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I see it exactly the opposite way. The people getting excited about micro payments are the ones who have failed to grasp the revolutionary potential offered by
by marssaxman 10y ago
I see it exactly the opposite way. The people getting excited about micro payments are the ones who have failed to grasp the revolutionary potential offered by the prospect of doing things collectively, in distributed fashion, without having to saddle every interaction with the overhead of commerce. Amazing things become possible when you give up the need to pay and be paid; the micropayment people don't seem to be able to see that vision.
We've been doing commerce for millennia; it is profoundly boring.
- jwatte 10y agoIf there is no payment system, then resources are guaranteed to be oversubscribed and exhausted if they are at all interesting. In the Iain M Banks Culture, that works, but we're not there yet.
- marssaxman 10y agoThat's the scarcity model in a nutshell, and it has run its course. We won't get to a Culture style future by nickel-and-diming each other; we'll get there by developing better mechanisms of communication, fostering low-overhead group decision-making, which will allow us to collect, share, and distribute resources without having to run everything through the enervating meat-grinder that is commerce. Capitalism got us where we are, but we have to build something better if we want to go further. The best parts of my life are already voluntary, cooperative, and social - people working together to make things better for each other. I want more of this, not less. Micropayments just drag the old way into the new. Why waste our time on that? Let's build the future we actually want to live in.
- pipermerriam 10y agoThis. A thousand times this.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]