Comments on Open Source Currency: Part 2: Greco's The End of Money

All who are really dedicated to the earliest possi...

2011-08-03T11:22:48.797-07:00

All who are really dedicated to the earliest possible attainment of economic and physical success for humanity - and thereby realistically to eliminate war - will have to shift their efforts from the political arena to participate in the design revolution.

That's one of the more powerful quotes I've heard in a long time.

@David Armistead - yes, greco's analysis seems...

2009-08-19T19:03:43.659-07:00

@David Armistead - yes, greco's analysis seems very much in line with yours. he goes into some detail about the debt imperative and its consequences. he says "it will require organized, coordinated, collective action to save civilization. it may seem paradoxical to some, but that kind of action is more likely to come from the collective intelligence and wisdom of ordinary people dealing with their own problems in small groups in their local communities, than from the knowledge and impulses of a few self-appointed "leaders" who have managed to climb to the top of the heap in the global game of Monopoly.(190) in his footnotes, he cites sources that show this to be the case. also, i like his illustration of the current period as the transition between the caterpillar and the butterfly: "we're being nourished by the accumulated resources of a dying civilization while we find ways to build the new." (19)

@michelangelo - thanks for the reference to Vladimir Z. Nuri. i'll check it out.

@King of the Paupers - i agree that there will be ...

2009-08-19T18:31:38.507-07:00

@King of the Paupers - i agree that there will be no end of money and that the title of the book can be misleading. i was meaning to include that in the post but it was already too long. thanks for noticing that too!

Jct: There will be no "end of money," th...

2009-08-19T18:00:44.160-07:00

Jct: There will be no "end of money," there will be a fixing of money by eliminating the instability, the positive feedback of usury on debt like when using community currencies.
When the local currency is pegged to the Time Standard of Money (how many dollars per unskilled hour child labor) Hours earned locally can be intertraded with other timebanks globally! In 1999, I paid for 39/40 nights in Europe with an IOU for a night back in Canada worth 5 Hours.
U.N. Millennium Declaration UNILETS Resolution C6 to governments is for a time-based currency to restructure the global financial architecture.
See http://youtube.com/kingofthepaupers on growth of the international time-trading network.

'Maybe central bankers aren't deliberately...

2009-08-19T11:43:03.180-07:00

'Maybe central bankers aren't deliberately trying to marginalize people. It may just be... that outdated jargon...'

With the global knowledge that renewable resources are being consumed faster than Nature can restore them (over consumption), and reserves of many industrially critical non-renewables are, with current technology, known to have supplies times in only decades or less - we have come to a truely new moment in the human experience.

Thus, this moment is the inflection point between an old economic form, the only prior form we've ever experienced, and a new emerging economic form.

In the old form resource abundance was assumed and the fundamental strategy for wealth creation was to increase, or amplify, resource consumption. The ouput of that system was the global consumer society.

In the new economy resource constraint is clear, thus the new strategy for creating wealth is resource productivity amplification, doing more and more with less and less continually. The output of this system will be a global sustainable society.

In this light, I do not believe that we have just confused the distinction 'money.' Instead, we face a time of transition in the nature of money, while the fundamental purpose of money is redirected from facilitating resource consumption amplification to facilitating resource productivity amplification.

This new role for money is part of an even more fundamental reorganization in the underlying nature and relative significance of the primary capital forms. In the old economy finance capital became the primary capital form. In the new economy, for reasons I will not attempt to outline here but which you can see partially in past blog postings at www.socialwebstrategies.com/blog, the new primary capital forms are knowledge and social capital.

In the new economy knowledge is progressively substituted for energy, materiality, labor, money and time, increasing the information content of all economic process and decreasing the energy and materials content.

Since knowledge is always and only created and shared in social networks, social capital is a primary enabler of knowledge use, so social capital, i.e. - the ability to generate a functional coordination of human action, is exceptionally important in the new economy.

All these factors will figure into what money is and how it functions in the new economy.

This moment contains both the old (now transforming) and the new (now emerging) economies. And I believe much of what we see happening in finance traces to this.

One last additional statement.

The new social media technologies are highly socially enabling, thus they amplify the productivity of social capital. Adoption of these technologies is cost driven - they are and have dramatically lowered the cost of creating a coordination of human action (ref Clay Shirky). Adoption of these technologies always has two effects: 1) they flatten the organization, 2) they increase transparency. Both of these effects are progressive and self-accelerating.

So in the new economy we also have a progressive acceleration of organization transformation through flattening (hierarchy is negative equity) and through transparency. So in addition to the new money being about facilitating the amplification of resource productivity, we also need to understand that the new money will flow in and facilitate increased transparency, not opacity, and increased access or flattening, not information control hierarchy.

Note that I do not hold these observations to be political or moral in nature. What I'm saying here is inherent to the effects of shifting the global technology base onto to a global knowledge economy in a context of inherent and permanent resource constraint.

Thanks for this blog and analysis.

David Armistead - Founding Partner
Social Web Strategies
www.socialwebstrategies.com

hello Tom, thank for your post! I would like to ad...

2009-08-19T09:42:23.181-07:00

hello Tom, thank for your post! I would like to add a consideration about the current money infrastructure.

A parasitical money system fundamentally has
three major requirements that are arguably now
already fully installed worldwide:
(a) any money must be exclusively in the form of
the state-authorized currency,
(b) all economic transactions are subject to taxation,
and
(c) loss of government control over the central bank.

Ultimately, the issue largely comes down to whether individuals have the right to make economic transactions between themselves free of state surveillance or interference.

U.S. and international laws and legal administration
currently do not appear to support such a right.
Coincidentally this is precisely the same question
surrounding the legitimacy of any taxation. Again,
the issue is closely related to the circumstances
surrounding the founding of the U.S. and

“no taxation without representation.”

In the new terminology, the U.S. Declaration of Independence phrase that Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed comes close to a tautology:

“money holders deﬁne, determine, and regulate what constitutes parasitism in the system via its administrative mechanisms.”

Credit goes to Vladimir Z. Nuri for the analysis that you can find on his paper entitled:
"Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism"