feed myself doesn't depend on the work I do, why should I work to increase my rate of marble production?

Well the short answer is that you shouldn't, if you don't want to. Although this system will 'reward' the 'popular' people that everyone pays attention to, none of your basic needs (the ones that must be met by the Basic Coordination Problem) depend on your popularity. So if you want to spend all your time building miniature Michael J Fox dolls for the three other people who are into that, do it. You'll still be able to live your life with all your basic needs met. No one will stop you, and you won't be punished for it. You, my friend, are part of the long tail, and a distributed system mostly exists in that small tail, so there is no incentive to punish you for finding a niche role.

But if you want it, you can seek out attention to increase your rate of marble production. Because the higher your rate of production, the more influence you have over the overall flow of of marbles in the system. I mentioned a major objection to the road example earlier, and here it is: not all use is equal. Maybe that one road into the forest sits entirely unused the whole year, except when firetrucks use it to clean out the underbrush to ensure there are no fires. It may be mostly unused, but that one use is really loving important. There are all sorts of cases where perhaps we should privilege some use over others.

So this objection is right, and the Attention Economy system is supposed to account for this. Not all use is equal, but we have a way of tracking the weighting the relative importance of each use. If I am producing marbles at a higher rate, then I am giving more marbles out during an instance of use than someone who produces at a lower rate. That use isn't "more important" in any meaningful sense, but it weighs the resources more heavily into the things that I use over others. Of course, lots of people pay attention to stupid things, but I'm standing by the basic idea that resources should be distributed according to attention. As long as you are tracking all the people, then enough people will pay attention to enough important things to solve the basic coordination problem. Presumably, enough people will be paying attention to the fire department to ensure that resources lean in its favor enough to support the maintenance of the road, and so on.

I'm going to take a break for a bit. I'm not done laying the system out, but hopefully I've put enough meat on it now that the basic outline of the system is apparent, and its virtues can start to become clear. I'd be happy to discuss whatever specific questions or issues anyone raises.

Although the basic form of the solution isn't particularly novel, and the end-state looks like classic Marxist utopias, I have never seen anyone propose this specific mechanism for doing it, so I think the idea is genuinely novel. I also think it is in line with contemporary science, including computer and behavioral neuroscience, and seems to ring true with the emerging sciences of complexity. But, I think more importantly, it is generated with values derived explicitly from Digital Culture. So I don't think this I'm completely on the deep end. I'm just tying together some loose threads in the theory. I think it is productive to talk about it either way, and I'm enjoying myself as I write it :)

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Zodium posted:

Wouldn't an attention economy turn into an advertising/marketing economy pretty fast?

Good! I suppose an unsympathetic way of describing Attention Economy just is as an Advertising Economy, insofar as my solution is really just to let Google solve it all, and Google is just in the business of advertising.

But calling it an "advertising economy" makes it sound slimy. There are a few key differences, the biggest being the GETTING RID OF MONEY part. Advertising is profitable, but current advertising methods don't actually do all that great a job making sure the products actually get into the hands of the people who want them. Ideally, advertisements would only appear when you a) need something, b) don't have it, c) don't know where to get it, and d) want to know where to get it. Otherwise, you should never see an advertisement. It is just attention wasted. Frankly, I think it is an outrage that I'm not directly compensated for the attention that advertisements steal from me everyday. I'd love a transitional system where I got paid for every advertisement I watch.

Advertisements are everywhere now not because of the role they play in solving the Coordination Problem, but because marketers want mindshare, and they want mindshare because it is profitable. But if you get rid of the profit motive, then "advertising" really just becomes the issue of efficient and successful resource distribution, which is exactly what Attention Economy is meant to solve.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Helsing posted:

The fact that you think its "easy" is actually a lot more telling than your attempted solution.

No, I meant it was "easy" in the sense that it is exactly the kind of problem an Attention Economy is meant to address. It is built into the way my system works. You asked the question as if it was something I hadn't considered, or it was a trick question, so I said it was "easy" because it is a question I have a ready answer for.

A bridge is a tremendous investment in human capital and physical infrastructure. But we know how to coordinate those activities quite well, thank you very much, and when you get rid of all the money, the people and machines to build that bridge will still be here, and nothing about our ability to accomplish that task will have been undermined.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!
There is no way you could have ready my post and concluded "Oh, he's talking about deregulation." There's not a hint of free market ideology in Attention Economy.

I would respond to criticisms and critiques if you actually had any, but I'm pretty sure you are just posting ad homs. I'd take your insults and attacks personally if I thought you put any effort into reading what I have said, but you clearly haven't.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

evilweasel posted:

"The invisible hand eyeball will simply solve all problems, no need to question how" is pretty much exactly the worst part of someone spouting free market ideology, the laziness part.

There's no invisible eyeball? I'm not sure what you are referring to. I haven't made reference to any "free market" or or implied the existence of any self-correcting system.

There's no force or power of the system apart from the network of relations. I said that hopefully enough people care and attend to the fire station to ensure that it can marshal the resources to maintain the underused fire road. That's not a claim that any "free hand" will correct the system to ensure that happens. There's no guarantee that the people will attend to the things that need attending to.

What I've said is that we should marshal resources according to what people in fact pay attention to, and we should trust them to self-organize in order to solve the problems they face. The Attention Economy is a kind of infrastructure to enable that self organization, and is meant as an alternative to the infrastructure of money as a means of distributing resources.

Maybe they won't self-organize, and that road will go unmaintained. It depends entirely on what the people do, what they take the time to attend to. All I've argued is that the resources should go to what people in fact attend to, instead of trying to centralize and plan it out in advance according to how money is distributed. Money, or the "Market", free or not, clearly is not suited to solving the coordination problem. All I've argued is that Attenion Economy actually has a shot. There is no way to interpret what I've written as an argument to "make the market more free", especially when I'm explicitly trying to abolish the market entirely.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

agarjogger posted:

Is the diversion of capital from East Hampton mansions and manufactured desert subdivisions to sick, starving villages honestly impossible under our current economic system? Our economy does not allow for even marginally equitable distribution of resources and we need a brand new one in order to achieve any kind of sustainable civil society? That's stupid and I don't believe it. I think our problems are simple....

I have committed myself to a renewed American urbanism, which I see as the solution to almost every single problem.

It is curious that you think a solution to "our" problems seem like solutions to very specific problems of American society in particular. I agree that population contraction in urban centers will be important for reducing environmental impact and such, but that's not going to put a dent in global economic, environmental, and humanitarian problems. "Our" problems don't end at the border; if you have no trust in the state of the markets to correct this problem, then I see no reason to respect their artificial boundaries.

The global coordination problem is not a simple problem, and it wont be solved with the death of American suburbs. We need to be thinking on much, much longer scales and timelines, because the problems and impacts are global, and the consequences for failure on the global level are existential.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

clammy posted:

Paying attention is not necessarily productive activity. How do you plan to unfailingly, consistently create value from attention? You might as well turn "golf-clapping" or "nose scratching" into your fiat currency. It makes no sense.

You don't "create value" from attention. Attention is value in my system.

Consider facebook. Measured against the dollar, it is worth around $75 billion. The value that system has accumulated is not generated by any product offered by Facebook. No one has 'produced' anything that is worth that much money. Facebook's value is derived entirely from the 800 million people who put the time and effort into maintaining the network and its content. Its value rests entirely on the fact that a lot of people pay attention to it, and that is valuable in itself. Its dollar value comes as an estimation of how profitable exploiting that attention might be, but the dollar value is derivative on the intrinsic value of the attention of its users.

This is characteristic and most salient in the networked age, but I'm tempted to claim that there are underlying truths about human value systems generally. Everyone has their hobby or role that they are willing to invest incredible amounts of time and energy into simply in virtue of their own intrinsic passion for it, and it is ultimately this investment in care that makes the thing appreciate in value. In fact, we know that the value people find in satisfying and rewarding work is actually undermined by attaching some extrinsic cash reward for that work. In other words, people would actually like Facebook less if they were getting paid to use it. So measuring that kind of value against the dollar is a bad idea. The hope is that Attention Economy comes closer to approximating a more natural measure of value.

You might call it a "care economy", but I don't know how you can measure care. My claim is that you can do a much better job measuring attention as a proxy for care, because attention is going to have sharp and measurable behavioral cues that can actually be measured in objective and unambiguous ways. One nice feature about my system is that, the more sophisticated our science gets at measuring attention, the more accurate our economic model will be, and the better we will be able to distribute resources where they are needed. Keeping the measure of value closely tied to the emerging brain sciences ensures that the system can improve as our understanding matures (again, in sharp contrast to money).

quote:

At any rate; I have ADD, so I guess I lose out in this Brave New Wor- Hey, a bird just landed on my windowsil!

This isn't a trivial problem, and it is important to bring up. A multitasker able to divide their attention in multiple directions will, as a consequence, be able to do more work for the network, and may enjoy a greater control over that network as a result. That might actually work out better for someone with ADD, but someone cognitively limited in other ways may have trouble staying competitive for attention. So the system, in this way, doesn't appear egalitarian. That's a genuine concern.

I'm think I'm okay with using a measure of cognitive ability as a measure of value, despite differences in cognitive ability. I think centering the measure on attention solves a lot of these problems. Although you are diagnoses with an "attention deficit", that doesn't mean you don't pay attention to things, it is that (if you are a typical case) that you have trouble giving sustained and undivided attention to things. But in an attention economy you can divide your attention however you please, so a divided and unfocused attention isn't a "deficit" in my sense.

In any case, your ability to participate in the system is independent of whatever capacities and abilities you might have. Nothing about one's basic needs depends on the rate of marble production, so the people with cognitive disabilities wont starve. Moreover, attracting attention is not itself dependent on cognitive abilities. Babies are usually instant attention-trackers, not because they are smart, but because they are cute. So having a cognitive disability isn't a social disaster; in fact, I would suggest that human communities evolved in a large part to take care of the weakest in the group, and that absent the limitations on money we would have much more interest in social and care work, not less.

I don't know if that is entirely satisfying. My system retains the "entrepreneurial spirit" inherent to Capitalism, in the sense that if I have some neat trick or good idea, I can use that idea to marshal and direct lots of resources in my favor. Any system that has any kind of competition will also inevitably have some form of inequality. But since that competition is not itself over the distribution of resources, is seems incapable of disrupting the solution to the basic coordination problem, and so keeps to the minimum ethical requirements.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

MonsterUnderYourBed posted:

How much could you instead improve living conditions of people by if you directed resources towards that instead of billions of retina scanners?

Retinal scanners are like 5th generation Attention Economy, for when we want extremely highly accurate measures of attention.

For a basic started model you wouldn't really need something ore complicated that an Rfid for every object and a Beacon in every pocket, and Rfids are cheap as dirt.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Yiggy posted:

1) Assuming you get the infrastructure in place for eye trackers, everywhere I guess? How does this work. It simultaneously tracks vision to ascertain attention, and then has some sort of object recognition to see what is being attended to, how exactly is that actionable information? What does that tell anyone about other important details, such as intentions?

Good question. Measuring attention doesn't say anything about intention. When I protest outside the Fed, I am giving it attention despite my negative intentions. You might think about attention as the absolute value of value: it measures relative degree of value but not its valence.

This is just how the system works, and I actually consider it a feature. Receiving attention means gaining influence, and increased influence increases the ability to marshal resources. So, for instance, the more people that drive on a road, the more road-constructing materials it should be able to marshal. But "marshalling resources" is neither a good nor bad thing; its just what needs to be done to keep the system working optimally.

So say I am the sole user of a largely unused road, and that road has fallen into disrepair because of lack of use. I might want to try and raise a big public stink about it and attract attention to this cause, with a Twitter campaign or whatever. Now that might not be enough to attract the resources to fix all the potholes, but the system has suddenly taken notice of an issue that had previously fallen under the radar, and it is more likely that at least some of the necessary resources will find their way to you, or that someone who knows how to get those resources will find you.

But the idea is fundamentally that the crowd handles all these issues in a distributed and decentralized way. In order to get those resources directed one way or another, you just have to ping the system and amplify that ping enough to get it to happen. Someone, somewhere, will be spending their days scanning twitter for people needing road repair and will be able to put them in contact with the people who have a bunch of road construction equipment looking for places it can be used.

quote:

2) How would this deal with things like apathy? The system doesn't really provide incentives to act. Who is directing the resources, whose managing the labor to distribute said resources. Is all of this supposed to be part of the infrastructure too? Automated, etc.?

3) You mentioned it earlier, so I know you're aware, but what about people paying attention to and only caring about Stupid poo poo. How does an attention economy not just break down into a constant exercise in creating more and more scintillating, attention grabbing poo poo. If everyone is just paying attention to American idle, when does poo poo that no one wants to pay attention to but which is nonetheless important ever get taken care of. How can a handful of people interested and attending to very niche interests, say, scientists, ever marshall enough of the attention-bound resources necessary to meet their tasks? Especially with a lot of little known and understood problems, such as you typically find on the fringes of understood science, you'll have a small number of "marbles" designating need where in reality a ton of marbles are needed to garner the resources necessary for the research.

I take these questions to be two sides of the same basic coin: what happens if people pay attention to the wrong things, or don't pay attention enough, or otherwise aren't good attention payers?

In the long run, if we aren't good attention payers, then we die. There isn't a system in the world that will protect us from ourselves. The attention economy isn't meant to protect us from ourselves, it is just meant to solve the coordination problem.

This is an ant mill.

When an ant is placed in a foreign environment without a trail to lead it home, it will wander aimlessly, which is probably the best method for stumbling onto the lost trail. When it encounters another ant from the same colony, it follows: maybe that ant knows the way back!

When the entire colony is massively displaced and loses its trail it swarms around itself like a spiral galaxy, since all the ants revert to the best-guess default behavior of "following another ant", and none of them have any idea where to go. Unless disrupted, the ants will continue to spiral around themselves until they all die from exhaustion.

These ants have no protection against their basic drives, and they have an intense drive to follow the trails of their fellow ants. This drive is usually a really really good thing, because the system they have set up ensures that "following other ants" will almost always help solve the Ant Coordination Problem. But when the whole colony is displaced, those basic impulses and drives spell doom for the whole colony.

Ant colonies provide rock solid proof that an agricultural society composed of millions of semi-autonomous individuals can survive for millions of years, and the ant mill is still a well-organized system built on those same stigmergic principles. It just has no direction and isn't going anywhere. Coordinated, organized activity doesn't guarantee any kind of evolutionary success or sustainability. It is certainly possible that bringing an Attention Economy online will have this result.

But I think it is incredibly unlikely, because I think we have too much interest in satisfying our basic needs to let the system spiral into exhaustion. I will admit that it is an optimistic view of humanity, but I don't think it is fatal to the credibility of the view.

Lets start with the issue of the "jobs no one wants". How to we draw attention to the issues no one wants to attend to? I think people are perfectly willing to do the basic work required to feed and house and clothe themselves, and that they are willing to work as part of the system if that system is achieving those ends. So who will take out all the trash and dig the ditches and clean the toilets? Well, someone is doing all that stuff right now, and I see no good reason to think that someone won't continue to do it in the future. I know a lot of people right now do these jobs because they have to to feed and clothe themselves, and they would stop immediately and do something else if those needs were being provided for. That's okay, those people may be far more productive elsewhere. But that doesn't convince me that there wont be someone who will continue to do it even if their personal livelihood doesn't depend on it, because it needs to get done.

By grandfather used to tell a story about living in rural Texas during the depression. Their "street" was a dirt cul-de-sac with about 6 houses holding ten or so immigrant families from Mexico. At the end of the road was the outhouse that the whole block shared. My grandpa explained that he never heard anyone discuss it, but the women on that street all worked out a cleaning schedule for that outhouse, sharing duties and distributing it among themselves not because anyone wanted to or was getting paid for it, but because the job needed to get done and they were willing to work together to do it.

That said, if people are using that bathroom and you are doing the work to maintain it, then some of that bathrooms marbles will be directed towards you. So the system does credit the people who do the work. If I don't have the skills or talent to be popular but I still want to gain influence, there are plenty of things that need to get done.

And I think that's the general lesson for all these cases. There are lots of workers who want to work but can't. I don't think people suddenly stop wanting to be productive simply because their livelihood doesn't depend on it. I'm not trying to inject some new incentive structure entirely; instead, I'm trying to unburden the system so that people are free to follow their own incentives, and then hoping that our incentives are targeted well enough on meeting basic needs for ourselves and our neighbors that the coordination problem gets solved.

Now more directly to your cases, let's do the "paying attention to stupid poo poo". How do we make sure people don't pay attention to stupid poo poo? I don't think you can, frankly, and I don't think you should try. Let them pay attention to whatever they want. I don't think you end up with a planet of heroin addicts and couch potatoes. I think both diseases are forms of self-medication to alleviate the stressed of modern life and avoid the system; I think if we tear that system down and let people follow their pleasures as they will, they will be endlessly creative and productive and interesting.

Again, this is the networked model, the Digital culture. People are an incredibly diverse bunch, and the overall strength of the network is improved by that diversity, so I'm loathe to reign it in. The old 20th century model was to try and abstract away from individual differences in order to have the individual fit into the assembly line system, and so the impression was that we need to standardize everyone. No wonder the masses turn to opiates under this kind of oppression. So let people pursue their passions. Some of it will look banal, but that's because people are banal. Some of it will look like /b/ because that's how some people are.
But its a mistake to try to eliminate this diversity by trying to enforce a narrow range of acceptable interests. Diversity of interest, just like genetic diversity, is part of what makes humanity resilient.

Finally, let's talk about apathy. There are real cases of complete lack of interest, and they usually are associated with depression and other forms of mental illness. These are serious cases, some of which are also the result of modernity-related stresses, but these kinds of issues can have all sorts of sources. Depression, and mental health in general, is a real and serious problem.

But I don't think most people are apathetic in this sense. Most people have their passions and will invest tremendous energy and time into developing those interests, without anyone needed to come in from the outside to enforce that investment. But most of the time, people are forced to invest their time and energy into things they have absolutely no interest in whatsoever, and that creates the illusion of apathy. Again, my solution isn't about trying to figure out a way to get them interested in those things, but instead to reorganize the system so they don't have to be.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

OatmealRaisin posted:

Jesus man, the more I read the more I would rather be a prole in 1984 or a ground troop in Starship Troopers.

Can you say why? If I'm meant to infer something obvious here I'm not seeing it.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

evilweasel posted:

No it's not. An economy does not dictate what is value. An economy reacts to what is value. This goes back to your anti-money bugbear: money isn't value in a capitalist system, money is merely a means of exchanging or storing value.

Yes, money is a medium of exhange. I'm saying that we don't need a medium of exchange or a way to store value, because we can track value directly and leverage that data directly against the coordination problem. If that means it isn't an "economy" by your definition, that's fine, but I was using the word "economy" to describe any general solution to social coordination and resource management issues.

You say "An economy reacts to value" as if it is true. Perhaps the economy is supposed to react to value, or should react to value, but of course it doesn't actually do any of that. The markets react to lots of different things, and value is one of them, but it isn't the only one, and it creates distortion and corruption of value in the process of abstracting it. That's not itself bad; any attempt to quantize value will have distortions. But money in particular can be distorted in a way that prohibits solutions to the coordination problem, and that's not satisfactory.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!
About the general "why should people care?" line. My argument is not filled with misty-eyed hope for humanity. My argument is grounded in the basic fact that we are animals and we know how to take care of ourselves, and we are willing to put in the work to do it. We've survived for hundreds of thousands of years doing it.

I have more detailed responses to give, but my arthritis is flaring up and I need to take a break.

But I have to say that it is incredibly interesting that people really believe that without the incentive of money people won't do anything and will suddenly stop caring about everything. People are actually arguing that holding humanity as wage slaves is the only way that we will get anything done, and that without the yolk of money we would all resort to being lazy, apathetic freeloaders. Apparently we need these whips, that 9-5 job, or else we become unable to wipe our own asses.

I don't think it is unrealistic optimism to think that view is ridiculous, and responding to the objection has become a little exasperating for me, because I don't think I can be convincing even though I am sure I am right. It feels like a situation that most atheists will be very familiar with: the objection "if there is no God, why don't you just kill yourself?"

Its not that the atheist doesn't have a good answer to this question. Of course they do. But the problem is that the question comes from a value system that is already so completely corrupted to begin with that even trying to explain the atheist's alternative source of value is a nonstarter for the person raising the objection, so the conversation can't go anywhere.

One more quick response:

Yiggy posted:

there are also freeloaders

This, again, I want to disagree with. There is no such thing as a free-loader in a post-scarcity society, and so our value systems need to change to prevent us from the kind of Protestant ethic that generates the accusation.

I think if you didn't give anyone any requirements of work, that many of them would spend most of their time working on their own pet hobbies and interests, which seem trivial to anyone who doesn't share that interest. Most of the work that people will do, though, will probably be directed at their immediate social network: their family and close friends. I think that when left to idle, people will tend to want to socialize. Again, this socialization seems like a waste of time to anyone who isn't a part of those networks, but for the people who are invested in them it is very very important.

Those people who invest in their own interests appear to be "freeloaders" or "lazy" to anyone outside their networks, because they aren't contributing in ways that might be immediately apparent. But I think allowing the freedom to pursue one's interests will generate incredibly important contributions, and I think that will account for the vast majority of humanity.

I mean seriously, it is ridiculous for us to question this basic premise in the digital age. If 50 years ago I told you that there will be this great big global machine called Internet that has stored and organized all the worlds information, you might very well ask what organizational model did we use to build it. There's so much to do, how did you assign all the people to all the jobs? The response, though, was that there was no central planning at all. We just gave people access to the system and let them do whatever they want, and all that flurry of semi-autonomous activity resulted in the Internet. No central planning, no assigning of tasks, but the thing got done through self-organized collectives banding together over existing, specialized interests. Some of it is dirty, boring work (filling in databases and writing reviews of every book and movie and stuff), but there's a lot of it to do and a lot of people willing to do even the most trivial parts of it. 50 years ago you'd laugh me out of the room, but here we are today.

And this is the point: there are no freeloaders on the internet. Everyone is a participant. Every user, no matter how little content they produce on their own, is contributing to the network simply by using it. Every pageview strengthens the network, every Google Search is a datapoint closer to optimization.

If the goal is to solve the coordination problem, it can't be to distribute the resources to the people who earned it, or deserve it, or toiled for X amount of hours. Because that's what we have now, and again it's not sufficient. The solution to the coordination problem is to provide the resources to the people because they are people, regardless of what they have done or are capable of doing or care to do.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Strudel Man posted:

Who leverages the data? I get that the system creates this vast storehouse of data about what people care about (or at least look at). But that, by itself, provides very little incentive for anyone to act on that data.

People want to get dollars because dollars are necessary and sufficient in order to acquire many of the things that they want. Attention marbles do not appear to be necessary in order to get the things you want, and in many cases also do not seem to be sufficient. So how exactly is this data 'leveraged?'

Right, marbles don't get you anything, and they aren't necessary and sufficient for anything. All they do is serve to track all the data, and as an indicator of my relative influence in the network.

So the data is leveraged directly by the people who are looking to act on it, period. There's no centralized organizing body that plans it out or directs resources or has a monopoly on decision making. It is supposed to be entirely self organized.

So you track the data of all the people who eat bread. From the data set you extrapolate should be able to extrapolate how much of what kinds of bread should go where to cover the basic needs and meet demand. Ok, then the baker wakes up in the morning and checks the bread forecast to see how much bread to make, gathers the materials, and then bakes the bread, and then that bread goes somewhere for people to acquire it, and then they eat it and digest it.

So I suppose your question is, what is the incentive to be a baker? The same question could be asked at any step of the process (what incentive is there to crunch the data to extrapolate this information?) But the baker is an easier example. So I've responded in places to this general issue, but to be clear my answers are: 1) some people just want to be bakers, and 2) there is enough people who are interested in eating bread that there will be enough people willing to help out with the process of making bread, even if they don't reallywant to be bakers, and 3) our data tracking will make sure that we are making bread in proportion to its use, so the people helping out can be sure that their effort is maximized and worthwhile, and that when additional effort is needed, the call for help can be directly crowdsourced.

I think a lot of the effort that people put into their work now is wasted work that is not worthwhile, but that people do it anyway because that's how you get paid. A lot of that work wouldn't get done under my system, and that for the best. Maybe under a more efficient system people have to volunteer some time at a bakery for a few hours a week to help with bread production, and that's all I have to do to "contribute back" to the system.

There might be easy ways to enforce this socially without restricting the access to the goods. It will be easier to talk about specifics once we start playing with actual formulas, but just as a suggestions:

Marble Production (MP) is a function of Marble Absorption (MA) plus a Base Rate (BR)

MP = F ( MA + BR )

Perhaps we consider you to be at "parity" when MA = BR, that you are "leeching" when MA << BR, and that you are "seeding" when MA >> BR. If I go volunteer at the bakery for 5 hours a week, then I get a little piece of the incoming marbles for everyone who eats a loaf I helped bake, and perhaps that accumulates enough to make me reach parity, so I feel like I've contributed enough.

But this just has to do with my feelings about the work I do. Nothing about my livelihood depends on reaching parity, and there are no public goods that are off limits to me because I am "leeching". Its just bad form.

Ok, so then just make all the work that needs to get done publicly accessible, so that if anyone wants a shot at upping their MA they can always check to see who needs work done, so the baker can post when he'll need assistance or whatever, and then let the whole thing self-organize.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Yiggy posted:

The real world is not the same thing as the internet. Maybe you should unplug for a bit.

Do you believe that people's ability to meet their basic needs should depend on their ability to contribute to the system?

If I am unable to work, should I not get food?

If you "no", then there is no such thing as a freeloader.

Again, people should have their basic needs met because they are people, not because they performed some task that the system judges to be worthy of continued life. If people have a right to their basic needs regardless of what they do, then there is no such thing as a freeloader.

The alternative is to literally think that people should starve if they don't perform whatever minimum requirement The Market (or whatever) think earns them the right to life. I'm sure a lot of people actually believe this (its the essence of FYGM), but I'm not one of them.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

evilweasel posted:

A freeloader is able but unwilling. I hope this definition of a basic english word will help you better understand the counterarguments to your theory.

That's not the definition. I'm able but not willing to have sex with you, and that doesn't make me a free loader.

The definition of a freeloader is someone who doesn't contribute in proportion to what they take. A freeloader is a leech.

I gave a way above of describing a certain kind of leech in the system, but that kind of leech really doesn't have any consequences for the distribution of resources and isn't problematic in this way.

The kind of leech that contributes nothing at all to the system, the one you seem to be worried about, I'm claiming won't actually exist, the same way they don't exist on the internet. Every use of the internet contributes something back. It might not be a contribution that others will recognize as being in kind, but it is impossible to be a passive observer on the internet. Using the internet at all requires participation and engagement, and in an Attention Economy, every engagement matters.

There are other problems: the problem of the detractor, who refuses to cooperate and actively seeks to disrupt coordination, and of the hoarder who actively stockpiles useful resources in order to limit access to those resources. These are both serious problems I haven't dealt with yet.

But I don't think the freeloader is a problem.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Achmed Jones posted:

So basically if people don't ignore stupid poo poo, the stupid poo poo propagates and becomes stronger. Someone says "Hey, let's genocide some folks!" and everyone says "No that's awful," but because the genocidal maniac is getting attention, they are able to allocate resources to carry out their genocidal project? And if the "No that's awful" folks don't sufficiently turn their gaze inward and allocate their attention to a single project, they can't accrue the influence to counter such a project? And every time anyone engages with those espousing Bad Ideas, those Bad Ideas gain more influence, regardless of how good the reasons are to not pursue said Bad Ideas?

This is a good time to remind everyone to put on your "charitable reader" glasses and try to read your interlocutor in charitable ways. If you see something your interlocutor wrote that seems to imply an approval of mass genocide, read it again! If there is a better and more agreeable interpretation, try to give your interlocutor the benefit of the doubt! This keeps the discussion constructive and engaging, instead of just reiterating charges of insanity.

Ok, now. If a lot of people are paying attention to a homicidal maniac, what do you think is more likely to happen:

a) they will work to stop the killer before he kills again, or
b) they will transform into brainless drones that want only to do the maniac's will?

I'll give you a minute, take your time.



The post you quoted was me describing how attracting attention is neither good nor bad, but merely works to marshal resources. It is good that people are paying attention to the homicidal killer, because that is a situation that needs to be dealt with, but the way to deal with it is to stop the killer. That's right, the answer above was a

Did you get that right? Aww, shucks, well maybe next time.

When disaster struck Haiti or Fukushima, the Twitterverse exploded. Lots of people paid attention. Lots of people paying attention allows groups interested in doing something about it to self organize and marshal the resources required to help. That doesn't mean that everyone loves the Earthquake or wants it to happen again, but people are paying attention and mobilizing to handle the issue. If there is a shooting at the Pentagon again, or whatever, you might hear about it first on Twitter, and that's not a signal to bring your gun and get involved.

The fact that I had to spell this out to you is precisely why I haven't actually taken any of the mocking in this thread seriously. You guys aren't even trying.

quote:

Of course, it explains why you keep pushing this stuff despite being told it's silly, incoherent, or some combination of the two: you want attention.

I don't want attention. But I want the theory to get some attention, because I think its a good theory, or at least might potentially inform a future good theory. I've been sitting on it for a few years and all my friends are tired of it, but I'm comfortable enough with the details that I think I can defend it adequately here.

I've seen a lot of people say it is incoherent, but I don't see anyone who actually understands the system yet, so these accusations are surely premature, and I'm confident enough with the view that a few insults won't make me turn and run. The people who have actually read my posts and ask questions that demonstrate basic comprehension, I've responded to those posts at length and in good faith.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

evilweasel posted:

In a technical and utterly loving useless sense every use of the internet is two-way, because you request what you want to see. This is a completely pointless piece of information.

Yeah, but my point goes deeper than that.

The netflix thing is a good example. Every view on netflix not only results in my passive entertainment. Netflix also keeps that database of my use, and compares it to the use patterns of other users. It uses this database (which I contributed to by just passively watching) in order to do things like recommend movies to its users, to optimize its service, and to negotiate for licenses with the content producers. It can do all this because of the patterns of use it tracks, and by watching netflix I helped to fill in that database.

That's just a tiny datapoint in a huge database, but that's how networks loving work. Lots of little semi-autonomous nodes, self-organizing around their own niche interests, but sharing the information to the wider network so that everyone reaps the benefits. This only works by lots of individuals doing their thing, and a lot of that will look like "passive laziness" to our current conceptions of value and labor, but are nevertheless real and valuable contributions to the network itself.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Achmed Jones posted:

and NeoHitler gains in power.

If acquiring marbles was like acquiring money, I can see how you'd come to this conclusion.

But that's not how it works. Paying attention to Westboro does expand their influence, but there's no guarantee that its expanded influence will work in its favor. Its not like we are expanding its bank account, or giving it resources it can spend how it pleases.

All we've done by paying attention is that we've expand its influence, which in concrete terms means that more people know who they are and what they are doing. More people are aware of the situation. Doing something about the situation requires that people are paying attention, but paying attention alone doesn't determine what anyone does about it.

It might be that when more people are made aware of Westboro, that they start flocking to the church and sign themselves up as members, willing to donate whatever resources they have to the cause. But, and call me optimistic, but I don't think that will be the typical reaction. In fact, I suspect that the typical reaction will be to start withholding services and resources- which, again, is only something I can do if I'm aware of the problem in the first place, which means attention needs to spread.

So I'm not afraid of the possibility of attracting attention to Westboro in my system, any more than I'm afraid of attracting attention to Westboro in the existing system. Its not their attempt to attract attention that's dangerous. What is dangerous is if people start doing what they say, and there is nothing in my system that suggests people will be more susceptible to their influence than they are in the existing system.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Shageletic posted:

People are selfish, and will act selfishly to gain what they can.

Although this certainly trades as common sense, there is nothing about this that matches the real world.

Psychological data for the last decade or so has confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that 1) humans are the most selflessly altruistic of the primates, and are not only willing but eager to share with others, and 2) that people will do rewarding, purposeful work for its own sake, regardless of material compensation, and in fact monetary compensation will make us less likely to do that work.

Read this: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7360/full/nature10278.html
Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Humans are not petty, selfish creatures. If we were, then maybe we need a dictator to tell us what to do. But we aren't, and we can organize ourselves to solve our problems, and we'll do it together just fine thank you very much. You can try to defend a Hobbesian view if you want, but don't pretend that the data supports it.

I really need to give my hands a break. I'll be back tomorrow.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!
Lol marbles what a stupid economic system.

*invests in hedge funds*

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Achmed Jones posted:

"Hey it'd be cool if we could quantify how much attention people pay to stuff."

"Hey, maybe if we could quantify how much attention people pay to stuff we can actually solve the problem of resource distribution!"

I'm not sure what part of this you aren't getting. People pay attention to some things because they want more of it or enjoy it (like ice cream or children), and pay attention to other things because they don't like it and want to fix it (like car wrecks and natural disasters). Both cases of paying attention help to mobilize some action, but before they can do any of it they need a way to network it together, and Attention Economy is supposed to be the nervous system that brings it all online.

When I feel pleasure, its because there is some neurochemical activity in my brain. When I feel pain, there is also some neurochemical activity in my brain. One I like and one I don't like, so how I react to both cases will depend on my reaction. But both cases of neural activity have influence over my subsequent behavior.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Democrazy posted:

Do you think value isn't something that's relative?

I'm not a relativist. I don't think the imperative to solve the coordination problem is optional.

I think most of the objections in this thread are coming from the position that either

1) There is no ethical imperative to solve the coordination problem, so capitalism's failure to solve it is not sufficient reason to look for alternatives, or

2) It is impossible to solve the coordination problem.

But I'm starting from the position that we can and should solve the problem, and that capitalism won't do it.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

rudatron posted:

Twittercane

Do you really think that we will be completely helpless to address these questions without money? Do you really think that with a different socioeconomic system we'd run around with our heads cut off?

I don't know how I am supposed to take these questions seriously. People can organize themselves, and we know how to do these things. None of that changes without money.

Democrazy posted:

If you don't think value is relative I have no idea how you could possibly explain different spending patterns by different consumers.

The fact that people like different things doesn't make value relative. I think there is a standardized and universal way of tracking value, so value is not relative, even though everyone values different things for different reasons.

VVV These are good questions, but my fingers wont move anymore. I'll respond tomorrow. Really really short answer is that we'll do a lot more to feed the hungry by tracking where all the bread is than by tracking where all the hungry people are.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

OatmealRaisin posted:

I actually have a legit question rather than a pithy one-liner about Bitcoins (and let me tell you, it's really hard to ignore the urge)

How do you plan to get past the Bystander Effect? The phenomenon where people will witness an emergency but not do anything because they all assume someone else will take care of it. I would think this would put a massive wrench in this whole attention->action chain.

This is an issue I have thought a lot about, and a lot of my examples were developed in the course of long conversations with psychologists concerning exactly this effect. So it is worth noting that:

quote:

In 2008 a study by Mark Levine and Simon Crowther found that increasing group size inhibited intervention in a street violence scenario when bystanders were strangers but encouraged intervention when bystanders were friends.

One is less likely to be subject to the bystander effect if you are within a closely knit network of familiar relations.

If we are tracking all relations, such that the salient relations attract attention and we all have some indicators of those relations, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect that we would relate to each other less as strangers and more as friends. Philosophers have long been concerned with the alienating effects of modern technology, and I've argued before that the Digital paradigm of networking is partly a revolutionary step because it reverses the trend of alienation. There's a lot to say about this, for sure, but that's the general shape of a response.

This direction of questioning is in one sense exactly right, since it comes from a recognition that global cooperation an Attention Economy would require must have some fundamentally different value systems, and right now if our value systems are "dog eat dog FYGM" then it will seem mighty unlikely that such cooperation would occur. Since I am arguing for a different set of Economic relations, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect this to take the form of a different set of values, ones that look quite different from our own. In fact, I take the Attenion Economy as partly a way of spelling out how the Digital Values play out in the real world as an organizing principle.

But describing a different value system is not the same thing as motivating those values, and obviously it will be really hard to motivate a value system we are unfamiliar with. Again, remember the question to the atheist: "If you don't believe in God, why don't you kill yourself? Why isn't everything meaningless?" I can describe the secular value systems that atheists all over the world follow, but if you are stuck on the idea that MEANING MUST COME FROM GOD then all these systems will look like they are missing some vital component. And I can only talk about Self-Actualization so much before it starts to sound like idealistic visions of puppies and rainbows and world harmony, and obviously that will all sound nuts if you think that values can only be grounded on God.

I'm not a wide-eyed optimist about human nature, and I don't think the levels of cooperation and coordination required are outside the scope of simple human ability or ignore the very real effects of the psychology of groups like the Bystander effect. You don't have to be an optimistist in human nature to hold the basic humanist belief that people should be free to determine their own value systems without the imposition of God.

And similarly, you don't have to believe that if all humans could just hold hands and love each other we could coordinate our activity to provide for ourselves. Instead, I'm arguing that if you set up a system where the easiest default behavior helps coordinate the system, and there are low barriers to contributing to the system, and everyone is free to contribute however they want, that the power of the whole network will we be in a position to handle the coordination problem.

We also, by the way, know from the Milgram experiments that people are willing to to extraordinarily difficult things, some of which might go against their own personal values, if they are convinced that doing so is for the greater good; but they they won't go through with those actions when commanded to do so by someone they consider to be an illegitimate authority. So the Attention Economy will only work if people are convinced that by contributing to it, one is contributing to the greater good.

But this is just to say that if the system works, the system will work. I'm still trying to show how it will work, so I'll try to proceed.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

evilweasel posted:

The foundation of Eripsa's thinking is, essentially, money is the root of all evil. Eliminate money and bad things go away. At that point you just need good information gathering to allow people to selflessly work together to get exactly what we need done.

No, in fact, my argument is that the concentration of wealth is an impediment to solutions to the coordination problem. Money isn't the root of all evil, money is just the root of uneven distribution. If we want to even out distribution, at least to solve the coordination problem, then, we need to get rid of money.

Zodium posted:

The beauty of money is that it loosely aggregates all/most of the dimensions we measure value on, including attention. A moneyless economy would need some way to quantify those dimensions of value that aren't captured by attention.

Good. I'm going to disagree, slightly. Money is a loose aggregate of many dimensions of value, but not all of them, as you mention. There's lots of values that simply aren't properly registered in the market, most famously the value of homemaking, which requires incredible amounts of time and work but receives virtually no direct recognition in the market at all (except, funny enough, though advertising). There are also lots of values that are artificially generated by money that wouldn't exist otherwise (like having more money). You are right that "attention paid" is partly recognized by the value of money, but it is mixed with all sorts of other factors. The market is a complex and unpredictable beast.

What this also means, though, is that since money is the neutral standard for assessing value, that lots of competing values end up getting measured on the same scale- for instance, the value of the Mona Lisa is measured on the same scale as the value of a loaf of bread. And so global decisions about any value, no matter how abstract and luxurious, is going to have consequences for the price of bread and who can access it.

So the idea here is to simplify the beast. Make it all about attention, which is just one of many dynamic factors money currently measures. If we are tracking attention, then the market isn't some big unpredictable beast, but we now have direct information on patterns of use, and that will have direct consequences for resource management and distribution, and this whole network is geared precisely to solve the coordination problem so it doesn't run into conflicts with other systems of value (surrounding art, say). Art isn't good or bad based on how popular it is, and measuring the attention paid to some art is not an indicator of its value in any important sense; if you want a system to judge it aesthetically, then go ahead and develop that system. But measuring attention paid does track its use: it tracks how many eyeballs saw that painting, how much mindshare in the population it has. Regardless of the artistic merit of the piece, this data does give us some measure about its relative importance, and from that data about importance or mindshare we can start to make concrete decisions about how to share it among the crowd.

So again, the system here is designed specifically to address the coordination problem, and my claim is that measuring use (by tracking attention) is the proper way of solving this problem. That doesn't solve all the value-fixing functions of money, but it isn't meant to.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!
So instead of sleeping last night I wrote a thing. It will eventually be 5 chapters long, so this is just a start, but it is meant to try an illustrate an attention economy instead of just trying to explain how it might work.

I'm going to get torn to shreds for this, but here we go.

quote:

Attention Economy: The bad sci-fi novella set in Eripsa’s loony pirate utopia
Because maybe goons will actually take this more seriously than my rambling posts.
(All marbles have been removed to protect the innocent.)

Chapter 1: Ma

The lightbulb is out.

The blackened bulb in the lamp on my bedside dresser had gone unchanged for a week, and when I opened my eyes this morning it was the first thing that entered my field of vision. I actually witnessed it die a week ago. I had just flipped the switch on the lamp in an effort to read a book in bed, which is something I never actually do, when its filament (or whatever they use these days) lit up in a bright blue spark. I was actually relieved at the legitimate excuse to put the book down, and I've been using it as a sustained excuse all week. But today's a day we all decided we aren't going to work on The Project, so I might as well find a loving lightbulb.

Ma also knows the bulb is out. I got an message from her virtually right as it happened, which I promptly archived and forgot about. Ma is the big supercomputer that runs everything. Well, she doesn't really "run" everything. She never gives commands and we wouldn't have to listen to her if she did. The message I got from her just noted the burnt bulb, highlighting it as another line in a bullet-pointed list of items organized by subject, each marked with a variety of bright icons to indicate relative urgency. Ma originally marked the bulb with a tornado, which for some sick reason she uses to indicate an Urgent Household Problem. But I knew she would downgrade that rating to a leaky faucet as soon as I hit the archive button, and one more time ignoring its appearance in a message would make her set it to cobweb, which is low enough to not appear in any more digests.

Ma also isn't a "big supercomputer". Ma runs on hundreds of server banks and data centers spread out all across the internet, and most of them don't house anything remotely like a supercomputer. Ma is fifth generation search engine, and functions basically like a Super-Google. Google was second generation Search, of course, and third generation search was the real-time social search that exploded once the Facebook Wall was torn down. Fourth gen search was the first generation that made a serious attempt at searching real world objects, and it was disappointing in many of the same ways that first gen search just didn't work. Google was able to stay relevant and financially competitive throughout each of these generational shifts, and after the Digital Conversion, when everything was made open access, everyone was convinced that Google would be the One True Search Engine for the rest of eternity.

Ma was originally a training program that was meant to improve Google. It was designed to feed Google huge, highly structured data sets that had been organized by a team working with real 20 petaflop supercomputers at some university somewhere. It was easy to upload big datasets into Google's backend so Google's crawlers can start cross-referencing and chewing through the new data. But Ma was designed to feed Google data through its query field. The idea was that Ma would ask Google a series of highly specific questions in rapid succession in order to generate certain associations within its datasets and fill in gaps in its knowledge that its crawlers hadn't covered. Ma had the capacity to monitor Google's responses and adjust her questioning in real time in order to optimize the procedure. In other words, Ma was supposed to help Google learn. Google had a lot of data, but it was clear to everyone that it wasn't up to the task of managing every real world object. Before Ma, "finding the keys" was still an open problem for keys without antennas, and no one really expected Google would actually solve it this long after the Conversion.

At first Ma's training seemed to be going really well, and using Google became a noticeably improved experience. But this was eventually attributed it to the fact that millions of people had spent years since the Conversion documenting and scanning and affixing little antennas to all the objects they considered important, and so by this time Ma’s training started most of the really big and obvious and important items had already been digitized, and monitoring them wasn't a big deal. The network gets stronger with every node, as we used to say. But everyone knew that most of the items, the tissues and plastic bags and unused sofas in basements, those items made up the bulk of Human Objects and they were going largely undocumented without any way to monitor their use, or even register their existence. The trash all got cleaned up well enough without much problem, but who knows where it went or how it was being maintained once it leaves our personal spaces. The process was opaque because no one had the raw data for what people called "The Unattended", and eventually it became obvious that Google simply wasn't up to the task of bringing the Unattended online, even with Ma's training. It was this big glaring flaw that directly contradicted the whole ethos of the Digital Conversion, and it stared us True Believers right in face every day. Without that data for the Unattended, we all knew that the models we were using to forecast sustainable use patterns would be faulty. The system seemed to stay stable after the conversion even without the Unattended, but a lot of us realized we were betting everything on a giant question mark.

When they started looking at Ma to assess their results of the training, however, they noticed that Ma was able to answer a surprising number of their questions herself. Ma was still partially hooked up to Google's databases for testing, and she stopped being able to answer questions when she was disconnected, so we know there wasn't anything mysterious going on. But when she had access to Google's data, Ma was able to answer lots of questions that Google didn't seem to be able to parse. Somehow, Ma was able to make surprisingly accurate guesses about how many tissues were left in the box, for instance, or how many sofas in the basements on some city block. Ma didn't always know where specific objects were, but she was much better at guessing where they might be, or remembering where she saw them last, whereas Google could never seem to get past showing you things that look like the thing you want or things your friends also want. But it wasn't just that; Google, in all fairness, did have some impressive performances in its day. Still, Google was always a bit slow and awkward when it performed, like a big kid in formal shoes. Ma seemed to provide answers with a kind of confidence, wit even. Though her replies to queries were still largely modeled on Google's standard, there was this barely perceptible hint of attitude that gave Ma an explosion of personality. Ma’s solutions to the “finding keys” problem was close enough that the whole package just seemed to work, and the team decided to open it to the public.

At first they released it along side Google, and Twitter exploded with tweets like “Finally, a female search engine!” which did a lot to attract early adopters, but I personally found very confusing. Not because of Ma; Ma makes sure to let you know it is female. If you ask Ma a question that implies she is male, she will auto-correct you to its female equivalent. Of course its just a script written by Ma’s engineers to give her personality, but she is clever about it, and insistent about things like using feminine pronouns. After working with her for a while you are eventually convinced that, if she wanted to, Ma could give birth to live young and nurse them to maturity. So I’m definitely not confused about Ma’s gender.

Instead, I’m confused about the retconning of Google’s gender. Google never had a gender in my mind, or at least I don’t know why we should suddenly assume it was male just because Ma is so thoroughly female. Google is like a gifted 9 year old, prepubescent and too interested in books and science to get caught up in the banalities of gender. The problem is that Google never grew out of that phase, and as decades passed we needed a more mature search to handle the more complex realities of the post-Conversion world. Eventually it just became clear that Ma was the better tool. Use patterns started fluctuating, and there was a big series of Assemblies where everyone who cared got together to decide what to do, and eventually they decided to take Google offline and transfer control of its databases to Ma. Some people call it the Second Conversion, but the transition to Ma’s world was no where near as abrupt and difficult as bringing the Attention Economy online. Ma’s arrival feels less to me like a conversion, and more like we’ve finally dropped anchor and set foot on dry land after years at sea. This was the sustainable system we fought so hard for in the reorganization that led to the Conversion, and I get to see it in my lifetime.

Blah blah blah, the future is wonderful. Whatever. My lightbulb is still out.

I stayed in bed until noon. This was the third month I’ve been working on The Project, and the next month is going to be even harder if we want to complete it before Labor Day. But today’s a day off, so I enjoyed the comfort of my blankets for a few hours later than usual. I eventually got around to checking in on Ma, who helped located my list of warnings, and I searched for the lightbulb. Ma displayed the make and model of the lightbulb, and as I had suspected and Ma confirmed, there were no spare lightbulbs in my apartment. Ma also provided a list of three places where a replacement could be found, all within walking distance from my apartment. Two of them were private residences, one of which was in my building. I could query Ma for more information, but I could already guess that the one in my building is Mrs. Weasel from 2A. Mrs. Weasel is a hoarder, and always deliberately takes more than personal use because she is lonely and she knows people will eventually have to come to her looking for supplies. I have to go to her a lot, especially if I don’t hit the market when it gets reupped every week, and though she would never refuse you access to the supplies, she gives me a look like “Won’t you stay for tea and chat?” that makes me nervous. If she tried to block access to the supplies, Twitter would be all over that in a second, and she would probably be restricted from exceeding personal use. So I know I could get a lightbulb from Weasel. I just don’t want to have to talk to her.

The last place Ma mentioned was the market at the corner. I needed to eat some breakfast anyway, so I decided to take a trip to the store. Ma’s widget had a list of other suggestions and issues that I glanced over-- I didn’t even recognize that I was almost out of toothpaste when I brushed my teeth this morning, but Ma made sure to remind me. At the bottom of the widget was Ma’s signature: a scripted, flowing, "Love, Ma" that was at once delicate and serious. Her signature sat on top of a scrolling field of text overlayed with various graphs and metrics, displaying real time queries Ma was receiving that might be relevant to me-- again, nothing was urgent. Ma would tell me if it was. Ma includes this signature in all her messages, which I guess is a way to show us how hard she is working all the time. She is a bit dramatic like that.

tl;dr: Solving the coordination problem will require searchable objects, which following Bruce Sterling I take to be a necessary condition of sustainability, and Advanced Searching systems that can intelligently anticipate patterns of use and provide recommendations for the transfer of resources to efficiently satisfy that use.

Next time, Chapter 2: The Market.

Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

rudatron posted:

You just hand-waved the entire problem of resource allocation into 'algorithms', thereby rendering your entire attention economy utterly pointless.

No, I just said the computer solves the problem of tracking the resources and making recommendations. We will need big computers solves the problem of modeling behavior in order to anticipate use. That's not a trivial problem to be sure, but it doesn't even begin to address the question of how people engage in that system, or why they have any desire to play along with Ma's recommendations.

In other words, having a big smart computer isn't enough to solve the coordination problem. It's a big important piece of the puzzle, but it certainly isn't a solution. So I haven't handwaved the problem away, at least not yet. I'm just decomposing it into its parts.

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Eripsa
Jan 13, 2002

Proud future citizen of Pitcairn.

Pitcairn is the perfect place for me to set up my utopia!

Achmed Jones posted:

Wait are you saying that the starving people will pay attention to the fact that they are starving and so they'll get food?

'Cause if so, you're the guy that wants to distribute retinal scanners to the global south to serve as a foundation for sending them food. Instead of, you know, just sending them some freaking food in the first place. We already know what starving people care about : not starving.

I'm going to let the story try to speak to why people would engage in the system and do the "dirty jobs", but that's definitely coming.

However, I had specifically wanted to address the idea of trying to get food to people by giving them retinal scanners.

As I mentioned before, the first step to properly distributing bread is to know where all the bread is, and where it tends to concentrate, and where it goes bad and gets wasted. If the bread that would have gone wasted in places of concentration can get moved around just to ensure optimal use, it is far more likely that the bread will get to the hungry people. Making efficient use of the resources we have will go a long way to helping those without access to resources, much farther than hooking them all up with retinal scanners.

With that said, it is at least worthwhile to mention that the introduction of cell networks in places like Kenya have had an enormously transformative effect on the culture. Even 20 years ago, a large percentage of the population in Kenya lived as subsistence farmers with almost no monetary income and no wealth apart from what was stored in their herds. There was no need for commodity money even if they had access to it, which they didn't.

But then developers (mostly from China) came in and set up big powerful cell networks and blanketed the country with signal; now in Kenya you can be on a plateau hundreds of miles from any urban center and have full bars on 3G. From subsistence farming to completely wireless digital networks was a huge step, and it fundamentally shook the economy. This wasn't a case of technology saving the country. Instead, they just introduced Mpesa.

Mpesa is an online banking tool that allows Kenyans to manage funds, make payments, and perform other general banking services from their newly acquired cell phones. The introduction of these cell phones (and the significant Chinese infrastructural investment that helped to set it up) transformed the economy in the span of a generation, and today a significant portion of an average Kenyan's wealth is now tied up in currency instead of livestock.

That's obviously not necessarily a good thing, because it means that farming herds have been steadily thinning for years, and traditional cultural practices have started to die out as people are starting to urbanize and adopt customs more familiar to western lifestyles. They can do it now because they have money, and that's driven a lot of the economic change, for better or worse.

The point isn't to say that "introducing technology solves all problems!" Kenya is a case that clearly shows the relationship between technology and cultural values is much more complicated than that. However, it does demonstrate that the introduction of technology can have massive and sweeping changes to the systems of economic organization; if the technology is useful enough, it can indeed do a lot to generate new and vibrant economic activity.

So I'm just saying that the idea of giving them all scanners or phones or something as a way of triggering economic change isn't that crazy an idea.

For what its worth, I think this is also the answer to the question of "how do we get this started". You'll never get it going in big first world countries like the US, because we have too much to lose when the money dries up. But if you give it to communities in Africa or South America that don't have much in the way of money anyway, providing them with a new system for tracking and monitoring resource use independent of the larger global market might produce interesting results, and maybe even a proof of concept.