On 2009-02-26, SteveC <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Feb 26, 2:04 pm, Jonathan Sherwood <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > Stross had an interesting take on this in Accelerondo. He laid out a > world > > where doing something for money became unfashionable; it was preferable > to > > do something for free and then reap the rewards of the kudos or > reputation > > you received because of it. Essentially, reputation became the new > > barter-esque currency. > > > Cory Doctorow did the same two years earlier in Down and Out in the > Magic Kingdom. That's how Cory made his name. There was a lot of talk > on the Net at that time or earlier about how important reputations > were becoming and noting that message boards were allowing people to > vote on other people's status and positing all sorts of changes > thereof. > > In fact, nothing really changed. Sure, a few authors have become well- > known and even bestselling for marketing themselves on the web with > free content, but a few authors have always stood out because of their > marketing. A few groups have become known for their free music. A few > have become known for their movies. A few have become known for their > blogs. The tools changed but the underlying economic reality still > means that to make money their products get sold in the old-fashioned > way. Google "reputation economy" for discussion of this. Five years > old and already obsolete.
But aren't you doing the same thing you've accused others of doing -- expecting radical change, when what we should really expect is something either incremental or less obvious? Especially considering the time scale involved. It's really not in any way fair to judge an idea based on whether or not it takes over the world in five years (or 20). In fact, what Stross and Doctorow were talking about was nothing new, even in that form: It had been talked about in crunchy circles for many years. I first ran into it as a ripe old discussion in Whole Earth Review in the 80s. It's had brief flourescenses into strange and wonderful things like FactSheet 5 (which bloomed from the fertile soil of Mike Gunderloy's well-deserved reputation). More recently, you can see it manifest in online communities -- any well established online community. Metafilter is a good example. But you have to be an ethnographer about it: You can't expect to see it all laid out in neat and orderly Whuffies (*Down & Out*) or karma points (like they use on Plastic.com). I say this: If you look for actual financial-system replacements to spring up in the space of a few years to replace economies, you're looking in the wrong place. Reputation economies are real, and they're everywhere, and they've been around since humans have had a concept of reputation. But they very seldom are codified. Where they are, the codified systems often degrade into really nasty, unpleasant situations. Plastic.com, again. (Matt Haughey of Metafilter made a very explicit and conscious decision to avoid codified reputation systems for exactly that reason, but Metafilter is intensly reputation-driven. Since the reputation has to be continually created, and can't be banked or gamed like Plastic Karma points, people have an incentive to behave in a more civil manner with one another than they might in other forums.) I think that's the thing that folks like Cory D. and Charlie S. and Bruce Sterling (see *Distractions *for his version) "miss" is that we are not accustomed to commodifying the economics of gift exchange. I well remember the reaction of other undergrads when we read Mauss's *The Gift* in class. They mostly thought it was a horrible, inhumane concept, gifts entailing obligation! How mean-spirited! Yet it's clear if you think about it that status-seeking via gift exchange is a pretty fundamental human behavior. That's basically what Reputation Economies are; the gift is service. It's just that we're not used to them being an actual, primary economy. Reputation economies (really, econologies, I would argue) are what keep large criminal organizations rolling along, and they've been a fundamental organizaing principle of every agrarian smallholder society that I've ever had any knowledge of. It happens in business; it happens in churches; it happens on the web; it happens in school classes. It's everywhere. It's just that in the last 5, 10 or 20 years, nobody's yet cooked up a way to replace our entire economic system with a rationalized Reputation Economy. As though anyone, including Charlie Stross or Cory Doctorow, expected them to. Craig, the Guild is most definitely defending an existing business. > The audio book business is the one part of publishing that's making > money. It's a harsh truth, but: Sometimes businesses die. There are very few buggy-whip manufacturers anymore, for example. > > -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
