Monday, November 24, 2008

accelerationistas! be careful what you wish for

So its my belief that the current economic woes of the west can be blamed on the accelerationistas! of the Internet era - basically, the old fogeys who "run" things in the financial service world, around the time of Clinton and Blair, actually believed what they were being told by the mad people who said - economics is not a zero sum game (c.f. Clifford Stross's novel, Accelerando, and many writings of people who read (but don't understand) Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, and the madder moments of the net e.g. Agassi's free cars)

So the spin gained traction but had no torque.

Especially with the .com fiasco at the end of the last boom....although there's evidence of cell phones and computers and even some drugs being close to free

But then
the governments of the world thought they'd try it in the realm of finance - now as far as I am concerned, the governments of the world look after my desiderata - as an English person, this is my home (castle), health, and shopping (food/consumables) and (I suppose) transport and heating/lighting - i want them defended - this means both against invaders real, and invaders economic -

Homes, food and transport/power/fuel are basically very a close to a zero sum game, and the price system should really be a convex optimisation problem - this is almost certainly precisely soluble through central planning on a Very Big Computer, or through a decentralised system such as a free market -
this all depends on people running free markets in these things unconstrained, but they don't.

Unfortunately, oil isn't a free market (the price is set in dollars which favours US businesses energy costs and set by a cabal called OPEC). food isnt a free market (the EU and US both conspire to run protectionist worlds).

On the other hand, where the whole non-zero sum game does operate (hi-tech industries such as computers, networks and bio-tech) is where there shouldn't be a normal market - indeed, there should be NO IPR either. basically,
entertainment (fulfillment and well-being) and health (longevity and well-being)
are aribtrarily consumable and so innovation can spiral.

But food, energy, housing - these are not amenable to the accelerationist dream,
and that's I guess what the world just found out.

Economics 2.1 alpha should include this concept

(yes, yes I know when we have nano-tech, then these other bastions of traditional scarce resource allocation may too fall before the burgeoning "technosaur").

So what I am saying is that the spiral (on house loans exceeding 2nd order derivative of the house price increase) is a simple lesson in controls on resources whose dynamics are limited by traditional physics. But that shouldn't mean we abandon the cool madness of hyperinflation on valuation of new tech work - just that we separate these two regimes until later....much later...

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misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home