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Actually, cryptocurrencies and DAOs were supposed to be socialism. The network was going to be owned by the people. The natural way to monetize open source.

Well, minus the whole one person one vote part, but still better than the surveillance capitalism of Big Tech companies funded by VCs buying shares, propping up their “free to lockin” model and dumping them on the public, who then made them extract rents forever to satisfy wall street earnings.

In my opinion, cryptos were seduced by the dark side of profit, and buyers failed to care that the emperor (blockchain) has no clothes (scalability).

I am focused on micropayments and local currencies with actual utility, and moving past blockchain. I am going to link to something — and historically this link was immediately knee-jerk perceived as “shilling a coin” but if you read, there is no coin, it’s just talking about how to ACTUALLY monetize open source projectsand joirnalism and other online content on the WEB using WEB technology instead of government enforcers: https://qbix.com/token




That's an interesting perspective. I've had this debate before with people, but i personally believe the way to build socialism (or anarchy, or communism or whatever you'd like to call it) is to abolish money and private property. Trying to game the system using its own axioms is not going to bring any major change, as history has shown.

Only by fundamentally changing the nature of relationships can we fundamentally change society overall.


Without money / currency, how do we reward people for their contributions to a project? How do you quantify the needs in "to each according to his need"? If one day a person wants to throw a party, how will they obtain the materials? But if they try to throw a party every single day, someone has to account for this, no?

As for private property, I have written about this before -- I believe that private property, like government, is an institution that relies on threats of force to be enforced, and restricts people... but that on small levels, it's good and as the level gets larger (owning 900 houses vs 9 houses) the courts should simply enforce it with less and less force: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=208


> Without money / currency, how do we reward people for their contributions to a project?

Do you find that most of your actions and interactions are "rewarded" with money? Even in your family or between friends? David Graeber had an interesting take on this topic [0]. Most of what we need to do is a reward in itself, or the reward is helping out other people, or scratching an itch.

The exceptions are tasks which nobody wants to do (eg. garbage collection -- on the streets obviously), in which case fairly sharing the task load sounds like the happiest path for all: it's easy not to care what kind of a dirty mess you create if you're not responsible for cleaning it up. It's also worth noting that such necessary tasks which nobody wants to do are the most precarious jobs in capitalist society: if you insist on money to reward people for their contribution to society, i would argue the hardest/dirtiest jobs should be the most well paid.

> If one day a person wants to throw a party, how will they obtain the materials?

That's not an easy question because there's many parameters involved. First, does throwing a party require an abundance of materials? I've sometimes had amazing parties that mostly revolved around herbal teas and some music. If you insist on psychoactive substances, making your own alcohol isn't complex (but requires huge amounts of grains) and some other substances are even easier to accommodate (eg. weed/psilos). Baking your own pies and making fries out of whatever vegetables you have is arguably also very easy, especially when a lot of people who want to take part help out.

Now if you're not going full DIY, there's different ways to explore as a commune. Could be quotas such as if we're producing a certain amount, everybody gets a fair share to either use themselves or give away. Could be a participatory system: if you'd like some beer, just come every now and then help in the field and/or in the distillery and you'll be "rewarded" with whatever you've helped produce. Or it could be free access, which i think is a good strategy for most goods but a terrible choice for addictive substances.

I'm not claiming i have a definitive answer, but i'm concerned our wasteful capitalist economy resides in the least efficient timeline i can think of (if only, in terms of climate change and unequal access to resources), and i'm 100% certain we collectively have the capacity to find decent answers to all our troubles.

> on small levels, it's good and as the level gets larger (owning 900 houses vs 9 houses) the courts should simply enforce it with less and less force

Do you consider owning 9 houses to be reasonable. Owning one is fine, so is sharing other dwellings for spending vacation time. But owning more than one? In the name of what could you own a place in which you don't reside? Of course a person hopping from city to city would be an exception, but then you don't need to "own" anything beyond a room in a shared dwelling.

I found your article interesting, although in some different cultural contexts like from France the State does have an actual monopoly on violence and municipalities can't have their own armed forces (unless when run by a fascist like in Béziers but that's a different argument to have). I also don't think we have the same understanding of what a coop is (it means workers coop to me); i understand you mean some sort of homeowner coop? In any case, most coops i know of don't actually have a board and everyone is equally responsible for taking decisions. The exceptions are usually coops just in the name, as they've been coopted by the capitalist system as part of their "social economy" which is just feel-good capitalism.

I think in the end a key question is that of consent. If i don't consent how a commune is run, it's rather straightforward to be on my way to somewhere else (barring economic limitations due to the capitalist system). If i don't consent how a State is run, finding a new place and/or learning a new language can be a much higher barrier. Nothing prevents a federation from building consent from the bottom up, although federal governments (eg. Germany/USA) are just as tyrannical in their current forms.

I liked your article on education [1] and agree with some points. But i don't think tech is key to making a better education, and i'm certain putting locked-down devices in the hands of children is the wrong way to go about education: if the device was easily repairable and had the entire source code and datasheets published, it would be more suitable for educational purposes, including IT/electronics education. The issue that would remain is that of material waste and climate change, which is why i would personally argue we need less electronics around us (more lowtech approaches).

Thanks for sharing!

[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-yo...

[1] https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158


> Trying to game the system using its own axioms is not going to bring any major change, as history has shown.

The Free Software movement (and its offspring Open Source) has wrought rather major change by "gaming" the copyright / licensing system using its own axioms.




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