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Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The Baffler - 0 views

  • This tendency to view questions of freedom primarily through the lens of economic competition, to focus on the producer and the entrepreneur at the expense of everyone else, shaped O’Reilly’s thinking about technology.
  • the O’Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world,
  • His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword.
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  • gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism
  • innovation is the new selfishness
  • mastery of public relations
  • making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject
  • memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.
  • “Open source software” was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reill
  • It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.
  • ideological cleavage between two groups
  • Richard Stallman
  • Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public
  • “free software.”
  • association with “freedom” rather than “free beer”
  • copyleft
  • profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
  • Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.
  • Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types
  • he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association
  • By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand.
  • “open source”
  • The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.
  • In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda
  • This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined.
  • extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination.
  • In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component.
  • “open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results
  • While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
  • Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate
  • O’Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O’Reilly books and events
  • The coup succeeded. Stallman’s project was marginalized. But O’Reilly and his acolytes didn’t win with better arguments; they won with better PR.
  • A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O’Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.
  • much of Stallman’s efforts centered on software licenses
  • O’Reilly’s bet wa
  • the “cloud”
  • licenses would cease to matter
  • Since no code changed hands
  • So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”
  • O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied.
  • the freedom of the producer
  • who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics.
  • The most important freedom,
  • is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”
  • O’Reilly opposed this agenda: “I completely support the right of Richard [Stallman] or any individual author to make his or her work available under the terms of the GPL; I balk when they say that others who do not do so are doing something wrong.”
  • The right thing to do, according to O’Reilly, was to leave developers alone.
  • According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothing—no laws or petty moral considerations—stood in the way of the open source revolution
  • Any move to subject the fruits of developers’ labor to public regulation
  • must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software
  • the advent of the Internet made Stallman’s obsession with licenses obsolete
  • Many developers did stop thinking about licenses, and, having stopped thinking about licenses, they also stopped thinking about broader moral issues that would have remained central to the debates had “open source” not displaced “free software” as the paradigm du jour.
  • Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.
  • “open to intellectual exchange”
  • “open to competition”
  • “For me, ‘open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market”).
  • “Open” allowed O’Reilly to build the largest possible tent for the movement.
  • The language of economics was less alienating than Stallman’s language of ethics; “openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics
  • highlight the competitive advantages of openness.
  • the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness
  • What the code did was of little importance—the market knows best!—as long as anyone could check it for bugs.
  • The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd.
  • What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.
  • What they had in common was disdain for Stallman’s moralizing—barely enough to justify their revolutionary agenda, especially among the hacker crowds who were traditionally suspicious of anyone eager to suck up to the big corporations that aspired to dominate the open source scene.
  • linking this new movement to both the history of the Internet and its future
  • As long as everyone believed that “open source” implied “the Internet” and that “the Internet” implied “open source,” it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm
  • Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet
  • “If you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,”
  • everything on the Internet was connected to everything else—via open source.
  • The way O’Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called “open source behavior,” even if such behavior was not codified in licenses.
  • No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source
  • apps might be displacing the browser
  • the openness once taken for granted is no more
  • Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws.
  • One of the key consequences of linking the Internet to the world of open source was to establish the primacy of the Internet as the new, reinvented desktop
  • This is where the now-forgotten language of “freedom” made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.
  • Soon this “freedom to innovate” morphed into “Internet freedom,” so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users.
  • Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression
  • Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the former—because “the Internet” stood for progress and enlightenment.
  • infoware
  • Yahoo
  • their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.
  • The “infoware” buzzword didn’t catch on, so O’Reilly turned to the work of Douglas Engelbart
  • to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its “collective intelligence” and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor.
  • Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index.
  • The idea of the Internet as both a repository and incubator of “collective intelligence”
  • in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of “Web 2.0.” What did “2.0” mean, exactly?
  • he primary goal was to show that the 2001 market crash did not mean the end of the web and that it was time to put the crash behind us and start learning from those who survived.
  • Tactically, “Web 2.0” could also be much bigger than “open source”; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow O’Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology
  • O’Reilly couldn’t improve on a concept as sexy as “collective intelligence,” so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon.
  • What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, O’Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didn’t embrace it went bust
  • find a way to harness collective intelligence and make it part of their business model.
  • By 2007, O’Reilly readily admitted that “Web 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what’s happening.”
  • O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like “Gov 2.0” and “Where 2.0.” Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, O’Reilly is quietly dropping it
  • assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances
  • Take O’Reilly’s musings on “Enterprise 2.0.” What is it, exactly? Well, it’s the same old enterprise—for all we know, it might be making widgets—but now it has learned something from Google and Amazon and found a way to harness “collective intelligence.”
  • tendency to redescribe reality in terms of Internet culture, regardless of how spurious and tenuous the connection might be, is a fine example of what I call “Internet-centrism.”
  • “Open source” gave us the “the Internet,” “the Internet” gave us “Web 2.0,” “Web 2.0” gave us “Enterprise 2.0”: in this version of history, Tim O’Reilly is more important than the European Union
  • For Postman, each human activity—religion, law, marriage, commerce—represents a distinct “semantic environment” with its own tone, purpose, and structure. Stupid talk is relatively harmless; it presents no threat to its semantic environment and doesn’t cross into other ones.
  • Since it mostly consists of falsehoods and opinions
  • it can be easily corrected with facts
  • to say that Tehran is the capital of Iraq is stupid talk
  • Crazy talk, in contrast, challenges a semantic environment, as it “establishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.” To argue, as some Nazis did, that the German soldiers ended up far more traumatized than their victims is crazy talk.
  • For Postman, one of the main tasks of language is to codify and preserve distinctions among different semantic environments.
  • As he put it, “When language becomes undifferentiated, human situations disintegrate: Science becomes indistinguishable from religion, which becomes indistinguishable from commerce, which becomes indistinguishable from law, and so on.
  • pollution
  • Some words—like “law”—are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific “laws” to moral “laws” to “laws” of the market to administrative “laws,” the same word captures many different social relations. “Open,” “networks,” and “information” function much like “law” in our own Internet discourse today.
  • For Korzybski, the world has a relational structure that is always in flux; like Heraclitus, who argued that everything flows, Korzybski believed that an object A at time x1 is not the same object as object A at time x2
  • Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our reality—or as he put it in his most famous aphorism, “the map is not the territory.”
  • Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of “abstracting,” whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us.
  • nothing harmful in this per se—Korzybski simply wanted to make people aware of the highly selective nature of abstracting and give us the tools to detect it in our everyday conversations.
  • Korzybski developed a number of mental tools meant to reveal all the abstracting around us
  • He also encouraged his followers to start using “etc.” at the end of their statements as a way of making them aware of their inherent inability to say everything about a given subject and to promote what he called the “consciousness of abstraction.”
  • There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybski’s theories
  • but his basic question
  • “What are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?”
  • Tim O’Reilly is, perhaps, the most high-profile follower of Korzybski’s theories today.
  • O’Reilly openly acknowledges his debt to Korzybski, listing Science and Sanity among his favorite books
  • It would be a mistake to think that O’Reilly’s linguistic interventions—from “open source” to “Web 2.0”—are random or spontaneous.
  • There is a philosophy to them: a philosophy of knowledge and language inspired by Korzybski. However, O’Reilly deploys Korzybski in much the same way that the advertising industry deploys the latest findings in neuroscience: the goal is not to increase awareness, but to manipulate.
  • O’Reilly, of course, sees his role differently, claiming that all he wants is to make us aware of what earlier commentators may have overlooked. “A metaphor is just that: a way of framing the issues such that people can see something they might otherwise miss,
  • But Korzybski’s point, if fully absorbed, is that a metaphor is primarily a way of framing issues such that we don’t see something we might otherwise see.
  • In public, O’Reilly modestly presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting the “faint signals” of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of überinnovators that he dubs the “alpha geeks.” “The ‘alpha geeks’ show us where technology wants to go. Smart companies follow and support their ingenuity rather than trying to suppress it,
  • His own function is that of an intermediary—someone who ensures that the alpha geeks are heard by the right executives: “The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. . . . What we do at O’Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them, and try to spread the word by writing down (
  • The name of his company’s blog—O’Reilly Radar—is meant to position him as an independent intellectual who is simply ahead of his peers in grasping the obvious.
  • “the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think”
  • As Web 2.0 becomes central to everything, O’Reilly—the world’s biggest exporter of crazy talk—is on a mission to provide the appropriate “context” to every field.
  • In a fascinating essay published in 2000, O’Reilly sheds some light on his modus operandi.
  • The thinker who emerges there is very much at odds with the spirit of objectivity that O’Reilly seeks to cultivate in public
  • meme-engineering lets us organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more effectively, and have the desired effect once they are transmitted
  • O’Reilly meme-engineers a nice euphemism—“meme-engineering”—to describe what has previously been known as “propaganda.”
  • how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for “peer-to-peer” technologies—traditionally associated with piracy—and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry.
  • O’Reilly and his acolytes “changed the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,” while also articulating what broader goals the projects on the new list served. He then proceeds to rehash the already familiar narrative: O’Reilly put the Internet at the center of everything, linking some “free software” projects like Apache or Perl to successful Internet start-ups and services. As a result, the movement’s goal was no longer to produce a completely free, independent, and fully functional operating system but to worship at the altar of the Internet gods.
  • Could it be that O’Reilly is right in claiming that “open source” has a history that predates 1998?
  • Seen through the prism of meme-engineering, O’Reilly’s activities look far more sinister.
  • His “correspondents” at O’Reilly Radar don’t work beats; they work memes and epistemes, constantly reframing important public issues in accordance with the templates prophesied by O’Reilly.
  • Or take O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts around cyberwarfare.
  • Now, who stands to benefit from “cyberwarfare” being defined more broadly? Could it be those who, like O’Reilly, can’t currently grab a share of the giant pie that is cybersecurity funding?
  • Frank Luntz lists ten rules of effective communication: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context.
  • Thus, O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts usually result in “meme maps,” where the meme to be defined—whether it’s “open source” or “Web 2.0”—is put at the center, while other blob-like terms are drawn as connected to it.
  • The exact nature of these connections is rarely explained in full, but this is all for the better, as the reader might eventually interpret connections with their own agendas in mind. This is why the name of the meme must be as inclusive as possible: you never know who your eventual allies might be. “A big part of meme engineering is giving a name that creates a big tent that a lot of people want to be under, a train that takes a lot of people where they want to go,”
  • News April 4 mail date March 29, 2013 Baffler party March 6, 2013 Žižek on seduction February 13, 2013 More Recent Press I’ve Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness io9, April 02, 2013 The Baffler’s New Colors Imprint, March 21, 2013
  • There is considerable continuity across O’Reilly’s memes—over time, they tend to morph into one another.
Kurt Laitner

Smart Contracts - 0 views

  • Whether enforced by a government, or otherwise, the contract is the basic building block of a free market economy.
  • A smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on the other promises.
  • The basic idea of smart contracts is that many kinds of contractual clauses (such as liens, bonding, delineation of property rights, etc.) can be embedded in the hardware and software we deal with, in such a way as to make breach of contract expensive (if desired, sometimes prohibitively so) for the breacher.
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  • A broad statement of the key idea of smart contracts, then, is to say that contracts should be embedded in the world.
  • And where the vending machine, like electronic mail, implements an asynchronous protocol between the vending company and the customer, some smart contracts entail multiple synchronous steps between two or more parties
  • POS (Point of Sale)
  • EDI (Electronic Data Interchange
  • SWIFT
  • allocation of public network bandwidth via automated auctions
  • Smart contracts reference that property in a dynamic, proactively enforced form, and provide much better observation and verification where proactive measures must fall short.
  • The mechanisms of the world should be structured in such a way as to make the contracts (a) robust against naive vandalism, and (b) robust against sophisticated, incentive compatible (rational) breach.
  • A third category, (c) sophisticated vandalism (where the vandals can and are willing to sacrifice substantial resources), for example a military attack by third parties, is of a special and difficult kind that doesn't often arise in typical contracting, so that we can place it in a separate category and ignore it here.
  • The threat of physical force is an obvious way to embed a contract in the world -- have a judicial system decide what physical steps are to be taken out by an enforcement agency (including arrest, confiscation of property, etc.) in response to a breach of contract
  • It is what I call a reactive form of security.
  • The need to invoke reactive security can be minimized, but not eliminated, by making contractual arrangements verifiable
  • Observation of a contract in progress, in order to detect the first sign of breach and minimize losses, also is a reactive form of security
  • A proactive form of security is a physical mechanism that makes breach expensive
  • From common law, economic theory, and contractual conditions often found in practice, we can distill four basic objectives of contract design
  • observability
  • The disciplines of auditing and investigation roughly correspond with verification of contract performance
  • verifiability
  • The field of accounting is, roughly speaking, primarily concerned with making contracts an organization is involved in more observable
  • privity
  • This is a generalization of the common law principle of contract privity, which states that third parties, other than the designated arbitrators and intermediaries, should have no say in the enforcement of a contract
  • The field of security (especially, for smart contracts, computer and network security), roughly corresponds to the goal of privity.
  • enforceability
  • Reputation, built-in incentives, "self-enforcing" protocols, and verifiability can all play a strong part in meeting the fourth objective
  • Smart contracts often involve trusted third parties, exemplified by an intermediary, who is involved in the performance, and an arbitrator, who is invoked to resolve disputes arising out of performance (or lack thereof)
  • In smart contract design we want to get the most out of intermediaries and arbitrators, while minimizing exposure to them
  • Legal barriers are the most severe cost of doing business across many jurisdictions. Smart contracts can cut through this Gordian knot of jurisdictions
  • Where smart contracts can increase privity, they can decrease vulnerability to capricious jurisdictions
  • Secret sharing
  • The field of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), in which elements of traditional business transactions (invoices, receipts, etc.) are exchanged electronically, sometimes including encryption and digital signature capabilities, can be viewed as a primitive forerunner to smart contracts
  • One important task of smart contracts, that has been largely overlooked by traditional EDI, is critical to "the meeting of the minds" that is at the heart of a contract: communicating the semantics of the protocols to the parties involved
  • There is ample opportunity in smart contracts for "smart fine print": actions taken by the software hidden from a party to the transaction.
  • Thus, via hidden action of the software, the customer is giving away information they might consider valuable or confidential, but the contract has been drafted, and transaction has been designed, in such a way as to hide those important parts of that transaction from the customer.
  • To properly communicate transaction semantics, we need good visual metaphors for the elements of the contract. These would hide the details of the protocol without surrendering control over the knowledge and execution of contract terms
  • Protocols based on mathematics, called cryptographic protocols, tre the basic building blocks that implement the improved tradeoffs between observability, verifiability, privity, and enforceability in smart contracts
  • secret key cryptography,
  • Public key cryptography
  • digital signatures
  • blind signature
  • Where smart contracts can increase observability or verifiability, they can decrease dependence on these obscure local legal codes and enforcement traditions
  • zero-knowledge interactive proof
  • digital mix
  • Keys are not necessarily tied to identities, and the task of doing such binding turns out to be more difficult than at first glance.
  • All public key operation are are done inside an unreadable hardware board on a machine with a very narrow serial-line connection (ie, it carries only a simple single-use protocol with well-verified security) to a dedicated firewall. Such a board is available, for example, from Kryptor, and I believe Viacrypt may also have a PGP-compatable board. This is economical for central sites, but may be less practical for normal users. Besides better security, it has the added advantage that hardware speeds up the public key computations.
  • If Mallet's capability is to physically sieze the machine, a weaker form of key protection will suffice. The trick is to hold the keys in volatile memory.
  • The data is still vulnerable to a "rubber hose attack" where the owner is coerced into revealing the hidden keys. Protection against rubber hose attacks might require some form of Shamir secret sharing which splits the keys between diverse phgsical sites.
  • How does Alice know she has Bob's key? Who, indeed, can be the parties to a smart contract? Can they be defined just by their keys? Do we need biometrics (such as autographs, typed-in passwords, retina scans, etc.)?
  • The public key cryptography software package "Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP) uses a model called "the web of trust". Alice chooses introducers whom she trusts to properly identify the map between other people and their public keys. PGP takes it from there, automatically validating any other keys that have been signed by Alice's designated introducers.
  • 1) Does the key actually belong to whom it appears to belong? In other words, has it been certified with a trusted signature?
  • 2) Does it belong to an introducers, someone you can trust to certify other keys?
  • 3) Does the key belong to someone you can trust to introduce other introducers? PGP confuses this with criterion (2). It is not clear that any single person has enough judgement to properly undertake task (3), nor has a reasonable institution been proposed that will do so. This is one of the unsolved problems in smart contracts.
  • PGP also can be given trust ratings and programmed to compute a weighted score of validity-- for example, two marginally trusted signatures might be considered as credible as one fully trusted signature
  • Notaries Public Two different acts are often called "notarization". The first is simply where one swears to the truth of some affidavit before a notary or some other officer entitled to take oaths. This does not require the notary to know who the affiant is. The second act is when someone "acknowledges" before a notary that he has executed a document as ``his own act and deed.'' This second act requires the notary to know the person making the acknowledgment.
  • "Identity" is hardly the only thing we might want map to a key. After all, physical keys we use for our house, car, etc. are not necessarily tied to our identity -- we can loan them to trusted friends and relatives, make copies of them, etc. Indeed, in cyberspace we might create "virtual personae" to reflect such multi-person relationships, or in contrast to reflect different parts of our personality that we do not want others to link. Here is a possible classification scheme for virtual personae, pedagogically presented:
  • A nym is an identifier that links only a small amount of related information about a person, usually that information deemed by the nym holder to be relevant to a particular organization or community
  • A nym may gain reputation within its community.
  • With Chaumian credentials, a nym can take advantage of the positive credentials of the holder's other nyms, as provably linked by the is-a-person credential
  • A true name is an identifier that links many different kinds of information about an person, such as a full birth name or social security number
  • As in magick, knowing a true name can confer tremendous power to one's enemies
  • A persona is any perstient pattern of behavior, along with consistently grouped information such as key(s), name(s), network address(es), writing style, and services provided
  • A reputable name is a nym or true name that has a good reputation, usually because it carries many positive credentials, has a good credit rating, or is otherwise highly regarded
  • Reputable names can be difficult to transfer between parties, because reputation assumes persistence of behavior, but such transfer can sometimes occur (for example, the sale of brand names between companies).
  • Blind signatures can be used to construct digital bearer instruments, objects identified by a unique key, and issued, cleared, and redeemed by a clearing agent.
  • The clearing agent prevents multiple clearing of particular objects, but can be prevented from linking particular objects one or both of the clearing nyms who transferred that object
  • These instruments come in an "online" variety, cleared during every transfer, and thus both verifiable and observable, and an "offline" variety, which can be transfered without being cleared, but is only verifiable when finally cleared, by revealing any the clearing nym of any intermediate holder who transfered the object multiple times (a breach of contract).
  • To implement a full transaction of payment for services, we need more than just the digital cash protocol; we need a protocol that guarantees that service will be rendered if payment is made, and vice versa
  • A credential is a claim made by one party about another. A positive credential is one the second party would prefer to reveal, such as a degree from a prestigious school, while that party would prefer not to reveal a negative credential such as a bad credit rating.
  • A Chaumian credential is a cryptographic protocol for proving one possesses claims made about onself by other nyms, without revealing linkages between those nyms. It's based around the is-a-person credential the true name credential, used to prove the linkage of otherwise unlinkable nyms, and to prevent the transfer of nyms between parties.
  • Another form of credential is bearer credential, a digital bearer instrument where the object is a credential. Here the second party in the claim refers to any bearer -- the claim is tied only to the reputable name of issuing organization, not to the nym or true name of the party holding the credential.
  • Smart Property We can extend the concept of smart contracts to property. Smart property might be created by embedding smart contracts in physical objects. These embedded protocols would automatically give control of the keys for operating the property to the party who rightfully owns that property, based on the terms of the contract. For example, a car might be rendered inoperable unless the proper challenge-response protocol is completed with its rightful owner, preventing theft. If a loan was taken out to buy that car, and the owner failed to make payments, the smart contract could automatically invoke a lien, which returns control of the car keys to the bank. This "smart lien" might be much cheaper and more effective than a repo man. Also needed is a protocol to provably remove the lien when the loan has been paid off, as well as hardship and operational exceptions. For example, it would be rude to revoke operation of the car while it's doing 75 down the freeway.
  • Smart property is software or physical devices with the desired characteristics of ownership embedded into them; for example devices that can be rendered of far less value to parties who lack possesion of a key, as demonstrated via a zero knowledge interactive proof
  • One method of implementing smart property is thru operation necessary data (OND): data necessary to the operation of smart property.
  • A smart lien is the sharing of a smart property between parties, usually two parties called the owner and the lienholder.
  • Many parties, especially new entrants, may lack this reputation capital, and will thus need to be able to share their property with the bank via secure liens
  • What about extending the concept of contract to cover agreement to a prearranged set of tort laws? These tort laws would be defined by contracts between private arbitration and enforcement agencies, while customers would have a choice of jurisdictions in this system of free-market "governments".
  • If these privately practiced law organizations (PPLs for short) bear ultimate responsibility for the criminal activities of their customers, or need to insure lack of defection or future payments on the part of customers, they may in turn ask for liens against their customers, either in with contractual terms allowing arrest of customers under certain conditions
  • Other important areas of liability include consumer liability and property damage (including pollution). There need to mechanisms so that, for example, pollution damage to others' persons or property can be assessed, and liens should exist so that the polluter can be properly charged and the victims paid. Where pollution is quantifiable, as with SO2 emissions, markets can be set up to trade emission rights. The PPLs would have liens in place to monitor their customer's emissions and assess fees where emission rights have been exceeded.
Kurt Laitner

Towards a Material Commons | Guerrilla Translation! - 0 views

  • the modes of communication we use are very tightly coupled with the modes of production that finance them
  • I’m focused on the policy formation around this transition to a new, open knowledge and commons-based economy, and that’s the research work I’m doing here
  • The problem is I can only make a living by still working for capital.
  • ...88 more annotations...
  • We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right
  • A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge
  • We cannot create our own livelihood within that sphere
  • instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons.
  • The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production
  • then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops
  • But it hasn’t had much of a direct connection to this emerging commons movement, which shares so many of the values and  principles of the traditional cooperative movement.
  • There’s also a lot of peer-to-peer work going on, but it’s not very well versed around issues like cooperative organization, formal or legal forms of ownership, which are based on reciprocity and cooperation, and how to interpret the commons vision with a structure, an organizational structure and a legal structure that actually gives it economic power, market influence, and a means of connecting it to organizational forms that have durability over the long-term.
  • The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups
  • They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take
  • Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money
  • Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system
  • we don’t have what Marx used to call social reproduction
  • I would like John to talk about the solidarity co-ops, and how that integrates the notion of the commons or the common good in the very structure of the co-op
  • They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge
  • Cooperatives, which are basically a democratic and collective form of enterprise where members have control rights and democratically direct the operations of the co-op, have been the primary stakeholders in any given co-op – whether it’s a consumer co-op, or a credit union, or a worker co-op.
  • Primarily, the co-op is in the service of its immediate members
  • What was really fascinating about the social co-ops was that, although they had members, their mission was not only to serve the members but also to provide service to the broader community
  • In the city of Bologna, for example, over 87% of the social services provided in that city are provided through contract with social co-ops
  • democratically run
  • much more participatory, and a much more engaged model
  • The difference, however, is that the structure of social co-ops is still very much around control rights, in other words, members have rights of control and decision-making within how that organization operates
  • And it is an incorporated legal structure that has formal recognition by the legislation of government of the state, and it has the power, through this incorporated power, to negotiate with and contract with government for the provision of these public services
  • In Québec they’re called Solidarity co-ops
  • So, the social economy, meaning organizations that have a mutual aim in their purpose, based on the principles of reciprocity, collective benefit, social benefit, is emerging as an important player for the design and delivery of public services
  • This, too, is in reaction to the failure of the public market for provision of services like affordable housing or health care or education services
  • This is a crisis in the role of the state as a provider of public services. So the question has emerged: what happens when the state fails to provide or fulfill its mandate as a provider or steward of public goods and services, and what’s the role of civil society and the social economy in response?
  • we have commonses of knowledge, code and design. They’re more easily created, because as a knowledge worker, if you have access to the network and some means, however meager, of subsistence, through effort and connection you can actually create knowledge. However, this is not the case if you move to direct physical production, like the open hardware movement
  • I originally encountered Michel after seeing some talks by Benkler and Lessig at the Wizard of OS 4, in 2006, and I wrote an essay criticizing that from a materialist perspective, it was called “The creative anti-commons and the poverty of networks”, playing on the terms that both those people used.
  • In hardware, we don’t see that, because you need to buy material, machines, plastic, metal.
  • Some people have called the open hardware community a “candy” economy, because if you’re not part of these open hardware startups, you’re basically not getting anything for your efforts
  • democratic foundations like the Apache foundation
  • They conceive of peer production, especially Benkler, as being something inherently immaterial, a form of production that can only exist in the production of immaterial wealth
  • From my materialist point of view, that’s not a mode of production, because a mode of production must, in the first place, reproduce its productive inputs, its capital, its labor, and whatever natural wealth it consumes
  • From a materialist point of view, it becomes  obvious that the entire exchange value produced in these immaterial forms would be captured by the same old owners of materialist wealth
  • different definition of peer production
  • independent producers collectively sharing a commons of productive assets
  • I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods
  • share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.
  • One was the Georgist idea of using rent, economic rent, as a fundamental mutualizing source of wealth
  • Mutualizing unearned income
  • So, the unearned income, the portion of income derived from ownership of productive assets is evenly distributed
  • This protocol would seek to normalize that, but in a way that doesn’t require administration
  • typical statist communist reaction to the cooperative movement is saying that cooperatives can exclude and exploit one another
  • But then, as we’ve seen in history, there’s something that develops called an administrative class,  which governs over the collective of cooperatives or the socialist state, and can become just as counterproductive and often exploitive as capitalist class
  • So, how do we create cooperation among cooperatives, and distribution of wealth among cooperatives, without creating this administrative class?
  • This is why I borrowed from the work of Henry George and Silvio Gesell in created this idea of rent sharing.
  • This is not done administratively, this is simply done as a protocol
  • The idea is that if a cooperative wants an asset, like, an example is if one of the communes would like to have a tractor, then essentially the central commune is like a bond market. They float a bond, they say I want a tractor, I am willing to pay $200 a month for this tractor in rent, and other members of the cooperative can say, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea,we think that’s a really good allocation of these productive assets, so we are going to buy these bonds. The bond sale clears, the person gets the tractor, the money from the rent of the tractor goes back to clear the bonds, and  after that, whatever further money is collected through the rent on this tractor – and I don’t only mean tractors, same would be applied to buildings, to land, to any other productive assets – all this rent that’s collected is then distributed equally among all of the workers.
  • The idea is that people earn income not only by producing things, but by owning the means of production, owning productive assets, and our society is unequal because the distribution of productive assets is unequal
  • This means that if you use your exact per capita share of property, no more no less than what you pay in rent and what you received in social dividend, will be equal
  • But if you’re not working at that time, because you’re old, or otherwise unemployed, then obviously the the productive assets that you will be using will be much less than the mean and the median, so what you’ll receive as dividend will be much more than what you pay in rent, essentially providing a basic income
  • venture communism doesn’t seek to control the product of the cooperatives
  • It doesn’t seek to limit, control, or even tell them how they should distribute it, or under what means; what they produce is entirely theirs, it’s only the collective management of the commons of productive assets
  • On paper this would seem to work, but the problem is that this assumes that we have capital to allocate in this way, and that is not the case for most of the world workers
  • how do we get to that stage?
  • other two being counter politics and insurrectionary finance
  • do we express our activism through the state, or do we try to achieve our goals by creating the alternative society outside
  • pre-figurative politics, versus statist politics
  • My materialist background tells me that when you sell your labor on the market, you have nothing more than your subsistence costs at the end of it, so where is this wealth meant to come from
  • I believe that the only reason that we have any extra wealth beyond subsistence is because of organized social political struggle; because we have organized in labor movements, in the co-op movement, and in other social forms
  • To create the space for prefiguring presupposes engagement with the state, and struggle within parliaments, and struggle within the public social forum
  • Instead, we should think that no, we must engage in the state in order to protect our ability to have alternative societies
  • We can only get rid of the state in these areas once we have alternative, distributed, cooperative means to provide those same functions
  • We can only eliminate the state from these areas once they actually exist, which means we actually have to build them
  • What I mean by insurrectionary finance is that we have to acknowledge that it’s not only forming capital and distributing capital, it’s also important how intensively we use capital
  • I’m not proposing that the cooperative movement needs to engage in the kind of derivative speculative madness that led to the financial crisis, but at the same time we can’t… it can’t be earn a dollar, spend a dollar
  • We have to find ways to create liquidity
  • to deal with economic cycles
  • they did things the organized left hasn’t been able to do, which is takeover industrial means of production
  • if they can take over these industrial facilities, just in order to shut them down and asset strip them, why can’t we take them over and mutualize them?
  • more ironic once you understand that the source of investment that Milken and his colleagues were working with were largely workers pension funds
  • idea of venture communism
  • pooling, based on the capture of unearned income
  • in Québec, there is a particular form of co-op that’s been developed that allows small or medium producers to pool their capital to purchase machinery and to use it jointly
  • The other idea I liked was trying to minimize a management class
  • much more lean and accountable because they are accountable to boards of directors that represent the interests of the members
  • I’ve run into this repeatedly among social change activists who immediately recoil at the notion of thinking about markets and capital, as part of their change agenda
  • I had thought previously, like so many, that economics is basically a bought discipline, and that it serves the interests of existing elites. I really had a kind of reaction against that
  • complete rethinking of economics
  • recapture the initiative around vocabulary, and vision, with respect to economics
  • reimagining and reinterpreting, for a popular and common good, the notion of market and capital
  • advocating for a vision of social change that isn’t just about politics, and isn’t just about protest, it has to be around how do we reimagine and reclaim economics
  • markets actually belong to communities and people
  • capital wasn’t just an accumulated wealth for the rich
  • I think what we’re potentially  talking about here is to make the social economy hyper-productive, hyper-competitive, hyper-cooperative
  • The paradox is that capital already knows this. Capital is investing in these peer production projects
  • Part of the proposal of the FLOK society project in Ecuador will be to get that strategic reorganization to make the social economy strategic
  •  
    A lot of really interesting points of discussion in here.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

James Grier Miller, Living Systems (1978) - 0 views

  • reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy
  • General living systems theory is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones
  • a space is a set of elements which conform to certain postulate
  • ...266 more annotations...
  • s. Euclidean space
  • metric space
  • topological space
  • Physical space is the extension surrounding a point
  • My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstracted spaces
  • Physical or geographical space
  • Euclidean space
  • distance
  • moving
  • maximum speed
  • objects moving in such space cannot pass through one another
  • friction
  • The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving.
  • information can flow worldwide almost instantly
  • Physical space is a common space
  • Most people learn that physical space exists, which is not true of many spaces
  • They can give the location of objects in it
  • Conceptual or abstracted spaces
  • Peck order
  • Social class space
  • Social distance
  • Political distance
  • life space
  • semantic space
  • Sociometric space
  • A space of time costs of various modes of transportation
  • space of frequency of trade relations among nations.
  • A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups.
  • These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space
  • Social and some biological scientists find conceptual or abstracted spaces useful because they recognize that physical space is not a major determinant of certain processes in the living systems they study
  • interpersonal relations
  • one cannot measure comparable processes at different levels of systems, to confirm or disconfirm cross-level hypotheses, unless one can measure different levels of systems or dimensions in the same spaces or in different spaces with known transformations among them
  • It must be possible, moreover, to make such measurements precisely enough to demonstrate whether or not there is a formal identity across levels
  • fundamental "fourth dimension" of the physical space-time continuum
  • is the particular instant at which a structure exists or a process occurs
  • or the measured or measurable period over which a structure endures or a process continues.
  • durations
  • speeds
  • rates
  • accelerations
  • irreversible unidirectionality of time
  • thermodynamics
  • negentropy
  • "time's arrow."
  • Matter and energy
  • Matter is anything which has mass (m) and occupies physical space.
  • Energy (E) is defined in physics as the ability to do work.
  • kinetic energy
  • potential energy
  • rest mass energy
  • Mass and energy are equivalent
  • Living systems need specific types of matter-energy in adequate amounts
  • Energy for the processes of living systems is derived from the breakdown of molecules
  • Any change of state of matter-energy or its movement over space, from one point to another, I shall call action.
  • It is one form of process.
  • information (H)
  • Transmission of Information
  • Meaning is the significance of information to a system which processes it: it constitutes a change in that system's processes elicited by the information, often resulting from associations made to it on previous experience with it
  • Information is a simpler concept: the degrees of freedom that exist in a given situation to choose among signals, symbols, messages, or patterns to be transmitted.
  • The set of all these possible categories (the alphabet) is called the ensemble or repertoire
  • .) The unit is the binary digit, or bit of information
  • . The amount of information is measured as the logarithm to the base 2 of the number of alternate patterns
  • Signals convey information to the receiving system only if they do not duplicate information already in the receiver. As Gabor says:
  • [The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.'
  • meaning cannot be precisely measured
  • Information is the negative of uncertainty.
  • information is the amount of formal patterning or complexity in any system.
  • The term marker was used by von Neumann to refer to those observable bundles, units, or changes of matter-energy whose patterning bears or conveys the informational symbols from the ensemble or repertoire.
  • If a marker can assume n different states of which only one is present at any given time, it can represent at most log2n bits of information. The marker may be static, as in a book or in a computer's memory
  • Communication of almost every sort requires that the marker move in space, from the transmitting system to the receiving system, and this movement follows the same physical laws as the movement of any other sort of matter-energy. The advance of communication technology over the years has been in the direction of decreasing the matter-energy costs of storing and transmitting the markers which bear information.
  • There are, therefore, important practical matter-energy constraints upon the information processing of all living systems exerted by the nature of the matter-energy which composes their markers.
  • organization is based upon the interrelations among parts.
  • If two parts are interrelated either quantitatively or qualitatively, knowledge of the state of one must yield some information about the state of the other. Information measures can demonstrate when such relationships exist
  • The disorder, disorganization, lack of patterning, or randomness of organization of a system is known as its entropy (S)
  • the statistical measure for the negative of entropy is the same as that for information
  • entropy becomes a measure of the probability
  • Increase of entropy was thus interpreted as the passage of a system from less probable to more probable states.
  • according to the second law, a system tends to increase in entropy over time, it must tend to decrease in negentropy or information.
  • therefore no principle of the conservation of information
  • The total information can be decreased in any system without increasing it elsewhere
  • but it cannot be increased without decreasing it elsewhere
  • . Making one or more copies of a given informational pattern does not increase information overall, though it may increase the information in the system which receives the copied information.
  • transforms information into negative entropy
  • smallest possible amount of energy used in observing one bit of information
  • calculations of the amount of information accumulated by living systems throughout growth.
  • the concept of Prigogine that in an open system (that is one in which both matter and energy can be exchanged with the environment) the rate of entropy production within the system, which is always positive, is minimized when the system is in a steady state.
  • in systems with internal feedbacks, internal entropy production is not always minimized when the system is in a stationary state. In other words, feedback couplings between the system parameters may cause marked changes in the rate of development of entropy. Thus it may be concluded that the "information flow" which is essential for this feedback markedly alters energy utilization and the rate of development of entropy, at least in some such special cases which involve feedback control. While the explanation of this is not clear, it suggests an important relationship between information and entropy
  • amount of energy actually required to transmit the information in the channel is a minute part of the total energy in the system, the "housekeeping energy" being by far the largest part of it
  • In recent years systems theorists have been fascinated by the new ways to study and measure information flows, but matter-energy flows are equally important. Systems theory is more than information theory, since it must also deal with energetics - such matters as
  • the flow of raw materials through societies
  • Only a minute fraction of the energy used by most living systems is employed for information processing
  • I have noted above that the movement of matter-energy over space, action, is one form of process. Another form of process is information processing or communication, which is the change of information from one state to another or its movement from one point to another over space
  • Communications, while being processed, are often shifted from one matter-energy state to another, from one sort of marker to another
  • transformations go on in living systems
  • One basic reason why communication is of fundamental importance is that informational patterns can be processed over space and the local matter-energy at the receiving point can be organized to conform to, or comply with, this information
  • the delivery of "flowers by telegraph."
  • Matter-energy and information always flow together
  • Information is always borne on a marker
  • . Conversely there is no regular movement in a system unless there is a difference in potential between two points, which is negative entropy or information
  • If the receiver responds primarily to the material or energic aspect, I shall call it, for brevity, a matter-energy transmission; if the response is primarily to the information, I shall call it an information transmission
  • Moreover, just as living systems must have specific forms of matter-energy, so they must have specific patterns of information
  • example
  • example
  • develop normally
  • have appropriate information inputs in infancy
  • pairs of antonyms
  • one member of which is associated with the concept of information (H)
  • the other member of which is associated with its negative, entropy (S)
  • System
  • A system is a set of interacting units with relationships among them
  • .The word "set" implies that the units have some common properties. These common properties are essential if the units are to interact or have relationships. The state of each unit is constrained by, conditioned by, or dependent on the state of other units. The units are coupled. Moreover, there is at least one measure of the sum of its units which is larger than the sum of that measure of its units.
  • Conceptual system
  • Units
  • terms
  • Relationships
  • a set of pairs of units, each pair being ordered in a similar way
  • expressed by words
  • or by logical or mathematical symbols
  • operations
  • The conceptual systems of science
  • observer
  • selects
  • particular sets to study
  • Variable
  • Each member of such a set becomes a variable of the observer's conceptual system
  • conceptual system may be loose or precise, simple or elaborate
  • Indicator
  • an instrument or technique used to measure fluctuations of variables in concrete systems
  • Function
  • a correspondence between two variables, x and y, such that for each value of x there is a definite value of y, and no two y's have the same x, and this correspondence is: determined by some rule
  • Any function is a simple conceptual system
  • Parameter
  • An independent variable through functions of which other functions may be expressed
  • The state of a conceptual system
  • the set of values on some scale, numerical or otherwise, which its variables have at a given instant
  • Formal identity
  • variables
  • varies comparably to a variable in another system
  • If these comparable variations are so similar that they can be expressed by the same function, a formal identity exists between the two systems
  • Relationships between conceptual and other sorts of systems
  • Science advances as the formal identity or isomorphism increases between a theoretical conceptual system and objective findings about concrete or abstracted systems
  • A conceptual system may be purely logical or mathematical, or its terms and relationships may be intended to have some sort of formal identity or isomorphism with units and relationships empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
  • Concrete system
  • a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy, in a region in physical space-time, which is organized into interacting interrelated subsystems or components.
  • Units
  • are also concrete systems
  • Relationships
  • spatial
  • temporal
  • spatiotemporal
  • causal
  • Both units and relationships in concrete systems are empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
  • patterns of relationships or processes
  • The observer of a concrete system
  • distinguishes a concrete system from unorganized entities in its environment by the following criteria
  • physical proximity of its units
  • similarity of its units
  • common fate of its units
  • distinct or recognizable patterning of its units.
  • Their boundaries are discovered by empirical operations available to the general scientific community rather than set conceptually by a single observer
  • Variable of a concrete system
  • Any property of a unit or relationship within a system which can be recognized by an observer
  • which can potentially change over time, and whose change can potentially be measured by specific operations, is a variable of a concrete system
  • Examples
  • number of its subsystems or components, its size, its rate of movement in space, its rate of growth, the number of bits of information it can process per second, or the intensity of a sound to which it responds
  • A variable is intrasystemic
  • not to be confused with intersystemic variations which may be observed among individual systems, types, or levels.
  • The state of a concrete system
  • its structure
  • represented by the set of values on some scale which its variables have at that instant
  • Open system
  • Most concrete systems have boundaries which are at least partially permeable, permitting sizable magnitudes of at least certain sorts of matter-energy or information transmissions to pass them. Such a system is an open system. In open systems entropy may increase, remain in steady state, or decrease.
  • Closed system
  • impermeable boundaries through which no matter-energy or information transmissions of any sort can occur is a closed system
  • special case
  • No actual concrete system is completely closed
  • In closed systems, entropy generally increases, exceptions being when certain reversible processes are carried on which do not increase it. It can never decrease.
  • Nonliving system
  • the general case of concrete systems, of which living systems are a very special case. Nonliving systems need not have the same critical subsystems as living systems, though they often have some of them
  • Living system
  • a special subset of the set of all possible concrete systems
  • They all have the following characteristics:
  • open systems
  • inputs
  • throughputs
  • outputs
  • of various sorts of matter-energy and information.
  • maintain a steady state of negentropy even though entropic changes occur in them as they do everywhere else
  • by taking in inputs
  • higher in complexity or organization or negentropy
  • than their outputs
  • The difference permits them to restore their own energy and repair breakdowns in their own organized structure.
  • In living systems many substances are produced as well as broken down
  • To do this such systems must be open and have continual inputs of matter-energy and information
  • entropy will always increase in walled-off living systems
  • They have more than a certain minimum degree of complexity
  • They either contain genetic material composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
  • or have a charter
  • blueprint
  • program
  • of their structure and process from the moment of their origin
  • may also include nonliving components.
  • They have a decider, the essential critical sub-system which controls the entire system, causing its subsystems and components to interact. Without such interaction under decider control there is no system.
  • other specific critical sub-systems or they have symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other living or nonliving systems
  • Their subsystems are integrated together to form actively self-regulating, developing, unitary systems with purposes and goals
  • They can exist only in a certain environment
  • change in their environment
  • produces stresses
  • Totipotential system
  • capable of carrying out all critical subsystem processes necessary for life is totipotential
  • Partipotential system
  • does not itself carry out all critical subsystem processes is partipotential
  • A partipotential system must interact with other systems that can carry out the processes which it does not, or it will not survive
  • parasitic
  • symbiotic
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      The Exchange fime is a symbiotic system to SENSORICA
  • Fully functioning system
  • when it
  • Partially functioning system
  • it must do its own deciding, or it is not a system
  • Abstracted system
  • Units
  • relationships abstracted or selected by an observer in the light of his interests, theoretical viewpoint, or philosophical bias.
  • Some relationships may be empirically determinable by some operation carried out by the observer, but others are not, being only his concepts
  • Relationships
  • The relationships mentioned above are observed to inhere and interact in concrete, usually living, systems
  • these concrete systems are the relationships of abstracted systems.
  • The verbal usages of theoretical statements concerning abstracted systems are often the reverse of those concerning concrete systems
  • An abstracted system differs from an abstraction, which is a concept
  • representing a class of phenomena all of which are considered to have some similar "class characteristic." The members of such a class are not thought to interact or be interrelated, as are the relationships in an abstracted system
  • Abstracted systems are much more common in social science theory than in natural science.
  • are oriented toward relationships rather than toward the concrete systems
  • spatial arrangements are not usually emphasized
  • their physical limits often do not coincide spatially with the boundaries of any concrete system, although they may.
  • important difference between the physical and biological hierarchies, on the one hand, and social hierarchies, on the other
  • Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms
  • we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom
  • intensity of interaction
  • in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity
  • To the extent that interactions are channeled through specialized communications and transportation systems, spatial propinquity becomes less determinative of structure.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      This is the case of SENSORICA, built on web-based communication and coordination tools. 
  • PARSONS
  • the unit of a partial social system is a role and not the individual.
  • culture
  • cumulative body of knowledge of the past, contained in memories and assumptions of people who express this knowledge in definite ways
  • The social system is the actual habitual network of communication between people.
  • RUESCH
  • A social system is a behavioral system
  • It is an organized set of behaviors of persons interacting with each other: a pattern of roles.
  • The roles are the units of a social system
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      That is why we need a role system in SENSORICA
  • On the other hand, the society is an aggregate of social subsystems, and as a limiting case it is that social system which comprises all the roles of all the individuals who participate.
  • What Ruesch calls the social system is something concrete in space-time, observable and presumably measurable by techniques like those of natural science
  • To Parsons the system is abstracted from this, being the set of relationships which are the form of organization. To him the important units are classes of input-output relationships of subsystems rather than the subsystems themselves
  • system is a system of relationship in action, it is neither a physical organism nor an object of physical perception
  • evolution
  • differentiation
  • growth
  • from earlier and simpler forms and functions
  • capacities for specializations and gradients
  • [action] is not concerned with the internal structure of processes of the organism, but is concerned with the organism as a unit in a set of relationships and the other terms of that relationship, which he calls situation
  • Abstracted versus concrete systems
  • One fundamental distinction between abstracted and concrete systems is that the boundaries of abstracted systems may at times be conceptually established at regions which cut through the units and relationships in the physical space occupied by concrete systems, but the boundaries of these latter systems are always set at regions which include within them all the units and internal relationships of each system
  • A science of abstracted systems certainly is possible and under some conditions may be useful.
  • If the diverse fields of science are to be unified, it would be helpful if all disciplines were oriented either to concrete or to abstracted systems.
  • It is of paramount importance for scientists to distinguish clearly between them
Kurt Laitner

Call for Papers: Defining the Spatiality of Co-Creation, Collaboration and Peer Product... - 0 views

  •  
    Another way to reuse work on the industry canada paper this one due Feb 10 in abstract, not sure of the process from there
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Evolving Towards a Partner State in an Ethical Economy - 0 views

  • In the  emerging institutional model of peer production
  • we can distinguish an interplay between three partners
  • a community of contributors that create a commons of knowledge, software or design;
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  • There is a clear institutional division of labour between these three players
  • a set of "for-benefit institutions' which manage the 'infrastructure of cooperation'
  • an enterpreneurial coalition that creates market value on top of that commons;
  • Can we also learn something about the politics of this new mode of value creation
  • Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices, that may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy
  • we are witnessing a new model for the state. A 'P2P' state, if you will.
  • The post-democratic logic of community
  • these communities are not democracies
  • because democracy, and the market, and hierarchy, are modes of allocation of scarce resources
  • Such communities are truly poly-archies and the type of power that is held in them is meritocratic, distributed, and ad hoc.
  • Everyone can contribute without permission, but such a priori permissionlessness is  matched with mechanisms for 'a posteriori'  communal validation, where those with recognized expertise and that are accepted by the community, the so-called 'maintainers' and the 'editors',  decide
  • These decisions require expertise, not communal consensus
  • tension between inclusiveness of participation and selection for excellence
  • allowing for maximum human freedom compatible with the object of cooperation. Indeed, peer production is always a 'object-oriented' cooperation, and it is the particular object that will drive the particular form chosen for its 'peer governance' mechanisms
  • The main allocation mechanism in such project, which replaces the market, the hierarchy and democracy,  is a 'distribution of tasks'
  • no longer a division of labor between 'jobs', and the mutual coordination works through what scientist call 'stigmergic signalling'
  • work environment is designed to be totally open and transparent
  • every participating individual can see what is needed, or not and decide accordingly whether to undertake his/her particular contribution
  • this new model
  • has achieved capacities both for global coordination, and for the small group dynamics that are characteristic of human tribal forms and that it does this without 'command and control'! In fact, we can say that peer production has enabled the global scaling of small-group dynamics.
  • And they have to be, because an undemocratic institution would also discourage contributions by the community of participants.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      disagree, there are many ways to ethically distribute governance, not just democracy
  • Hence, an increased exodus of productive  capacities, in the form of direct use value production, outside the existing system of monetization, which only operates at its margins.
  • Where there is no tension between supply and demand, their can be no market, and no capital accumulation
  • Facebook and Google users create commercial value for their platforms, but only very indirectly and they are not at all rewarded for their own value creation.
  • Since what they are creating is not what is commodified on the market for scarce goods, there is no return of income for these value creators
  • This means that social media platforms are exposing an important fault line in our system
  • If you did not contribute, you had no say, so engagement was and is necessary.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      key divergence from birth/process citizenship driven democracy
  • ⁃   At the core of value creation are various commons, where the innovations are deposited for all humanity to share and to build on ⁃   These commons are enabled and protected through nonprofit civic associations, with as national equivalent the Partner State, which empowers and enables that social production ⁃   Around the commons emerges a vibrant commons-oriented economy undertaken by different kinds of ethical companies, whose legal structures ties them to the values and goals of the commons communities, and not absentee and private shareholders intent of maximising profit at any cost
  • the citizens deciding on the optimal shape of their provisioning systems.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      ie value equations..?
  • Today, it is proto-mode of production which is entirely inter-dependent with the system of capital
  • Is there any possibility to create a really autonmous model of peer production, that could create its own cycle of reproduction?
  • contribute
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      defined as?
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      "ad hoc": perhaps based on context, needs and everyone's understanding of the situation
  • and whose mission is the support of the commons and its contributors
  • In this way, the social reproduction of commoners would no longer depend on the accumulation cycle of capital, but on its own cycle of value creation and realization
  • Phyles are mission-oriented, purpose-driven, community-supportive entities that operate in the market, on a global scale, but work for the commons.
  • peer production license, which has been proposed by Dmytri Kleiner.
  • Thijs Markus writes  so eloquently about Nike in the Rick Falkvinge blog, if you want to sell $5 shoes for $150 in the West, you better have one heck of a repressive IP regime in place.
  • Hence the need for SOPA/PIPA , ACTA'S and other attempts to criminalize the right to share.
  • An economy of scope exists between the production of two goods when two goods which share a CommonCost are produced together such that the CommonCost is reduced.
  • shared infrastructure costs
  • 2) The current system beliefs that innovations should be privatized and only available by permission or for a hefty price (the IP regime), making sharing of knowledge and culture a crime; let's call this feature, enforced 'artificial scarcity'.
  • 1) Our current system is based on the belief of infinite growth and the endless availability of resources, despite the fact that we live on a finite planet; let's call this feature, runaway 'pseudo-abundance'.
  • So what are the economies of scope of the new p2p age? They come in two flavours: 1) the mutualizing of knowledge and immaterial resources 2) the mutualizing of material productive resources
  • how does global governance look like in P2P civilization?
  • conflicts between contributors
  • are not decided by authoritarian fiat, but by 'negotiated coordination'.
Kurt Laitner

Owning Together Is the New Sharing by Nathan Schneider - YES! Magazine - 0 views

  • VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing
  • Their main contribution to society has been facilitating new kinds of transactions
  • The notion that sharing would do away with the need for owning has been one of the mantras of sharing economy promoters. We could share cars, houses, and labor, trusting in the platforms to provide. But it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.
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  • Whoever owns the platforms that help us share decides who accumulates wealth from them, and how
  • Léonard and his collaborators are part of a widespread effort to make new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between. Plans are being made for a driver-owned Lyft, a cooperative version of eBay, and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are scheming to build a crowdsourcing platform they can run themselves. Each idea has its prospects and shortcomings, but together they aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.
  • Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “ zero marginal cost society“ in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations
  • once the VC-backed sharing companies clear away regulatory hurdles, local co-ops will be poised to swoop in and spread the wealth
  • People are recognizing that doing business differently will require changing who gets to own what.
  • “We’re moving into a new economic age,” says Marjorie Kelly, who spent two decades at the helm of Business Ethics magazine and now advises social entrepreneurs. “It needs to be sustainable. It needs to be inclusive. And the foundation of what defines an economic age is its form of ownership.”
  • It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus—though they prefer the term “collaboration”—about decisions that affect their lives.
  • From the start Loomio was part of Enspiral, an “open value network“ of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.
  • a companion tool, CoBudget, to help them allocate resources together
  • The team members recently had to come to terms with the fact that, for the time being, only some of them could be paid for full-time work They called the process “participatory downsizing.”
  • And they can take many forms. Loomio and other tech companies, for instance, are aspiring toward the model of a multi-stakeholder cooperative—one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once.
  • Loconomics is a San Francisco-based startup designed, like TaskRabbit, to manage short-term freelance jobs
  • “People who have been without for a long time,” she says, “often operate with a mindset that they can’t share what they have, because they don’t know when that resource will come along again.”
  • As Loconomics prepares to begin operations this winter, it’s running out of the pocket of the founder, Josh Danielson
  • The ambition of a cooperative Facebook or Uber—competitive, widespread, and owned by its community—still seems out of reach for enterprises not willing to sell large parts of themselves to investors. Organizations like 
  • His fellow OuiShare founder Benjamin Tincq is concerned that too much fixation on a particular model will make it hard for well-meaning ventures to be successful. “I like the idea that we don’t need to have a specific legal status,” he says. “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”
  • Fenton’s new undertaking, Sovolve, proposes to “create innovative solutions to accelerate social change,” much as CouchSurfing did, but it’s doing the innovating cautiously. All work is done by worker-owners located around the world. Sovolve uses an internal platform—soon to become a product in its own right—through which contributors decide how much they want to be paid in cash and how much in equity. They can see how much others are earning. Their virtual workplace is gamified, with everyone working to nudge their first product, WonderApp, into virality
  • Loomio’s members use a similar system, which they call Loomio Points. But Sovolve is no cooperative; contributors are not in charge.
  • Open-source software and share-alike licenses have revived the ancient idea of the commons for an Internet age. But the “ commons-based peer production“ that Sensorica seeks to practice doesn’t arise overnight. Just as today’s business culture rests on generations of accumulated law, habit, and training, learning to manage a commons successfully takes time
  • It makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, which exist entirely on a shared network
  • The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum, has raised more than $15 million in crowdfunding on the promise of creating such a network.
  • all with technology that makes collective ownership a lot easier than a conventional legal structure
  • A project called Eris is developing a collective decision-making tool designed to govern DAOs on Ethereum, though the platform may still be months from release.
  • For now, the burden of reinventing every wheel at once makes it hard for companies like Sensorica and Loomio to compete
  • For instance, Cutting Edge Capital specializes in helping companies raise money through a long-standing mechanism called the direct public investment, or DPO, which allows for small, non-accredited investors.
  • Venture funding may be in competition with Dietz’s cryptoequity vision, but it provides a fearsome head start
  • Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits, so they’re a possible remedy for worsening economic inequality
  • Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes—it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows
  • A less consensual strategy was employed to fund the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain; over the course of a few years, one activist borrowed around $600,000 from Spanish banks without paying any of it back.
  • In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor in 2013 on a platform of fostering worker-owned cooperatives, although much of the momentum was lost when Lumumba died just a few months later.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Beyond Blockchain: Simple Scalable Cryptocurrencies - The World of Deep Wealth - Medium - 0 views

  • I clarify the core elements of cryptocurrency and outline a different approach to designing such currencies rooted in biomimicry
  • This post outlines a completely different strategy for implementing cryptocurrencies with completely distributed chains
  • Rather than trying to make one global, anonymous, digital cash
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  • we are interested in the resilience that comes from building a rich ecosystem of interoperable currencies
  • What are the core elements of a modern cryptocurrency?
  • Digital
  • Holdings are electronic and only exist and operate by virtue of a community’s agreement about how to interpret digital bits according to rules about operation and accounting of the currency.
  • Trustless
  • don’t have to trust a 3rd party central authority
  • Decentralized
  • Specifically, access, issuance, transaction accounting, rules & policies, should be collectively visible, known, and held.
  • Cryptographic
  • This cryptographic structure is used to enable a variety of people to host the data without being able to alter it.
  • Identity
  • there must be a way to associate these bits with some kind of account, wallet, owner, or agent who can use them
  • Other things that many take for granted in blockchains may not be core but subject to decisions in design and implementation, so they can vary between implementations
  • It does not have to be stored in a synchronized global ledger
  • does not have to be money. It may be a reputation currency, or data used for identity, or naming, etc
  • Its units do not have to be cryptographic tokens or coins
  • It does not have to protect the anonymity of users, although it may
  • if you think currency is only money, and that money must be artificially scarce
  • Then you must tackle the problem of always tracking which coins exist, and which have been spent. That is one approach — the one blockchain takes.
  • You might optimize for anonymity if you think of cryptocurrency as a tool to escape governments, regulations, and taxes.
  • if you want to establish and manage membership in new kinds of commons, then identity and accountability for actions may turn out to be necessary ingredients instead of anonymity.
  • In the case of the MetaCurrency Project, we are trying to support many use cases by building tools to enable a rich ecosystem of communities and current-sees (many are non-monetary) to enhance collective intelligence at all scales.
  • Managing consensus about a shared reality is a central challenge at the heart of all distributed computing solutions.
  • If we want to democratize money by having cryptocurrencies become a significant and viable means of transacting on a daily basis, I believe we need fundamentally more scalable approaches that don’t require expensive, dedicated hardware just to participate.
  • We should not need system wide consensus for two people to do a transaction in a cryptocurrency
  • Blockchain is about managing a consensus about what was “said.” Ceptr is about distributing a consensus about how to “speak.”
  • how nature gets the job done in massively scalable systems which require coordination and consistency
  • Replicate the same processes across all nodes
  • Empower every node with full agency
  • Hold this transformed state locally and reliably
  • Establish protocols for interaction
  • Each speaker of a language carries the processes to understand sentences they hear, and generate sentences they need
  • we certainly don’t carry some kind of global ledger of everything that’s ever been said, or require consensus about what has been said
  • Language IS a communication protocol we learn by emulating the processes of usage.
  • Dictionaries try to catch up when the usage
  • there is certainly no global ledger with consensus about the state of trillions of cells. Yet, from a single zygote’s copy of DNA, our cells coordinate in a highly decentralized manner, on scales of trillions, and without the latency or bottlenecks of central control.
  • Imagine something along the lines of a Java Virtual Machine connected to a distributed version of Github
  • Every time this JVM runs a program it confirms the hash of the code it is about to execute with the hash signed into the code repository by its developers
  • This allows each node that intends to be honest to be sure that they’re running the same processes as everyone else. So when two parties want to do a transaction, and each can have confidence their own code, and the results that your code produces
  • Then you treat it as authoritative and commit it to your local cryptographically self-validating data store
  • Allowing each node to treat itself as a full authority to process transactions (or interactions via shared protocols) is exactly how you empower each node with full agency. Each node runs its copy of the signed program/processes on its own virtual machine, taking the transaction request combined with the transaction chains of the parties to the transaction. Each node can confirm their counterparty’s integrity by replaying their transactions to produce their current state, while confirming signatures and integrity of the chain
  • If both nodes are in an appropriate state which allows the current transaction, then they countersign the transaction and append to their respective chains. When you encounter a corrupted or dishonest node (as evidenced by a breach of integrity of their chain — passing through an invalid state, broken signatures, or broken links), your node can reject the transaction you were starting to process. Countersigning allows consensus at the appropriate scale of the decision (two people transacting in this case) to lock data into a tamper-proof state so it can be stored in as many parallel chains as you need.
  • When your node appends a mutually validated and signed transaction to its chain, it has updated its local state and is able to represent the integrity of its data locally. As long as each transaction (link in the chain) has valid linkages and countersignatures, we can know that it hasn’t been tampered with.
  • If you can reliably embody the state of the node in the node itself using Intrinsic Data Integrity, then all nodes can interact in parallel, independent of other interactions to maximize scalability and simultaneous processing. Either the node has the credits or it doesn’t. I don’t have to refer to a global ledger to find out, the state of the node is in the countersigned, tamper-proof chain.
  • Just like any meaningful communication, a protocol needs to be established to make sure that a transaction carries all the information needed for each node to run the processes and produce a new signed and chained state. This could be debits or credits to an account which modify the balance, or recoding courses and grades to a transcript which modify a Grade Point Average, or ratings and feedback contributing to a reputation score, and so on.
  • By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware.
  • You also don’t need to incent people to hold their own record — they already want it.
  • Another noteworthy observation about humans, cells, and atoms, is that each has a general “container” that gets configured to a specific use.
  • Likewise, the Receptors we’ve built are a general purpose framework which can load code for different distributed applications. These Receptors are a lightweight processing container for the Ceptr Virtual Machine Host
  • Ceptr enables a developer to focus on the rules and transactions for their use case instead of building a whole framework for distributed applications.
  • how units in a currency are issued
  • Most people think that money is just money, but there are literally hundreds of decisions you can make in designing a currency to target particular needs, niches, communities or patterns of flow.
  • Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies. They create tokens or coins from nothing
  • These coins are just “spoken into being”
  • the challenging task of
  • ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
  • Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies
  • These coins are just “spoken into being”
  • the challenging task of tracking all the coins that exist to ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
  • You wouldn’t need to manage consensus about whether a cryptocoin is spent, if your system created accounts which have normal balances based on summing their transactions.
  • In a mutual credit system, units of currency are issued when a participant extends credit to another user in a standard spending transaction
  • Alice pays Bob 20 credits for a haircut. Alice’s account now has -20, and Bob’s has +20.
  • Alice spent credits she didn’t have! True
  • Managing the currency supply in a mutual credit system is about managing credit limits — how far people can spend into a negative balance
  • Notice the net number units in the system remains zero
  • One elegant approach to managing mutual credit limits is to set them based on actual demand.
  • concerns about manufacturing fake accounts to game credit limits (Sybil Attacks)
  • keep in mind there can be different classes of accounts. Easy to create, anonymous accounts may get NO credit limit
  • What if I alter my code to give myself an unlimited credit limit, then spend as much as I want? As soon as you pass the credit limit encoded in the shared agreements, the next person you transact with will discover you’re in an invalid state and refuse the transaction.
  • If two people collude to commit an illegal transaction by both hacking their code to allow a normally invalid state, the same still pattern still holds. The next person they try to transact with using untampered code will detect the problem and decline to transact.
  • Most modern community currency systems have been implemented as mutual credit,
  • Hawala is a network of merchants and businessmen, which has been operating since the middle ages, performing money transfers on an honor system and typically settling balances through merchandise instead of transferring money
  • Let’s look at building a minimum viable cryptocurrency with the hawala network as our use case
  • To minimize key management infrastructure, each hawaladar’s public key is their address or identity on the network. To join the network you get a copy of the software from another hawaladar, generate your public and private keys, and complete your personal profile (name, location, contact info, etc.). You call, fax, or email at least 10 hawaladars who know you, and give them your IP address and ask them to vouch for you.
  • Once 10 other hawaladars have vouched for you, you can start doing other transactions because the protocol encoded in every node will reject a transaction chain that doesn’t start with at least 10 vouches
  • seeding your information with those other peers so you can be found by the rest of the network.
  • As described in the Mutual Credit section, at the time of transaction each party audits the counterparty’s transaction chain.
  • Our hawala crypto-clearinghouse protocol has two categories of transactions: some used for accounting and others for routing. Accounting transactions change balances. Routing transactions maintain network integrity by recording information about hawaladar
  • Accounting Transactions create signed data that changes account balances and contains these fields:
  • The final hash of all of the above fields is used as a unique transaction ID and is what each of party signs with their private keys. Signing indicates a party has agreed to the terms of the transaction. Only transactions signed by both parties are considered valid. Nodes can verify signatures by confirming that decryption of the signature using the public key yields a result which matches the transaction ID.
  • Routing Transactions sign data that changes the peers list and contain these fields:
  • As with accounting transactions, the hash of the above fields is used as the transaction’s unique key and the basis for the cryptographic signature of both counterparties.
  • Remember, instead of making changes to account balances, routing transactions change a node’s local list of peers for finding each other and processing.
  • a distributed network of mutual trust
  • operates across national boundaries
  • everyone already keeps and trusts their own separate records
  • Hawaladars are not anonymous
  • “double-spending”
  • It would be possible for someone to hack the code on their node to “forget” their most recent transaction (drop the head of their chain), and go back to their previous version of the chain before that transaction. Then they could append a new transaction, drop it, and append again.
  • After both parties have signed the agreed upon transaction, each party submits the transaction to separate notaries. Notaries are a special class of participant who validate transactions (auditing each chain, ensuring nobody passes through an invalid state), and then they sign an outer envelope which includes the signatures of the two parties. Notaries agree to run high-availability servers which collectively manage a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) servicing requests for transaction information. As their incentive for providing this infrastructure, notaries get a small transaction fee.
  • This approach introduces a few more steps and delays to the transaction process, but because it operates on independent parallel chains, it is still orders of magnitude more efficient and decentralized than reaching consensus on entries in a global ledger
  • millions of simultaneous transactions could be getting processed by other parties and notaries with no bottlenecks.
  • There are other solutions to prevent nodes from dropping the head of their transaction chain, but the approach of having notaries serve out a DHT solves a number of common objections to completely distributed accounting. Having access to reliable lookups in a DHT provides a similar big picture view that you get from a global ledger. For example, you may want a way to look up transactions even when the parties to that transaction are offline, or to be able to see the net system balance at a particular moment in time, or identify patterns of activity in the larger system without having to collect data from everyone individually.
  • By leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity to run numerous parallel tamper-proof chains you can enable nodes to do various P2P transactions which don’t actually require group consensus. Mutual credit is a great way to implement cryptocurrencies to run in this peered manner. Basic PKI with a DHT is enough additional infrastructure to address main vulnerabilities. You can optimize your solution architecture by reserving reserve consensus work for tasks which need to guarantee uniqueness or actually involve large scale agreement by humans or automated contracts.
  • It is not only possible, but far more scalable to build cryptocurrencies without a global ledger consensus approach or cryptographic tokens.
  •  
    Article written by Arthur Brook, founder of Metacurrency project and of Ceptr.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Partner State - P2P Foundation - 0 views

    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      we call this a custodian
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      we call this a custodian
  • So here we have it, the new triarchy: - The state, with its public property and representative mechanisms of governance (in the best scenario) - The private sector, with the corporation and private property - The commons, with the Trust (or the for-benefit association), and which is the ‘property’ of all its members (not the right word in the context of the commons, since it has a different philosophy of ownership)
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      so where is direct democracy in all this?
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  • In a first phase, the commons simply emerges as an added alternative.
  • becoming a subsector of society, and starts influencing the whole
  • phase transition and transformation will need to occur.
  • how a commons-dominated, i.e. after the phase transition, society would look like.
  • At its core would be a collection of commons, represented by trusts and for-benefit associations, which protect their common assets for the benefit of present and future generations
  • The commons ‘rents out’ the use of its resources to entrepreneurs. In other words, business still exists, though infinite growth-based capitalism does not.
  • More likely is that the corporate forms will be influenced by the commons and that profit will be subsumed to other goals, that are congruent with the maintenance of the commons.
  • The state will still exist, but will have a radically different nature
  • Much of its functions will have been taken over by commons institutions, but since these institutions care primarily about their commons, and not the general common good, we will still need public authorities that are the guarantor of the system as a whole, and can regulate the various commons, and protect the commoners against possible abuses. So in our scenario, the state does not disappear, but is transformed, though it may greatly diminish in scope, and with its remaining functions thoroughly democratized and based on citizen participation.
  • In our vision, it is civil-society based peer production, through the Commons, which is the guarantor of value creation by the private sector, and the role of the state, as Partner State, is to enable and empower the creation of common value. The new peer to peer state then, though some may see that as a contradictio in terminis, is a state which is subsumed under the Commons, just as it is now under the private sector. Such a peer to peer state, if we are correct, will have a much more modest role than the state under a classic state society, with many of its functions taken over by civil society associations, interlinked in processes of global governance. The above then, this triarchy, is the institutional core which replaces the dual private-public binary system that is characteristic of the capitalist system that is presently the dominant format.
  • fundamental mission is to empower direct social-value creation, and to focus on the protection of the Commons sphere as well as on the promotion of sustainable models of entrepreneurship and participatory politics
  • the state becomes a 'partner state' and enables autonomous social production.
  • the state does exist, and I believe that we can’t just imagine that we live in a future state-less society
  • retreating from the binary state/privatization dilemma to the triarchical choice of an optimal mix amongst government regulation, private-market freedom and autonomous civil-society projects
  • the role of the state
  • “the peer production of common value requires civic wealth and strong civic institutions.
  • trigger the production/construction of new commons by - (co-) management of complexe resource systems which are not limited to local boundaries or specific communities (as manager and partner) - survey of rules (chartas) to care for the commons (mediator or judge) - kicking of or providing incentives for commoners governing their commons - here the point is to design intelligent rules which automatically protect the commons, like the GPL does (facilitator)"
  • the emergence of the digital commons. It is the experience of creating knowledge, culture, software and design commons, by a combination of voluntary contributions, entrepreneurial coalitions and infrastructure-protecting for-benefit associations, that has most tangibly re-introduced the idea of commons, for all to use without discrimination, and where all can contribute. It has drastically reduced the production, distribution, transaction and coordination costs for the immaterial value that is at the core also of all what we produce physically, since that needs to be made, needs to be designed. It has re-introduced communing as a mainstream experience for at least one billion internet users, and has come with proven benefits and robustness that has outcompeted and outcooperated its private rivals. It also of course offers new ways to re-imagine, create and protect physical commons.
  • stop enclosures
  • peer to peer, i.e. the ability to freely associate with others around the creation of common value
  • communal shareholding, i.e. the non-reciprocal exchange of an individual with a totality. It is totality that we call the commons.
  • It is customary to divide society into three sectors, and what we want to show is how the new peer to peer dynamic unleashed by networked infrastructures, changes the inter-relationship between these three sectors.
  • In the current ‘cognitive capitalist’ system, it is the private sector consisting of enterprises and businesses which is the primary factor, and it is engaged in competitive capital accumulation. The state is entrusted with the protection of this process. Though civil society, through the citizen, is in theory ‘sovereign’, and chooses the state; in practice, both civil society and the state are under the domination of the private sector.
  • it fulfills three contradictory functions
  • Of course, this is not to say that the state is a mere tool of private business.
  • protect the whole system, under the domination of private business
  • protector of civil society, depending on the balance of power and achievements of social movements
  • protector of its own independent interests
  • Under fascism, the state achieves great independence from the private sector , which may become subservient to the state. Under the welfare state, the state becomes a protector of the social balance of power and manages the achievements of the social movement; and finally, under the neoliberal corporate welfare state, or ‘market state’, it serves most directly the interests of the financial sector.
  • key institutions and forms of property.
  • The state managed a public sector, under its own property.
  • The private sector , under a regime of private ownership, is geared to profit, discounts social and natural externalities, both positive and negative, and uses its dominance in society to use and dominate the state.
  • civil society has a relative power as well, through its capability of creating social movements and associations
  • Capitalism has historically been a pendulum between the private and the public sector
  • However, this configuration is changing,
  • the endangerment of the biosphere through the workings of ‘selfish’ market players; the second is the role of the new digital commons.
  • participatory politics
  • Peer production gives us an advance picture of how a commons-oriented society would look like. At its core is a commons and a community contributing to it, either voluntarily, or as paid entrepreneurial employees. It does this through collaborative platforms using open standards. Around the commons emerges enterprises that create added value to operate on the marketplace, but also help the maintenance and the expansion of the commons they rely on. A third partner are the for-benefit associations that maintain the infrastructure of cooperation. Public authorities could play a role if they wanted to support existing commons or the creation of new commons, for the value they bring to society.
  • if a commons is not created as in the case of the digital commons, it is something that is inherited from nature or former generations, given in trust and usufruct, so that it can be transmitted to our descendents. The proper institution for such commons is therefore the trust, which is a corporate form that cannot touch its principal capital, but has to maintain it.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Access control - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • The act of accessing may mean consuming, entering, or using.
  • Permission to access a resource is called authorization.
  • Locks and login credentials are two analogous mechanisms of access control.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • Geographical access control may be enforced by personnel (e.g., border guard, bouncer, ticket checker)
  • n alternative of access control in the strict sense (physically controlling access itself) is a system of checking authorized presence, see e.g. Ticket controller (transportation). A variant is exit control, e.g. of a shop (checkout) or a country
  • access control refers to the practice of restricting entrance to a property, a building, or a room to authorized persons
  • can be achieved by a human (a guard, bouncer, or receptionist), through mechanical means such as locks and keys, or through technological means such as access control systems like the mantrap.
  • Physical access control is a matter of who, where, and when
  • Historically, this was partially accomplished through keys and locks. When a door is locked, only someone with a key can enter through the door, depending on how the lock is configured. Mechanical locks and keys do not allow restriction of the key holder to specific times or dates. Mechanical locks and keys do not provide records of the key used on any specific door, and the keys can be easily copied or transferred to an unauthorized person. When a mechanical key is lost or the key holder is no longer authorized to use the protected area, the locks must be re-keyed.[citation needed] Electronic access control uses computers to solve the limitations of mechanical locks and keys. A wide range of credentials can be used to replace mechanical keys. The electronic access control system grants access based on the credential presented. When access is granted, the door is unlocked for a predetermined time and the transaction is recorded. When access is refused, the door remains locked and the attempted access is recorded. The system will also monitor the door and alarm if the door is forced open or held open too long after being unlocked
  • Credential
  • Access control system operation
  • The above description illustrates a single factor transaction. Credentials can be passed around, thus subverting the access control list. For example, Alice has access rights to the server room, but Bob does not. Alice either gives Bob her credential, or Bob takes it; he now has access to the server room. To prevent this, two-factor authentication can be used. In a two factor transaction, the presented credential and a second factor are needed for access to be granted; another factor can be a PIN, a second credential, operator intervention, or a biometric input
  • There are three types (factors) of authenticating information:[2] something the user knows, e.g. a password, pass-phrase or PIN something the user has, such as smart card or a key fob something the user is, such as fingerprint, verified by biometric measurement
  • Passwords are a common means of verifying a user's identity before access is given to information systems. In addition, a fourth factor of authentication is now recognized: someone you know, whereby another person who knows you can provide a human element of authentication in situations where systems have been set up to allow for such scenarios
  • When a credential is presented to a reader, the reader sends the credential’s information, usually a number, to a control panel, a highly reliable processor. The control panel compares the credential's number to an access control list, grants or denies the presented request, and sends a transaction log to a database. When access is denied based on the access control list, the door remains locked.
  • A credential is a physical/tangible object, a piece of knowledge, or a facet of a person's physical being, that enables an individual access to a given physical facility or computer-based information system. Typically, credentials can be something a person knows (such as a number or PIN), something they have (such as an access badge), something they are (such as a biometric feature) or some combination of these items. This is known as multi-factor authentication. The typical credential is an access card or key-fob, and newer software can also turn users' smartphones into access devices.
  • An access control point, which can be a door, turnstile, parking gate, elevator, or other physical barrier, where granting access can be electronically controlled. Typically, the access point is a door. An electronic access control door can contain several elements. At its most basic, there is a stand-alone electric lock. The lock is unlocked by an operator with a switch. To automate this, operator intervention is replaced by a reader. The reader could be a keypad where a code is entered, it could be a card reader, or it could be a biometric reader. Readers do not usually make an access decision, but send a card number to an access control panel that verifies the number against an access list
  • monitor the door position
  • Generally only entry is controlled, and exit is uncontrolled. In cases where exit is also controlled, a second reader is used on the opposite side of the door. In cases where exit is not controlled, free exit, a device called a request-to-exit (REX) is used. Request-to-exit devices can be a push-button or a motion detector. When the button is pushed, or the motion detector detects motion at the door, the door alarm is temporarily ignored while the door is opened. Exiting a door without having to electrically unlock the door is called mechanical free egress. This is an important safety feature. In cases where the lock must be electrically unlocked on exit, the request-to-exit device also unlocks the doo
  • Access control topology
  • Access control decisions are made by comparing the credential to an access control list. This look-up can be done by a host or server, by an access control panel, or by a reader. The development of access control systems has seen a steady push of the look-up out from a central host to the edge of the system, or the reader. The predominant topology circa 2009 is hub and spoke with a control panel as the hub, and the readers as the spokes. The look-up and control functions are by the control panel. The spokes communicate through a serial connection; usually RS-485. Some manufactures are pushing the decision making to the edge by placing a controller at the door. The controllers are IP enabled, and connect to a host and database using standard networks
  • Access control readers may be classified by the functions they are able to perform
  • and forward it to a control panel.
  • Basic (non-intelligent) readers: simply read
  • Semi-intelligent readers: have all inputs and outputs necessary to control door hardware (lock, door contact, exit button), but do not make any access decisions. When a user presents a card or enters a PIN, the reader sends information to the main controller, and waits for its response. If the connection to the main controller is interrupted, such readers stop working, or function in a degraded mode. Usually semi-intelligent readers are connected to a control panel via an RS-485 bus.
  • Intelligent readers: have all inputs and outputs necessary to control door hardware; they also have memory and processing power necessary to make access decisions independently. Like semi-intelligent readers, they are connected to a control panel via an RS-485 bus. The control panel sends configuration updates, and retrieves events from the readers.
  • Systems with IP readers usually do not have traditional control panels, and readers communicate directly to a PC that acts as a host
  • a built in webservice to make it user friendly
  • Some readers may have additional features such as an LCD and function buttons for data collection purposes (i.e. clock-in/clock-out events for attendance reports), camera/speaker/microphone for intercom, and smart card read/write support
mayssamd

Blockchain-based Supervision model for off-site modular housing production - 0 views

  •  
    This is more a case of blockchain applications on the supply chain and information management, in the construction sector. More supply chain than p2p, it would be a stretch to call it p2p manufacturing... The paper has some interesting points though, that I am extracting in the document, under the "Tech level" section. I WOULD DELETE THE "P2P Manufacturing" TAG. Another note: access to full paper not provided.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

If not Global Captalism - then What? - 0 views

  • I posit an optimistic view of the potential for Society from the emergence of a new and “Open” form of Capitalism.
  • Open Capital
  • the concept of “Open” Capital is “so simple…. it repels the mind".
  • ...162 more annotations...
  • Open Capital is defined as “a proportional share in an enterprise for an indeterminate time”
  • ‘Enterprise’ is defined as ‘any entity within which two or more individuals create, accumulate or exchange Value”.
  • Value is to Economics as Energy and Matter are to Physics.
  • The Metaphysics Of Value
  • division between “subject” and “object”.
  • primary reality is “Quality”
  • formless and indefinable
  • not a “thing”
  • a non-intellectual awareness or “pre-intellectual reality”
  • but an event at which the subject becomes aware of the object and before he distinguishes it
  • Quality is the basis of both subject and object
  • distinguish between “Static” and “Dynamic” Quality
  • treating Value as a form of “Quality” as envisioned by Pirsig.
  • Riegel
  • defined “Value” as “ the Relativity of Desire” again implying indeterminacy.
  • Pirsig’s approach Capital may be viewed as “Static” Value and Money as “Dynamic” Value. “Transactions” are the “events” at which individuals (Subjects) interact with each other or with Capital (both as Objects) to create forms of Value and at which “Value judgments” are made based upon a “Value Unit”.
  • The result of these Value Events /Transactions is to create subject/object pairings in the form of data ie Who “owns” or has rights of use in What,
  • at what Price
  • accounting data
  • Neo-Classical” Economics confuses indeterminate Value with a market– determined Price –
  • Data may be static
  • This Data identifies the subject with objects such as tangible ‘Material Value’
  • Data may itself constitute ‘Intellectual Value’
  • It, too, may then be defined in a subject/object pairing through the concept of “intellectual property”.
  • Other forms of Value are however not definable by data:
  • “sentimental” Value
  • Emotional Value’
  • 'Spiritual Value’
  • We may therefore look at the “transaction” or “value event” in a new light.
  • The creation and circulation of Value essentially comprises the concept we know of as “Money”.
  • Money / Dynamic Value
  • “The purpose of money is to facilitate barter by splitting the transaction into two parts, the acceptor of money reserving the power to requisition value from any trader at any time
  • money
  • value unit dissociated from any object
  • monetary unit
  • the basis relative to which other values may be expressed
  • The monetary process is a dynamic one involving the creation and recording of obligations as between individuals and the later fulfilment of these obligations
  • The monetary “Value Event”/ Transaction involves the creation of “Credit”
  • obligation to provide something of equivalent Value at a future point in time.
  • These obligations may be recorded on transferable documents
  • database of “Credit”/obligations is not Money, but temporary “Capital”
  • “Working Capital”
  • Static Value – which only becomes “Money”/ Dynamic Value when exchanged in the transitory Monetary process.
  • what we think of as Money is in fact not tangible “cash” but rather
  • the flow of data between databases of obligations maintained by Credit Institutions
  • or dynamic
  • Banks literally “loan” Money into existence
  • In exchange for an obligation by an Individual to provide to the Bank something of Value
  • Bank’s obligation is merely to provide another obligation at some future time
  • These Bank-issued obligations are therefore
  • claim upon a claim upon Value
  • The true source of Credit is the Individual, not the intermediary Bank
  • this Money they create from nothing despite the fact that it is literally Value-less
  • Thus there is no true sharing of Risk and Reward involved in Lending
  • issue in relation to Credit/Debt and this relates to the nature of Lending itself.
  • the practice of Lending involves an incomplete exchange in terms of risk and reward: a Lender, as opposed to an Investor, has no interest in the outcome of the Loan, and requires the repayment of Principal no matter the ability of the Borrower to repay.
  • Ethical problem
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      "The Lender has no interest in the outcome of the loan", i.e doesn't care what happens in the end. The Lender ins not interested in the economical outcome of the Lender-Loner relation. So in fact there is no real risk sharing. the only risk for the Lender is when the Loner doesn't pay back, which is not really a risk... In fact it is a risk for the small bank, who has to buy money from the central bank, but not for the central bank. 
  • Money is not
  • an “Object” circulating but rather a dynamic process of Value creation and exchange by reference to a “Value Unit”.
  • Capital/ Static Value
  • Capital represents the static accumulation of Value
  • Some forms of Capital are “productive”
  • An ethical question
  • in relation to Productive Capital relates to the extent of “property rights” which may be held over it thereby allowing individuals to assert “absolute” permanent and exclusive ownership - in particular in relation to Land
  • our current financial system is based not upon Value but rather a claim upon Value
  • Financial Capital consists of two types:
  • “Debt”
  • “Equity”
  • Interest
  • obligations of finite/temporary duration but with no participation in the assets or revenues
  • absolute and permanent ownership/participation (without obligation) in assets and revenues
  • discontinuity between Debt and Equity
  • at the heart of our current problems as a Society
  • The Enterprise
  • ‘Charitable’ Enterprise
  • ‘Social’ Enterprise
  • Value
  • exchanged in agreed proportions;
  • Value is exchanged for the Spiritual and Emotional Value
  • ‘Commercial’ Enterprise
  • ‘closed’
  • Value are exchanged between a limited number of individuals
  • Early enterprises were partnerships and unincorporated associations
  • need for institutions which outlived the lives of the Members led to the development of the Corporate body with a legal existence independent of its Members
  • The key development in the history of Capitalism was the creation of the ‘Joint Stock’ Corporate with liability limited by shares of a ‘Nominal’ or ‘Par’ value
  • over the next 150 years the Limited Liability Corporate evolved into the Public Limited Liability Corporate
  • Such “Closed” Shares of “fixed” value constitute an absolute and permanent claim over the assets and revenues of the Enterprise to the exclusion of all other “stakeholders” such as Suppliers, Customers, Staff, and Debt Financiers.
  • The latter are essentially ‘costs’ external to the
  • owners of the Enterprise
  • maximise ‘Shareholder Value’
  • There is a discontinuity/ fault-line within the ‘Closed’ Corporate
  • It has the characteristics of what biologists call a ‘semi-permeable membrane’ in the way that it allows Economic Value to be extracted from other stakeholders but not to pass the other way.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      It is a way to extract value from productive systems. It is a system of exploitation. 
  • Capital most certainly is and always has been - through the discontinuity (see diagram) between:‘Fixed’ Capital in the form of shares ie Equity; and ‘Working’ Capital in the form of debt finance, credit from suppliers, pre-payments by customers and obligations to staff and management.
  • irreconcilable conflict between Equity and Debt
  • xchange of Economic Value in a Closed Corporate is made difficult and true sharing of Risk and Reward is simply not possible
  • No Enterprise Model has been capable of resolving this dilemma. Until now.
  • Corporate Partnerships with unlimited liability
  • mandatory for partnerships with more than 20 partners to be incorporated
  • in the USA
  • it is the normal structure for professional partnerships
  • Limited Liability Partnerships
  • In the late 1990's
  • litigation
  • The UK LLP is supremely simple and remarkably flexible.
  • All that is needed is a simple ‘Member Agreement’ – a legal protocol which sets out the Aims, Objectives. Principles of Governance, Revenue Sharing, Dispute Resolution, Transparency and any other matters that Members agree should be included. Amazingly enough, this Agreement need not even be in writing, since in the absence of a written agreement Partnership Law is applied by way of default.
  • The ease of use and total flexibility enables the UK LLP to be utilised in a way never intended – as an ‘Open’ Corporate partnership.
  • ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership
  • concepts which characterise the ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership
  • it is now possible for any stakeholder to become a Member of a UK LLP simply through signing a suitably drafted Member Agreement
  • ‘Open’
  • supplier
  • employee
  • may instead become true Partners in the Enterprise with their interests aligned with other stakeholders.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Can SENSORICA be a UK LLP?
  • no profit or loss in an Open Corporate Partnership, merely Value creation and exchange between members in conformance with the Member Agreement.
  • Proportional shares
  • in an Enterprise constitute an infinitely divisible, flexible and scaleable form of Capital capable of distributing or accumulating Value organically as the Enterprise itself grows in Value or chooses to distribute it.
  • Emergence of “Open” Capital
  • example of how ‘Temporary Equity’ may operate in practice
  • The Open Capital Partnership (“OCP”)
  • Within the OCP Capital and Revenue are continuous: to the extent that an Investee pays Rental in advance of the due date he becomes an Investor.
  • Open Capital – a new Asset Class
  • create a new asset class of proportional “shares”/partnership interests
  • in Capital holding OCP’s
  • Property Investment Partnerships (“PIP’s”)
  • Open Corporate Partnerships as a Co-operative Enterprise model
  • A Co-operative is not an enterprise structure: it is a set of Principles that may be applied to different types of enterprise structure.
  • Within a Partnership there is no “Profit” and no “Loss”.
  • Partnerships
  • mutual pursuit of the creation and exchange of Value
  • Partners do not compete with each othe
  • the crippling factors in practical terms have been, inter alia: the liability to which Member partners are exposed from the actions of their co-partners on their behalf; limited ability to raise capital.
  • they favour the interests of other stakeholders, are relatively restricted in accessing investment; are arguably deficient in incentivising innovation.
  • The ‘new’ LLP was expressly created to solve the former problem by limiting the liability of Member partners to those assets which they choose to place within its protective ‘semi-permeable membrane’
  • However, the ability to configure the LLP as an “Open” Corporate permits a new and superior form of Enterprise.
  • it is possible to re-organise any existing enterprise as either a partnership or as a partnership of partnerships.
  • the revenues
  • would be divided among Members in accordance with the LLP Agreement. This means that all Members share a common interest in collaborating/co-operating to maximise the Value generated by the LLP collectively as opposed to competing with other stakeholders to maximise their individual share at the other stakeholders’ expense.
  • facilitate the creation of LLP’s as “Co-operatives of Co-operatives”.
  • he ‘Commercial’ Enterprise LLP – where the object is for a closed group of individuals to maximise the value generated in their partnership. There are already over 7,000 of these.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Can SENSORICA be one of these?
  • the Profit generated in a competitive economy based upon shareholder value and unsustainable growth results from a transfer of risks outwards, and the transfer of reward inwards, leading to a one way transfer of Economic Value.
  • This,
  • will very often impoverish one or more constituency of stakeholders
  • A partnership, however, involves an exchange of value through the sharing of risk and reward.
  • Whether its assets are protected within a corporate entity with limited liability or not, it will always operate co-operatively – for mutual profit.
  • Open Capital, Economics and Politics
  • continuity between Capital as Static Value and Money as Dynamic Value which has never before been possible due to the dichotomy between the absolute/infinite and the absolute/finite durations of the competing claims over assets – “Equity” and “Debt”
  • Open Capital Partnership gives rise to a new form of Financial Capital of indeterminate duration. It enables the Capitalisation of assets and the monetisation of revenue streams in an entirely new way.
  • It is possible to envisage a Society within which individuals are members of a portfolio of Enterprises constituted as partnerships, whether limited in liability or otherwise.
  • Some will be charitable
  • Others will be ‘social’
  • ‘Commercial’ enterprises of all kinds aimed at co-operatively working together to maximise value for the Members.
  • the process has already begun
  • Capitalism
  • superior
  • to all other models, such as Socialism.
  • It can only be replaced by another ‘emergent’ phenomenon, which is adopted ‘virally’ because any Enterprise which does not utilise it will be at a disadvantage to an Enterprise which does.
  • The ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership is: capable of linking any individuals anywhere in respect of collective ownership of assets anywhere; extremely cheap and simple to operate; and because one LLP may be a Member of another it is organically flexible and ‘scaleable’. The phenomenon of “Open Capital” – which is already visible in the form of significant commercial transactions - enables an extremely simple and continuous relationship between those who wish to participate indefinitely in an Enterprise and those who wish to participate for a defined period of time.
  • Moreover, the infinitely divisible proportionate “shares” which constitute ‘Open’ Capital allow stakeholder interests to grow flexibly and organically with the growth in Value of the Enterprise. In legal terms, the LLP agreement is essentially consensual and ‘pre-distributive’: it is demonstrably superior to prescriptive complex contractual relationships negotiated adversarially and subject to subsequent re-distributive legal action. Above all, the ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership is a Co-operative phenomenon which is capable, the author believes, of unleashing the “Co-operative Advantage” based upon the absence of a requirement to pay returns to “rentier” Capitalists.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Promoting and Assessing Value Creation in Networks - P2P Foundation - 1 views

  • Promoting and Assessing Value Creation in Networks: A conceptual framework
  • there are three pieces of a CoP
  • the evaluation framework is able to assess the value of each piece
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The framework itself has five levels
  • The first level—related to the satisfaction level—is called "immediate value" and it assesses what just happened, for example, in a webinar
  • The second level is called "potential value," and I like to think of this as the new knowledge or understanding that is lying latent but ready to be put to use in the future
  • This level looks at change
  • The third level does this, and it is called "applied value" and this is where the model starts to become interesting to CEOs and others
  • hard metrics like reduced development time, improved efficiencies, or financial returns. The fourth level in the framework provides this, and the level is called "realized value."
  • he fifth level is where the community changes as a result of the activity occurring in the first four levels. At this highest level, the framework examines changes in the community—norms, standards, practices, and thought leadership—that has occurred as a result of activity within the community
Kurt Laitner

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - STRIKE! - 1 views

  • financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations
  • provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones
  • It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat)
  • working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars
  • The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger
  • The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political
  • And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them
  • Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at
  • they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets
  • It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.)
  • plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school
  • Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist
  • I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?
  • (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)
  • should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely
  • This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?
  • Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work
  • in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it
  • There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?
  • Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should b
  • You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people
  • It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems)
  • It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”
  • If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job
  • The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value
Yasir Siddiqui

Open Innovation in Cities - 0 views

  • The collaborative economy, driven by a convergence of numerous factors including the global economic recession, growing environmental consciousness and the growing ubiquity of information communication technologies (ICTs) is booming, with more than $2 billion in investment raised from venture capitalists 5  and $3.5 billion generated for users in P2P models in 2013. 6  
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Ethical Marketing in Age of Horizontal Social... - 0 views

  • the development of marketing is sensible to its environment and is hence already self-limiting itself according to the previously mentioned legal and social framework
  • neuromarketing
  • explore new inner dynamics of marketing, new directions in the field of possibilities offered by the current organology and its articulations between techniques and social organization in order to influence and shape marketing as an associative force – in opposition to its current dissociative force – in the larger psychic, social and technic organology
  • ...70 more annotations...
  • find new ways of efficiency
  • arbitration between efficiency and care
  • a global thinking of the problem
  • Fighting the attention and desire resource shortage: stoping to use advertisement?
  • The question is rather here to think the moderation of the psychopower
  • empower transindividuation, i.e. to make sure that an economic activity creates more possibilities of individuation than it tend to destroy by attempting to capture attention and canalize motivation in a funnel. Empower transindividuation would imply to empowering actors of their own lifestyle, winning back the savoir-vivre prescribing production
  • Should marketing stop using psychopower?
  • marketing ethics guidelines
  • transactions are more likely to be morally defensible if both parties enter it freely and fully informed
  • the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
  • putting freedom as a criteria of morality
  • the industrial use of pycho- and neuropower tend to fall under the category of barriers to freedom
  • neurotechniques – to capture the attention
  • psychotechniques – to attempt to create motivation
  • Most people think commercials are a small price to pay for these benefits
  • advertising
  • denying the schemes of addiction and the fact that we are becoming through the objects of attentions
  • right to avoid attention capture by advertising
  • progress made in cognitive sciences proving that
  • reward system being abnormally stimulated
  • Advertisements exploit
  • vulnerability and reinforce their overconsumption behaviors
  • “if food advertising on TV were banned, significant reductions in the prevalence of childhood obesity are possible.” (Veerman et al. 2009)
  • What is at stake falls to be much more complex than the sole Freedom of Speech invoked for the advertiser
  • liberty of non-reception
  • would mean to guaranty every citizen the right to choose where and when he wants to access the advertising information
  • Change in the industrial and commercial paradigm
  • Economy of contribution and peer production
  • An economy of contribution means that users of a service are contributing to the production of these services.
  • example
  • is open-source software that are contributively build by potentially hundreds of developers organized in communities
  • minimize the gap between the producer and consumer
  • blur the frontier between professionals and amateurs
  • The Copernican revolution of the Vendor Relationship Management paradigm
  • change in the commercial paradigm, described as an Intention Economy i.e. the opposite of the Attention Economy
  • consumers are charged to express and discuss their intention
  • with businesses rather than the usual paradigm in which businesses where fighting for a piece of canalized motivation
  • Implementing such a system would nevertheless imply that marketing departments dispose of a system in which they could value their supplies and where they could be easily found by customers. Doc Searls promotes his answer to this issue: the Vendor Relationship Management system.
  • the belief that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — to themselves, to vendors, and to the larger economy.
  • To be free
  • 1. Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors.
  • 2. Customers must be the points of integration for their own data.
  • 3. Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.
  • 4. Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.
  • 5. Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.
  • This is a profoundly game-changing approach
  • big data that is the rush for consumers’ information potentially leading to the same dead-end of attention destruction and affective saturation than the former offline paradigm
  • VRM system working as a marketplace
  • the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
  • less imperfect and less biased information in a cultural context overvaluing transparency, and a bigger atomicity due to the hereafter introduced trend for re-localized peer production.
  • 3.2.2.3 VRM and externalization of the socialization process
  • Promoting the end of advertisement
  • means to find a new way to make the information circulate, what was the primary goal of advertisement
  • Until there is no alternative to massive advertisement campaign for the information circulation, it is indeed hard to ask entrepreneurs and managers to get rid of those successors of propaganda: such a transition process necessarily imply adaptation costs from the producer and the consumer side, and possible competitive disadvantage against competitors still maximizing profit through advertisement means
  • But the internet transformation of the general organology offers new way to think information circuits and potentially constitute an opportunity to externalize the socialization process of products that is to empower citizen-consumers organized in communities
  • Empowering groups of citizen doesn’t annihilate the risks of mis-use or counterproductive interest-taker behaviors but a well-designed system of trust between peers could minimize this risk by creating a dependency to what social capital other peers give you, as it is happening in the sharing economy: the credibility of a contributive peer would be guaranteed through what the P2P Foundation calls Feedback systems and peer-police
  • a strong structuration of products characteristics, allowing customers to personalize their choices according to their desire and constraints: such a “VRM+” system
  • Marketing would then be the art of being as high as possible in this ranking, as it is happening in SEO for search engines, but in this context of criteria explosion, marketing would then be the disciple of listening to customers’ wishes and aspiration needing an attention, in order to kick in the production or to adapt the following series.
  • 3.2.2.4 Toward a possible equi-power
  • Such a system would tremendously re-configure the balance of power and tend toward a form of equi-power i.e. a social organization in which abuses of a “big” would be the potential object of a ranking sanction by the peers
  • self-regulative function
  • a form of economic Darwinism would let to conscious organization the right to curve their path toward a durable configuration in accordance with the social ecosystem.
  • the idea of equi-power is a form of homogenization of the social matter, in which the distortions in the balance of power would be compensated by the gathering of small forces sharing a common interest
  • Such a sanction systems, if successfully implemented, would make value-destructing businesses progressively decline and hopefully bankrupt,
  • long-term valuable strategic choice
  • long term satisfyingly high ranking
  • It would be utopic to think that the “being cool” marketing
  • would disappear, but marketers would have to make those two objectives compose together.
  • This social capital contagion is nevertheless a tool that would need to be controlled in its form of violence by extensive testings and iterations with forms of protections for the smallest peers, that is to say to keep this form of social violence to institutionalized, classic forms of businesses, clearly beyond the line of what should be acceptable in the global village.
  • the goal is here to create an artificial form of majority that is a self-censuring responsible behavior of corporations
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

How The Blockchain Will Transform Everything From Banking To Government To Our Identities - 1 views

  • The first generation of the Internet was a great tool for communicating, collaborating and connecting online, but it was not ideal for business. When you send and share information on the Internet, you’re not sending an original but a copy. That’s good for information — it means people have a printing press for information and that information becomes democratized — but if you want to send an asset, it’s a problem. If I send you $100 online, you need to be sure you have it and I don’t, and that I can’t spend the same $100 somewhere else. As a result, we need intermediaries to perform critical roles — to establish identity between two parties in a transaction, and to do all the settlement transaction logic, which includes record-keeping.
  • With blockchain, for the first time, we have a new digital medium for value where anyone can access anything of value — stocks, bonds, money, digital property, titles, deeds — and even things like identity and votes can be moved, stored and managed securely and privately. Trust is not established though a third party but with clever code and mass consensus using a network. That’s got huge implications for intermediaries and businesses and society at large
  • And also with government, as a central repository of information an entity that delivers services.
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  • There’s an opportunity to disrupt how those organizations work. Intermediaries, though they do a good job, have a few problems — they’re centralized, which makes them vulnerable to attack or failure
  • They tax the system
  • They capture data
  • They exclude billions of people from the global economy
  • internet of value
  • With blockchain, we can go from redistributing wealth to distributing value and opportunity value fairly a priori, from cradle to grave.
  • creating a true sharing economy by replacing service aggregators like Uber with distributed applications on the blockchain
  • unleashing a new age of entrepreneurship
  • build accountable governments through transparency, smart contracts and revitalized models of democracy.
  • The virtual you is owned by large intermediaries
  • This virtual you knows more about you than you do sometimes
  • So there’s a strange phenomenon from the first generation of the Internet where the most important asset class that’s been created is data —and we don’t control it or own it.
  • individuals taking back their identity through your own personal avatar
  • The financial services industry
  • antiquated
  • a complicated machine that does a simple thing
  • settlement
  • an opportunity to profoundly change the nature of the entire industry. The Starbucks transaction should be instant.
  • At the heart of it, the financial services industry moves value.
  • so this is both an existential threat to the financial services industry and an historic opportunity.
  • Banks trade on trust
  • Within the decade, every single financial asset, which is really just a contract
  • will all move to a blockchain-based format
  • In the accounting world, a lot of firms rely on costly audits to drive their profits
  • With blockchain, you could have a third entry time-stamped in a distributed ledger that could be acceptable to any relevant stakeholders from regulators to shareholders, giving you a perfect record of the truth and thus the financial health of an organization.
  • Nobel-winning economist Ronald Coase argued that firms exist because transaction costs in an open market are greater than the cost of doing things inside the boundaries of the corporation.
  • four costs — of search, coordination, contracting and establishing trust
  • Blockchains will profoundly affect all of these.
  • you can now synthesize trust on an open platform and people who’ve never met can trust each other to do certain things. So this results in a whole number of new business models
  • It turns out the Internet of Everything needs a Ledger of Everything, because a lightbulb buying power from your neighbor’s solar panel definitely won’t use banks or the Visa network
  • Right now, governments take tax revenue from corporations, individuals, licenses and so on. All of that can change. We can first of all have transparency in a radical sense because sunlight is the best disinfectant. Secondly, we can open up governments in a different sense of sharing data.
  • governments can enable self-organization to occur in society where companies, civil society organizations, NGOs, academics, foundations, and government agencies and individual citizens ought to use this data to self-organize and create what we used to call services or forms of public value. The third one has to do with the relationship between citizens and their governments.
  • There are more opportunities to create government by the people for the people
  • Electronic voting won’t be delivered by traditional server technology because it won’t be trusted by citizens
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Welcome to the new reputation economy (Wired UK) - 1 views

  • banks take into account your online reputation alongside traditional credit ratings to determine your loan
  • headhunters hire you based on the expertise you've demonstrated on online forums
  • reputation data becomes the window into how we behave, what motivates us, how our peers view us and ultimately whether we can or can't be trusted.
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  • At the heart of Movenbank is a concept call CRED.
  • The difference today is our ability to capture data from across an array of digital services. With every trade we make, comment we leave, person we "friend", spammer we flag or badge we earn, we leave a trail of how well we can or can't be trusted.
  • An aggregated online reputation having a real-world value holds enormous potential
  • peer-to-peer marketplaces, where a high degree of trust is required between strangers; and where a traditional approach based on disjointed information sources is currently inefficient, such as recruiting.
  • opportunity to reinvent the way people found jobs through online reputation
  • "It's not about your credit, but your credibility," King says.
  • But this wealth of data raises an important question -- who owns our reputation? Shouldn't our hard-earned online status be portable? If you're a SuperHost on Airbnb, shouldn't you be able to use that reputation to, say, get a loan, or start selling on Etsy?
  • "People are currently underusing their networks and reputation," King says. "I want to help people to understand and build their influence and reputation, and think of it as capital they can put to good use."
  • Social scientists have long been trying to quantify the value of reputation.
  • Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers monitored brain activity
  • "The implication of our study is that different types of reward are coded by the same currency system." In other words, our brains neurologically compute personal reputation to be as valuable as money.
  • Personal reputation has been a means of making socioeconomic decisions for thousands of years. The difference today is that network technologies are digitally enabling the trust we used to experience face-to-face -- meaning that interactions and exchanges are taking place between total strangers.
  • Trust and reputation become acutely important in peer-to-peer marketplaces such as WhipCar and Airbnb, where members are taking a risk renting out their cars or their homes.
  • When you are trading peer-to-peer, you can't count on traditional credit scores. A different measurement is needed. Reputation fills this gap because it's the ultimate output of how much a community trusts you.
  • Welcome to the reputation economy, where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history.
  • Presently, reputation data doesn't transfer between verticals.
  • A wave of startups, including Connect.Me, TrustCloud, TrustRank, Legit and WhyTrusted, are trying to solve this problem by designing systems that correlate reputation data. By building a system based on "reputation API" -- a combination of a user's activity, ratings and reviews across sites -- Legit is working to build a service that gives users a score from zero to 100. In trying to create a universal metric for a person's trustworthiness, they are trying to "become the credit system of the sharing economy", says Jeremy Barton, the 27-year-old San Francisco-based cofounder of Legit.
  • His company, and other reputation ventures, face some big challenges if they are to become, effectively, the PayPal of trust. The most obvious is coming up with algorithms that can't be easily gamed or polluted by trolls. And then there's the critical hurdle of convincing online marketplaces not just to open up their reputation vaults, but create a standardised format for how they frame and collect reputation data. "We think companies will share reputation data for the same reasons banks give credit data to credit bureaux," says Rob Boyle, Legit cofounder and CTO. "It is beneficial for one company to give up their slice of reputation data if in return they get access to the bigger picture: aggregated data from other companies."
  • PeerIndex, Kred and Klout,
  • are measuring social influence, not reputation. "Influence measures your ability to drag someone into action,"
  • "Reputation is an indicator of whether a person is good or bad and, ultimately, are they trustworthy?"
  • Early influence and reputation aggregators will undoubtedly learn by trial and error -- but they will also face the significant challenge of pioneering the use of reputation data in a responsible way. And there's a challenge beyond that: reputation is largely contextual, so it's tricky to transport it to other situations.
  • Many of the ventures starting to make strides in the reputation economy are measuring different dimensions of reputation.
  • reputation is a measure of knowledge
  • a measure of trust
  • a measure of propensity to pay
  • measure of influence
  • Reputation capital is not about combining a selection of different measures into a single number -- people are too nuanced and complex to be distilled into single digits or binary ratings.
  • It's the culmination of many layers of reputation you build in different places that genuinely reflect who you are as a person and figuring out exactly how that carries value in a variety of contexts.
  • The most basic level is verification of your true identity
  • reliability and helpfulness
  • do what we say we are going to do
  • respect another person's property
  • trusted to pay on time
  • we will be able to perform a Google- or Facebook-like search and see a picture of a person's behaviour in many different contexts, over a length of time. Slivers of data that have until now lived in secluded isolation online will be available in one place. Answers on Quora, reviews on TripAdvisor, comments on Amazon, feedback on Airbnb, videos posted on YouTube, social groups joined, or presentations on SlideShare; as well as a history and real-time stream of who has trusted you, when, where and why. The whole package will come together in your personal reputation dashboard, painting a comprehensive, definitive picture of your intentions, capabilities and values.
  • idea of global reputation
  • By the end of the decade, a good online reputation could be the most valuable currency in your possession.
Kurt Laitner

Graphene supercapacitors: Small, cheap, energy-dense replacements for batteries. - Slat... - 0 views

  • Then something unexpectedly amazing happened. Maher El-Kady, a graduate student in chemist Richard Kaner’s lab at UCLA, wondered what would happen if he placed a sheet of graphite oxide—an abundant carbon compound—under a laser. And not just any laser, but a really inexpensive one, something that millions of people around the world already have—a DVD burner containing a technology called LightScribe, which is used for etching labels and designs on your mixtapes. As El-Kady, Kaner, and their colleagues described in a paper published last year in Science, the simple trick produced very high-quality sheets of graphene, very quickly, and at low cost.
  •  
    old article I thought I had shared, anybody care to try this out? LOL
Francois Bergeron

The Rise of the Service Robot - 2 views

  • Some experts believe that service robots will change the world the same way the personal computer did 30 years ago.
  • The field is relatively new, so the definition of “service robot” is still up for discussion, but it is generally considered to be a robot that is not installed in an industrial setting.
  • New sensors and processes that provide real-time environment monitoring in 3-D must not only prevent collisions during manipulation but also identify and learn new objects. The increasing use of service robots in everyday environments ultimately calls for new user interfaces that can take into account the full range of communications channels.
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  • “The biggest challenge is to cope with the dynamic and unpredictable environment of service robots,” Fischer said. “Compared to industrial robots, the environment is totally undefined
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