Only just started, so bear with me, I´ll add questions and reply to them when I have a chance.
Won´t this lead to a very homogenous society?
Answer: Sometimes I get asked this and find it confusing that the person does not ask the same about our current society that seems to reward only greed and getting away with whatever you can as long as you don´t get caught., or being a good little consumer, or working much too hard for much too little. If any society leads towards homogenity it is the society we are in now. But that is not my answer... The answer I would give is that the proposed society would highlight the positive similarities between groups of people. I believe most normal and well brought up humans are actually compassionate citizens who want to improve their society. Maybe they have loads of tattoos, listen to heavy music, do dangerous sports, an alchohol problem, no taste in clothes, an unhealthy passion for salsa/cycling/explosives, live on the streets, whatever... just because they are not 100% normal does not mean that they don´t want to positively contribute to society. The proposed idea would highlight this fact, letting other members in society sort the good from the bad (similarly, just because someone has a nice suit and a fat wallet, does not mean they are a good person, quite possibly the reverse, something the idea would help people realise).
So in this way, it can be seen that the proposed system would only lead to a homogenous society of citizens who want to contribute the same as they recieve and treat others as they would like to be treated themselves (if you have a problem with that I can´t help you). The members of this society would have the freedom to be very diverse in a range of other ways, probably much more so than in current society.
Also, another reason that people sometimes ask this question is because of the over-simplified examples that I give that use only a couple of variables (energy use, helpfullness to young/old...) and give a good/bad rating at the end. Sorry, this is just a fault of the analogies I use. In reality the system would consider hundreds or thousands of variables and create a value from one to ten (or something similar), which would mean the system is a lot less polarised. Try to imagine it more as "some people you are more likely to help, some you are less likely, and some people you help a lot, whilst some you just give a little help to" not "I only help these people and never anyone else".
Sometimes you say talk about good and bad people, that´s very subjective isn´t it?
Answer: yes it is very subjective. In this proposed idea/society each person decides personally for themselves what a good citizen and a bad citizen is. Then they give more help to those people who are closer to the "good citizen" ideal and less help to those people who are closer to the "bad citizen". There is no universal good or bad. It just gets very tiring for you to read when I have to continually repeat this. Further from this, I imagine that most people would start with some very basic rules about what makes a good person: non-violent, believes that each member of society should give equally what they able, respects others... (probably something quite similar to the bill of human rights) and that a bad person has the opposite characteristics. From this basic character set you can add whatever you want according to your personal preferences/cares. So, yes, good/bad is subjective, when I say it I generally mean either from each individual persons own opinion, or as an average of the morals of all people in society.
You say this idea is sort of Anarchist, but then it also sounds like you are prescribing how people will live and be organised, which goes against the idea of Anarchism that the people can choose how to organise and live their lives?
Answer: Good point, I really hope that I don´t prescribe too many ethics, nor that too many ethics are built into the system. I see that the system is more just a method of collecting, storing, interrogating, processing and evaluating data (specifically data about social events), hence it can not hold any ethics or prescribe any paticular lifestyle. To take this to the extreme counter-scenario, I believe that it would be possible using this system, for a group of like-minded people to use it to set up their own little capitalist heirarchical system amongst themselves. There would be only one caveat, any one of them would be free to leave it any time. That´s pretty damn libertarian in my opinion.
Mainly in this website I´m just giving lots of examples of how such a system could work, could be useful, could improve on the current system. So it is quite easy for it to be seen as prescribing a society for others, but I don´t intend to do that, it is usually just for sake of simplicity of explanation.
There probably are a couple of ethics built into the system, namely: treat others as you would like to be treated yourself and ... um ... not sure what else, will have to think about this.
In terms of the ethics of the software/hardware: it would be decentralised, P2P, data would not be stored in a central database, processing would be performed on the users own hardware, open-source. So I think that is relatively Libertarian, but others may disagree, I look forward to debate on this (provided it does not bog down development).
Why don´t you just do some other process that is way more likely to have immediate benefit (tax justice, lets, property tax...)?
Answer: yes there are lots of other systems that others have already proposed that would probably improve the fairness or efficiency of society (LETS, Anarchism, some forms of communism, tax justice network proposals, property tax to name a few), but I´m just not really interested in those. I personally believe that most of these do not go far enough and that although they make some improvement they are still based on concepts that are fundamentally broken (fiat reserve currencies, property, government). Take law as an example: we find something we don´t quite like about our current society so we make up a new law to combat that thing, but someone will eventually find some loophole around it or use it in some way that it was not intended to exploit someone/something. Eventually people realise, get annoyed and the politicians eventually do something (create another law) about it if it improves their chance at the next election. This leads to an ever more complicated system that only benefits the people who can understand or are rich/powerful enough to pay lawyers to help them exploit it.
When we add something else to cure a problem in our society, it´s usually just a short term solution that hides the problem till later. I believe that starting a discussion on what a theoretically perfect and fair currency looks like will give us something to work towards that finally fixes all the problems of the current systems. I also believe that such an ideal system should actually be very simple, robust, stable, without such things as "naked short selling", financial crashes, a million laws or hundreds of levels of beaurocracy.
What is so bad about current society?
Answer: Probably nothing if you are a white male, rich, in a developed country, without disabilities. But ask anyone else and there is a whole range of problems: wars, the ever growing wealth gap, the impending energy crisis (read "without the hot air" free online book), the possibility of human caused environmental catastrophe, large scale extinction of species, degradation of natural resources critical to future human survival, large scale malnutrition or famine ( every eighth person is malnourished whilst many people die from obesity), racism, sexism, wage slavery, rent slavery, poor sharing of resources, poor maintennance of resources, lack of time to do anything but work and watch TV, benefits cheats, etc. I believe these are fundamentally symptoms of the inadequate systems that we use to run our societies.
What rating system would you use? good/bad? 1 to 10?
Whatever the user wants to use they can. But here are some suggestions:
1 to 10 (or any other number) would be easy to understand, same with percentages. But what do you use to normalise against to get this value?
Society rank: Where does this person rate on your filters? To explain this imagine if you ran your filters against everyone in society, someone would get the highest value (they would be #1 or 100%) someone would be lowest (they would be #4.3 billion or 0%). I´m sure with some computer trickery and clever use of statistics this could be calculated without huge amounts of computer resources. Then you know when you help someone with a 91% that they are in the top ten percent of the people you would like to help.
An un-normalised value: just use whatever the filtering algorithm spits out, perhaps it gives the person a plus point for actions that get positively filtered (good actions) and a minus point for negatively filtered actions (bad). The user can weight of these actions accordingly if they care more or less about them, so - for example - someone who thinks violent people are really really bad may double the minus points for violent people, and they get -2 for each violent event they have done. In the end the algorithms just give some number, 23, 10023, -143... the user can then interpret that as they want based on their past experience.
Categorised: It could be possible to split the value into categories, e.g. environmental, social, work, violence, medical, etc. of your own choosing. But this may be more trouble than it is worth and it also raises the possibility of someone using it to spy on someone and find out information they don´t actually need to know.
Why the name Anarchist Currency?
It was the first thing I thought of when I was registering this site on google sites (originally it was called village analogy currency). Other options are numerous. Justifiably less significance to the the currency part (it´s actually a complete system for organising society not just a currency) and the Anarchist part (there are many other ways of explaining the idea). Suggestions accepted. Currently I´m considering something involving: Alternative currency, libertarian currency, alternative society and currency data system, alternative currency and social data system, future social currency..? Probaby whatever is most likely to get hits on google for someone searching for such a thing, it does not need to be short or elegant.
Humans are greedy, selfish and will do whatever they can to cheat others, that´s just "human nature". Hence your idea will never work, right?
I often get told this. Which is sad. It always seems a bit strange to me that people focus on the bad when they talk about human nature. But what about all the other things humans do? giving to charity, helping others, risking their lives to save others, un-known heroes, anonymous benefactors, etc. What about people such as Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Nightingale, etc. where was their evil human nature?
It seems to me that the "human nature" that most people talk negatively about is a symptom of the systems we use to run our society. If we didn´t have a system that encourages hoarding of wealth, materialism, machiavalinism, selfishness, unaccountability then we wouldn´t have the few bad apples. If we instead have a system that makes people accountable for all of their good and bad actions - and rewards/penalises them accordingly - then those bad apples would be exposed and have to either change or be excommunicated (or not go bad in the first place).
How long do you think it would for this idea to get up and running?
A long long time, with lots of mistakes on the way, lots of interference from people who are benefiting from the current way of things and a lot of work. Not surprising when we´re talking about changing the whole organisation of society.
Having said that, some parts of the idea can be implimented now (in tandem with our current systems) and be useful to people. These can then be ready to be incorporated into the bigger idea. For example, imagine a system that knows how much energy you use and could be interrogated by others. With this system you would get discounts when obtaining services from people who care about energy use and the environment. The same could go for involvement in small communities (online or real), ethicality of choice of food/investments/clothes, etc. These examples would be limited implimentations of the idea that can be run now but lay the foundations for development later.
Also some parts of the idea already being currently developed at some level: big-data, large-scale free public wi-fi networks (freenetworks.org), cryptocurrency (bitcoin contains some ideas that we can use), P2P facebook, open-source software, etc.
What type of things would you record and measure?
In keeping with the non-authoritarian nature of the system, anything, absolutely anything each user wants. Whether other users care or not is another issue.
Kinds of things we might measure:
Quantative: hours worked on a job, energy consumed, carbon created, food consumed, property rights requested,
Qualitative: how satisfied people are with your work, how annoyed people were with you about something annoying you did, experience in a specific field of expertise,
But doesn´t the choice of algorithms that are used tie the users to some sort of ethics, or be used to control people or gain unjustifiable power or knowledge?
Yes, this is one of the things I am going to need help with. We need an underlying database/system that can hold the data, but it must also be able to run algorithms/code in a secure environment and pre-check that code to ensure that it´s not cleverly designed to gain access to the specifics on the database. Keep in mind that not everyone will have the same algorithms. Here are some types I think may exist at first (until everyone realises that one or the other is more suitable, which one that is I am not sure yet).
The first type is the one that has been explained already, as it is easiest for most people to understand. In-a-nutshell, look at all past actions of a person, give each event a value (based on the interrogators personal ethics) then sum those values to get a final overall value.
The second type is based on examining the filters or values the person uses. In this case the interrogator compares their filter parameters against the filter parameters of the interogee. In this system the event data is only used to show how well the interogee lives up to their own filter parameters. It´s kind of like saying, "this is how I would calculate if someone is a good citizen, that´s how you would calculate it, you´re close to mine so I´ll help you (or not as the case may be). Oh! and your historical event data shows your not a massive hypocrite".
The main advantage the second type has over the first type is that it shows what you would do if given the chance, not just what you have done. For example, maybe you think the emergency services (ambulance, fire service) are good and useful, and you would help them if you could, but no one from that service has ever needed your services, so then when you have an emergency they would not help you.
Their may be extensions to both of these, including:
Filter history: it could be useful to know how long you have had a certain filter in place. So that you can´t switch your filters over just on the days you need them. For example, on the day you need a dentist you switch your filters to show you would help dentists (hence getting you good service), then the day after you switch it back so you don´t have to help one in return. With a filter history the interogator would be able to see how long you have had a certain filter in place and adjust their evaluation accordingly.
As you can see, this needs work...
What about welfare? it sounds like if you have nothing to provide then you get nothing, hence disabled or injured people will be left to starve?
It depends on your own ethics. If you believe that people who are really unable to work should be supported and cared for then you would help those people, if you don´t believe they are worthy of help then you wouldn´t help them. However, the catch is that if you don´t help such people then you should not expect help if you are ever injured or unable to work for some reason. So if you want welfare, provide welfare, if you don´t want to provide welfare then don´t ever expect any in return.
Who replaces the police? you know, investigating who is up to mischief, keeping the peace, restraining the violent...?
The answer to this is that everyone is the police, which is way better than what we have now. Currently, if someone is doing something bad you rely on the goodwill of passers-by to call the police and do something about it, even though it is of little benefit to them. I would imagine that the proposed system would encourage everyone to act as police, everyone to be vigilant for criminal behaviour and everyone to be eager to stop criminals and make them accountable for their actions. By making people more accountable they are encouraged to be better citizens and discouraged from turning to crime. By making people understand more that they are part of a community they will understand that by ignoring crime they are encouraging it and are likely to be the next victims.
What about dealing with very angry/violent people, the police are specially trained for this and random members of public may make situations worse? ... Answer: Except that plenty of police are actually terrible at this and make situations far worse: tasering kids, shooting hand-cuffed people, abusing people in cells, racist and homophobic. Ok, not all, but just because someone wears a police uniform doesn´t make them a good person for keeping the peace. Conversely, I know many non-police who are very at calming angry/violent people. So, if a violent situation happened with the proposed idea, then people who are good at calming people down would be called to mediate, maybe they have had training, maybe they are naturally good at it. This would be one of the services to the community that someone could provide. Perhaps your local Judo instructor could be callled to restrain someone who is violent without hurting them, better than a truncheon to the face.
Yet to be answered.
Organising large projects (bridges, roads, hospitals)?
How would society now transition to the proposed society, all sounds pretty dramatic?
How do you collect the data?
How do you give gifts in this society?
How would inheritance work?
Education system?
How would projects requiring long term investment occur (cure for cancer, scientific/academic research) and who decides?
What if you would like to help a certain subset of society if you had the chance, but have just not had the chance yet. Does that mean you wont get helped?