UPDATE: Temptative day saturday 26 of april 2008.
We are trying to organize something like what you see on the video below in Trento, Italy. If you are interested contact me … or just freeze!
Link to video. Improv Everywhere are geniouses! Ning group for organization or contact me. Freeze you soon!
(Image from Maggie Digital, released under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND)
Quote from Calvino’s Invisible Cities
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationdhip of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.
From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.
Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.
Maybe you have seen the announcement of the new bigG service: Google Health (see Blogoscoped).
I guess you have heard in the past years many times the “new” (?) terms, right?
E-voting, e-health, e-learning, e-government, e-democracy, e-identity, e-business, e-participation, e-environment, e-weather (if you have heard more, please suggest it in a comment). Just prefix “e-” in front of any oh-so-out-of-fashion word and you have a new keyword you can use to ask funds for new projects.
Now, there would be a lot of concerns about the e-anything by itself. But I was wondering: we haven’t even reach an agreement of what e-anything is (say e-government), how much it is useful, and how to deploy it for real for a better world (this is why we do things, right?) but maybe we are already moving from e-anything to google-anything or g-anything (say google-government)?
Just think about it for a second. Today we got Google-health, which I’m sure will be embraced by many people like you and me.
Tomorrow Google would start offering free (FREE!) services to governments such that governments can cut their costs of managing a state (finance, tax keeping, population registration, etc to 0 (ZERO!). How many countries would resists? That would be the google-government.
You can try to prefix google- to words and think about those services. google-voting, eh? Up up to google-democracy of course! Scary? Well, maybe you think I’m paranoid and this is probably very true but I’m curious to know what you think.
And for the record I use Google free services for most of my needs, so yes, I have already capitulated.
Last pointless point. I hope at least countries will not undergo this path. You know, I would not like to have to call E-stonia and E-Latvia as G-stonia and G-Latvia. Moreover names on maps will become more boring, no? Uhm, did anybody say e-earth google-earth?
Ripple is an attempt to (re)design society: our interactions will no more based on the fact we all agree money (generated by banks and governments) exist but on how much we trust other people. Each participant indicates which other participants he or she trusts, by offering to accept their IOUs up to a certain amount, like a line of credit: your peers become the generators of currency. In short, Ripple lets everyone act like a bank.
Now, in such a society, is interest needed? Do we want to implement as a feature of the system the fact you can make money from money? This was the question posed in the Ripple-users mailing list.
The answer by Daniel Reeves is illuminating. I copy a portion of it below but I suggest you to read the entire thread, it is really worth your minutes.
There was some google video circulating a while back that started out very informative and then spun off into batshit insanity, claiming that it’s mathematically impossible to pay off debts with compound interest, etc..
A thought experiment that has helped me is to pretend there is no money and just look at movement of wealth. Remember the distinction: wealth is the actual stuff we want, money is just a way to transfer it. So the question “how can I repay a loan with interest; where does the extra money come from?” becomes “how can someone give back more wealth than they were loaned; where does the extra wealth come from?”.
Well that’s easy to answer. The same place all wealth comes from: people make it. They build things, do work, cough up valuable property.Say you have a beautiful painting (= wealth) that I want and I have nothing to offer you for it except the promise to return it to you later. That’s a big favor I’m asking you. To keep things fair, I might offer you a small thing of my own in return (say, doing your dishes). So there you have it, I borrowed the painting and paid it back, plus interest (doing your dishes). Everyone’s happy.
It really is, fundamentally, as simple as that.
And, by the way, there’s nothing magical or mathematically insidious about compound interest either. In fact, the concept is already implicit in this “extra favor” conception of interest.