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Subject: Mar 20: industrialism required Fascism (reputation & bartering still doesn't scale in the Knowledge Age)
From:    iamback
Date:    Thu, March 19, 2015 12:07 pm
To:      "Armstrong Economics" <armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
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First let me summarize my understanding of l3552's proposal, to make sure I haven't missed his point.

l3552 proposes to have a decentralized, non-anonymous ledger for barter trading labor-in-kind, e.g. an hour of baby sitting for an hour of baby sitting. I suppose he also proposes that users are free to exchange ledger credits across kinds, e.g. if a pair of users are willing to trade 2 hours of baby sitting for one vehicle oil change. He asserts that the incentive for using this system versus fungible money, is the reputation in the community for helping the economy grow and avoiding the fungible money which the banksters can manipulate through the aggregation of collective power that widespread fungibility enables and requires. In other words, widespread fungible money is a power vacuum and who ever can get their hands on the levers of its debasement and fractional reserve lending, can aggregate power over community and good.

In his latest post, l3552 alludes to my concept that the Industrial Age required fungible money because production required aggregation of large fixed capital investment for factories, wherein the engineering component of the investment was an insignificant economic factor. These banksters and industrialists became Fascists out of necessity (<--- click the links to understand more deeply --->), because fungible money inherently drives the risky, bankrupt paradigm of fractional reserve banking and socialism. When a capitalist makes an investment in a factory with a NAV lifespan of decades, he needs to be sure that risky paradigm won't destroy his investment. (btw, this is also a reason that sometimes capitalism gets associated with Fascism, but people need to remember that capital is not just stored money, it is any productive capacity, e.g. knowledge is capital, social skills is capital, etc.)

Whereas, the Knowledge Age is rising to bring production economics back to the individual and l3552 is proposing to eliminate the power vacuum by making the aggregation of representations of capital non-fungible (l3552 refers to fungible money as "commodization").

For example, in theory Knowledge Age workers are not most incentivized to store money, rather instead to store knowledge; thus they want to promote knowledge trading. For example, a programmer is most juiced about finding some new awesome code to integrate with his own, e.g. I started programming for Android and Scala because these are cutting edge moving technology and society forward faster. This is why I had proposed back in 2012 on my Copute.com computer language development website site (btw I need to renew this domain) that programmers could trade LOC (lines of code) as barter mechanism, but fungible within their desired target market.

There are some similarities between l3552's proposal and Catherine Austin Fitts' (solari.com) proposal for doing finance on a local community level.

The reason l3552's (and Fitts') proposal won't work is the analogous visualized criticism I made upthread wherein I explained that efficiency trumps inefficiency. Why would someone dig canals with spoons when they can work for an hour at minimum wage, purchase 4 gallons of gas, then do the equivalent of 2000 man-hours of hard labor with a combustion engine. Moreover how could someone who egregiously wastes his time be more productive and significant in the economy than someone who doesn't.

So the problem with barter systems is they are inefficient, and the one thing Knowledge Age workers detest, it is inefficiency. The entire reason the Knowledge Age trumps the Industrial Age is because efficiency wins in nature. When ideas can be produced closer to their source of inspiration (e.g. 3D printing), then granularly matched production to the granular (not one-size-fits-all mass production) market demand accelerates faster. You want a custom designed pre-fab house[1] or car[2] completed tomorrow? Okay 3D printing and we don't need to build a factory first.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/19/evolutionary-process-of-labor/


Armstrong means that if you want to not do manual labor (e.g. manual bookkeeping account on the computer), then learn to program to automate it and be more efficient.

Reputation is important (e.g. you want to use my software code, because you know I am German and perfectionist), but it is orthogonal to the efficiency of trading value.

Also reputation in trading value can become very problematic. This the "coin taint" issue in non-anonymous Bitcoin (which is why gmaxell invent CoinJoin the precursor of Darkcoin, which btw I as AnonyMint was the first to point out could not scale because it can jammed), wherein certain coins won't be accepted or processed because of certain histories of trading. In short, the only way reputation scales is via political control, i.e. you want to drive the Knowledge Age back into the chains of Fascism that the industrialists couldn't escape!

If you want to build orthogonal reputation tracking systems, that is fine. But you can't tie the units of money to them, because otherwise there is no means to break free from "winner takes all" paradigm of politics.

Sorry guys I went down all these thought experiments years ago. That is why I get pissed off when people waste my time and don't go read what I already figured out years ago. Because I am in implementation mode now, and I only have a few months to get my work completed. You all might misperceive it as a lack of humanity on my part, but actually if I am not efficient then I am not helping mankind. And trust me, the world is depending on me right now. I don't care about those who are jealous. Go masturbate. I am busy.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3514


P.S. lately I don't have an hour to put into writing each of my posts carefully as I did the above one. Sorry I am working 18 hours daily.


[1] http://www.3ders.org/articles/20150118-winsun-builds-world-first-3d-printed-villa-and-tallest-3d-printed-building-in-china.html

[2] https://localmotors.com/3d-printed-car/