In Art we Trust
In Art We Trust The Kunst Reserve Bank was one of a number of projects presented at MoneyLab a conference held last month in Amsterdam that launched the latest research thread from the Institute of Network Cultures. which is addressing "digital experiments with revenue models, payment systems and currencies..." But not everyone who presented was on (digital) message among those who took a defiantly tangible approach to the money question was Ron Peperkamp, artist and CEO and brain-lord behind the Kunst Reserve Bank. As so often Warhol paved the way long ago for a knowingly cynical take on the special status attributed to art when he declared that "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art." In the 1962 Warhol took the art of making money, literally, with the Dollar Bill series of silk screes prints on canvas entitled 200 One Dollar Bills. Forty-seven years later, in November 2009, the same piece was expected to fetch between $8 million and $12 million, in the event it reached a record $43.8 million Not many artists have been able to trump Warhol's position of uber-capitalist and cynical realist of contemporary art though many have tried. Just maybe Kunst Reserve Bank might be an unwitting contender for the crown. One of the real achievements of this art Bank is that it is not immediately obvious whether it is a genuinely radical experiment, a brilliantly conceived Ponzi scheme or an interesting but conceptually flawed piece of conceptual art. Even if it is (as I suspect the last of the three) it is still a remarkable achievement in part because unlike most artistic experiments the artists have created the possibility of failure (bankruptcy) as the core of the project. It is thus a genuine experiment. It benefits from its fatal flaw and thus has the qualities of its defects. To begin with the bank actually exists as a physical entity with the three basic components required for some of the economic first principles of primitive accumulation or hoarding of value. They have a teller, a safe, and a mint. With this mint they create the coins. It is a fairly basic but well thought through and rigerous process. Every month an artist, some well known others less Every month an artist, are selected to design 4 coins. and every coin is issued for one week only in exactly one hundred copies. The offer is only available for one week. The Art Reserve bank thus creates coins which have an artistic value and are issued in a limited amount. As this is not legal tender (in other words its not really money) how does the purchaser trust the value of these coins ? Because, and this is what gives the project momentum, you can go back to the bank and you can exchange your coins at any point for the original cost with an annual rate of 10% a year non-compound interest. One would have thought that this would make the incentive to return the coins is very high after all the 10% rate of interest outstrips and actual retail bank. But Peperkamp and his associates reason the incentive to keep the coins is also very high because they may reason that as a piece of art its value may appreciate at an even faster rate. So far very few coins were returned. Though the coins are showing up on e-bay with an asking price of 150 euro. When the artists observed this they decided to integrate this into the project. So if you visit the site you will find their 'dealing room' where the coins are traded among the public. >From this process they estimate the daily fluctuating market value of the >coins. Every morning, like the Libor exchange rate, they cut of the top and bottom bids to arrive at an estimate of the actuall trade value of the currency. This means that as good little capitalists the exchange rate of the art currency is set by the market. So what security is there against a large number of holders of the currency arriving to demand their money back? The answer is that for every 100 euros that people pay for the coins 10 euros is put in the safe. This represents their reserve capital. 90% of the income goes into maintaining project (the costs of minting the coins and other elements of the infrastructure are quite high). So it’s a gamble that the "intrinsic value" of the coins will outweigh the impulse to make a quick profit and convert the value of the coins back into “real money”. If there were to be an actual 2088 style Northern Rock run on the bank they would go bankrupt. There would be no bail out. Real banks have only a capital reserve of 3% which makes the Kunst Reserve Bank triple A rated and ensures, Peperkamp jokingly declared, "it conforms to the Basel norms to at least 2040 ". In many ways this is one of the most interesting aspects of the project as a mirror of the fractional banking system as it currently exists. A reminder that the bank doesn't store our money in their safe. The final dimension of cunning that accompa
Computers in Society's Future, W.H. Ware, Rand Corp, 1971
(ran across this brief doc -- some of you might be interested. It's a tiny bit prescient of the current situation...) Cheers, John COMPUTERS IN SOCIETY'S FUTURE (1) W.H. Ware The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California I very much appreciated the opportunity of speaking last year at the Kingston Conference on Information and Personal Privacy.(2) I also appreciate that opportunity to talk again about essentially the same subject: computers in our society. I feel very much indebted to Canada and its professional and learned societies for stimulating me twice in slightly over a year to organize my thoughts on this matter. I probably would not have done so otherwise, given the normal press of business. Also, I'm getting very fond of the idea of coming to Canada every springtime. Today, I would like to 'describe' briefly some of the reasons why the computer has attained its present position relative to society and to suggest ways in which it is already touching the life of each individual -- in some cases very extensively, sometimes for good, sometimes with ominous overtones. I want to indicate why I think there is a problem, and if my discussion is persuasive, I will succeed in making you realize that the problem is real -- and is here now. Let's begin by asking the question: Why is it that information has become so increasingly important to society? Some of man's needs increase roughly with his numbers. Food and clothing arc obvious examples; approximately twice as many people will require twice as much food. Other needs, too, increase with the number of societal units. For example, as the number of families increase, so does the demand for housing and household appliances. But the information needs or society are multiplying much more rapidly. Take, for example, your own case: How many credit cards do you have? insurance policy accounts? bank or other financial accounts? magazine subscriptions? Do they number fifteen? twenty-five? fifty? Each one of these represents an information packet of some kind that has to be dealt with. Thus, any one of us is responsible for increasing the information needs of society by a few tenfold. Even if the need for information is proportional to the number of individuals, it has a very large multiplicative factor. One might even argue that information need is related to all the possible interactions that can take place among societal units. If so, society's information requirements are increasing according to some combinatorial function. Whatever the case, society has created a vigorously expanding consumer market for information. I'd like to emphasize that society's size alone is sufficient to drive the problem. You all know the classic statement about the telephone company: If the telephone company had not invented automatic switching and direct-distance dialing, then every woman would be required for a long-distance operator. Therefore, as industry supplies society with services and products, it must also automate in order to deal with the information that these services and products generate and imply. Consider the notion of an "information vector," which is some quantity of information that describes something about one of us personally, about something we do or about some interaction between one of us and another member of society. In this context, the number of information vectors needed to control, to govern, and to describe society and its members is increasing at a staggering rate. The number increases not only with the size of society but also with the affluence of society; as we acquire more and more disposable wealth, we want and do more and more things. Where does the computer fit into all of this and, especially, why has the digital computer become so important? Because it's all we have. It is the only technology that we possess that can store, retrieve, and manipulate data of any kind in very general ways. Let me point out in this context that the communications art, for air its usefulness, for all its advanced state of technology, is simply a transportation system for information. Thus, while communications technology provides us with a means of moving information from place to place, it does not process it. It is computer technology that enables man to really manipulate and process information in either simple or involved ways, and to derive new information from the original. Digital computer technology provides us with the tool we need to accommodate our growing information requirements; it lets us do the things we have to do as a society, economically and efficiently. The result is that we are today experiencing an almost chaotic proliferation of systems that deal with information about people, and that exploit the computer to do it. To put this in perspective, let me remind you that the computing business is only about twenty years old. In the 1950s, the industry really go
NETmundial: A Global Stakeholder Meeting on Future of Internet Governance
Dear nettime, Brazilian Internet Steering Committee in partnership with /1Net, a forum that gathers international entities of various stakeholders involved with internet governance is organizing ?NETmundial? at Grand Hyatt Hotel, Sao Paulo, Brazil, on April 23 and 24, 2014. Ministerial representatives from 12 countries (Argentina, Brazil, France, Ghana, Germany, India, Indonesia, South Africa, South Korea, Tunisia, Turkey and United States of America) along with 12 members of the multi-stakeholder international community participating in the meeting will primarily focus on: crafting internet governance principles and proposing a roadmap for further evolution of internet governance ecosystem. So far there have been a total of 187 submissions expressing divergent views, some in support and some in opposition. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has been involved in research on internet governance issues such as IT Act, privacy, and freedom of speech and expression. As part of its research to enable productive discussions of the critical internet governance issues at the meeting and elsewhere CIS has published the following outputs: Who Governs the Internet? Implications for Freedom and National Security (by Sunil Abraham, Yojana, April 4, 2014). Principles for Internet Governance: NETmundial 2014 ? What do the Contributions Reveal? (by Geetha Hariharan, April 21, 2014). NETmundial and Suggestions for IANA Administration (by Smarika Kumar, April 22, 2014). NETmundial - Comparing Appearance of Fifty Most Frequent Words (by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, April 22, 2014). NETmundial - Contributions by Countries of Origin (by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, April 22, 2014). NETmundial - Contributions by Types of Organisation (by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, April 22, 2014). NETmundial - Which Countries Have Not Contributed to NETmundial? (by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, April 22, 2014). NETmundial - Which Governments Have Not Contributed to NETmundial? (by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, April 22, 2014). NETmundial - Word Clouds of Contributions by Types of Organisation (by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, April 23, 2014). Accountability of ICANN (by Smarika Kumar, April 23, 2014). NETmundial Roadmap: Defining the Roles of Stakeholders in Multistakeholderism (by Jyoti Panday, April 23, 2014). NETmundial Day 0 (by Achal Prabhala, April 23, 2014). NETmundial Day 1 (by Achal Prabhala, April 24, 2014). Brazil passes Marco Civil; the US-FCC Alters its Stance on Net Neutrality (by Geetha Hariharan, April 24, 2014). CIS is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities. The following individuals are associated with this research, and can be reached at their e-mails or phone numbers given below: Sunil Abraham (su...@cis-india.org, 91-9611100817) Sumandro Chattapadhyay (m...@ajantriks.net, 078381 63651) Smarika Kumar (smar...@altlawforum.org) Achal Prabhala (aprabh...@gmail.com, 91-9845884149) Pranesh Prakash (pran...@cis-india.org) Geetha Hariharan (gee...@cis-india.org, 91-8860360717) Jyoti Panday (jy...@cis-india.org, 91-9717526223) Thanks and regards Sunil Abraham Executive Director Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore, India # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
