Cc on flow

Movement!

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Lots of things have been in flow since I’ve posted here, but here are few tidbits to explore:

We: Social Spaces for Collaboration

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Say that we agree to define collaboration as a group’s ability to coordinate effort to produce some work output. I believe that the effectiveness of collaboration improves in direct proportion to:

Decentralized Next-level Collaboration Apps with Syn

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Usually I am more energized by building tech than by talking about it, but I am so excited about what my son and I did over winter break, that I just have to share about it here. In an odd kind of busman’s holiday, I spent a good chunk of my time off writing a Holochain application. Coding with my kid is just pure pleasure for me, but I have to describe the additional incredible experience of having spent 4 years building a tool, and now suddenly being able to use that tool to build what it was meant for: creating collaboration applications.

Supremacy Consciousness, Grammatic Capacity, & Play

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As is pretty obvious I don’t write much here. My focus for the last 4 years has been pretty singular on getting Holochain and Holo built. And writing takes me a long time. I also have a hard time writing to the void of the Internet, I need to be in a direct conversation to share well. Recently a friend made an open invitation to respond “about what you’re seeing and thinking in the world right now.” and he provided these prompts:

Current-see and Death Straight Talk

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t written much lately, I guess I’ve been busy… mostly with two things: Cancer & Ceptr.

Currently, my time is about living with a spouse with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer and all that it takes to support her as well I can. My work is about building tools for a post-monetary society; creating a new meta-language to allow a vast expansion in social forms that is currently limited primarily by the world’s current statement of value: money. These two worlds have recently come together in ways worth writing about.

On Voles and Openings

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I just signed up for Edgeryders and completed my first mission, which is to “share your ryde.” This provided me with an end-of-year opportunity to think about and document where I’ve been over the past years, so I’m reposting that “mission” here:

An Occupy plan, money and free speech.

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I just read this interesting “plan” put forward by the Occupy “Working Group on the 99% Declaration.”

Notice that ten out of twenty-two of the suggested grievances are either directly or indirectly about money. Hmmm. Interesting indicator of where the problem is. It’s fascinating to me how stuck we are with the idea that such grievances about money will be resolved politically.

Paul Krafel on Occupy and economic equality

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

One of my heros is Paul Krafel, author of the book Seeing Nature, and short video, The Upward Spiral. In his recent newsletter he has this to say about economic equality:

One of the main issues of the Occupy movement is economic inequality. Whenever I think about it, I keep coming back to my watershed work. For me, economic inequality is a vital but secondary issue. The more fundamental issue is how should money ideally flow within an economy? I believe it should be recycled often to fall again and again as rain upon the slopes. What we are seeing is a concentration of wealth low in the watershed and how unproductive it is down there. Trillions of dollars in credit default swaps. What kind of truly human aspiration is that serving? Trillions of dollars being leveraged for what? One can argue that more of that money should be shared more widely in the name of economic justice. But I think there is a more politically powerful perspective of economic effectiveness. How pathetically little is being truly created by all the money that has flowed too far downslope. A failure of imagination is draining our culture of economic vitality. It’s not an issue of rich vs. poor but an issue of how possibilities drain away when wealth accumulates downslope. All of us, rich and poor alike, would be uplifted by a flow that recycled and held the wealth of our species higher in the watershed. I believe it is spiritually important to see this as a long-term issue, not of taxing the rich and giving to the poor, but of adjusting thousands of the ongoing flows within an economy so that the money keeps getting recycled back up to flow over and over again.

Threshing Rye

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

threshing

Last fall I planted rye in the disturbed ground around my house to act as a erosion control. Just this week my father helped my harvest the rye. We took it into the basement and, with the kids, danced around on it to thresh the kernels out of the heads. From about 3 or 4 hours of harvesting and about 2 hours of threshing and then winnowing, all this manual labor produced about half of a 5 gallon bucket’s worth of rye. That same 20lb of rye purchased from my local Agway would cost around $15. So clearly, economically there’s an indicator that I should be doing something else with my 6 hours that harvesting and threshing rye, because even if I flip burgers for minimum wage, I’d make more money in that time period that I’d spend on the rye.

Sanctuary for All Life & land emancipation

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m re-reading Jim Corbett’s Sanctuary for All Life. I don’t know how to express how powerfully deep this book is. For me it both opens doors and provides a foundation for a post-civilized world for humanity.

A story about expressive capacity

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

On a community currency related Skype chat that I’m a part of, there’s been a conversation that cycles around now and again about how the various national jurisdictions respond to community currencies, how they are likely to try and shut them down (as they did in the 30’s), and what to do about. Arthur Brock responded saying: “I think the most effective way to avoid being shut down (or even taxed for that matter) by the powers that be is to operate using non-monetary currencies that don’t look like money or compete in the same space as money. We use dozens of these a day and they’ll never be able to even attempt to shut all of these types of things down.”

The Vow of Wealth

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

My friend Jean-François Noubel has taken the vow of wealth. I believe this has huge implications for all of us. It opens a path by inspiration and example. Read the FAQ too.

Wall St Journal covers the currency revolution?

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The meme of coming multi-currency world is beginning to be visible to the main stream. To see how, watch this Wall Street Journal tech video by Andy Jordan. Not only is yours truly and the MetaCurrency project shown (I’m not really an economist BTW), but also some other nice efforts that show the growth in understanding of what currency can be.

Jane Jacobs: The Nature of Economies

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I have just 10 minutes ago finished Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies, and I just have to write about it.
I am totally stunned, and deeply sad that I never was able to meet her. In this book she speaks directly to me from beyond the grave completely confirming the approach I have been following in rethinking what currency is and what it means to humanity.

Rethinking Economy

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I gave a presentation on rethinking money at UMass Amherst for a course Julie Graham is teaching called Rethinking Economy. Julie does some very interesting work on community economies.

Historical Comments

Riley — December 30, 2008 at 12:32 AM

Hi, Eric.

econophysics and community currency

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been introduced to the field of econophysics and I’ve read an interesting the review paper on the field. My thoughts on this paper is that it’s very good news for the community currency movement, if understood properly.Â For a long time when talking about cc, I’ve been using the little thought experiment of asking people to imaging the Buddha, Jesus and Mother Theresa sitting down to play monopoly and to see if the game will have a different outcome. The answer is obviously no, not if they play by the rules. It doesn’t matter how good or evil you are, the rules of monopoly simply require that all the cash end up in one player’s hands, i.e 100% inequity.Â The econophysics work on the Statistical Mechanics modeling of money takes this intuitive analogy and “proves” quite definitively the fundamental inequity of our current system if you assume that the rules of the game are that money behaves like energy.Â The good news for community currency arises out of the basic flaw of the paper which is it seems to imply that money is natural system, rather than a created one. If money were an inevitable natural system, then the paper could be seen as an justification of that structural inequity. But since it is a created one, rather it’s an explanation of the the inequity, and thus can point us very clearly in directions of how the monetary system should instead be re-designed.Â What are those directions? Well, we see in the paper the very careful arguments to show how money is conserved. This is crucial to the model because in the model money is energy, and statistical mechanics is built on the law of the conservation of energy. But more importantly their model is about statistical equilibrium of energy states in closed systems. So this gives us a clear indication of where to go: change the monetary paradigm to one where the fundamental model is based on non-equilibrium state energy systemics. Well, we know what non-equilibrium state energy systems are, they are living systems. In living systems what matters fundamentally is not how much energy is accumulated but rather, whether energy can be made to flow in particular complex patterns that themselves are self-sustaining. Even more crucially, life is not about what happens if energy is allowed to dissipate to equilibrium. The name for that process is death! So I think we could even argue that that the modeling they have done is of the death of an economy! Life is not about accumulation of the energy itself, but instead it is about the accumulation of the complex patterns of energy flows. The word for a such patterns is “ecosystem”.Â In their model money is seen as energy, or the capacity to do work. This actually makes sense for an early stage in the evolution of money. When the main issue is the scarcity of the capacity to get work done, then finding ways to accumulate it is key, and building an economic structure to generate that accumulation makes sense. We now live in a world where our capacity to do work is not at all scarce, it’s over abundant. The big problem is the waste human capacity (think of the structural unemployment) and also the squandering of all that massive capacity in ways that are blatantly destructive (military expenditures) or systemically destructive (climate change). So our task is now to re-gear the fundamental system to not simply accumulate of the capacity to do work, but mostly to accumulate particular patterns of that capacity that are what we call “healthy”.Â So, how do we do that!? I use a completely different model for money that I think fits the bill, namely that money is a form of language, or more precisely a writing system that encodes information about wealth events. This model transcends and includes the model of money as energy, because in its simplest form, the rules of the writing system can be made to follow the rules of conservation of energy. What I have been calling for and working on with open money (as well as collaborting with Art Brock on his OS-Earth platform) is a meta-currency system that is precisely about making it easy to create these many different writing system (currencies) and their rule-sets, or another way to put that, that precisely enables a the creation of pattern sets for economic flows.

mexico

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in mexico, and it’s the start of the third day of theÂ open money intensive. Â This is an incredible experience of the expansion of the open money vision that’s been in gestation for so long and is now being Â birthed. Â More soon!

wealth literacy

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

why i am working on open money

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve had opportunity to reflect on why I’m particularly dedicated to the open money path out of all the many different community currency paths.

I offer it here not in the spirit of saying open money is better than other approaches, but rather just to share my understanding and what motivates me to work where I know I am best suited to contribute.

More on language and wealth acknowledgment

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In a discussion today with Jean-FranÃ§ois about the content of my previous post, he described another very important way of thinking about the evolution of writing from pictographs to alphabets and ideograms. Namely that the step taken was from a system in which representations could be created, to a system in which information can be created. Likewise our current wealth acknowledgment systems actually represent wealth directly. A direct consequence of this is that money can be stolen. Writing, however creates information. Information intrinsically can’t be stolen (you have to set up complicated legal systems to shoe-horn information into being steal-able). Open money embodies the shift to a wealth acknowledgment system that allows us to move beyond representing wealth, into building information about wealth.

the cost of lies

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Today it occurs to me that one way of describing inflation is that it is a tax on falsehood. Most of the taxes we pay are explicitly levied in some way or another. Inflation is the implicit tax that we pay through the structure of the monetary system itself, because of the way money is issued. I don’t want to dwell on that too much as others have; see: wikipedia, Ron Paul on the right, and Tom Greco on the left.

Language, Money and Wealth Acknowledgment

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

David Abram, in his book The Spell of the Sensuous, describes the history of written language and its evolution from pictographic directly representational symbolic system to an abstract phonemic system. He describes the incredible intellectual leap taken by some scribe who realized that the symbol doesn’t actually need to have ANY visual resemblance to the thing it represents. Apparently this evolutionary step came as a joke, as a pun. To describe this, the example Abram imagines is putting the image of a bee together with that of a leaf, making the word bee-leaf = belief. There is simply no pictorial representation of the abstract notion of a belief, but the pun simultaneously allows this representation and brings us to the first step of writing words phonemically. There are historical example of this in pictographic writing systems, and even in the first truly phonemic script of the semitic scribes, letters are often visually reminiscent of the word that contains that letter. For example our letter “A” comes from the aleph, which is drawn like our letter “A” turned upside-down and which looks like the head of an ox. The semitic word for ox began with the sound that the letter represented.

the "elevator-pitch" for community currencies

Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a skype chat I’m on that discusses community currencies, that recently was trying to find “the ultimate elevator pitch” for community currencies. This is a very reasonable request as all of us working in this area are frequently asked to describe what we are up to succinctly. Here’s my post to that chat in response to this request:

confucianism, standards, and culture

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post, I talked about how there are two different kinds of trust, and how important that is to understanding what needs to happen in the currency world. Here is a fantastic essay on confucianism technical standards and culture, which gets to the same essential pattern but in a different arena. The essay includes the following quote from Confucious’ Analects:

community currency and trust

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

When ever I introduce people to the idea of community currencies, I have experienced that the question of trust comes up again and again. This is reasonable, but I’m quite convinced that the breadth and depth of what trust is, is very poorly understood. Trust seems to be a word that, in the case of money, is hiding at least two forms of something that are actually quite disparate. I think this is because experientially, these forms of trust feel the same, but they arise from entirely separate circumstances. Some examples to get at this:

Yahoo gets into the community currency game

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

It looks like yahoo is getting into the community currency game with Yootles. A quick read of the their FAQ indicates a highly “economics” based approach. Also I don’t see an indication of the meta understanding that what’s necessary is to provide a playing field for people to create currencies, rather than just Yet Another Currency (YAC).

Currency "Equity" (Yet another community currency metaphor)

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

“Don’t worry, it’s a rental.” That’s what we say when we drive that Hertz car smack through a pot hole. The difference between how people keep up rented appartments and owned homes is a standard trope in our culture. We understand that people feel and behave differently about things that they own. The same must be true for currency. If we create our own currency, instead of rent it from a unknown source, we will treat it differently. In fact, we will probably do a lot of things differently, just because it’s ours and we own it. Probably most importantly, we can begin to thing about the “value” of the currency in a different way. We clearly understand that the value of a home is not encoded simply in the number of dollars we’ll get from it when we sell it. It’s true value is in the home’s utility to us, here and now. Oddly, the same is true of a currency. Selling a currency on an exchange market is like selling a house. It shows one kind of value that it has; it’s value to people who are comparing the overal value of two separate currencies (just like someone about to by a house may be comparing the overall “value” of two houses). But a currency, like a house, has the utility value of those who use it, which is of substantially different form than its exchange value. There are other things that might be different if we own our currency instead of rent it. Our relationship with debt might be different. For one thing, we would come to a deeper understanding of the connection between debt and money, and thereby be more healthy about it. The monetary experience is by its fundamental nature is the combination of debt and credit. The money I hold in my pocket is positive side of the ledger that elsewhere is written down as a negative number: a.k.a debt. It is not possible to have money without debt. If we owned our own money, the question of what kind and what amount of debt we want to have would become much more crucial to answer well and wisely.

another currency metaphor

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

In my on-going quest for good metaphors and ways of thinking about the community/multi-currency world, an excellent metaphor came to me that is useful when talking about all this with programmers:

Phronesis and the Internet: the Process Revolution

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I learned about the Aristotelean intellectual virtue of phronesis along with the related term episteme a few years back from Kathryn Montgomery in discussions about her book How Doctors Think. Episteme is the scientific rationality we are all quite familiar with. Phronesis is usually translated “practical wisdom” and is the kind of rational skill doctors and entrepreneurs have that is based on experiential knowledge and provides the ability to take the best action in particular circumstances. We are much less likely to have thought of this as a separate kind of rational capacity. These terms came up again recently for me in the context of a collective intelligence discussion, which really set my mind going and has led me to some propositions and a conjecture:

Viral Communications

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just read Andrew Lippman and David Reed’s paper on Viral Communications. It’s quite insightful. Two things:

I’ve said it before, but “Intelligence at the Leaves” for currency is what the open money project is all about. Currency is the centralized communication tool that needs to undergo the same process that Lippman and Reed describe in the paper, for all the same reasons. “In the end, viral communications transforms communication from something you buy to something you do. Independence of operation allows communications services to be separated from traditional service providers.” Substitute currency for communication.
On a more speculative note: maybe the reason why SETI has not been successful so far, is that intelligent species move very quickly to low power Tim Shepard style scalable radio! So our current high power RF output is very naturally a short lived (i.e. 200 year) stage in technological development, that lasts only long enough for us to realize that we are better served with a very different pattern of radio usage, which is not detectable at interstellar distances. Assuming this is true, I’d gues that the probablity of catching another intelligence in the same 200 year window is not very high.

[tags]viral communication,viral,SETI,open money,currency,money,scalable radio,David Reed,Andrew Lippman,Eric Harris-Braun,p2p[/tags]

BALLE presentation on open money

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the power-point version of the presentation on open money I gave at the local currency preconference to the BALLE gathering in Burlington last month. The presentation came after a full day of folks like Bernard Lietaer and Tom Greco excellently setting stage by explaining how our current monetary system is both unstable and the structural underlying cause of many of our economic woes. They explained clearly how changing the monetary system is a necessary step for fixing our economic system.

the case for local currencies: money as technology

Mon, 29 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Below is part of a talk I gave at the E. F. Schumacher Society seminar Tools for Change.

I’m assuming that at least one of the reasons why you are all here because you understand that the current economic order isn’t leading us down a healthy path. This is pretty easy to explain and to see as manufacturing jobs are outsourced, as land goes fallow and is developed into unsustainable strip malls, and as workers are more and more disempowered. These are very visible things that we hear about all the time in the independent media, and even in the main-stream media. But it’s much more difficult to see, let alone, explain, the role of our monetary system in all this. So my goal here is to give you the basic tools to explain why we need local currencies. That is the “The case for local currencies.”

money & spirit

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

For that last 2 years I’ve begun a process of examining perhaps one of the most fundamental ways that I “participate in the consumer economy” and that is simply my use of money, specifically US dollars. Before this period money seemed primarily mundane. Money was just a practical thing about living life. It’s there, and I didn’t question it very much. In my mind, the connection between money and spiritual matters was mostly from biblical quotes, for example “the love of money is the root of all evil,” “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” “seek ye first the kingdom of the lord and his righteousness,” the kicking out of the money-changers from the temple, and perhaps the most influential for me is where Jesus says “look at how beautifully God as clothed the lilies of the field, not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed such as they, how much more will he care for you?” All of these quotes set up the primacy of ones spiritual life and faith in the divine provider over what ever promise of security we might find in money. In a sense, these are all more about the disconnection between money and those higher spiritual aims.

the role of conventional money

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Since mutual credit money is truly valueless, it cannot BE a unit of measure. It must USE a unit of measure. This means that there must be something with which to set the price of things. You could use chickens or bales of tobbacco or kilowats, or hours as your unit of measure in which the mutual credit money is denomitated, but you can’t really do this because the “value” of any of those things varys across and within communities. Instead, the proper unit of measure is a conventional money, which is determined by an arbitrage market. So in fact, I think what I’m claiming is that the true role of conventional money is to determine aggregate value of things, skills and time, to be a unit of measure. Once we have that (which we allready do), then we can do the bulk of our exchanging using mutual credit money. [tags]money,mutual credit,LETS,price,value[/tags]