Kermit Snelson on Thu, 17 Jan 2002 08:25:01 +0100 (CET) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
[Nettime-bold] RE: <nettime> Open Source and Open Money |
> The key intellectual and practical breakthrough consists in > thinking of community currencies as plural rather than singular. With this statement by Keith Hart, further elucidated by those of his colleagues, I reached enlightenment. We're certainly fortunate to have had the world's leading experts on LETS join our discussion. I now have some new worries, however. But first I want to make sure the problem's not on my end. As I understand it, LETS designs are completely agnostic with respect to issues of trust. In fact, that's precisely the claimed breakthrough. By design, LETS systems make absolutely no assumptions about the economy, topology or culture of the communities that use them. By eliminating the concept of interest, LETS leaves it up to the communities themselves to devise their own norms and mechanisms for dealing with the risk of default. In fact, a community may choose not to address the risk at all. If it is sufficiently small and saintly (or simply harmless) it may be perfectly safe to allow any member to "create money" anonymously to her heart's content. The key point is that any self-constituted community may enjoy the market-making benefits of a currency without having to buy into a bundled social norm that it may find inappropriate, unnecessary or even oppressive. This LETS design feature leads directly to the concept of plurality of currencies. Because such systems don't assume any social norms in their design, they may be used efficiently by any kind of community, from commercial banks to autonomous worker collectives. Instead of the monolithic, one-size-fits-all design of national currencies, the LETS design enables a flexible constellation of interacting payment systems that operate for different purposes and on different levels of scale. This improved modularity of design allows the advantages of currency to penetrate those hard-to-reach places in the economy, such as non-profits, the self-employed and the NGO's, that are currently ill-served by the existing "central bank" design. (By the way, this modular design for flexibility reminds me a lot of best practices in computer science, such as "separation of concerns" in object-oriented analysis, normalization in database schemas and orthogonality in microprocessor instruction sets.) It was this plurality that was argued against Felix Stalder's main concern, which was that the transfer of trust "from the token to the person" (to invert Felix's elegant phrase) would inevitably harm personal privacy. In support of this, he pointed to the elaborate and invasive actuarial-forensic methods of the existing credit card regimes. The LETS experts answered by appealing not only to the above-mentioned agnosticism of their design with respect to enforcing social norms, but also to the plurality of payment systems they envision. In other words, the multitude of systems means that there will always be a currency available that suits one's privacy needs. Some will allow anonymous transactions, some won't. The customer is free to choose. But at this point, I caught a whiff of Milton Friedman and started to worry. I'll get right to the point. Isn't what we're really talking about here the eventual privatization of the monetary system? Consider, as an analogy, the present (yet fading) system of national currencies. Every sovereign state has the right to "create its own money," and usually does. But in practice, the dodgier the country, the dodgier its currency. If we give the same right to individuals or ad-hoc communities, what's to prevent the current international situation from becoming universal? So much for the old democratic principle that "one man's dollar is as good as another's." The poor and marginal may indeed have more currency at their disposal once LETS systems become widespread, but their currency is likely to be less acceptable than a rich person's and may, in fact, be completely unable to buy certain goods in any amount. Today's wealthy, advanced OECD countries may become like the Soviet Union once was, with a miserable ruble economy for the masses and a luxurious "hard currency" economy (complete with separate shops) for the well-connected. I realize, of course, that this isn't what the inventors of the LETS design intend. But as they've just taught us, the technology is agnostic with respect to social norms. ("Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?") And, with my hat off to them, I believe its adoption is inevitable. I don't at all dispute the fact that LETS could greatly benefit currently marginalized communities, but it also offers potential benefits to global corporations, both in terms of profits and social control, that are simply staggering. Just as Internet-enabled "granular" advertising bequeathed us today's privacy nightmare of CRM and "one-to-one marketing", the potential for a DNS-enabled "granular" and privatized monetary system opens up brave new worlds of opportunity for price discrimination. (This is economist-speak for the hugely profitable practice of charging based on elasticity of demand, i.e., effectively higher prices for those who have less market power.) I think it's safe to say that once today's business leaders have grasped the concept, if they haven't already, they'll co-opt LETS as soon as it's legally and politically possible. Long before the "multitude" catches on. Unless, of course, the "multitude" rediscovers effective political activism, and soon. Getting back to the Open Source movement, Lawrence Lessig is completely relevant here. Everybody in the movement seems to have latched on to his slogan "Code Is Law", but that's probably his worst and most misleading turn of phrase. His main and best message has been completely ignored: that there is nothing inherently progressive about the Internet. It certainly has much liberating potential, but it can also enable a commercially-driven nightmare of "exquisitely oppressive control." It all depends on the political choices we make and the effectiveness of our actions. The LETS technology is one of the most potentially liberating Internet-based technologies I've ever seen, but it's also perhaps the single most dangerous. Unfortunately, the commercial banks are currently the best-positioned to understand and profit from it. We need to educate ourselves fast. Kermit Snelson _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold