> "Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made out of dependencies."
A nice way of putting it, though I have a slightly different take - the "worlds of abundance" are made of relationships. And not in a good way.
When I own a bunch of files, I own a bunch of files. Nobody can mess with that. When I use Spotify, I'm in a relationship with Spotify the company. A relationship governed by a lengthy ToS, a relationship in which I'm at a disadvantage, but most importantly, it's another relationship to keep track of.
Things you own are out of mind until you need them. Yes, that sometimes means you'll fail to perform necessary maintenance in a timely fashion. But services are always on the top of your mind. They drain your bank account monthly or yearly. They have terms that keep changing. Their offerings keep changing. If you lose track of some, they'll just keep draining your bank account. Services create cognitive burden. Personally, I'm already confused and unsure about just how many things I subscribe to, and I'm someone opposed to X as a Service as a matter of principle.
I just don't want that many commercial relationships in my life. It's tiring.
I think most people miss how powerful relationships are in a network of abundance. You really nailed it.
Unless we can turn these relationships on their head, economically speaking.
Been trying to work out the math on this for the last year. Recently gave a talk on it (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1HJdrBk3BlE) would you mind sharing your thoughts on it and on abundance/relationships in general?
One of the technical directors of Silicon Valley TV show and I were talking, and he's very interested in what they call the "Post-Subscription Economy".
Basically Google and Netflix hijacked Hollywood, and now a lot of the studios are interested in what's next, for fear of missing out again.
Ok, so I watched your talk. You're a good, charismatic speaker. That said, I don't think I understood everything on the first pass. I have my concerns that it's not a solid idea, but I like the direction where it's heading. And so, I have loads of questions, like:
1) Is the % daily value a self-reported quantity? You seem to strongly suggest it is.
2) You described a hope - not unreasonable one - that under your ideal conditions, cheating on self-reporting of % daily values will make no sense and naturally disappear. But what about the conditions in which your system exists in parallel to the current one? How to prevent economic arbitrage? I.e. people misreporting their % daily value estimate to extract goods and services from your system, which then they sell for money in our current system?
3) Is there any form of money backing your system? If not, then how the people who have nothing to give to the society are supported? Wouldn't there be a poverty class in your system too? Does it have better economic mobility?
4) Do you have any more details about algorithms underpinning freeism, and how should they be created?
Did you write an article or a paper about this that goes into more details? I'd love to read it.
This is concerning for me too, but no other model I've explored let's us as accurately get at what the perceived value is other than directly asking.
Have any ideas for novel models? I'd love to connect you with someone that has a PhD in Economic Mathematical Models that is helping contribute to the design of this system.
If the abuses can be more easily adjusted for than the difficulting of interpreting a proxy measure in value, then I think there is merit.
For instance, if at a macroeconomic level we see coffee has a 2% daily value with only 1% variance, then we see some outlier claiming coffee was 69% of their daily value, it might mean something odd is going on. But knowing that for most people that coffee accurately represents 2% has far more possible wins in understanding logistics than the assumptions of other methods.
(2) Correct.
From my design stance, I see this as a feature not a bug. Could you expand on edge cases where this would produce harm for the % system?
It seems the harm would be for the legacy system, and the arbitrage is strategic.
Giving in this system is not obligatory. So if too many abundant goods get scraped, they'll turn into scarcity goods that require a higher Giving Index, OR it will represent market demand for an entrepreneur/startup to scale up the manufacturing/production of that good, to maintain its abundance factor.
Again, note, in $USD often the more of a good there is causes cost to fall. This is not true in %, a good may still have a high percent value, even if it is readily available to all. So there is a lot of profit (higher Giving Index = access to more luxury goods) to be made on these high demand high valued items. $USD is self defeating, the more Tesla you can produce outpacing demand, the cheaper you want to price them. Does this mean Tesla have lower and lower economic worth or value?
Arbitraging the system, skimming goods and selling them to legacy for $USD means you're not gaining inbound % value statements (as in you're not gaining wealth in the new system, the Giving Index) so perhaps you putting high % values on the goods you are skimming is more accurate than you'd think? They're maybe getting more value from it as a result of the arbitrage than purely somebody in the new system using it (say a banana) for average consumption.
This is why it would be an intentional feature. But please, if I'm missing an edge case that results in harm, please illuminate me!
(3) UBI is baked into the system!
First off, UBI doesn't work with money due to the inflation problem.
There is no money. That is because you don't need to pay (transact) for majority of goods (food, housing, etc. post scarce in USA, tho not other places) to be given to you, you just need to state how much value you get from them each day.
So the "poverty class" becomes the consumer class. Their needs should be taken care of, they would be material rich, but not prioritized in luxury or in waiting lines, the Biggest Givers would be able to skip to the front of a coffee shop, bakery, airport boarding, etc.
Better mobility yes, because you wouldn't need capital before doing a startup to pay for rent and employees. All you'd need to do is form a team with your friends (like many do in online games as "guilds") and invest your time into making or distributing products.
Economics mobility is incentived here because gangs of teenagers could go into Costco, get bulk of bananas, and then be last-mile distributors (TaskRabbit, etc.) without needing capital first to buy the bananas (obviously they could not do this for luxury items yet).
> the "worlds of abundance" are made of relationships. And not in a good way.
That doesn't sound entirely true. Imagine TNG, the typical abundance utopia (or Culture, insert your favorite post-scarcity society here). While it's true that you need relationships to be on the Enterprise, you don't need relationships to go to your replicator and get whatever material product you fancy.
Instead, dependencies seem come from two things combined: abundance plus centralization. Or economically: a fixed cost, and abundance beyond that fixed cost. You need a relationship with Spotify because Spotify is the one who holds the keys to the library. Contrast it to a world where piracy is legal: you wouldn't need a relationship with BitTorrent to download music, because it has no entry cost. You might need a relationship with private trackers if you're not content with the public ones, but again - that's because the private trackers hold the keys to the abundance beyond.
You're correct. That's why I put "worlds of abundance" in (scare) quotes - I don't particularly like that term, but it is what the author used. To me, our reality more closely resembles life on Ferenginar than in the Federation.
I'm not against all business relationships, just the proliferation of them. You don't need a relationship with the replicator to use one on Enterprise - just being there (even as a guest) gives you access. But that's Starfleet. I assume that Federation citizens don't need relationships to operate their household replicators either - they most likely own one. And while this is just my head canon, I imagine on Ferenginar you typically rent food replicators from Replicate.ly or some other competing startup.
I'm not agreeing with the author that the "worlds of abundance" need to have everything as services. I'm just complaining that our world is heading this way. Ultimately, I want our world to be more like the Federation, and less like the Ferengi.
The corporatism is rarely seen in sci-fi: either it's overwhelming fascist (e.g. battling corporations, killing innocents by the thousands) or trivial. Philip K Dicks' Ubik was close to where we're heading:
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
You need a relationship with content creators that provides strong incentives for them to keep producing non-trivial high quality content.
Neither Spotify nor piracy do that.
This is related to the dependency problem. Dependencies aren’t problematic just because they’re dependencies, but because too many systems are made of low quality work.
If the infrastructure worked absolutely reliably, no one would care about personal file ownership.
>When I own a bunch of files, I own a bunch of files. Nobody can mess with that. When I use Spotify, I'm in a relationship with Spotify the company. A relationship governed by a lengthy ToS, a relationship in which I'm at a disadvantage, but most importantly, it's another relationship to keep track of.
Doesn't "dependency" covers all these negatives?
(Dependency not as in "npm/maven dependency" but in the casual sense).
I suppose it does! But between the context of NPM and my own recent work on problems related to dependency resolution, I had only tech connotations of this word in mind when reading the article.
Yes, you generally can't resell relationships - transfering recurring services is usually impossible on the web, or a huge PITA off-line. That's another problem with them.
Ownership is exhausting. You can only "own" anything by going to great lengths to protect it. Ultimately, you are still reliant on the relationships you have with others and their willingness to respect that it is yours.
> You can only "own" anything by going to great lengths to protect it.
The expense is mostly shared across all the things you own. You protect one flat or house, and store most of your possessions in it.
> Ultimately, you are still reliant on the relationships you have with others and their willingness to respect that it is yours.
Those are relationships with humans, and perhaps fixed number of public services. Each provides something important. 100th commercial relationship that only exists because the industry likes recurring payments for what should be a one-time purchase is tiring.
A nice way of putting it, though I have a slightly different take - the "worlds of abundance" are made of relationships. And not in a good way.
When I own a bunch of files, I own a bunch of files. Nobody can mess with that. When I use Spotify, I'm in a relationship with Spotify the company. A relationship governed by a lengthy ToS, a relationship in which I'm at a disadvantage, but most importantly, it's another relationship to keep track of.
Things you own are out of mind until you need them. Yes, that sometimes means you'll fail to perform necessary maintenance in a timely fashion. But services are always on the top of your mind. They drain your bank account monthly or yearly. They have terms that keep changing. Their offerings keep changing. If you lose track of some, they'll just keep draining your bank account. Services create cognitive burden. Personally, I'm already confused and unsure about just how many things I subscribe to, and I'm someone opposed to X as a Service as a matter of principle.
I just don't want that many commercial relationships in my life. It's tiring.