Subtitles by Martien van Steenbergen. cc-by-nc-sa Aardbron.nl
…that actually restored my faith in Twitter…
after yesterday. I'm pleased again.
And now we have Twitter sensors answers and…
I don't have worry about getting embarrassed.
Okay, 15 minutes, 14:43.
I am here to tell you that the operating system…
for money is obsolete.
It is optimized for a different era than the era we are living in today.
It is old and it is incompatible with,
not just Web 2.0, but with an internetted world.
The money we use, in software terms…
is a legacy system to a very particular moment in history.
If we understand that moment in history,
then we can understand how to make a better kind of money,
and, I would argue, get very rich in doing so.
Before the stuff that we call money…
was invented, in the renaissance,
before this single monopoly currency was instituted,
there were many currencies in operation at once.
So if you lived in a small town —this is late middle ages, Europe,
you would have your own currency, in that town,
and you would have the more universal currency of the empire,
or the early nation that you were living in.
So you had more than one financial operating system you can use.
Today, basically, you wake up, we know what money is.
It's like you woke up, and every single computer in the world…
had Microsoft Windows 3.1 and that's it.
If there was never anything else,
you wouldn't even know that there was anything else.
But these people had different money for different things.
They had local currencies which were abundance-based currencies.
These were based on grain, usually.
You'd make grain in the field, bring it to the grain store,
he would weigh it, to store it, and he would give you a receipt…
for the amount of grain that you had brought him.
You could use this receipt to buy and sell things.
You would tear a little piece off and you would buy…
chickens, goats, shoes, whatever you needed.
This was a currency, actually, that didn't grow over time.
This is a currency that lost value over time.
Each year you would lose a certain amount of grain…
due to spoilage or rats or something else.
The grain store had to be paid.
So every year he would reissue that same currency,
it would be devalued.
So the bias of this currency was not towards saving.
The bias of this currency, this particular medium, was towards spending.
People did spend. People were actually getting really wealthy.
I know we like to think of the middle ages…
as just this universally bad thousand years.
But there were a few good things happening in the late middle ages, too.
One of them was this massive creation of wealth that started to happen around 1100.
It was a big problem for the people who were already rich.
If you were from a big aristocracy…
or if you were from one of the big aristocratic families,
or if you were an early sort of proto monarch, or a failing futile lord…
you looked at the rising middle class,
the bourgeois, and you are upset by this.
Because if people were getting wealthier,
it ment you are staying the same, were getting poorer.
So what they did was, they changed the operating system of money.
Philip the Fair is a great example in France,
one of the guys who did this very quickly.
What they did or said is “All local currencies are illegal.
Instead, you've got to use coin of the realm.”
—which is central bank issued treasury mark-imprinted currency.
This, rather than being an abundance-based currency,
is going to be a scarcity-based currency.
Why do they want to use a scarcity-based currency?
Bechause the monarch wants to be able to lend money into existence.
Now it all goes through him.
Now everybody competes for the currency that he issues…
between each other, and he has got as much money as he needs.
The way the monarch, the way the aristrocacy…
then learned to make money was by lending money.
The money that we use today was created —and this is not a conspiracy,
it is just an idea that they had—
the money we use today was created so that rich people could…
stay rich by being rich rather than doing anything.
That is what it is for.
So now we live in an economy where…
the sustenance of the economy itself is dependent on massive growth.
Growth at the rate of interest.
Because if you are going to borrow money, and now you want to pay it back in interest,
where do you get the other money?
You are going to have to borrow that too.
So the people lending the money end up getting richer.
The people actually creating value end up getting poorer.
Then we make corporations. What were they for?
Corporations were really optimized to support this currency system.
That is what they are for.
The only values that corporations have is to extract value.
To do it fast and complete.
As long as you do that, it is all good.
This was the value of our society right through the industrial age.
We had a scarce currency. We had scare markets.
We had big companies trying to extract value out of people…
and out of places as efficiently as possible.
What is the problem with any of that?
The problem with that, is what happens if you get something that is abundant?
How do you deal with something that you can't make scarce?
What would happen if we developed a renewable energy source?
If you develop a renewable energy source, you are screwed.
Because a renewable energy source is not optimized to that operating system.
A renewable energy source means that we just can share this thing and have it?
What happens to all that money that is invested in the oil industry?
What happens to that artificial scarcity?
This is the kind of thing that Norbert Wiener was thinking about…
when cybernetics, when computers were first coming around.
He started to imagine…
What would happen if we have robots out there to do our farming for us?
Do we just get to sit and relax?
How would our economy be able to cope with the world in which everything ends up being done?
Computers at the beginning, networking at the beginning,
seemed to create some of these terrific problems for us.
Computers and networking changes the centrality of value creation…
because now with a $1000, $500, now with a $200 laptop, you can actually make something…
that creates value for your self, and other people.
You are also able, through the net, in theory, as a medium,
to exchange value directly with one another…
rather than through a centralized currency, rather than through the bank.
Now you could do what we would call peer-to-peer value exchange.
That is sort of what E-bay figured out on a certain level.
Instead, what we have ended up doing is using the internet…
to try to extend the corporate industrial model…
to somehow extract more value out of people, to shrink time…
and to optimize human beings to technology…
since technology is really more compatible with the values of efficiency…
than with all the other human values.
So we end up in this early internet state, which is where we are at now,
with a lot of smart, smart people, writing new laws of the new economy…
and new ideas on how the business is going to happen.
These are always positioned as revolutionary new ideas for how to do business in the networked age,
when what are actually are, is extremely reactionary stances…
on how can traditional companies and traditional corporations…
maintain stranglehold over the economy,
even though that there is this vastly liberative technology out there?
You get Chris Anderson's ‘Free’, which is about “Oh, everything is free, so what do you do?”
Well, you have got to leverage the few things that are not free.
Now you have got a right for free, you've got to do your articles free,
you've got to do all that, and then talk for money.
Then, if you come here and you do not talk for money,
you are leveraging that talk to sell this other thing.
But what do you do when you are leveraging everything you do to sell everything else…
and everything is just leveraged? Then it is all free.
It is the kind of free that they talked about in the free market.
The idea of the world bank will lend money to a country, don't worry.
Just take this money and open your markets to us. Which means what?
It is sort of like Google coming onto your website. Now you're open and free to Google ads.
Even here—Tim O'Reilly and John Batelle, smarter than me—
even their Web Cubed idea, which smarter than I would come up with myself,
still, what is the conclusion of Web Cubed?
It is that the power will be won by the companies who can index…
or control the indexes through which we do everything.
Nothing we do or create matters. The only thing that matters now…
is the ability to put an umbrella around all this stuff that we are doing for free.
And I think we are mistaken what is free for what costs.
Our work, our labour, is not free.
Open source and crowd sourcing are not the same things.
Open source is a bunch of people getting together to try to do something. Crowd sourcing is…
a company figuring out how to get a bunch of people do something for it.
If I am giving all my writing and this and that, and I am just giving it for free…
to everyone who is blogging about it, and everybody has got their Google adsense,
then we are all working for Google.
The only thing that is actually free, or at least free-er,
are the means through which I can deliver stuff.
I can deliver stuff without some of the corporate mediation of before.
But with this false notion of free in our heads…
we end up living in a value system…
that insists that everything we do must be open source and Comments On.
How dare you put up a blog post and you put Comments Off?! Oh!
Everything you write, everything you say, everything you think, everything you feel…
is supposed to be out there. Supposed to be free!
Try even putting a link to something DRM —Digital Rights Management—
on Boing Boing and you get in trouble.
Because it goes against the philosophy —you shouldn't protect.
Everything I do is yours.
Not even just yours. Everything I do is ‘the hives'.
This is what leads ultimately to copying, to a society of copying,
to no originality, to a sort of DJ-ing of culture.
This is why we haven't had new music in 20 years…
and why the biggest TV movie we had was The Prisoner, which was a remake. -blergh-
Even in the open source movement, what did the open source movement give us so far?
Copies of things. Maybe better copies, but copies.
We got a copy of UNIX, a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica, a copy of Netscape.
Copy protection really means what? Protecting me from al these copies of things.
Where is the Creative Commons Law?
Where is Creative Commons License so that I can say…
Okay, you can have it for free but at least you just have to ask me for it.
Free if you can send me an e-mail. I just want to give it to you, rather than to ‘it’.
As a result of all this freedom, the abundance of creative material,
the abundance of genuine creative output is declining.
We are actually getting the scarce market place demanded by our legacy currency system.
The same way the early renaissance got scarcity of labour…
by killing off half the people with the plague.
The alternative— and we got two-and-a-half minutes to get it—
The alternative is two things.
One is the development of a digital culture that actually respects the labour of individuals.
My writing is my writing. It is not a medium for Google ads.
Second, the creation of new modes of currency based in abundance rather than scarcity.
I am talking about genuine alternative digital currencies.
The original PayPal dream. Before bankers went to government and said:
“You have to regulate them like a bank. This is illegal. Don't let anyone else do it.”
This is not nuts.
Twenty years ago we were all telling —probably if you were alive…
you were telling people they were going to be using e-mail some day…
and they all laughed you out of the room.
Amazon was a big deal. Craigslist was a big deal. E-bay was a big deal.
This is actually easier and less of a stretch, and actually needed.
I contend, the next big thing, if there is a next big thing—it's a lot of small things actually.
The people who are going to make the next big amount of money are the people…
who create genuine alternative electronic currencies and the means of…
peer-to-peer exchange that do not involve cash.
Cash is artificially scarce. Cash is been taken away, it is out of the system.
Cash has lost its utility value…
as it has been sucked out into investment capital and into the speculative marketplace.
The only real competition to a Google universe,
and nothing necessarily wrong with the Google universe, but let's have a few alternatives.
The only real possible competition to Google…
and their economy of foe openess… would be… peer-to-peer exchange.
There is a few versions out there. They are primitive.
There is Time Dollars out there for people in communities locally to try to do it.
Itex is an interesting one for business-to-business kind of barter.
There is a more advanced one I have been looking at, called Superfluid.
Check that one out, Superfluid.biz. Which is kind of the next generation for…
both peer-to-peer and business-to-business exchange…
with an alternative currency called Quids.
I don't believe we are suffering from an abundance of creativity.
Just an abundance of productivity, efficiency, and openness.
If Web Cubed leads to aggregators and indexes,
then peer-to-peer —genuine peer-to-peer…
would lead to bottom-up value creation.
I don't think this next era in the internet is about…
scaling up anymore. I think it's about…
figuring out how to exchange value…
instead of extracting value.
We are at a crossroads.
Right now we have the ability to optimize…
our systems, our technologies, and our currency to humans,
rather than optimizing humans to them.
I implore you to do that.
I think you will be happy and rich as a result. Thank you.
Subtitles by Martien van Steenbergen. cc-by-nc-sa Aardbron.nl