[p2p-research] Project Cybersyn

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Kevin Carson wrote:
> On 12/8/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Don't you think Kevin, that our present stigmergic capabilities, based
>> on ultra low transaction and communication costs, may revive such
>> possibilities, and replace the dream of centralized planning, by
>> horizontal coordination, as in fact already occurs in the large peer
>> production efforts?
> 
> Definitely.  But there's probably a limit to the scale of coordination.
> Such stigmergically organized projects must be tied, directly or
> indirectly, to a market pricing system that values their inputs.  And
> market pricing systems are useful for providing a system for evaluating
> the most productive use of inputs, comparative demand for different
> products, and the most productive of competing uses for inputs.  I see
> peer production taking place within a market framework that serves an
> informational function (if one of last resort).

From:
   "Stigmergic collaboration"
   http://collaboration.wikia.com/wiki/Stigmergic_collaboration
"""
# 2.3 Stigmergic Collaboration
     * 2.3.1 1. Collaboration is dependent upon communication, and
communication is a network phenomenon.
     * 2.3.2 2. Collaboration is inherently composed of two primary
components, without either of which collaboration cannot take place: social
negotiation and creative output.
     * 2.3.3 3. Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon
social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output.
     * 2.3.4 4. Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is dependent
upon stigmergy.
"""

So, it is the stigmergic systems that scale well. It is the discussion 
systems that don't. But how should stigmergy be done? What if we think about 
  fiat currencies act as a sort of generalized kanban token to signal demand 
in an economy that is a lot like a huge factory producing goods and services?
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
Then, from that perspective, we might see other parallels. Including, 
perhaps, to sometimes move some of those kanban tokens from one part of the 
factory where they pile up to another part of the factory where they are 
needed. (A "basic income"? :-)

I'd suggest that the big issue with "market pricing" is it tries to use one 
currency as a sort of generalized demand. This has at least two problems.

Currency units are fiat dollars, which are a product of the human 
imagination, aided mostly by numbers in the memory of banking computers and 
a little by the US Treasury's Printing Office. But the physical 
infrastructure is things like railroad tracks, dump trucks, watersheds, 
algae, or healthy humans with healthy relationships to other healthy humans. 
But things like "cost" or "capital" are buckets in our accounting system 
that lump the imaginary fiat dollars together with the physical assets. The 
imaginary units can be infinite, but the physical resources can be finite. 
This creates instability in the control models as the system pursues the 
creation of an infinite number of ration units while potentially ignoring 
(at best with a severe lag) the value of physical things. Thus, we can have 
a society with vast amounts of "paper wealth" but which is a physical 
disaster. And you also get all sorts of virtual bubbles and related 
dysfunctions (like we saw recently).

The second problem is that currency is a single thing to indicated demand. 
It assumes all items are easily interconvertible through the market. To 
convert railroad tracks to dump trucks, you sell one in the market, take the 
money, and buy the other. But, that only works on a micro-economic scale. On 
a macroeconomic scale, the two are not so easily converted from one to 
another. We need more complex planning to do that -- planning that 
understands the engineering issues and entropic issues that go into 
converting from one to another. And that requires a more sophisticated 
analysis, the kind that Cybersyn was moving towards. Without truly 
understanding how things really convert into each other, we can end up 
diverting to much resources into, say, one area of the econonomy only to 
find out we can't really change them over to resources we really want later 
for some other reason. In short, I'd suggest a single currency devalues 
generally productive technology (like 3D printers or agricultural seeds) and 
over values specific products (like hairbrushes or pizzas).

So, I'd suggest, Kevin, that to take your "free market anti-capitalism" work 
to another transcendent level, you might want to think about market pricing, 
but in some new way, where there are thousands or millions of different 
currencies reflecting unique things, all with various complex ways of 
converting them to each other. :-) So, maybe, think about:
   "free market anti-capitalism anti-single-currency"? :-)
Jane Jacobs ideas may be useful as she talks about currency fluctuations in 
exchange rates between cities and import replacements as a way to drive 
economic growth -- it is not the same as what I am outlining here, but she 
shows how a single national currency interferes with this cybernetic 
feedback process at the city level. Example summary in the section here:
   "How to stifle your cities"
   http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html

I'm kind of suggesting to think about this somehow at the household or 
factory or 3D printer level, somehow, even as I don't fully know what I mean 
by that. :-) And if you do that, you might end up with something as way 
beyond Cybersyn as today's Googleplex is beyond the first Google server. :-)

Some more ideas on that here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery#Resource-based_economics_and_employment

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/