“Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it.” -C. Wright Mills

Douglas Rushkoff recently presented a fifteen minute talk entitled Radical Abundance. The basic premise is intriguing. The introduction of government monopolized currency in the Middle Ages was a technique for keeping power in the hands of the aristocracy, since it gave them control over the relative scarcity of currency and thus the ability to extract interest without working. Parallel to this, current efforts to manage the internet economy (e.g., DRM) seek to maintain control in the hands of an oligopoly that extracts value from the real producers by copying open source or employing crowd sourcing. Instead, Rushkoff argues, we should introduce new “currency” for peer-to-peer exchange based on (I think) labor time, a new OS for the economy. Essentially, he wants to reintroduce electronic bartering based on  labor value rather than exchange value. He directs the listener to superfluid.biz as an example.

Interesting to think that we might be able to rebuild our economy from the ground up through sophisticated electronic, peer-to-peer bartering.