current-see & DNA for social organisms

writings on my working towards a post-monetary society

Phronesis and the Internet: the Process Revolution

Published on by zippy

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:

Proposition: Whereas the printing press was an episteme engine, the Internet is a phronesis engine.
Alternative long phrasing: The printing press and the Internet are cognitive technologies that provide people and cultures with “mechanical advantage” or leverage for the development of the Aristotelean intellectual virtues of epistome and phronesis respectively.

It’s pretty easy to see how the printing press is responsible for the massive scaling of epistome into the general culture. It’s a bit harder to see how what the Internet is doing is the same for phronesis because our first viewing of the Internet (the web at least) has been that it’s just one giant sales brochure/advertising billboard/encyclopedia/etc, i.e. that it is a global source of knowledge. My proposition is that the key thing going on with the Internet is not access to knowledge, but rather access participation in knowledge processes. Three examples:

  1. Wikipedia. What really matters about it is not that we have access to a massive knowledge font, but rather that each of us can become encyclopedists and have to face the questions of ontological classification, neutral voice, objective/subjective reality, etc, that that entails.
  2. Blogs. A word perhaps for at least three information processes moved out mass culture: journalism, publishing, political analysis. Again the key shift is not that there is all this reporting/publishing/political analysis available for our consumption, but that that each of us can become journalists/publishers/political analysts.
  3. My own online-writing workshop. People come to the site thinking that they will get reviews of their writing which will improve it. They invariably discover that reviewing the work of others is how they end up learning to improve their own writing.

In each of these cases the key thing is the shift from access to static information, to active participation in an information process. The Internet is providing a “mechanical advantage” for putting people together in a place where they can jointly engage in the kind of information processes and processing that I think leads to the developing of phronesis.

Proposition: Economic revolutions occur when aspects of production are sufficiently amplified by cognitive technologies that new economic patterns of production come into being. Example: the printing press provided the intellectual infrastructure (a culture of epistome) for the expansion of the simple tools of production during the industrial revolution into what is called Capital in the classical economic sense.

Proposition: There is a new economic revolution under way, the Process Revolution, that is the result of the amplification of information and information processing by the cognitive technology of the Internet, and which is similarly bringing new economic patterns of production into being. These patterns are a new economic factor that can be called Information (capital I), which is defined (analogously to Capital) as the data plus the patterns and processes that use that data to organize production.

Proposition: New economic factors produce competing political systems that are answers to the question: who should own the new economic factor. Example: In the industrial revolution the question was: who should own Capital and the products produced by Capital. Communism proposes common ownership in the form of the State, and Capitalism proposes ownership by individuals.

Proposition: The new economic factor of Information is likewise producing competing approaches to answer who should own it. “Ownerism” which proposes the same answer as Capitalism (ownership by individuals, natural or corporate), and “Commonism” which proposes that its ownership be held in the commons (not by the State).

Proposition: Capitalism won out against Communism for three fundamental philosophical and systemic reasons:

  1. Capitalism was better at recognizing and building on individual dignity and potential.
  2. Capitalism is essentially decentralist because it pushes the intelligence out to the edges (see David Reed & Andrew Lippman’s paper on Viral Communication for details on this idea) where local information can be used to maximum advantage in decision making.
  3. Capitalism works with, not against people’s natural self-interest.

Conjecture: Commonism will win out over Ownersim because it shares with Capitalism the same first two properties as well as another property which is analogous to the third, namely that Commonism works with Information’s natural abundance and it’s tendency to flow everywhere, whereas Ownerism has to fight tooth and nail to keep it scarce and from getting out.

I’ve put together a more detailed presentation of these ideas (including their relation to money) in the form of a paper.

Viral Communications

Published on by zippy

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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

Published on by zippy

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.

So this presentation was aimed at showing how a decentralized community currency network platform in which individuals and communities are given the power to create an ecology of currencies, is the necessary second order mechanism so that we can change our monetary system. I argued that not only do you have to change the monetary system, but that you have to change how we change. This is a second order change. Which in this case, I propose, means setting up a system that allows for decentralized broad-based creation of many types (most yet unknown) of currencies in a unified network platform. Without that second order change in place I don’t think the system can be changed.

By the way, the red fish in the presentation is a herring. Get it, get it? :-)

[tags]open money,local currency,money,community currency,BALLE,Eric Harris-Braun[/tags]

the case for local currencies: money as technology

Published on by zippy

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.”

I’m going to spill the beans on the case for local currencies as I see it in just one sentence: I can’t live out my values without local currencies. It’s as simple as that. I can’t live out my values with out them. This is because money is actually a technology. Like all technologies, it has effects on two levels, one is the functional level in which it’s effects on society are related to our choices of how we use the technology, and the other is the structural level, where the effects are not ours to choose, because they are the result the nature of the technology itself.

The first level of connection between values and money is fairly broadly understood. At this level the connection between money and values is functional, that is, it’s about how we use it.. We know that if we are to live by our values, we must align how we spend and invest our money with those values. The breadth of understanding of this connection between money in values this is reflected in the growth of excellent things such as Erbin’s fair-trade movement and the socially responsible investing.

The second level of connection between money and values, the level of structural connection, is less broadly understood A this level we see that our values are not just expressed in how we use money, but are encoded into the structure of money itself. As we come to understand that money is just another one of our technologies, it becomes much easier to understand this second level in the case of money.

As a culture, we’ve come to understand the effects of our technologies both levels. We see that technologies are not value neutral, that the use of this or that technology in and of itself has effects because of the nature of the technology that is independent of how we choose to use it. For example, internal combustion engines emit CO2 whether they are in a tank or in a tractor. Even though the internal combustion engine is wonderful at one level (let’s face, it makes the good parts of modern lives possible), at a wider systemic level, it has a the devastating effect on the biosphere that we call global warming.

What we need to understand is that money is another one of our technologies, and just like the internal combustion engine, at one level, conventional money is great, but at that wider systemic level, it is devastating the entire econosphere.

Raise your hand’s if you are thinking: “wait, wait, you’ve got his analogy all mixed up. It’s not the internal combustion engine’s production of C02 that’s the cause of global warming, it’s the fact that petroleum is used as fuel.” (This is because the carbon in the oil is taken out of the ground where it’s been sitting safely for millions of years, and pumped into the atmosphere. We could run the same internal combustion engines with bio-fuels and add absolutely no net C02 to the atmosphere because the C02 it puts out, was just extracted from the atmosphere that year by the crops grown to produce the biofuels. Global warming solved.) Well, you get the gold star, and that’s a key thing, because that points to a structural solution to the problem. If you change the fuel, you have suddenly aligned structurally aligned the technology with your values of not destroying the biosphere. By noticing this, you’ve focused on the structural, not functional aspect of the technology. Local currencies are about doing that with money.

So what’s the CO2 (or petroleum) of money? Well just like CO2 isn’t the only thing that’s going on in the global warming equation, the situation with money also has many variables. However, not surprisingly, here at the Schumacher Society, we’d say that the C02 of money is its centralization. Or more specifically, the CO2 of money (the part of the technology that has deep side-effects on the econosphere) is that its issuance is strictly controlled by centralized monetary institutions. The case for local currencies is built on examining what happens if we take away that centralized aspect of money, and we let communities, businesses, and even people issue money.

[tags]money,local currency,community currency,peak oil,global warming,technology,value neutral,economy[/tags]

the role of conventional money

Published on by zippy

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]

money & spirit

Published on by zippy

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.

These last two years, however is bringing me to a new place. I’m now seeing that at least some of the power of money to distract us from the divine, is not inherent in money itself, but rather in the form of our current monetary system, and further that news types of money can be re-invented such that much of that power is removed from it, even more so, such that money itself will become yet another part of living a God centered life. If so, that would be a real step toward achieving that third QIVP purpose. An economy more aligned with our Quaker testimonies.

At the most fundamental level, money is the information that encodes who has how much of a claim on things of value in a community. Historically this information was encoded very simply in the the ownership of scarce metals. Later we used paper that was legally equated to that same scarce metal. Our current monetary system no longer equates the medium of exchange with gold, but it it still relies on treating that information, be it paper or numbers in a bank account, as valuable in and of itself by maintaining its scarcity. How is it possible to make information scarce? It’s difficult, but that’s exactly what our monetary system is, a large body of regulations that use the coercive force of law to create a very precise scarcity of the medium of exchange (information) so that it will “maintain its value.” That’s exactly what’s going on when the Fed changes interest rates.

The assumption behind this is that people won’t use a medium of exchange to trade if the medium itself is not valuable. In other words, the medium of exchange will only work if you can trust it, and the way to make it trustworthy is to make it valuable. Well, there’s one case where this equation doesn’t apply. Namely when you are trading with people whom you trust. If you trust the people with whom you trade, then you don’t need to trust in the medium of exchange itself. The medium of exchange can just devolve into its purest form, i.e. simply the record of who has a claim on the economy.

Here’s how it works: when you trade with another individual, money (information) is created on the spot. How? With a ledger book. If I buy something, I subtract from the balance in my ledger the price of the item, and seller adds the price to balance in her ledger book. Remember that money is just the information on who has a claim on the economy. So now, the seller has a positive value in her ledger book. That positive value represents the claim she has on the community. The negative value in my ledger represents the obligation I have to give to the economy. In this system money is created on the spot by the purchaser and given to the seller who then has a claim on the economy (as represented by the positive value in the ledger book), a claim which will be redeemed when seller in turn goes to purchase something from someone else, just as the obligation of the purchaser will be fulfilled later when he or she sells something.

So if the medium of exchange isn’t valuable in and of itself a whole world of things change: the task becomes how to enlarge the circle of people I trust so I can trade in using this incredibly available money; I don’t have to earn it, I can create it on the spot, as long as it’s being used in a circle of trust people will know that I won’t create more than I can redeem; relationships become primary.

To me this is the fundamental spiritual issue of money: Do I trust my neighbor? Do I trust that of God in my neighbor enough to transact with him or her and not have the coercive force of law in place to back up the claim I might have in my ledger book? Our US dollars say “in God we trust” but we don’t, we trust in the coercive force of law that backs the dollar.

[tags]money,spirit,trust[/tags]