[wsfii-discuss] Worldchanging article on Complementary currencies

Wed Oct 5 18:38:09 UTC 2005

hi paul, nice to see you on this list,

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 10:52:36AM +0100, Paul Sanders wrote:
> >The Lime made some local food retail
> >establishments very happy to know that they knew us.
> This of course is a characteristic of power relationships, as much as  
> it is of loving relationships and of the bonds of community.
> 
> Jo took pleasure at being able to see what was going on more clearly.  
> In my view this is not necessarily a virtue. One of our best defences  
> against tyranny is our ability to avoid being seen. Freedom is rarely  
> served by excessive monitoring, and the systems for monitoring are  
> very easily used to monitor control itself. Purposeful inexactitude  
> and ignorance is very hard, however, particularly when you are  
> structuring and storing metadata.

the Lime as an abstraction did provide some meta-level vagueness,
a means of *not* having to monitor and account for every tiny action.
Instead of having to collect and collate lots of individual
transaction receipts from many participants, Julian could just invest
a bulk sum in the Lime, simplifying the edges of his accounting system
and distributing shares to the participants, who spent anonymously. 

These are the kinds of solutions i would like to look for to give us
the benefit of enhanced environment without concession to monitoring;
like the road charging scheme which never has to know where any
participant is; or a hospital like system where you acquire a token of
your interaction which is disposable, even meaningless outside the
system. Something that allows en masse interactions to be 'contained'
as a shared representation; might that just simplify control, for you?

The Oyster trends i really dont like: the good multi-day deals for
tickets only available on the monitored system now; talk of 50% price
increases for regular tickets soon, plus the introduction of currency
capacity in it for small goods at the kinds of outlets that distribute
lottery tickets. I don't see the positive capacities in this
structure; i see long queues of people when the new integrated
ticketing system blinks out again, and otherwise paranoid people
blithely engaging with it. self-reinforcing and sealing.

People are being programmed by the identification of their
transactions with rulesets; perhaps abstracting those transactions
locally (from credit cards into local credit unions) would prevent
systemic victimisation. A trend in Lets, Mary claims is that the
volume of transactions does or should lessen over time, more value
comes to be exchanged in an unrecorded and informal way, or value
exchange becomes secondary to more 'social' transactions. this is a
kind of minimising traffic? 

i am definitely beset by an enthusiasm for making abstract models that
might help encapsulate and render comprehensible and improvable,
subsystems of a whole. i believe a generation of tools exist which do
comprehensive spatial-temporal-topical inference, yet most of the
commercial applications are really interested in the assumptions of
aggregates. i would like to be able to give more people access to
those kinds of tools, that are now contained at a price and a
constitutional size, i would like us to be able to sell the data that
we generate, through collective structures, if that is viable, there
is a lot of value in it, it is better than watching it being extracted
from us at different toll points with no true recognition other than
non-exchangeable discount tokens which direct value ultimately upwards
to a very few outlets. 

Perhaps i am misguided. i think, "how will we know unless we try to 
build it," and i recall the end of Chris's geospatial web presentation, 
"We're only going to only get there together, we need to build this, 
we need to free the spatial data infrastructures from the powers that be,
tailor them to our uses and build something better than they could
even possibly imagine." My blind optimism about a system that somehow
wants to be built. But you are reserved about the coercive nature of
systems and the ease with which they can be - metaprogrammed? and i do
not have an answer to that, only that i would like to help put
programming tools into the hands of more people.

zx