Moving on to a much lighter topic, I mentioned the other day that I was planning to return to discussions about the National Intranet and the International Internet. Anyone who has read my Blog will recall me mentioning about the “Social Forums” of the National Intranet and how they were the digital equivalent of the Councils offline. The Social Forums would extend the SSE and the VCS Economy to the digital realm, allowing the Totality with another avenue to the offline political process.
Looking around the World Wide Web (WWW) from the 1990s and 2000s, I came across a number of people discussing about the feasibility of digital economies and their relation to the offline counterparts like the Market/Mixed Economy or the Planned/Command Economy. The theory goes is that a digital economy might less stable and more volatile than either of those two offline economies because they lack the political and social structures of the offline economies.
Consider an MMO video game as an example. Players pay a Subscription to the developers in order to play the MMO, which includes its own in-game currency and economy. Players spend real units of currency for virtual in-game currency. Since the former is obviously understood as Kapital, the latter must also be understood as Kapital, which raises the question of what ultimately backs the Value of the virtual in-game currency. This question often emerges whenever the issue of Currency Depreciation vis-a-vis Inflation occurs, and it is not like the developer has an Interest Rate to control the rate of Currency Depreciation. Also, some players in MMOs organize themselves into “Guilds” or “Clans,” creating social structures that recreate the Social Communion concept for the digital realm.
This may seem trivial to some people, but the Cryptocurrency audience among my readership should be well-aware of where I am going with this as it ties in with why I am not swayed by Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the rest. In the Real World as opposed to the digital realm, governments around the world have been aware of the implications that such currencies might pose to their own Fiat Currencies. Since Fiat Currencies are dependent on “Full Faith and Credit” as Legal Tender, the prevalence of virtual gaming currencies threatened their own Values. This partly explains why the virtual gaming currencies governed by RMTs (Real Monetary Transactions) are treated as a form of gambling (thus making them liable to Taxation Policies) or why Cryptocurrencies have been coopted by the Financial Markets (and by extension, the Fractional-Reserve Banking System).
It is because of those considerations that the Social Forums of the National Intranet rely on the same Sociable Currency as the Councils offline. The former oversees the overall creation of Digital Arbeit and Digital Geld that will eventually be turned into Actual Arbeit and Actual Geld through the LERE Process. But if the preceding corresponds with the WWW in Production for Profit/Production for Utility paradigm, how different will things be on the National Intranet?
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