Michael H Goldhaber on Fri, 18 Jan 2002 06:41:01 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Open Source and Open Money |
I have long felt that “open money” in its various forms is a red herring, partly for the reasons Doug Henwood offers, but more because there already exists a “natural” and open system of exchange that lends itself to “open source” and other possibilities of the Internet. That is the flow of attention. If, e.g. you write good code and make it available as open source, you will get attention. Once you have this, you may make use of it in various ways, ranging from getting a job coding (something else) to having a devoted entourage (if you have enough attention) eager to pay attention to your every wish, of whatever nature. As I have often emphasized, there is nothing necessarily utopian about this. Attention is scarce, and some get more than an equal share, which inevitably means that others get less. Anyone can choose to devote a certain portion of their own attention to those who for whatever reason don’t have much of it. This means going against the grain of learned if not innate tendencies to pay attention to those who either already are getting a lot of it (stars) or those who are particularly skilled at getting it in some way. Existing monetary systems increasingly serve simply as means of mapping attention flows. Those who have more attention tend to end up with more money (though some still get money (mostly by inheritance) without being good at snagging any kind of attention. Any kind of system that mimics money will still depend on individual's being able to get attention somehow. It will be no more inherently equality-producing than the way attention itself is equally shared. Also keeping track of separate currencies mostly simply duplicates the fact that everyone, automatically, keeps track of whom they have given attention to. Except for some very specialized purposes, open money is therefore an unnecessary invention,and not a particularly progressive one. As for Kermit Snelson’s fear that specialized open money can be used by corporations for purposes such as price discrimination, is this new? Don’t large corporations and their leaders in effect have all the flexibility they want to construct markets as they see fit, and to favor those to whom, for whatever reason, they prefer to give attention? Felix Stalder worries about privacy. Privacy (in the sense of not getting attention) is often highly desirable in an economy of material things. One does not want to draw attention to one’s holdings or proclivities lest one be robbed in some way. In an attention economy, it can be advantageous to reveal all, for that gets one more attention. The better known you are, the harder it is to get away with stealing attention (which means, in practice, anything) that should be yours. What one does not want is to be forced to pay attention against one’s will, a very opposite kind of privacy to that usually meant. Of course, progressives should favor steps that will help equalize attention. We do have to fight for, among other things, keeping the Internet open to everyone as a potential and flexible means of attention getting, rather than seeing it restricted only to those who are sanctioned by large companies. Lawrence Lessig’s pessimism on this score is probably realistic, but his deeper message, that we should keep fighting even so is still justified. > -- Best, Michael H. Goldhaber http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/ _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold