[p2p-research] fiction about metaverse money

[Michel Bauwens]

Great Kevin, I'm publishing this on the 7th and added the entry here at

http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Fiction, as well,

Michel

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 5/27/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,982610,00.html
>
> Just for starters, I really liked the tone; it gave me the same
> "Babylon is about to fall" vibe I picked up in Cory Doctorow's online
> chapters of Theme Punks.
>
> I notice the story was written in 1995, and it's hard for me to
> estimate its fictional time frame just by comparing the events in the
> story to a likely near-future exrapolation from the mid-90s.  But I'm
> guessing it probably could have been written with--say--2009 in mind.
>
> Given the euphoria over the "information superhighway" back then,
> Stephenson's merging of  "Internet and optical fiber and HDTV and
> digital cash" sounds like something it would be plausible to expect by
> now.
>
> Of course, he failed to anticipate the extent to which the Copyright
> Nazis would put the country under lockdown.  For one thing, it's a lot
> harder to merge cable TV with the Internet when it's illegal to
> circumvent the DRM that prevents transferring content from one
> platform to another--unless the entire "superhighway" or "metaverse"
> is DRM'ed and run on Windows, which ranks pretty high on my list of
> nightmares.
>
> For another, although his observation that "in the Metaverse, you can
> actually whip out a gun and blow the Energizer Bunny's head off,"
> should appeal to anyone who's ever read the Cluetrain Manifesto (as I
> recall Searle, Weininger et al used the analogy of the 'bots on MST3K
> ruthlessly mocking commercials), I'm pretty sure that would violate
> enough trademark rights under the DMCA to get any would-be parodist a
> full-jackboot facial massage in Gitmo.  Or at least extraordinary
> rendition to a country that doesn't recognize Fair Use.
>
> I find the crypto-credit idea appealing, although Stephenson puts
> something of an anarcho-capitalist spin on it (with the "Distributed
> Republic" folks sounding an awful lot like the e-gold/seasteading
> crowd, and the main motivation for the currency as tax-dodging).   But
> it seems to me that another major motivation for such an encrypted
> currency would be to circumvent bank licensing laws that prevent
> (among other things) the crowsourced mobilization of credit through
> social lending networks, without any capitalization besides the
> members' own contributions.  That kind of thing (ordinary producers
> advancing credit to each other against future production, and pooling
> their small capitals outside the monopoly banking system) is as much a
> nightmare of the usurers who profit from artificial scarcity of credit
> and money, as free culture and software are to the artificial scarcity
> profiteers in the cognitive realm.
>
> And it also strikes me that any such currency would be designed on a
> tiered and/or modular basis, with the the most important service
> package being an encrypted electronic LETS system for facilitating
> exchange in local, alternative economies (not that it wouldn't also be
> useful on a larger scale, on a secondary level).
>
> Crypto-credits would be great for circumventing banking regulations
> that hinder mutual credit schemes, and for facilitating local trade
> off the books with unlicensed practitioners (the low-overhead
> microenterprises in the household and informal economy that I'm so
> fond of, who would undoubtedly like a secure means of exchange that
> didn't leave a paper trail for the local inspection/licensing
> regime)--as well as for eliminating what federal, state and local
> taxes contribute to overhead.  This latter is especially important in
> bringing out the efficiencies of the informal economy, because--as
> Scott Burns pointed out in The Household Economy--if the tax burden on
> enterprises is (say) 50%, that means a plumber and an electrician
> can't exchange their services on an hour-for-hour basis in the
> conventional capitalist economy.  The plumber has to work an hour and
> a half to pay for an hour of the electrician's time, and vice versa.
>
> One caveat I have is that Stephenson seems to view the currency mainly
> as a store of value, rather than a means of facilitating exchange.
> But the primary benefit of a local currency, as a facilitator and
> measure of exchange, is that it provides liquidity for exchange of
> future services by people who don't presently have any money (in the
> sense of a store of value) accumulated.
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>
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