an economy is more efficient when its actors take more care of each other

i propose to define transaction costs as the delta between an optimal efficient organisation and the current organisation

update: define transaction costs as the delta between exchange value and use value

to understand the new economy i propose the following twist to monopoly:

play monopoly according to all standard rules, you only change your behaviour, viz all players share their money.

So there are two piles of money in the game: one for the bank and one for the players. When a player passes go his income is moved form the bank to the players pile and when a player receives money from another player this is also deposited in the players pile. When a player wants to buy real estate or has to pay rent he takes money from the pile to pay the bank resp his fellow player

One variant of this setup is to start playing the conventional way and after some time, eg when the first bankruptcy occurs, switch to the new behaviour.

i see many people believing that interest is the stinge in our money system. i want to use a simpel model here to explain where they go wrong. basically the argument is that they use an oversimplified model.

first let me remark that the use of money as a means of exchange is a function that only became widespread in use millenia after money had been invented as a means of recording credit. the oversimplified model(s) used by people that believe that interest is the problem never comprise this credit functionality.

my model consists of three workers: a farmer, a baker and a banker.

now the farmer produces grain enough for three breads.
the baker can bake three breads from the grain produced by the farmer.
the banker runs the money system that the three of them use to interchange their goods.

before i go into the dynamics of this model i’d like to make clear that if the farmer, baker and banker would trust each other there would be no need for money.
the whole idea of (institutionalised) credit is that we don’t trust each other, instead we trust the value of money.
what money (credit) really does here is enabling swapping THROUGH TIME.

it works like this:

the farmer produces grain that the baker would like to bake.
because the farmer doesn’t trust that the baker will give him one of the breads he will bake, the farmer wants the baker to pay him for his grain.
but the baker can only pay after he has sold his bread, not upfront.

now the banker is willing to take this risk.
therefore the banker makes 1 coin.
the banker lends this coin to the baker and makes the baker promise that the baker will pay back this coin twice (so 100% interest).

now the baker buys the grain from the farmer with this 1 coin.
now the baker can bake three breads, keep one for himself and sell the other two.
first the farmer buys one bread for 1 coin.

now the baker can pay the interest to the banker.
consequently now the banker can buy a bread form the baker, again for 1 coin (this is the step that the oversimplified models forget).
so the baker acquires this coin once again and consequntly the baker can pay back his debt to the banker.

so the system started with the farmer having grain and the banker having 1 coin.
at the end of the dynamics each of the farmer, baker and banker have a bread and the coin has returned to the banker.
this is what money is supposed to do, it enabled the farmer and the baker to interact (over a longer period of time) without trusting each other.

as many of us have already tried to bring initiatives together it’s important to understand why nobody has succeeded yet

in a yunity session we identified 6 (groups of) reasons:

externally:
– lack of resources
– hostile environment

internally
– ego’s
– lack of critical mass
– no understanding of goal/utopia
– lack of skills

i believe the main thing is the critical mass. without critical mass nothing will work. and once the critical mass has emerged you can’t stop it anymore. all you can do is delay the advent of the new world, and that is what many people will unconsciously do. because they don’t understand or are afraid.

by critical mass i mean a critical mass of people who are free from their ego (to a workable extent at least). it is my belief that the evolution of our consciousness is the driving force behind the advent of the critical mass.

note that once the critical mass is there that doesn’t mean the new world will emerge automatically. on the contrary this will be the result of deliberate, focussed and commited action by those who have gained consciousness. which is what is happening right now.

to make this work several things are needed, here is my list of prerequisites:
– plan/idea/vision, including organisational processes, and this should be clear, concrete or executable and there should be consensus about this plan
– resources
– skills
– maturity in the sense of consciousness, ego and commitment

eg there are many youngsters wanting to change the world but many of these youngsters are still in the phase of discovering the world (and themselves). there is nothing wrong with that because each one of us has to do that before (s)he can contribute to the evolution of our society but it is not very helpful for the action of changing the world itself.

about the plan/idea/vision: it would be nice to have an image of utopia and the many ways in which this utopia can be adapted to humans. also we need a development strategy: in which steps can we achieve our goal?

disruption is something we find in the old economy, in the new economy we find care

i’m somewhat disturbed by all these people that want to disrupt our economy or our society. basically disruption means that you destruct something that people have been building for years, decades or even centuries and who’s lives depend on this something. that cannot be a goal in the new economy. in the new economy we take care of each other. this means that if something blocks our evolution we will help the people dependent upon this something to move to a sustainable alternative, we don’t let them drown by killing their something.

here i describe how the awareness process can be facilitated.

so what is this awareness process? it is about people becoming aware of their self and our unity. how does it work? there are many ways of becoming aware, many different events can trigger aha-erlebnisse. here i propose to facilitate the verbal part of this process. it consists of locutions uttered by people. and they utter these locutions in response to some trigger. in many cases there is a parent locution triggering a child locution. i propose to record these locutions and their response links.

so our model consists of two primitives:
1. locutions, this can be anything from a sentence, or even just a word, to websites or pages thereof. tweets and whatapps.
2. response links.
this is best understood as a directed graph.

i propose the name: awareness space.

i envision that this awareness space is ubiquitous, can be accessed from all over the world, through many different apps on your phone for example, or a website.

as mentioned before websites are possible locutions and the hyperlinks between them can be understood as response links.

now the (directed) links allow us to follow paths through this awareness space. such a path is called a conversation.

any real world conversation can be recorded as a conversation in the awareness space.

conversations, or more generally any set of locutions can be grouped to form a new locution. obviously a response link also links the locution groups which it forms part of.

the natural form to technically represent these links is using triples in the semantic web, the predicate always being: response.

you can use the awareness space when seeking to achieve some goal. if you are fully aware of your goal you don’t need the awareness space. but in case your’re not entirely sure of what you want or how to formulate that in an operable way you can use the awareness space. it goes like this:

you start by entering a question or a first idea. next you look for a conversation, ie a path through the awareness space. if your entry has been recorded before you can start from the links from this locution, if not you can add your locution to the awareness space. there will be tools facilitating this process of “looking for the next locution”, eg by doing a text based search like google does in websites. each next locution provides a response link. the number of times locutions are used is data used by the tooling to facilitate. the same holds for the number of times response links are used. the aim of this exercise is to find (a conversation ending in) an executable goal. suggestions for links are done both by the tooling and the community.

time for an example: suppose i want to move house. nowadays i would ask my friends to help out. asking would be done by phone or email. in the new economy i would tell search & share (s&s) that i want to move house. the advantage of s&s is multifold. one advantage is that if my friends can’t make it there will be other people available. another advantage is that s&s has learnt that in most cases when somebody wants to move house several questions need to be answered: when, where, what, which car to use, etc, and so s&s poses these questions (s&s doesn’t know they are questions, it just notices that these locutions invariably get followed).

note that the questions suggested by the tooling are not modelled in some relational sense. they are suggested on the basis of having been asked previously. this is a matter of counting.

suppose you end up on a deserted island, what would you do?

eventually and abstracting from trifles you would probably
1. set yourself some goals
2. make a planning in order to achieve these goals
3. decide whether or not the effort planned justifies the goals achieved (their use value as opposed to exchange value)
4. in case of a positive decision execute the planning and adjust the planning based upon the progress of the execution
5. adjust the goals as you go along

i believe currently (actually as long as humanity has existed) our awareness is evolving
currently our awareness evolves from self consciousness to what i call unity consciousness, it is the consciousness that we are all dependant on each other

there are theories assuming that individual cells in a (human) body each have their own consciousness
the consciousness of a human transcends these individual consciounesses
in a biomimic vain i postulate the existence of a consciousness transcending individual humans, a collective consciousness, i will call it the unity consciousness

just like a conscious human instructs his body and thus his individual cells to achieve his goals i postulate that utopia can be conceived of as this unity consciousness instructing the individual members of the new economy
thus the unity consciousness expresses itself distributedly through the actions of the members of the unity consciousness

how would that function?
first have a look at our bodies acting induced by our will:
when i decide to go biking all my cells cooperate to achieve this goal, but my consciousness doesn’t have direct access to my individual cells
it is as if my cells pick up my counscious decision and act upon that decision without me being aware of each individual cells contribution, the nervous system is used for this purpose
also my cells cooperate achieving things like energy transformation without me being aware of that, they do this in a rather autonomous sense

so now have a look at utopia
basically i believe that the universe speaks to each of our hearts, or maybe guts
so when i perceive an instruction from the universe it is up to my autonomy to contribute
and for the necessary cooperation i contact my peers without interference/mediation from the unity consciousness
for this intermember interaction some form of administration is useful

now we look back from utopia to our current world, then we see three layers:
layer 1: coordination: we always have some administration mirroring the coordination
level 2: goals: in the first step we assume that we have to organise the process of becoming aware of the goals
level 3: trust: and finally in a second step we have to mitigate possibly missing trust

now the economic process consists of four parts:
part 1: awareness: becoming aware of the goals
part 2: planning: planning of the manufacturing process in the coordination layer
part 3: execution: execution of the planning
part 4: trust: a trust process pervades all of the previous three parts

the layers and parts may be confusing, here is some explanation:
the layers are thought of as arising in a natural way when stepping back from utopia
the parts are in chronological order, with the exception of part 4 which pervades the other three

the first three parts are cycled through iteratively
eg if the planning process reveals that the set goals take more effort than can be justified then the goals will be adjusted

here are some thoughts on each of these parts:

awareness:
see section elaboration below

planning:
the weconomy experience simulation is a specification of the planning process
implementation presumably uses demo.nl

execution:
falls outside the scope of this text because this text deals with the organisation of the new economy, the execution is supposed to follow the planning
obviously important here is that the actual execution ideally gets monitored in some sense thus supplying feedback to the planning part

trust:
many groups around the world are experimenting with ways of cooperation, all of these experiments address the issue of trust and hence there are many ways to implement the trust layer
i expect that all of these implementations can be built upon crud rights on the coordination layer

elaboration of awareness:
so the evolving awareness brings us that our economic process turns from a survival race into an awareness process
how does this awareness process work? or better: how can we make this awareness process work?

we propose the following process to use when becoming aware of our goals (needs):
the process consists of locutions uttered, sent to all participants, they can be understood as tweets
we think of locutions like: ‘i am hungry’, ‘bake a bread’
these locutions can be selected from a list but can also be added newly
now both the tool and community members can react by sending a response, ‘bake a bread’ could be such a response to ‘i am hungry’, obviously more answers can be expected
the locutions form the nodes of a graph and the responses form the edges, together they form a directed graph
websites can be conceived of as locutions and anchors from one page to another could be seen as responses in the above sense
all conversations between members about goals through the tool are thus administrated
now the idea is that the tool can search previous conversations and present the outcome of these conversations as possible responses to the original post, in this way the graph is a semantic directed graph

a node is said to be executable when it is linked to the planning space
the edges in the semantic directed graph are meant to finally point to executable nodes (ie executable goals)

so now the awareness process has become one of navigating through this semantic directed graph eventually finding an executable node
this is a journey which each one of us embarkes upon with the help of their peers
it goes like this: you enter a locution, ie you start typing, and immediately the tool starts guessing which of the more popular locutions you might want to utter
you can also post a new locution

now there are two possibilities
– you choose a known locution, then based upon previous conversations the tool will suggest several executable nodes as a next step
– you enter a new locution, then this new locution is forwarded to your peers so that they might help out