Brian Holmes on Wed, 16 Jan 2002 12:05:01 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] re: Open Source and Open Money |
Felix Stalder writes, about trust and fiduciary systems: "Cash solves the reputation problem elegantly, by transferring the trust from the person to the token. Credit cards solve the problem horribly with an incredible invasive global authenticating infrastructure which is queried virtually every time one uses the card." This is extremely well put. Cash shows how a specific institutional mix was required to uphold the private/public distinction on which liberal democracy was based. To be able to transact freely, without having to establish trust by giving any account of one's personal history - that is, without having to drag the private laundry out into public - required a national bank system with a near-monopoly on the issuing of legal tender. Today, credit money - i.e. checks and cards managed by private banks - has outstripped cash in terms of volume of circulation. This means that fully capitalist systems of money, based on making profit out of money itself, have outstripped the currency instituted by the state for purposes of facilitating exchange. In my daily life, cash is only accessed through the card, and is therefore subordinated to credit money. The "invasive global authenticating infrastructure" goes along with it, and is one of the powerful manipulating forces in the world today, as I tried to show in my paper on the flexible personality. However, I also think that David Lyon in his book _Surveillance Society_ has shown pretty well that much of surveillance infrastructure is an attempt to recreate trust in the face of modern international mobility and what he calls "disappearing bodies." How to be sure of strangers' promises? It's a real problem. In the face of the answers that society is currently offering us, it seems to me that two little questions arise, for individuals, plus one big one, which is collective. The first little question is, how to get out of surveilled relations? Just to breathe a little. There, the gift economy aspects of open source and knowledge potlatch have been extremely interesting, these last years, as a way to open up spaces of transaction without arithmetic. Spaces that really work, in my experience: I always want to contribute more to networks like nettime itself, or the antiglobalization movements, where the relations are at once very casual and in vast excess of satisfaction over what can be obtained through authenticating systems of knowledge exchange, like the university or official art criticism, or even voting and taking part in party politics, for that matter. (Kermit can rake me over the coals for this bit of political naivete, but whatever.) The second question for individuals is how to build exchange communities of lasting, instituted trust that actually work under conditions of modern mobility, where the spatial embrace of the village or neighborhood or commune is not available. Keith Hart's proposals are interesting in that regard, particularly on the urban scale, or perhaps within certain occupational universes extending over larger distances. I'm not sure the difficulty of translating them to the large scale of complete impersonality, international validity and so on, is really pertinent. I suspect the problem is finding the right scale on which each proposal can work, then sticking more or less to it. The same observation applies to all mutualist or "third-sector" arrangements, where an element of solidarity is made part of a functioning exchange arrangement. The big, collective question remains: how to trust strangers for transactions that go beyond the risks that individuals are willing to manage for themselves? Cash does solve the problem, but look: we have basically a world currency, the dollar, and the kind of person who goes around with suitcases full of them is not particularly trustworthy. We also have global networks of credit money, but today those networks (banks, stock markets) are big factors encouraging "turbo-capitalism" as Luttwak calls it, which is itself producing huge risks of systemic crisis, among others by lending too much in hopes of getting too much back in interest (or in Enron's case, by "backing up" commodity exchange with pure speculation). The only viable solutions are to return to some degree of collective control over the economy at the national scale (i.e. some effective central planning, Keynesian policies and so on), while at the same time regulating the credit-money infrastructure much better on a world scale, because at this point it's pretty much ad hoc, and that encourages abberations in the whole surveillance architecture (not to mention making planning impossible, and creating huge systemic risks of krachs and deflationary spirals). But as soon as you say what I just did, you realize how important the two little answers are in terms of critique and counter-power (or "sub-politics" as Ulrich Beck says). That's why I'm a member of Attac (the would-be regulators) and prefer to hang out with anarchists. In the face of the coherent state and world-government functions that we need to protect ourselves from turbo-capitalism, modes of private association that are either outside money, or potentially, rest on non-capitalist moneys of one's choosing, are vital in the literal sense of the word. Because large-scale, rationalized trust-producing systems have the inconvenience of crushing the life out of the people who are supposed to trust each other. Brian _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold