Why did you buy MAID when it came out, knowing that you by definition can’t use it?
That is, you’ll be able to use Safecoin, which will be widely available when it comes out? From the perspective of your comment above, it would seem more reasonable to use BTC or whatever you had originally, and not buy MAID, but you didn’t do it.
Edit: just in case it’s not clear, and I’m pretty sure it’s not because of what you wrote: if you don’t own anything, why save?
What is the point of having Safecoin, then? I actually proposed having a coinless Safnet to stress-test the network and launch it faster.
Safecoins could be completely lotterized and given away randomly.
Unrelated to this Safecoin stuff, what I don’t understand is how someone can think that others would like to give their possessions away just because it’d be a cool thing to do. Charity and donations weren’t invented in that Guardian article. If you donate your time to a Github project you don’t own, you’re part of the “new” economy.
But you maybe need a PC with 16GB of RAM for that, and in order to get that RAM you need to have a way to get it before the store runs away of it, which it would most definitively do if it was giving it away to every RAM beggar. You need to pay more than zero (and so on, until you outbid the last person bidding for the last DIMM you need.) And more importantly, if you don’t do that, you’d end up with 2 or 0 GB of RAM and remain unable to donate your time to that project. That’s where the house of cards starts going down.
Oh just yes, yes and yes! I literally don’t think I could agree more with every word each of you has said.
Warren, by labour I really just meant time. Technical unemployment will wipe out most ‘laborious’ work, but the time that is then required by the market might also be considerably more expensive in an era of greater abundance through tech advancement.
justin, I absolutely agree and live the same way. So nice to hear a fellow self-sufficient also into tech side… I grow my food and keep chickens etc with solar and biomass on 3 acres in South Wales and I love the lifestyle, low outgoings and extra time I get to spend with my wife and kids.
Blindsite2k. Absolutely! Best thing I ever did was give up my job in London and move here. I have more money now that I hardly ever need it and time to learn and discover the world now that I don’t have to ‘work’ to make someone else obscenely rich… for 60 hours a week. I now do all kinds of stuff voluntarily. Some bits earn me money, others do not, but I do them because I enjoy them or have time to help people I love. Now that I don’t have much income I feel I have less to worry about, not more.
Best advice I’ve ever had was ‘do only what you love’. It doesn’t make you selfish, it makes you happy and when you’re happy it’s much easier to make others happy too… happy is more important than a mirage of insecurity that makes you submit to dominion to get your scraps from their table. Live in the now, not eternal worry about a future that’s always around the corner… that’s my opinion anyway =)
Incidentally, just watched this…
It got me really excited at first, but the ending annoyed me. Wouldn’t this have been amazing if instead of deciding that ‘avoiding tax might hurt their community/services’, they simply decided to put all of their income tax dodged savings into the community… then HMRC would really have to consider them a viable threat instead of a curious problem with no teeth
Seems like a tax protest could easily be turned into a golden opportunity for a decentralist movement if they decided to reinvest their tax and started managing their own town…?
That’s great, but the article isn’t about that, and neither is that new. It’s always been like that. Most folks never leave the “simple” life to begin with.
The article (from the Guardian) is about how this is a result of some new sharing economy.
You still have the chickens only because you aren’t sharing your farm with others. You can choose to donate the eggs and occasionally a chicken. TFA is telling us soon you won’t need to own anything - you’ll get chickens (or maybe take them as you please) because your neighbor - thanks to the huge productivity in the 21st century, has five too many.
Why do you assume that I’ve bought MAID? Or bitcoin for that matter? I think I’ve posted several times I don’t have excess funds to do so. And the reason one would buy MAID is the same reason why one would buy any prerelease or anything on sale, not because one can use it in the present but because one WILL be able to use it in the future.
Conserving resources for a project is the same regardless whether that project is used individually or collectively. Isn’t this obvious? If I want contribute to creating a driverless taxi for example that will benefit not only myself but everyone else resources need to be stored and conserved, either individually by myself or in some collective storehouse somewhere as it takes a certain amount of steel, circuitry, and other materials to create a vehicle regardless of whether it will be owned or ownerless. Saving resources has to do with the laws of conservation of power and energy NOT about ownership and permission. You need x amount of energy to do anything regardless of whether you are attempting to create property or a free entity.
The point of safecoin is to measure contribution of RESOURCES contributed to the network. You are confusing resources with ownership. Say one did create that ownerless taxi. To do so would consume resources but ultimately, by benefiting others via it’s usage, would ultimately be a greater resource to the network at large. Thus even though one, collectively or individually, didn’t own the taxi, by creating it they had benefited the network by creating a valuable resource to the network. THAT is what safecoin measures. That is what app development and farming is about. If you create an app that’s open source you are creating a resource to the network and even if it’s utterly free and everyone can use it you’re still rewarded because you are providing a valuable resource, measured by the usage of the app, to the network at large and rewarded for your service via safecoin. SAFE is a resource economy. That’s why safecoins are not just distributed randomly.
Yes, its a very strange concept this prioritizing actual contribution over rent seeking, while providing a commons for those who need a rest or a breather or aren’t quite in a position to contribute at the moment to the common good. A system that can foster trust. SAFE, security in liberty.
You cannot contribute resources that don’t belong to you.
I don’t at all feel confused about that.
People have been making voluntary contributions for centuries, but it didn’t create a “sharing economy.”
The likelihood of anything close to the fantasies described in the article happening in the next 15 years is nil.
We are seeing changes in our economies I do not know if we call it a ‘sharing economy’ I would describe it as more of a ‘p2p economy’.
As technology advances many people have become there own retailer,energy producer,freelancer.
crowd sourcing as of crypto currency and project are more common.
with 3d printers people will have the abilty to become there own manufacture.
The monopolies are been broken down as people become less dependent on the 'man"
Hi, I’m a latecomer here; I’m just skimming through the article from the OP.
Information economy, where content is worth more than the means used to produce it. A world of small co-ops. And so on. And it’s all lovely.
I just can’t believe it. The means to produce digital content are made by factories owned by Chinese capitalists, using minerals from the DRC mined by slaves. Integrated circuit production, which basically is creating those means to produce that information, is increasingly centralized, because it’s cheaper that way. Roads won’t be built by co-ops, either.
Whole segments of our lives are being replaced by decentralized alternatives, and it’s lovely. There are others, and they are the resource intensive ones, that won’t be. Not because it wouldn’t be nice, but because they are more expensive to do in small scales (sometimes prohibitively so: you can, but probably won’t, buy a tunnel boring machine on Alibaba), and people prefer the cheap over the idealistic or impossible.
Well, there still may come a time when we won’t need roads and our flying cars can be 3d-printed in the 3d-printed garage with the 3d-printed 3d-printer whose circuit board was baked in our self-replicating circuit fab using minerals from the community recycler in Uncle Jim’s corner store…
“You cannot contribute resources that don’t belong to you.” Ah I see. So you are positing that one’s computer resources, creativity, time and money do not belong to them and are not theirs to give? Just because one creates an owner less resource, even an entire owner less resource economy, that doesn’t eliminate all ownership in the universe.
No, I was positing that in order to contribute you need to own those resources, which in a “sharing economy” you wouldn’t.
There’s nothing new in that. 200 years ago one would have horses and every now and then give a free ride to market to a neighbor or someone you wanted to help out. There is no new sharing economy in any of the examples people have been trying to make in this topic.
lol at “post capitalism.” There is no such thing as post capitalism. Everybody dreams the day of post-scarcity which is impossible. It will never happen, ever and ever and ever and ever.
Capitalism = free trade. So post capitalism means anti-free trade. So it is communism where the workers get to decide how to allocate resources but they failed to conceive how gets to control the resources? Voting? Democratic voting? Hah, back to square one, statism. Here is the free pdf on the economic calculation in socialist commonwealth. This is the greatest book ever existed, and all socialist/ communist have to read it.
The digital world is capitalism. I made money by playing valve games. I trade commodities for steam games and/or bitcoins.
No capitalism doesn’t mean free trade. This free trade stuff is idiotic, a pure distraction. For instance all the blather about freedom of contract comes down to what the South argued for in a right to exploit. So much of the libertarian stuff amounts to nothing more than the dumbest of religions, with a bunch of paid for prostitute economists trying to prop it up.
We need a commerce last approach. And not because trade or commerce is not important but because it can never be first. If it is you lose any kind of situation where you put people first. Just as with sponsored media being utterly incompatible with power sharing and democracy you can’t have a money first approach and think it won’t lead to rule by inherited wealth- the worst of all possible situations, You don’t put the merchant business optimized mind at the top of things anymore than you put the inbred mafioso thug at thug at the top of things. The rabble is a better governor than the stupid and shallow.
As above for the parts where a cooperative won’t do- well there is nothing that a corporate can do that a cooperative can’t. It doesn’t matter that it may not always do it as well in all situations. There are at leas some where it will do it better- and probably most. But thing with the corporate and why it has to end is that it is always life killing criminal idiocy in its operation and always eventually its results. Its basically crime and rule by wealth.
@janitor Sharing an owned resource, such as the horse in your example is not the same as creating an owner less resource that in effect owns itself. No we haven’t had this before because the tech to support such a concept hasn’t existed before. Resources could only be traded between autonomous entities and with the exception of slaves could not gain self ownership and autonomy of their own. But now with the advent of smart contracts, apps and crypto currency that’s changing. It’s conceivable for things like cars or other objects to gain autonomy though commerce. A vending machine service could be entirely automated just like owner less cars. And who owns the SAFE network? No one as its decentralized.
@Warren Do not confuse capitalism and free trade with corporate fascism.
@anon81773980 There will always be scarcity why? Much of the scarcity today is artificial.
I think you could compare the SAFE network with the Internet. But just like the Internet, the SAFE network can’t do anything without physical resources.
It’s like an RFC specification for the SMTP protocol, it doesn’t do anything by itself.
Disk space and network transfer service are owned, but can be shared. The moment they stopped being owned by someone I’d take them and sell them (or stop sharing them for free and do it for profit).
But as you point out about scarcity and in line with what is implied/explicit in the general post-capitalism critique, capital is itself obsolete over its contemporary relationship to scarcity. We shouldn’t give it more credit than it deserves, it was always an unstable system prone to devolving into corporate facism and monarchy. Whether a corporation, a private factory owner or a monarchical thug the situation is always a variation on theft where one person with more arbitrary power exploits another (worker) taking the fruits of that person’s contribution in excessive or wrongful proportion to their own contribution and nullifying inverting their own contribution through foisting the same crime on possibly countless others. It was always a system of exploitation, but the prior necessity of human labor made it seem more justifiable. Now its just a phoney system propped up by denial and accumulating interest on reparation for this fake period.
I’m quite happy with what’s left to me after they’re done exploiting me. The only problem I have is with the quasi-monarchical thugs from the government. At least in monarchies every now and then the people would send them to the gallows.
And this Guardian-led mob will determine the precise and rightful proportion of each person’s contribution … how?
Okay then let’s follow this line of logic. If an “ownerless” entity is simply a cooperative co-creation that everyone shares using resources from a decentralized community, and you point out that if something is ownerless you’d just take it. Then how does one prevent the destruction and/or privateering of any ownerless creations such as a decentralized taxi service like dUber? Say you have a decentralized driverless taxi meet up with a fellow like yourself. What would prevent such an encounter from ending in you breaking a window and trying to hotwire or hack the taxi for your private use? Consider this is also the basis of the slave trade as we are all ownerless and autonomous beings. But as you say there are those that wish to “privatize” that which is ownerless, in this example human beings are the “ownerless” and autonomous being in question, and turn them into property. So whether its a driverless ownerless decentralized taxi or human trafficking the problem remains the same.
Do not confuse artificial scarcity with ACTUAL scarcity. Take the diamond trade for instance. Did you know that diamond companies have monopolized all the diamond mines around the world and jacked up the price artificially? There is no ACTUAL scarcity of diamonds on earth, we’ve got tons of the things. They’ve got bloody warehouses full of them and if they were released into the market to be affected by supply/demand the price would plummet. Which is why they rely on hype and hoarding to artificially jack up the prices.
If you lived on a space station (We do in fact live on a spaceship, spaceship earth, we just don’t usually think about it that way) you’d have a measurable set amount of food, water, air, etc. Those would be examples of ACTUAL scarcity limits on your resources that you would need to monitor in order to survive. If you lived in the desert water would be scarce, actually scarce, and would be highly valued. Or if you were facing drought, same thing.
But much of the scarcity we face today isn’t caused by lack of resources but rather by mismanagement or resouces and beaurocracy. If everyone grew food in their front yard instead of grass there could hardly be a food shortage. We truck food all across the country, using gas powered transport trucks, which require food to lose nutrition so that it can have longer shelf life so that it can withstand such long voyages. Gas costs money, trucks cost money, drivers cost money, and then there’s time on top of it, and then there’s the road maintainance cost and truck maintainance on top of THAT. Then you’re also looking at insuence for the food supplier, making sure the food is edible all the way from farmer to retailer to plate. Probably a dozen or more hands have handled that food before you eat it. That in itself isn’t all that hygenic. (Which is ironic really considering all the emphasis on hygene in the resteraunts but no one bats an eye when a customer picks up a lettuce and puts it back or sneezes by the kiwi fruit. And then some other customer, who has just finished petting their dog and handling god knows what, picks it up and puts it in their shopping cart.)
So my point is growing one’s own food would not only save costs and be more efficient for the individual but it would also save society costs in transportation, health, welfare (as if you’re self sustaining that means you need less money from the gov’t for food, or it could translate into higher quality food and less health bills which works out to the same) and over all increased food, health and financial security. But that would also mean less control for the government and big corporations. We don’t have an ACTUAL scacity of food. We throw out like 40% - 60% of the food we produce. And that in itself wouldn’t be the problem if we composted and reclaimed it properly. Nature wastes nothing and neither should we. The problem is we don’t reclaim it. It goes to landfills and becomes wasted energy. And that’s just a quick summery of the waste of artificial scarcity of food. The same goes for waste disposal, for transportation, for any number of different industries.
I agree that artificial scarcity has to go. But capitalism and trade does work really well when working with ACTUAL scarcity of resources. When some government isn’t interfering and saying that people can’t buy and sell something or can’t grow or produce what they want on their own property then you get closer to actual free market economics.
Capitalism and communism have THE SAME PROBLEM. They’re joined at the hip and the ideals behind them get corrupted the same way: Politics. Capitalism and communism are ECONOMIC systems not political systems. But inevitably politics gets mixed in with both. When you mix politics with communism it loses it’s classless status and becomes a dictatorship. When you mix politics with capitalism you quite often get a fascist corporate oligarchy of one degree or another. Frankly I find both quid pro systems equally corrupt as their both based on tit for tat. In the one everyone recieves their portion, to each according to their need and ability. In the latter you receive based on ability and competition. But at the end of the day when you have you’re two cents to rub together you’re still spending them tit for tat for something else. So you’re still honoring what you have rather than what you give or what is accomplished. Nothing has changed fundamentally. The only difference is who controls the purse strings. In capitalism everyone gets their own purse. In communism everyone gets an allowance from a big central wallet. Frankly I’d opt for capitalism over the two but I still want my free trade and to get money out of govt and gov’t out of money.
I have to concur with janitor here. What we are discussing here is essentially the dynamics of power. Trying to establish a democracy and pretend larceny won’t creep in is naive at best. Better to simply admit that those that are allowed to accumulate and centralize power will do so and take measures to decentralize that power as much as possible in the first place.
@Warren If you don’t think that employer is paying enough then quit and don’t work for them. It’s that simple.
That’s precisely why I claim this “post capitalism” fantasy can’t take off. There must be an owner. What’s unowned can be owned. If I spot a $10 bill lying on the floor, I’m not going to take it and replace it with $9 because I’m short $1 to pay for my drink.
It’s not true - at least in my thinking - that human beings are ownerless. A child belong to its parent(s), an 18 year old belongs to himself. That’s how most free market economists see it. A statist would surely give you a different opinion (e.g. parentless children belong to the state, and adults have to serve the state).
I stick to the free market explanation and this is what leaves no doubt whatsoever as to what freedom means and how it’s supposed to work. Because an adult belongs to himself, that’s why it’s noone’s business if the owner of a body decides to have an abortion, smoke weed and shoot porn movies.
You’re right, and I think the common denominator to most of these problems is the government, fiat and the ever growing debt. I suppose it’s too much to expect The Guardian to mention any of that - after all that media is controlled by redistributionists who depend on taxation, budget deficits and government spending not less than the Military Industrial Complex.
Sorry that doesn’t work as you just refuted a driverless ownerless autonomous taxi. Are you for the concept of independence or against it? Moreover a child is not property and does not belong to it’s parents or the state. A child is a free human being. Granted it’s parents might protect it and claim ownership of it but that has more to do with social attatchment than what should be considered legal attachment. In a legal or philosophical sense no I do not agree with the concept that a child of any age is property any more or less that any other human being is property. If a child becomes estranged from it’s parents then what claim of ownership should they have over it? It makes no sense to keep one with those one is not emotionally attached to or even threatened by. If a child is on good terms with his parents then it’s natural for the bond to be strong and for them to feel a sense of ownership of him and him of them. If the child is NOT on good terms then to legally bind a child to his parents would be an act of abuse both because one is forcing both child and parents to be with one they do not wish to be and two because it violates the child’s free will. Yes one can argue till the cows come home about the ability to consent. But it comes down to this for me. If we consider a child property, legally belonging to it’s parents, we are creating a seperate legal class. We are dividing humans into two classes at least: one that we honor their right to consent or not, their free will and the other which we do not. 18 years is far too long a span not to honor something as fundamental to being human as free will and tolerate an entire age bracket as being considered property.
Why is a human being autonomous but an ownerless taxi is not? How can an 18 year old belong to himself and an ownerless autonomous taxi or other such construct not belong to itself? Is it a question of liability? Is it like how a child cannot consent and so it’s parent must do that for them because their ability to make decisions is in question? But how would you determine whom to hold liable should the creation of such a construct be decentralized and anonymous? Moreover what if you had cars creating themselves? It would be like having an orphaned child. Again does the child belong to himself or to the state if there are no parents to claim him?
And given the absence of parents or state does a superior power now have a right to forcibly claim that child or autonomous vehicle as their own property like a discarded $10 bill?
In the end it doesn’t matter how you view the taxi.
Taxi = human being = autonomous entity therefore how do you rightfully appropriate one but not the other?
Taxi = child = autonomous entity denied ability to consent same problem as above as trafficking children is just as bad as trafficking adults if not worse.
taxi = property = how do you assign liability?
Prove to me that if a car can’t own itself and can be absconded as unowned property that a human being’s rights to owning himself should be respected and someone else SHOULDN’T also abscond with them as property. How are the two different? They are both ownerless and own themselves and are being taken ownership of by an outside power.
Whether 8, 18 or 80, the state treats people as their property anyway. They load us up with debt and take most of our stuff.
As for children being property of parents, presumably they could be scrapped without prejudice? I don’t think killing children has ever been considered an acceptable.
No, children are not property, but parents would be negligent if they brought them into this world and allowed them to die. If they don’t want such responsibility, they can abstain or use contraception.
There are parallels between the state and parenthood, bit children get their independence and cannot be forced to take the debts or their parents (at least in most societies).
