Yeah… Boik sent me his paper (which I think was the first I’d heard from him directly, although we’ve been in some of the same social media threads/spaces).

I like a lot of where he’s coming from, especially about assessment of the problem, and the focus on optimality as collective well-being, but the part of the solution he misses (pretty much everyone misses) is the reality of post-monetary currencies. They’re already here. They’re not going away. And I believe they will push money to the margins because money is less efficient, as well as being erosive to relationship.

So as far as I’m concerned, if you’re making proposals for the next economy, and still think it’s a monetary economy (at least he does include other types of local and crytpo monetary currencies), then you’re missing the exciting part of how different the next thing is.

Unfortunately, very few people see things this way yet, so this kind of talk often causes strong reactions and criticisms. But part of how I know it’s true and possible, is that I’m building the tools to make it happen. Other are building too. So we’ll just have to see how it plays out.

I expect these tools to out-compete money, like Wikipedia outperformed centralized knowledge harvesting, like Craigslist replaced classifieds, like Facebook traffic out-publishes news sites by many orders of magnitude. The rules are changing, and I think these forces are rather irresistible. It may be my tools that make it happen, or someone else’s along the same lines, but now that this is possible, it’s pretty unstoppable.

And about scales. Yes… these need to work, and be proven, at every scale. That’s part of why I implemented these kinds of protocols for self-organizing at Agile Learning Centers — a small-scale proving ground for self-governance which enables kids to design their own education and run the school. If 8 year-olds in Harlem can master these patterns in a few days, then most adults can probably learn it in only a few years. :)