Note: The next version of this manifesto can be found at SourceCred Manifesto v1.1.
Capitalism: A Coordination Game
Capitalism is a coordination game. Capitalism is built around a virtual environments, called Markets, and a quantifiable score, called Wealth. Within a Market, players can Transact, exchanging Wealth for Resources. Each Transaction has a Price, which determines how many Resources may be acquired for a given amount of Wealth.
A player’s Wealth determines their access to vital Resources like food, shelter, and healthcare. It also determines their social status. Thus, the main activities of the game revolve around participating in Markets to acquire Wealth.
There are two basic character classes in Capitalism: Owners and Workers.
Owners are players with excess Wealth. Using the excess Wealth, they acquire Resources, and marshall those Resources to produce more Wealth. This is called Investing. Since Investing turns Wealth into more Wealth, it creates a positive feedback cycle. Skilled and lucky Owners acquire spectacularly high Wealth, becoming billionaires.
Workers are players who do not have excess Wealth. However, they still consume Resources. Therefore, they have a perpetual survival need to acquire Wealth. They do this by selling themselves on the Market for Human Resources; such Transactions are called Employment. Skilled and lucky Workers may command a high Price, and negotiate favorable Transactions. These workers may acquire enough excess Wealth to transition into Owners.
Capitalism’s Success
Capitalism is an incredibly successful game, thanks to two key dynamics:
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Marketsand prices are very effective for rationing access to scarce resources - Investment leads to a positive, exponential feedback cycle, as wealth begets more wealth
Due to its spectacular strengths, Capitalism has outcompeted the other social games that humans play. In some cases it has subordinated the game, as when Elected Officials–the key character class in the game of Democracy–are purchased with the excess Wealth of the Capitalists, creating a Market for Policy. In other cases, Capitalism has simply crushed the competing game, as can be seen in the collapse of Small Town Farming.
Capitalism’s Flaws
It is generally agreed, however, that Capitalism is badly flawed. To start, the character classes are obviously unfair: no one, glimpsing past the veil of ignorance, would willingly choose to play as a Worker instead of an Owner.
Even more problematically, the Wealth being maximized by Capitalism is a narrow and limited metric. Since Wealth is manifested in Markets and through Transactions, it fails to include any value which is not Transactable, or any value for which there is no Market. For example, there is no market for friendship, community, natural diversity, or ecological health. Therefore, these values are treated as “externalities”. At best, they are ignored by Capitalism; at worst, they are plundered for Resources.
For several centuries, Capitalism has been accumulating power and scope in an exponential feedback cycle. It has now reached geological scale, and the actions of its players now imperil the Earth’s habitability. Since there is no Market in habitability, Capitalism is incapable of changing course, even to prevent its own self-destruction. Therefore, it has become necessary to change Capitalism.
Attempts to Change Capitalism
Many attempts have been made to improve or replace this game.
Attempts to improve Capitalism have met with some success. For example, players of Democratic Politics produced Environmental Regulatory Agencies, which constrained some of the worst externalities from Capitalism.
However, Capitalism superior ability to marhsall resources often leads it to stunning victories. For example, players of Capitalism achieved Neoliberal Economics, embedding Capitalist dogma into the adjacent games of Democratic Politics and Academic Consensus.
At present, adjacent games are failing to check Capitalism; as a result, attempts to improve Capitalism from the outside are stymied.
Attempts to Replace Capitalism
Unfortunately, attempts to replace Capitalism have been even less sucessful.
The most ambitious attempted replacement was Statist Communism. Statist Communism is best understood as a Capitalism variant, in which there is only a single Owner. This Uber-Owner is called The State, and is nominally subordinate to the Workers. As Markets are a two-sided multiplayer environment, it replaced them with Commitees, a one-sided environment.
In theory, the Uber-Owner would serve all Workers, leading to utopia. In practice, the Uber-Owner was a particularly powerful and rapacious Owner, whose behavior was unchecked by competition with other Owner. Fortunately, the switch from Markets to Committees greatly reduced the system’s information processing abilities, and Statist Communism was outcompeted by mainline Capitalism.
We believe it is time to create a new game to replace Capitalism. As a design requirement, it must be a better game than Capitalism. Its gameplay must not be so unfair and unbalanced. And it must be able to recognize values other than Wealth: values like community, or diversity, or ecological integrity.
However, it is not enough that this game be an ethically better game. It must also be able to outcompete Capitalism.
SourceCred is a prototype of the game that will outcompete Capitalism.
(to be continued… explaining how:
- Open source is the birthplace of a postcapitalist paradigm
- The transition from “Wealth” to “Cred” implies recognizing the multidimensionality of value
- The transition from upfront “Transactions” to retroactive “Gratiflows” allows recognizing the value of things which cannot be priced)
Thanks to @flyingzumwalt, as my writing this manifesto was inspired by an offline chat with him.
