| Net Work | 2003-08-12 04:42 7 comments |
 by Flemming FunchNow, if we all had sufficiently good information, that whole issue about what to do and how to make a living would just not be a problem. Most of us have something very useful we can do, which is needed somewhere. For that matter, there will usually be somewhere where that which we most love to do is exactly what is needed. What makes our current economic system work very inefficiently is that we usually don't have good information about what is needed and where, and about who are the best people to deal with. And we don't have a good way of informing others about what we'd like to do, or what we can do. Oh, there's an overwhelming abundance of information around us, about products and services offered, and opportunities available. But it is not very good information. Most of it is bogus information. Advertising is mostly bogus information. It tries to make us desire and seek certain products, not based on that we really need them or that they're the best ones available, but based on making us want them, despite that we might not need them, or they aren't really the best. A free economic market is ideally perfectly fair, and is driven by information. If people consider a certain product or service worthless, the price will drop, and it will no longer be sensible to produce it. If people find a certain product or service very valuable and desirable, the price will go up, which will reward those who produce it, and inspire the production of more of it. Until there is too much of it, where the prices will then drop and things will adjust themselves again. It is a very sensible system of self-organization. It is unfortunately not completely how it works in real life. Some wrenches have been thrown into the free market, such as the existence of corporations, with corporate veils, and intellectual property right. We have a Monopoly game, essentially, where the biggest rewards go to those who most succeed in grabbing a monopoly in some area, in part by making their product look better than they really are, by paying less for producing them than what is fair, by hiding their corporate structure, by bribing governments to give them special treatment, and generally by hiding or embellishing the truth about how things really are. Oh, there's still a market there, so market mechanisms can still manage to adjust things, as some of the true information gets shared. The public might discover who consistenly produces bad products, or they might discover who really owns a company, or which public official is working for them, and they might disapprove. The system still tends to be more efficient than a centralized bureacracy. I suppose the communist system was based on the idea that if we centralize all the information, we can make the best possible decisions about what production power is needed where, and we can do things most efficiently. But the problem is that it ignored all the little pieces of information exchanged between individuals, and it ignored their individual choices, and their need to be motivated by personal accomplishment. And then a top-down hierarchy becomes very inefficient. No, what we really need is an open network of very well-informed people who make decisions based on what they know. If the information is mostly good, the result will be useful self-organization, despite that not all participants can be expected to make completely rational decisions. Imagine for a moment that we all had fully functional telepathy. I would know right away when you're lying to me, and I would know right away what you're actually doing, and how you are doing it, and with whom. There would be no point in you trying to tell me anything else, as I could just look in your mind and see the truth. Thus you wouldn't be able to sell me something that wasn't right for me, or which pretended to be something else than it really was. We'd need some kind of networked telepathy. I don't just need to know the truth about what you're about, I'd need to be able to quickly assess what is *out there*. What is offered and what is needed, in a wide sphere around me. Currently, if I need something, I might search on the net, look in a newspaper, write about it in my newslog, ask a few people. And quite often I'll find something that fits what I'm looking for. But it is in a very haphazard manner. Like, right now I have certain skills, certain experience, and certain desires, and I have a need for applying some of these in a way that my life is supported from it. Putting that out to a few hundred people who read this, and networking it a little bit on other sites - that does produce results. It is good to have friends. Quite often, what one is looking for might be found amongst the few dozen or few hundred friends one has. And that's certainly a good thing. But if we had a good enough information network, be it telepathic or computerized, there could very well be ways that I might access the information shared by thousands or millions of people, and it would be much more likely that I'll find what I'm looking for. I'm not talking about that I can do a search on keywords in a search engine. I can already do that, and that is great. But it gives me a very small portion of the whole picture. I'm right now in a city of close to a million people, and of course, amongst those, there will be some people who know a great place where some of my skills will fit in a very mutually advantageous place. But I only know a handful of people here. I'll know more. But most information is well hidden, so it takes a while. There's plenty to do here, and anywhere on the planet, and there are plenty of people who can do what needs to be done, and plenty of resources to do them with. The only thing in the way is our lack of ability to see all this clearly. We don't have enough good information, or it isn't structured to give a clear picture, or we're not sure we can trust it. Thus we operate based on small personal networks and questionable information from public sources. Where we really could operate at a whole different level if the real information was available. It is not an impossibly hard problem to solve this. Telepathy would be preferable, but it can also be done through well-structured computerized databases. Large numbers of people who share their knowledge and value judgements about many things. Better ways of expressing needs and offerings in a concise way. |