[p2p-research] Global Guerrillas: Is our current Economic Model Parasitic Predation?

[marc fawzi]

With respect to having a performance driven "Darwinian selection" process I
think the criteria for selection should be a lot more than just performance.

Performance (as it's defined in our education system) means a race toward
efficiency in one game (getting the highest grades) at the expense of
discovering new games (new possibilities outside the system.)

If you place me (for example) in any game my prime objective is not to win
the game but to break the game wide open, discover its inner workings and
devise alternatives to it some better, some worse and some a mix of better
and worse aspects.

In other words, I generally play to fail because that's how I can get to
understand the most about the players in the game, their psychology, and the
nature of the game being played, i.e by taking the most risk. If I only play
to win (which I do from time to time) all I care about is how to dominate
and that feels deeply shallow to me and intellectually useless.

At first, I want to understand the players more than I want to understand
the game, then in the next stage I want to take the game apart and then I
want to screw with the player and see what happens, and then try challenge
the idea of the game and see what happens. Eventually, my goal is to have a
holistic understanding of the game and people in it, and it's rarely about
winning. I play to win only when I need to send a signal that I'm still a
worthy opponent so that I get others to continue playing, so I continue
studying them and how the game operates on them and how they try so hard to
manipulate it or how they construct their rules for winning.

I'm sure this behavior I'm describing of myself is shared with many people
here. I just want to be explicit about it in the context of what we're doing
here, which seems to be a collaboration game with open ended goals but
distinctly in favor or social progress, which is a game I can take seriously
as it's a game to unravel existing games.

When playing against people who are holistically reflexive (holistically
intuitive and fast) the game becomes a form of meditation (like my
discussions on Ning with Dante) not a competition and not a collaboration
either.  Games that involve more than one dimension (i.e. more than just
competition or collaboration) teach us a lot about life so we can use them
to simulate future scenarios (in life) and understand our 'world' through
them. Winning in such games is meaningless since the objective of life-like
games (or life itself) is to open up and become part of the greater whole
not separate from the greater whole by winning an internal game of pride and
ego.

What I see happening with the P2P Energy Economy model (which is not driven
by efficiency for the sake of efficiency.. there is 'environmentally,
socially and ecologically positive efficiency' or environmentally, socially
and ecologically high performance.

The simulation objective of the P2P Energy Economy is to see if people can
live without the social, environmental and ecological inefficiencies that
exist today? Will they rebel against environmental, ecological and social
efficiency? Even if the efficiency model is designed to guarantee a much
higher degree of resilience? For example, in Release 4.0 I plan to enforce
constant renewal of the entire system (for sake fo resiliency and moral
wholeness) through sand-pile type collapses (or avalanches) triggered by
tiny events where the self-organized criticality that leads to this kind of
large and robust response to tiny events would meander randomly to change
the timing of when such criticality matures (when the system is ready for an
engineered collapse)  This feature is not implemented yet in the P2P Energy
Economy model and I'm looking for an algorithmic method for building self
organized criticality into the model (it would make the P2P game version of
the model very entertaining as one wrong move by one player can set off an
economic avalanche wiping out a lot of the players' profits/status without
affecting the foundation of the economy, which is unlike what seems to be
happening now in the current economy... but more importantly constant
collapse and renewal on the level of the whole economy is important for
resilience and sustainability much the same way a renewable hierarchy is
important)

Where I agree with Ryan is that difficult propositions in any model (ones
that are undesirable to most) need to be amended or changed or evolved.

However, the idea of a renewable hierarchy is something that we have in the
Constitution (for Congress, Senate and President) and it's something that I
happen to be living everyday now as this whole place I'm living at is
governed by a renewable hierarchy (based on elections not random selection
from equally qualified members)

Marc

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 10:39 AM, marc fawzi <marc.fawzi at gmail.com> wrote:

> <<
> The key is to move education from credentialing for admissions to
> credentialing for performance.
> >>
>
> I believe that is true. Very good point.
>
> Imagine if everyone was admitted into Stanford and Yale and only those who
> compete and collaborate well enough make it as graduates. Unlike giving Bush
> Jr. admission into Yale and Harvard when he can't even make a complete
> sentence.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 7:43 AM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> It seems the great question for this century will be individualism versus
>> collective.  That was not the case in the socialism/communism of the 19th
>> century and 20th centuries where something more leader-focused took hold.
>>
>> Equivalency of outcomes is not appealing to most.  Equivalency of
>> opportunity is appealing to large numbers, as is the implementation of
>> sustainable processes. The balance between opportunity and sustainability is
>> key.
>>
>> The renewal of hierarchy you speak of seems to come back to approaches
>> that remove unearned advantages...very difficult, biologically.  People want
>> to advantage their children.  The whole idea of property can be seen as a
>> way to advantage offspring.  So, I think if you want renewable hierarchies,
>> a place to start contemplating outcomes is equal access to elite learning
>> credentials...not information.  It is the credentials which advantage...not
>> the learning itself.
>>
>> The key is to move education from credentialing for admissions to
>> credentialing for performance.  That is hard because the life blood of
>> institutions is the capacity to create elites who protect exclusivity to
>> increase the value of their own network associations.
>>
>> Ryan Lanham
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 11:59 PM, marc fawzi <marc.fawzi at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> Interesting that both parasitic and predator behavior are key traits of
>>> sociopaths.
>>>
>>> Capitalism (the way it is now) makes heroes out of sociopaths.
>>>
>>> The movie Watchmen actually captures that reality although in a raw,
>>> archetypal way.
>>>
>>>
>>> 2009/3/27 Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com>
>>>
>>>>  Interesting...
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/03/parasitic-predation.html
>>>>
>>>> Ryan Lanham
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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