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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  757 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The currency of the New Economy won't be money, but attention

Oh, there's definitely a "we'll all love each other and capitalism will dissolve" vibe. Thing is? Humans developed money to facilitate trade with people we aren't friends with. So either (A) something needs to fill the sandwich gap or (B) there needs to be some sort of middleware to translate "unknown attention" into "known attention."

Both (A) and (B) are going to belong to some sort of external system. You could do it with blockchain but blockchain has no ability to protect you from reavers so fundamentally, it's gonna be whatever the heavies wanna get paid in. If the heavies don't run the blockchain, you need a blockchain-to-heavybucks exchange rate which means we're right back where we started, paying taxes in money. If the heavies do run the blockchain, you're looking squarely at the Social Credit System.

Which, frankly, is where they've always been. People hear "China invented paper money" and think "china invented coins made out of paper" when in fact, the value of Chinese currency was whatever the Emperor said it was which had the effect of entrenching their user class against all challenges short of foreign invasion (mongols, Brits) and brutally restricting their ability to trade.

The Renaissance was created in no small part by Europeans taking the "money is whatever we say it is" insight of the Chinese and giving it to the banks, rather than feudal lords. Graeber might disagree, but answering the question "how do I pay strangers for stuff I can't afford" is how capitalism took over the world.

The Babylonians ran pretty much everything internal on a social credit system. But when they needed external stuff, they used silver. Worked for like 2000 years, until the barbarians they traded with learned to write in a pidgin easier to transact with, went around the social credit system and out-innovated 'em. Seems to me a Tik Tok economy is not a step forward.





NikolaiFyodorov  ·  755 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This was a great comment - more interesting than the Wired article, actually. Thanks for the discussion.

kleinbl00  ·  754 days ago  ·  link  ·  
NikolaiFyodorov  ·  754 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'll add these to my ever expanding reading list.

NikolaiFyodorov  ·  754 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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NikolaiFyodorov  ·  755 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.