Parallel Economies

By Dean

O ur present hegemonic economic model imposes a single supersturcture on the entire economy, in the case of today's global economy, this is the capitalist system.

All transactions involving the purchase and sale of goods and services is done in the currency of the national economy, or in an international currency such as the US dollar. The citizen simply selects his own credit or debit card, or uses cash. The transaction uses the accounting rules defined for the capitalist domain to transfer funds from one account to another, by debiting one and crediting another.

Yet, this hegemony imposes a cybernetic economic model, the capitalist model, on the entire population of a nation, or even of teh World. And, while this domain model has been shown to create wealth and to optimize the production of goods and services, it is simply not suited to the conditions in the developing world,where poverty and marginalization are so extreme that by imposing such a model, we are condeming the vast majority of the population to poverty.

We need air to breathe, we need to have clear skies to dream our big dreams, and to be able to implement these dreams cybernetically.

Work is ruled by the laws of physics, by the interplay of force on matter, of energy on silicone, of human beings performing work. It is not iherenlty constrained by money.

Money is simply an accounting entity, a tracking metric, it has no direct link to work. In a capitalist sytem however, precious litte work is done without a monetary inducement. Therefore, only that work which generates wealth, by means of a profit for the labor employed, is performed. Work that does not result in the acumulation of profit is not done, unless it is done by a govermnet agnecy, NGO, or a charity.

Yet, even for these not-for-profit entities, there must be some form of monetary inducement to the participants.

The resulting monetary hegemony resulst in poverty because only work which is directly or indireclty related to money gets done. Money makes money, no money makes poverty.

Yet, we all can see that there are vast millions of able bodied people the world over who would be able to work for themselves, if they did not have to rely on capital to perform their work.

We can work our way out of this conundrum by creating parallel economic systems, or domains, which define their own economic model, transation protocols, currency functions and taxation.

Each nation would have a global economic domain, which would provide an economic superstructure for all other econimc domains, in a manner similar to a federal govermnet system, where the federal govermnet laws are of national scope, over the state laws, and the local laws. Each has it's own methods of taxtation, but share the same economic model, transaction protocols and currency.

Below the local level, there are communities of people which share common interests and ideals. With the advent of the Internet, these communities are no longer local, but can be virtual communities spanning accross local, state and even national bounds.

Given a broad enough perspective, today's global economy is a virtual community enganged in a global economy, which can be termed a global capitalist domain.

If the Y2K event tauhgt us something, it is that the global economy is indeed digital and relies completely on cybernetic means for its very existence. We are living in a globally hegemonic cybernetic economy running the capitlaist model.

In a cybernetic economy, there may be several co-existing economic domains running on the same public network infrastructure. The difrenciation between the domains can be completely defined at the point of contact of the citizen or enterprise with the network.

At these cybernetic portals, the citizen can define the rules for his transaction. In todays hegemonic systems, the citizen can select wheter a transaction is to be done in cash, or by means of a debit or credit card. Obviously, there is no impediment in combining all of these insturments into a single smart card.


Atlanta,GA
December 11, 2000
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