Economic Frictions (and Capital Letters?)

Not sure what they have against capital letters but headmap: augmented capitalism raises some good points about the potential lessening of economic frictions in a digital economy:

money was predicated on spatial constraints

the range of currencies is infinite and the money is intermediary between them

hats are currency, butter is currency,

they get filtered through money (so that ..hats can buy butter at another place and time)

the friction that transportation and distribution and communication among those who would exchange created the right climate for money

the internet is doing some disturbing things

it is creating currencies and ecoonomies with no money intermediary

link economies, peer two peer file sharing economies and software development and exchange economies

this seems to suggest that in the absence of friction money makes less and less sense

in fact in the current climate many things are starting to make less and less sense

and these network economic anomalies will soon slip into the real world

destroying huge industries based on friction difficulty seperateness and centralisation

as exchange without money becomes more efficient and reliable

money won't disappear but will have to start living in parallel with vibrant, aggressive efficient parallel economic forces

the moves towards hardware level copyright controls and crippling copyright legislation

seem more and more like attempts to artificially introduce friction into a system that by its nature is able to remove it entirely

there seems to be the fear that money itself may be on the verge of collapse and that only a radical lockdown can save a civilisation with money at its heart

capitalism is being augmented at a frightening speed

Posted by William Blaze at April 25, 2003 05:23 PM | TrackBack