Das Web

At first, I was not sure if I should take this economic topic.  “MoneyLab: Coining Alternatives” sounds more like a macroeconomic or politic topic than a Web science topic. However because the interdisciplinary nature of the Web, and moreover, because the influence of the Web(2) on  society , are the social question in my opinion the most important question into the Web. 

As a matter of fact that emerging digital technologies have enabled an explosion of alternative financial models(3), it is out duty to govern this models in order to do the good for our society. However its seems that we are not doing that. In contrast, according with  experts like Saskia Sassen(4)   the current system of financial institutions  “revolves around creativity that sells what it does not have through inventive instruments”. Moreover, she affirmed that “it is a mistake to think that finance is about money”, finance is a capability(5)  and underline how the finances are acting without control, leaving people without home and impoverishing governments.  

Moreover, Sassen affirmed that she is not against finance, in contrast, she said that finance could be a good possibility  to build housing for the world, or give education to the poor. The real problem is that the finance are not doing that, but having a monopoly over “money creation” that  lost  the capacity to govern itself. 

On the other hand, the german brothers Stefan and Ralph Heidenreich(6)  critiqued the roll that  money have in the actual economy.  They took the definition of money given from the Bank of England, which says  that  “money is a social institution that provides a solution to the problem of a lack of trust”. 

With this in mind, Ralph Heidenreich asseverate that money is at the present time obsolete und critiqued how the finances institutions uses money to control us: “If money is debt and we are govern by structured  system which rule us by the means of money we are living in a net of privat debt that we can not escape”.  

After they postulated this critique of money as a system of exploitation and inequality, the authors proposed a non monetary economy. For this reason, they affirmed that they are not looking for a money substitute but creating a technical possibility of a algorithm based on the idea that each person and each economy entity may receipt from the outside as many goods as he oder she would give to the outside. 

Finally the authors formulated some question that this algorithm(7) should answer like: Who gets what at what time? Who does what at what time?  who are the economic actors of the algorithm(8)? or how could we make a transition from a  monetary economic to a non monetary economic? 

All this questions and generally speaking, all  this social topics about the web are, in my opinion,  equally important als the technical topics, because without this social perceptive the web will lost his most important objective: to make us human a better life.   

(1)  This event took place at the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, on March 21st and 22nd 2014, at Lab111. It brought together more than 25 speakers divided in eight sessions, including an art performance. Other highlights included a crowdfunding workshop and an alternatives bazaar.

 (2)Die Intention von „Web Science“ wurde in einem Paper von James, Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, Tim Berners-Lee und Daniel Weitzner im Jahr 2006 beschrieben – eine Abhandlung aus eher technischer Sicht. Eine Kurzversion findet sich im ACM Paper „Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web“ der oben genannten Personen.

(3) MoneyLab: Coining Alternatives ,2.1 Session 1: Monetization of Everything, Session description.

(4) Saskia Sassen is a Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair at Committee on Global Thought, both positions held within Columbia University. She joined speakers Stefan and Ralph Heidenreich and Bill Maurer in the first panel of the MoneyLab conference - “Monetization of Everything” in Amsterdam. 

(5)For Saskia Sassen finance is a capability understood here as a variable whose valence can change radically.  

(6)Ralph Heidenreich lives in Biberach/Riss and works as a programmer (www.ralph- heidenreich.de). Stefan Heidenreich lives in Berlin and holds a research position at the Center for Digital Culture, Lüneburg University (www.stefanheidenreich.de). Together they wrote the books Mehr Geld (‘More money’, Merve:Berlin 1998) and Der Preis der Welt (‘Pricing the World’, 2014).

(7) Ralph and Stefan Heidenreich also defined this algorithm as a “network-based matching”. 

(8)  Are the economic actors every entity taking part in exchange: a person, a house, a car, or a state. Or should we separate persons from objets?