# Value stuff ## 0. Motivating questions Although the pinnacle of today's society affords many people the basics for life, and although we don't often punch each other in the face and mostly don't get shot randomly, and although we can visit our friends for tea and sushi, and although we can get Amazon packages to our doorstep, and although we have access to medicine, running water, and clean towels... Although we can work for a living, and although state actors usually don't unfairly confiscate our property, and although we've reached some degree of freedom that our ancestors couldn't imagine, still, there are glaring societal inefficiencies that infringe on us and cause us harm. Like... - A person embarking in her career or purpose should be able to think about providing value to her neighbors and society. Thinking about this should far outweigh thoughts about profit. Profit-first thinking should be socially inefficient. - In general, Peter Thiel's paradigm that “Creating value is not enough — you also need to capture some of the value you create" aptly describes our current economy but is an inefficient mode of operation. Monopoly is good for businesses, but is it good for us? Inefficient. - Communities have eroded. From David Harvey's Marx Capital reader, "there exists a material relationship between people and a social relationship between things." A reoriented value system could encourage the return of the community. Love and connection is efficient. - The free rider problem: it's a well known problem that within capitalism, public goods are underprovisioned. The providers of the public good are cheated by the free riders. Society gets value but does not pay for it. Providers create value but do not get paid. - This value asymmetry shows itself, for example, in open source software. That OSS developers create value for society but are not justly compensated is inefficient. It is more efficient for society to encourage value creation, with the profit motive lobotomized. Then, the overhead of business activities is eliminated. But isn't the process of discovering product-market-fit productive? Isn't this the most efficient way we've discovered to determine value? Let's discover a new way. - Another inefficiency of the current system can be seen in medical research. It's a researcher's incentive to keep her research secret so as to maximize the eventual profit when her effective result goes to market. On one hand this profit motive is efficient because *research gets done and is helpful.* On the other hand it is inefficient because this researcher's effort if combined with others could yield a higher quality result. - Another inefficiency - "nespresso cups" - wow, a big win for Nespresso! Selling $17 worth of product for $137! But at what loss for us? What is the cost of unsustainable coffee consuming: the waste of the plastic, the waste of the machine? Our current system cannot factor this in. - Capitalism has increased social surplus, but in a jangled way. Can't we do better? - - Why does someone get paid for creating dearths in surplus value? - I see videos about climate change, about ice caps melting. But what is its effect on surplus value? Once we can determine the effect, we can represent it in value calculations and mitigate the net negative activities. All of this boils down to the way we currently arrive at a value calculation. We do it through markets. - What if there was some other way to discover value? What if markets was the best value solution for information-scarce environments? What happens when we start to store more information related to value? - How can we determine the value that everyone provides? Can we do it through some process of consensus? At least, can we invent a new system with the tech we have such that it gives ideas to the next generation of thinkers? Call it an art piece. This system should be examined against some of the above criteria. For example, does it provide the right incentives such that medical researchers freely share their work and collaborate with each other? Are developers happy to create valuable OSS? Are we incentivized to teach each others' children, to help neighbors in need, and to raise up marginalized classes of people? ## 1. Crumbling bibliography One artistic shit show of a value system is what I call the crumbling bibliography. What is it? It's reams of data that we share p2p. The data is information about value. Like, if I work on a tuna can assembly line, one of my ids (0x1...f) is associated with that tuna can. Each tuna can has this gigantic graph of PKs involved with its production. Same with, say, medicine. If I recommend you this brand of tuna fish, you are incentivized to associate my PK with these tuna cans as well. Ultimately, you "acquire" the tuna can. And with that acquisition you are incentivized to acknowledge the value that this tuna can brought you. It provided you lunch for a day. That's great. Me, I'm thankful when I eat lunch. And if you had something to do with it, I have gratitude for you. And I'm a networker. I tell everybody about the value it provided me. And now my whole network knows that you, the tuna can assembly guy, provided me value. But it's also private -- they know you provided me value but they don't know how. The same thing as above, but copied out of my notebook: Is it possible to imagine an economy where creating value is enough? Where value doesn't need to be captured, just attributed? Let's imagine a p2p age where everything comes with a comprehensive digital bibliography. If you download an mp3, for example, you also sign metadata that acknowledges the involvement of certain people in the process. Madonna, her backing band, her influences. The sound engineer. The sound engineer's mom. The grocery store clerk, maybe. The peers that made this music available online. The peers that scripted the p2p interface. This is all digitally represented in some kind of merkle tree such that you need not know all the details -- you can just agree to credit Madonna. There are other people who have a more extensive opinion on who this value is really owed to, and you agree to allot a certain percentage of your "tribute" to the categories of peers that others have specified. What does this tribute record give us? If someone comes up to me with a score of 100 or higher, asking me for a loaf of bread, or to cook them dinner, can I say "here you go. Thank you for all you have done for me" and then my "tribute debt" is back at 0? Then, how can Madonna get her bread if I operate under multiple addresses? Perhaps it is not bread she's after, but social power manifested in voting power. The current crisis in open source software reveals a deficit in utility. Other deficits in utility abound, most of these things we expect to be publicly funded: public schools, daycares, nutrition programs, healthcare, mindfulness programs. Work in these areas creates more utility than it pays. But in these areas, we stand to gain the most. ## 2. Asking for advice - What am I not understanding? - How can someone make a living focusing on this problem? - Can you save me a lot of hassle by telling me to forget about this idea and focus on monopoly profits instead?