More on P2P Economy

Via Independent Country. Some good material at Future Hi.

Liberating Capital, You and Me

The Internet is already pervasive. Already people are paying exorbitant amounts of money to buy virtual things and places in virtual games. Many of these games are using virtual currency within the game. It has become so valuable to some people that they are now buying OTHER things besides game stuff. For example, people have exchanged thousands of earned game money into "real" dollars and vice versa. How long until out of control decentralized p2p currencies proliferate? Not long I suspect. Meanwhile, the Internet itself is becoming more liberated and decentralized, more p2p applications are flourishing, open source in every stripe and every possible application is being developed. Wikipedia is offering all of its knowledge for free. Google, Yahoo and at some point many, many others will be offering the entire worlds knowledge found in books (tens of millions of them) online. And this is just the beginning. Within 10 years, the Internet will have allowed almost everything we know and are to become digitized. This includes money, which as I pointed out above, HAS ALREADY STARTED.

Please keep in mind, that while all this is happening, alternative energy continues to get cheaper and more pervasive, nanomaterials and soon nanofabs will start cropping up everywhere, totally disrupting the corporate supply chain, making people ever more autonomous, which further feeds on itself the mobility of people, things, ideas, money, everything. Further driving prices down....

Decentralized marketplaces out compete centralized ones. We should have learned that when the west beat the Soviet Union, just because such a centrally controlled economy is not sustainable. It’s stupid and vunerable to corruption and control. The same thing has happed here now. They are trying to create a corporate controlled state economy, in which very specific corporations have all the control over everyone and everything else on the planet - total world domination. The problem with this plan is that it has all the same weaknesses as the old soviet system. It's basically replacing the soviet party with the corporate party. Our CEO's become more like their leaders - fat cats. The parallels are striking. That is the ultimate irony of what is unfolding on the world stage today. It can't last and is not sutainable.

The Coming Leisure Society

Imagine you have two publicly traded companies that are both competing in the same sector. One of these companies is completely transparent throughout the entire enterprise - finances, hiring/firing, supply-chain, everything is open for review. One possible way to visualize this is to imagine a sophisticated 2D/3D real-time interactive animation display of every area of the companies operations. You could tell exactly how many people are working where, who is being hired, fired, expenditures for everything from trash bags in the company lunch room, to how much is being spent on advertising. All of it will be completely displayed in dynamical real-time techni-color graphics. The second company is just like most any company now doing business as usual (circa 2003)....

As time goes on, and it won't take long in this nanosecond, increasingly automated and accelerated economy for this ecology of transparent companies to fine tune the very essence of what a company/economy does. By definition the economy itself will become utterly response to investors and customers who increasingly become the same person. These so-called ad-hoc transient companies will increasingly blur the line between one company and another, employees and investors, customers and executives, that such distinction will become meaningless. No longer will we have distinct "solid" and separate companies and consumers, but an evolving complex decentralized ad-hoc network of capital, people, ideas, innovation and wealth responding in real-time to the people it serves. It will mark the end of the corporation as we know it and the beginning of a truly support economy.