the end of money -- further thoughts
Jul. 9th, 2004 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI've previously written that I think money will cease to be an important thing in the near future and that not long after it will largely disappear from mainstream society. As the very essence of scarcity, it would fall away as a butterfly sheds its ugly pupal shell. But I have been wondering... might it just adapt?
A quick recap:
Value in our society is mostly assigned by scarcity. This is why money is historically based upon gold, because there is only so much of it and it can't be duplicated. Hitler tried to fix Germany's money problems by simply printing more of it, but that didn't work because it is the very scarcity of money that gives it its value. He sent his country spiralling into terrible inflation. Why does the value of an artist's works increase after their death? This little absurdity results from the sudden scarcity of their creations. Their intrinsic worth hasn't changed; just their availability. Mass production has been great for our society because it propagated previously scarce and expensive items to everybody cheaply. The lowered prices are generally ascribed to reduced production costs, but that isn't so. If the companies had been able to maintain high prices and a wider profit margin then they certainly would have, but money works by assigning value to scarcity. It has been a very useful system, but also riddled with absurdities and has made possible great evil, allowing some to control bottlenecks and restrict the flow of goods and knowledge and enslave others.
We live at a pivotal time in history: this scarcity-based system is changing. The information age allows pictures, music, books, and other electronically codable data to be easily duplicated at virtually no cost. The world can easily be swamped in humanity's greatest art, our most useful knowledge and insights completely independent of money. The open source movement has shown that simple cooperation of people on a grand scale where money plays no real part can produce results superior to those made by the richest and most powerful corporations. Increasingly, the best software products are free. The not-for-profit sector has become one of the largest and most effective parts of society, growing under our noses with hardly anybody realising it.
A new technology, just now beginning to grow, will take these first baby-steps to a gallop. It is the 3d printer. Currently is is expensive and only small numbers exist. They are often called 3d prototyping machines. A person or a company wants to see if their design for something is correct, so they send the 3d computer files to the 3d prototypers to create the object for real. NASA uses this technology for manufacturing a lot of parts because they often need just one of each; off the shelf items don't exist and conventional production would just be too expensive. Some companies are starting to consider using 3d printing in their production lines because it can save them a lot of money while enhancing their flexibility. Some researchers have shown how to use conductive plastics to incorporate electronics directly into such 3d printed objects. Not long ago the idea that everybody would soon be able to buy a cheap printer to produce high quality documents just sounded absurd. In light of that is it so difficult to imagine that we will all soon own small, cheap 3d printers? But this won't be just another in a long stream of useless consumer items because a 3d printer will be able to create other consumer items from data! And data is a fundamentally different thing. Soon after, somebody will circulate the design for how to use a 3d printer to create another 3d printer, and suddenly poverty is no longer an obstacle to owning almost any consumer good.
Similar things will happen later with food, energy, transport and land, but I won't go into them here. (I will if you are really interested.) Suffice it to say that scarcity will no longer function as a model for an economy. Thank heavens large (unofficial) parts of society are making preparations so that we will be able to take this in our stride.
In a world no longer ruled by scarcity, money could become simply an indicator of an object's true worth as judged by each person. Any person could create as much much money as they wished and send it to an admired designer. It would be an indicator of worth in the eyes of others. You couldn't buy anything with it, at least not in the normal sense, but there wouldn't be any need to buy things anymore. I know it sounds strange, but it is easier to understand if you replace the word "money" with the word "credit", in the sense of giving someone credit for a job well done.
What a wonderful future to look forward to.
A quick recap:
Value in our society is mostly assigned by scarcity. This is why money is historically based upon gold, because there is only so much of it and it can't be duplicated. Hitler tried to fix Germany's money problems by simply printing more of it, but that didn't work because it is the very scarcity of money that gives it its value. He sent his country spiralling into terrible inflation. Why does the value of an artist's works increase after their death? This little absurdity results from the sudden scarcity of their creations. Their intrinsic worth hasn't changed; just their availability. Mass production has been great for our society because it propagated previously scarce and expensive items to everybody cheaply. The lowered prices are generally ascribed to reduced production costs, but that isn't so. If the companies had been able to maintain high prices and a wider profit margin then they certainly would have, but money works by assigning value to scarcity. It has been a very useful system, but also riddled with absurdities and has made possible great evil, allowing some to control bottlenecks and restrict the flow of goods and knowledge and enslave others.
We live at a pivotal time in history: this scarcity-based system is changing. The information age allows pictures, music, books, and other electronically codable data to be easily duplicated at virtually no cost. The world can easily be swamped in humanity's greatest art, our most useful knowledge and insights completely independent of money. The open source movement has shown that simple cooperation of people on a grand scale where money plays no real part can produce results superior to those made by the richest and most powerful corporations. Increasingly, the best software products are free. The not-for-profit sector has become one of the largest and most effective parts of society, growing under our noses with hardly anybody realising it.
A new technology, just now beginning to grow, will take these first baby-steps to a gallop. It is the 3d printer. Currently is is expensive and only small numbers exist. They are often called 3d prototyping machines. A person or a company wants to see if their design for something is correct, so they send the 3d computer files to the 3d prototypers to create the object for real. NASA uses this technology for manufacturing a lot of parts because they often need just one of each; off the shelf items don't exist and conventional production would just be too expensive. Some companies are starting to consider using 3d printing in their production lines because it can save them a lot of money while enhancing their flexibility. Some researchers have shown how to use conductive plastics to incorporate electronics directly into such 3d printed objects. Not long ago the idea that everybody would soon be able to buy a cheap printer to produce high quality documents just sounded absurd. In light of that is it so difficult to imagine that we will all soon own small, cheap 3d printers? But this won't be just another in a long stream of useless consumer items because a 3d printer will be able to create other consumer items from data! And data is a fundamentally different thing. Soon after, somebody will circulate the design for how to use a 3d printer to create another 3d printer, and suddenly poverty is no longer an obstacle to owning almost any consumer good.
Similar things will happen later with food, energy, transport and land, but I won't go into them here. (I will if you are really interested.) Suffice it to say that scarcity will no longer function as a model for an economy. Thank heavens large (unofficial) parts of society are making preparations so that we will be able to take this in our stride.
In a world no longer ruled by scarcity, money could become simply an indicator of an object's true worth as judged by each person. Any person could create as much much money as they wished and send it to an admired designer. It would be an indicator of worth in the eyes of others. You couldn't buy anything with it, at least not in the normal sense, but there wouldn't be any need to buy things anymore. I know it sounds strange, but it is easier to understand if you replace the word "money" with the word "credit", in the sense of giving someone credit for a job well done.
What a wonderful future to look forward to.