This page is currently only links. ---- [http://www.shirky.com/writings/information_price.html Shirky: The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't Get Up] ---- [http://www.shirky.com/writings/pretend_vs_real.html Pretend vs. Real Economy] by Clay Shirky.
The internet that the stock market has been so in love with (call it the "Pretend Internet" for short) is all upside -- it enables companies to cut costs and compete without respect to geography. The internet that affects the way existing goods and services are sold, on the other hand (call it the "Real Internet"), forces companies to cut profit margins, and exposes them to competitors without respect to geography.
Its just that most of the value is concentrated in the hands of the consumer. Every time someone uses the net to shop on price (cars, plane tickets, computers, stock trades) the money they didn't spend is now available for other things.
That saved money eventually goes to producers as well. The economy is a closed system. ---- [http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_2/delong/index.html Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy] by J. Bradford DeLong and A. Michael Froomkin
The case for the market system has always rested on three implicit pillars, three features of the way that property rights and exchange worked: Call the first feature excludability: the ability of sellers to force consumers to become buyers, and thus to pay for whatever goods and services they use. Call the second feature rivalry: a structure of costs in which two cannot partake as cheaply as one, in which producing enough for two million people to use will cost at least twice as many of society's resources as producing enough for one million people to use. Call the third feature transparency: the ability of individuals to see clearly what they need and what is for sale, so that they truly know just what they wish to buy.
---- [http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/ghosh/index.html Cooking pot markets: an economic model for the trade in free goods and services on the Internet by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh] * the other (than reputation) value you get from you internet publications is feedback (comments etc.) * you don't need to change the whole of the reputation to money to profit from it, you can circulate most of it inside of the reputation economy and only a small fraction use for money Citations:
Like money, reputation is a currency, i.e. a proxy, which greases the wheels of the economy. Monetary currency allows producers to sell to any consumer, without waiting for the right one to offer a needed product in barter exchange. Reputation encourages producers to seed the cooking-pot by providing immediate gratification to those who aren't prepared to pull things out of the pot just yet, or find nothing of great interest there, and keeps the fire lit.
The management of reputation is far too inefficient today to be a useful aspect of a working economy. Its semantics are poorly understood; moreover, there is nothing remotely akin to the technology that determines prices based on individual transactions in the monetary economy.
An economic model based on rational self-interest and the maximisation of utility requires the identification of what is useful - sources of value - as well as a method of expressing economic interaction.
The cooking-pot model shows the possibility of immense value being generated through the continuous interaction of people at a numbing speed, with an unprecedented flexibility and aptitude towards intangible, ambiguously defined goods and services. The cooking-pot market already exists, it is an image of what the Internet has already evolved into, calmly and almost surreptitiously, over the past couple of decades.
I don't agree with that:
It suggests that people do not only - or even largely - produce in order to improve their reputation, but as a more-than-fair payment for other goods - "ideas" - that they receive from the cooking-pot. The cooking-pot market is not barter, as it does not require individual transactions. It is based on the assumption that on the Net, you don't lose when you duplicate, so every contributor gets much more than a fair return in the form of combined contributions of others.
---- [http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/ The High-Tech Gift Economy by Richard Barbrook]
The design of the Net therefore assumes that intellectual property is technically and socially obsolete.
On the Net, enforcing copyright payments represents the imposition of scarcity on a technical system designed to maximise the dissemination of information.
The 'New Economy' is a Mixed Economy Following the implosion of the Soviet Union, almost nobody still believes in the inevitable victory of communism. On the contrary, large numbers of people accept that the Hegelian 'end of history' has culminated in American neo-liberal capitalism [24]. Yet, at exactly this moment in time, a really existing form of anarcho-communism is being constructed within the Net, especially by people living in the U. S. When they go on-line, almost everyone spends most of their time participating within the gift economy rather than engaging in market competition.
the gift economy and the commercial sector can only expand through mutual collaboration within cyberspace. The free circulation of information between users relies upon the capitalist production of computers, software and telecommunications. The profits of commercial Net companies depend upon increasing numbers of people participating within the hi-tech gift economy.
---- [http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/index.html The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net by Michael H. Goldhaber.] Abstract:
If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as "the information age" suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions - stars vs. fans - and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality.
But, just as in a money economy practically everyone must have some money to survive, so attention in some quantities is pretty much a prerequisite for survival, and attention is actually far more basic. This has always been the case for tiny babies. About the only thing they can get for themselves, or can give, is attention, which they begin to do within a half hour of birth, by smiling at those who smile at them. Without attention an infant could never satisfy its material needs, for food, warmth, fresh diapers, being burped, and so on.
As we move towards an attention economy in a fuller sense, the ethos of the old economy which makes it often bad taste or a poor strategy to consciously seek attention seems to be giving way to an attitude that makes having a lot of attention rather admirable and seeking it not at all to be frowned upon. Think of the sorts of things people are now willing to admit about themselves just to get on the likes of Oprah or the Sally Jesse Raphael show.
---- [http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content by Clay Shirky] Again an argument why there is no alternative to reputation economy. ---- [http://radio.weblogs.com/0114726/2002/11/19.html Occupational Spam]
Its the unwanted or uncessary email that clogs corporate mail systems, characterized by excessive CC'ing. Gartner and others estimate Occupational Spam to be 30% of email volume. The problem grows at pace with email, at 30% CAGR.
People do excessive CC to make sure the mail can be read by someone. That indeed is a case for other model of communication, where the message is open for everybody inside the organisation, but they don't receive anything preemptively. ---- [http://www.corante.com/many/20030901.shtml#51765 The Value of Latent Ties By Ross Mayfield] The latent ties are the ties with peoples you met in the past. They are latent - because you don't use them currently, but you can awoke them with some minimal effort. ---- [http://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia/wiki/wiki.cgi?TheAttentionEconomy">A comment to Goldhaber on ThoughtStorms]