On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, John Verdon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Charles,
> thank you for the comments. I think you understand most of what I > tried to communicate. > The important thing I intended to say, is not that anything can be > money, but that money (as essentially a number system) can be used to > represent any subject value. There is no need to get rid of money, > there is only need to provide better access to it (in its function as > a mean of exchange) as the result of the aggregated subjective > perception of the value of individual and group contribution (as > opposed to need to sell our labour to a particular employer). > Here again, the transformation of money from concrete object to > digital bits bring an unprecedented emergent new capability - to but > extra bits on the bits. That is to add information to the bits that > represent money/value. Creating smart money. So that not only is > subjective perception of value scored by all, but extra information is > added on. So for instance should a dollar earned speculating on > millions of dollars on the stock market actually be worth the same as > a dollar earned digging a ditch, or teaching a child? All sorts of > contextual information allowing more ways to compare and assess value > can be added to digital money. This reminds me of something I've been thinking about lately. During the height of the dotcom boom, I was distressed at the growth of what I considered "vapourware" employment, where people were doing things, and apparently getting paid for it, somehow, when the job descriptions didn't contain any words I would regard as concrete, referring to any actual actions having a direct connection to the world. It seemed to me that these jobs were sort of makework, and wouldn't exist if people didn't think that they somehow were required to play the game of "work and get paid" even when there was not a lot of work needing to be done. A lot of these jobs were associated with the proliferation of websites of dubious value, and the great dotcom shakeout seemed to at least in part corroborate my suspicions. Others, however, were simply an adjunct to the huge growth of the service sector, being apparently occupations whose purpose, when scrutinized closely enough, was to provide a means for clients to feel better about themselves, or learn to play well with others. Well, value is what people are willing to play for, so if people with more money than they know what to do with are happy to pay to employ professional sycophants, or playground monitors for their workplace, I guess that means those are valid occupations. But what has really got me fascinated lately, and I confess I haven't quite worked out how I should form the connection that I'm certain exists between this and the situation I described above, is the development of jobs in the curious space which is the interface between the real world and the fictional virtual cyberworlds of online games. This is a whole new benchmark in vapourware. People who now are logging on to online Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games - MMORPGs - by the _tens_ _of_ _millions_, are willing to pay substantial amounts of real money to be provided with pre-developed identities in these virtual worlds, rather than spend the time in the games to acquire the "brownie points" themselves. It seems to me there are a large number of sociology graduate theses in this phenomenon. It is providing employment for boiler rooms full of third world 21st century technopeasants sitting at banks of computers playing MMORPGs all day long, to acquire virtual "goods" which can then be sold to developed world players who can then spend their leisure hours guiding their virtual characters around the gamespace in the style to which their realworld wealth leads them to expect they should be accustomed. Now, the developers of the games created a series of virtual activities which the players are intended to navigate in order to gain status for their characters, and this was originally conceived to be a major part of the gameplay, so it is to say the least baffling to me why someone would first pay for the game, then pay for the online gameserver connection, in order to play the game, and then pay someone to do the major part of the gameplay for them, just so that they can avoid the experience, even in a virtual world, of being a lower class, underprivileged person. Bizarre... The most interesting aspect of this activity, I suppose, in connection with the current discussion, is in those interactions where the "work" results in accumulation of virtual currency in the game world, which is then purchased by the players, thus establishing an exchange rate between real and virtual currency, and thus by extension establishing real economic value for any activity in the virtual world from which game currency can be generated. Anyway, I continue to wrestle with attempts to extrapolate these trends into the future, trying to imagine how the economy operates when a substantial fraction of available manhours are expended in activities with, in some cases, explicitly no impact whatsoever on the real world, yet result in real compensation. I don't know whether this is an auspicious trend, or pathological, or neither. -Pete _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
