Possibilities

There's a very interesting article in this month's issue of Wired. There usually is, of course--Wired is one of a very few publications I tend to read cover to cover--but this one is above and beyond. It concerns the future of music, now that Facebook is teaming up with Spotify to dethrone iTunes.
The beleaguered record industry hasn't even fully accepted iTunes yet. Imagine the conniption when 'buying' music becomes entirely obsolete.
That's what the union of Facebook and Spotify will evertually accomplish. You won't "own" music anymore: it will reside in the amorphous, world-spanning "cloud", ready to rain down on you, or your friends, with a single mouse-click. When you're done listening, back to the cloud it goes.
 How, exactly, money will be made from this model of instant access to everything remains to be seen. Currently, Spotify (which, like almost everything really valuable on the Internet, is not yet available in Canada), "charges" you a few minutes of ads per hour of listening, with ad-free listening available at $5 a month and the ability to listen offline costing an additional $10/month.

The way kids are today, I can all too easily imagine the offline option disappearing. You mean, listen to music...OFF THE INTERNET? Why would I ever go offline? That's like cutting out my eyes!


Anyway, Facebook and Spotify are in the process of converging, which is a big reason why Facebook's user interface changed yet again a few months back. Soon, you'll be able to see exactly what your friends are listening to (and eventually watching).  It's all about sharing, which is Facebook's core value, much to the dismay of privacy commissioners and other old fogies who think like them.

"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it", said the CEO of Sun Microsystems in that ancient year of 1999. And many have,  to the point where it seems the first instinct after anything happens is to tweet it, or take a picture of it and post it on your Wall. Events have occurred in my own life over the past few years that I have had to resist the impulse to share. I still have (at least) one foot in the era where the default setting was 'private'. The new paradigm requires a complete redefinition of self that I am not quite up to.

This article really did get me thinking, though, because in it I can see the barest glimpse of a possible future. It remains to be seen how money can be made off a business model that grants instant access to any desired piece of musical product, especially since consumers have shown a marked aversion to subscription options. The only way I can see this working is if we're willing to redefine "money".

And we just may be.

Consider the Huffington Post. Many people (most of them considerably younger than I) line up for the chance to write for them. When I first discovered this site, I considered writing for them as well. Something with the reach of HuffPo must pay handsomely.

Nope. In fact, they don't pay AT ALL, not in any currency you can hold in your hand. They pay in exposure. The mind recoils. Exposure won't pay the bills. Exposure is something you can die from! And yet here are people willing and eager to get their name out there gratis, paid, for the time being, in nothing but fickle fame.

Another example: Rome, Sweet Rome.
Reddit.com is the only site I frequent more often than Facebook. It is my chief source for news and entertainment both. Reddit itself uses a reputational-based currency ("upvotes") to "reward" contributions of interesting and informative material and commentary. Anyway, a few months back, someone asked the Reddit community (which numbers in the millions, and includes people from every conceivable profession and walk of life), "could a single regiment of the U.S. Marines take out the Roman Empire?"  An anonymous user was intrigued by this question, and threw together a piece of flash fiction. Fellow Redditors were so impressed they demanded a fleshing out. And now that anonymous contributor has himself a movie deal.

That's reputational currency morphing into actual dollars. Let's go one step further and leave dollars out of the equation entirely.

Such a system is only possible in a fully integrated world where everyone's actions are at the very least traceable...better yet, instantly visible. That may sound ridiculous, but in fact we're not near as far away from such as system as you might like to believe. The average person in Britain passes over three hundred cameras in the course of his or her daily routine, and those are just cameras placed by the state.  Imagine how many cellphone cameras there are. Better yet, imagine a few iterations of Moore's Law down the line, when effectively unlimited processing power is essentially free. Today's blogs become true lifelogs. Big Brother is not some faceless governmental entity: he's...everyone. All of us are under surveillance; all of us are doing the surveilling.
You could actually eliminate money. You could be credited for your good deeds...and debited for your bad ones. A full scoping out of such an economy is well beyond the scope of this Breadbin...mostly because it's up to us how it's shaped, and what constitutes good or evil deeds, and what level of remuneration is applicable for each. That could well be decided by group up-vote or down-vote. Certain crimes like rape or murder would have a set negative value. (The way I envision this is that anyone would be born with, say, a thousand credits; a crime like murder would automatically net you, say, ten thousand negative credits, and anyone with a negative reputational value would be sent to prison.
You'd still need a court system to present an alleged criminal's side of the story, but evidence itself would rarely be in dispute.

All this from sharing music, Ken? Well, yes. The creators of music would also be paid in reputational credits. You could even scale this such that certain trustworthy individuals, themselves with a high credit standing, could award more credits with a kind word (though I'd be leery of allowing any one person too much negative capability). You could gain reputational credits for producing any sort of highly regarded art; heck, even menial jobs could pay in credits for a good job, and debit a poor one.  Cory Doctorow, in his novel Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, described his reputational currency ("Whuffie") like this:

"Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented — your personal capital with your friends and neighbors — you more accurately gauged your success."

We're still several paradigm shifts from this being a desirable system to the majority of people. As usual, I find myself out ahead of the curve. I believe reputational currency is one possible solution to the disparity of wealth behind the Occupy protests. In my imagined world, there would still be rich people--probably many more rich people, actually. The difference is, in my world, all of them would have earned it...and if they were to use their riches for ill, they'd lose them in a hurry.