Comments - Money is information - but does it want to be free? - Urgent Evoke2024-03-29T07:58:00Zhttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/comment/feed?attachedTo=4871302%3ABlogPost%3A77150&xn_auth=noTo elaborate more on Sarah's…tag:www.urgentevoke.com,2010-04-07:4871302:Comment:836082010-04-07T08:26:05.887ZEzra Hohttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/EzraHo
To elaborate more on Sarah's post, people have to be aware of the history and develop of what we call the consumer society, which has its roots in the science of mass psychology. To make a long story short, what we think of as 'normal' economic behaviour was engineered at the start of the 20th Century by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays. See <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dA89CBBOC0" target="_blank">Century of the Self,</a> highly recommended. And also consider this phrase, mass…
To elaborate more on Sarah's post, people have to be aware of the history and develop of what we call the consumer society, which has its roots in the science of mass psychology. To make a long story short, what we think of as 'normal' economic behaviour was engineered at the start of the 20th Century by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays. See <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dA89CBBOC0" target="_blank">Century of the Self,</a> highly recommended. And also consider this phrase, mass production requires mass consumption. We usually think of it the other way, but what about from this perspective?<br />
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@Patricio:<br />
Yes, that is really true. We see so much evidence of this all the time from the hike in oil prices due to Wall Street speculation to the creating of diamond scarcity. In a monetary system that profits from inefficiency and scarcity, this is how the system is designed to operate. Money is the process of abstr…tag:www.urgentevoke.com,2010-04-07:4871302:Comment:834662010-04-07T04:43:04.485ZPatricio Buenrostro-Gilhuyshttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/PatricioBuenrostroGilhuys
Money is the process of abstracting real resources, form seeds to metals to paper to plastic to bits. The latest economic crisis is multifactorial but I truly believe that the bottom line is the disconnection between real resources and money on a screen. At some point there is discrepancies between wall street, banks and the real value of stuff. Now money doesn´t even needs to be printed its just information. Yet it has a real social and environmental impact. How many hours does a sweatshop…
Money is the process of abstracting real resources, form seeds to metals to paper to plastic to bits. The latest economic crisis is multifactorial but I truly believe that the bottom line is the disconnection between real resources and money on a screen. At some point there is discrepancies between wall street, banks and the real value of stuff. Now money doesn´t even needs to be printed its just information. Yet it has a real social and environmental impact. How many hours does a sweatshop worker it took to make does motherboards? What´s the embodied energetic cost of the computer´s lifecycle including raw material extraction, transport, manufacture, assembly, installation, disassembly, deconstruction and/or decomposition? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy</a> That includes the oil for the plastics in the computer, the death soldiers that it took to take over an oil rich country etc . . .<br />
Information has a very high cost. It seems that trust and value…tag:www.urgentevoke.com,2010-04-06:4871302:Comment:822452010-04-06T05:45:33.581ZMichele Baronhttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/MicheleBaron
It seems that trust and value, as well as knowledge, may reside in Pandora's Box. It is a dilemma, assigning accessibility and worth to knowledge. Interesting post. Thank you
It seems that trust and value, as well as knowledge, may reside in Pandora's Box. It is a dilemma, assigning accessibility and worth to knowledge. Interesting post. Thank you Thank you both for your comme…tag:www.urgentevoke.com,2010-04-06:4871302:Comment:822302010-04-06T05:18:54.617ZDaniel LaLibertehttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/DanielLaLiberte
Thank you both for your comments. Many interesting points to respond to. This medium of communication is not ideal for such discussions, but I'll give it a try. Well, never mind. My response got long enough that I will post separate blogs. (And while I was doing that, I got locked out by ning. Just as well, the weather was great for yard work.)<br />
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I just posted "<a href="http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blogs/money-will-always-have-some">Money will always have some value</a>" in response to…
Thank you both for your comments. Many interesting points to respond to. This medium of communication is not ideal for such discussions, but I'll give it a try. Well, never mind. My response got long enough that I will post separate blogs. (And while I was doing that, I got locked out by ning. Just as well, the weather was great for yard work.)<br />
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I just posted "<a href="http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blogs/money-will-always-have-some">Money will always have some value</a>" in response to Ezra's comments and blogs. Thanks for inspiring me to get those thoughts out.<br />
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Sarah, I think we are more in agreement, so ya... :) But here are a couple more things that came to mind in response to what you said.<br />
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The lack of transparency regarding pricing applies to all products, of course. For physical products, I think it is interesting that in addition to other factors, there is a perceived value based on the size and mass of the object that doesn't necessarily reflect the development costs. Another interesting related fact is that the cost of physical products over time eventually bottoms out at the cost of transporting the material around, proportional to its mass and distance traveled.<br />
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For an information product, there is the additional problem of finding out what the value of it is without actually having a copy of it and trying it out. Various strategies for dealing with that all amount to some form of trust. E.g. trust that you won't "steal" the information, or trust that someone else who reviewed the product is telling the truth, or trust that even if I give it to you free, you will probably buy something else. And that relates to your point about the increasing value of filtering - you have to trust that the filter is not excluding something you would want to see.<br />
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As far as what the products "should" be worth, I am not a believer in somehow making those decisions in any centralized manner, unless there is a near-monopoly situation or other inequities in which it is necessary to maintain control over a market that would otherwise not have sufficient self-control. So I believe that people, both buyers and sellers, should be able to agree on whatever value for products that they agree on, and this distributed control is better for approximating real value. Thanks Daniel-- Stewart Brand…tag:www.urgentevoke.com,2010-04-02:4871302:Comment:774842010-04-02T12:59:53.709ZSarah Shaw Tatounhttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/SarahShawTatoun
Thanks Daniel-- Stewart Brand is one of my long-time heroes. I think there are two great problems going forward-- one is a lack of transparency: It's very hard to tell, often, just what the inputs are that have gone into the production of information and what it 'should' be worth. Marketers are extremely skilled at using the latest knowledge about human psychology to 'suggest' very high prices to us. (Using things like 'social proof' and establishing a high 'first price' which is then…
Thanks Daniel-- Stewart Brand is one of my long-time heroes. I think there are two great problems going forward-- one is a lack of transparency: It's very hard to tell, often, just what the inputs are that have gone into the production of information and what it 'should' be worth. Marketers are extremely skilled at using the latest knowledge about human psychology to 'suggest' very high prices to us. (Using things like 'social proof' and establishing a high 'first price' which is then discounted, leading the consumer to believe that they are getting a bargain.)<br />
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The other problem is one that <a href="http://www.rheingold.com/" target="_blank">Howard Rheingold</a> and, I believe, <a href="http://www.shirky.com/" target="_blank">Clay Shirky</a> are particularly concerned with: the time cost of what I think Rheingold refers to as 'crap filtering'. As more and more information appears it becomes essential to learn how to quickly discard the stuff that's badly thought out, misleading or outright wrong. Particularly in the current economy, where companies often have large investments in producing extremely persuasive 'crap' this is, I think, our biggest challenge. Making money free is as good…tag:www.urgentevoke.com,2010-04-02:4871302:Comment:772842010-04-02T07:22:53.398ZEzra Hohttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/EzraHo
Making money free is as good as saying phasing out the monetary system.<br />
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Instead of defining money as what you did, why not consider why we started to use money. At a time when human labour was needed to extract resources and then to manufacture a certain produce, a value would be attached to that product simply because it took human effort to do it. And in an environment of scarcity, people just did not have time to make stuff out of goodwill. They had to have the monetary incentive to do it.…
Making money free is as good as saying phasing out the monetary system.<br />
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Instead of defining money as what you did, why not consider why we started to use money. At a time when human labour was needed to extract resources and then to manufacture a certain produce, a value would be attached to that product simply because it took human effort to do it. And in an environment of scarcity, people just did not have time to make stuff out of goodwill. They had to have the monetary incentive to do it. At the same time, it is this same monetary incentive that corrupts our social institution.<br />
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In your article, you mention that the cost of information and physical products are increasingly becoming cheaper and cheaper due to automation. Right, when machines increasingly replace human labour, the value of a product based on human effort becomes zero. Also, if machines were to replace human labour, and no one was employed, in a monetary system, this would mean that purchasing power of the average citizen/consumer would become so low that economic "growth" cannot be sustained. The solution then, acting in tandem with technological progress is to abolish the monetary system and realise that we have to use our combined technological and natural resources for all the world's peoples, not just for a small group of elites.