SourceCred Manifesto v1

[decentralion]

@flyingzumwalt

1. Include a Preamble/Intro

2. Provide Setup for this descriptive section

Thanks @flyingzumwalt for this feedback, it makes a lot of sense. Based on your feedback, I “forked” over to a different manifesto draft (v1.1). Please take a look over there and let me know what you think of it from an overall structure perspective.

Meanwhile, I’ll engage with some of the other questions/points you raised here.

@flyingzumwalt

Why “player” instead of participant, actor, etc? Using the term “player” makes this sentence read as cold and reductive. It basically invites readers to recoil

I think the simplest answer is that I was writing for myself, i.e. attempting to find a framing I could pull on to get the ideas out of my head and into a text editor, rather than writing with any audience in mind. The way I think about SourceCred is influenced a lot by my many years playing MMOs (meme), providing framing for people who don’t already see the world this way will make the writing a lot more accessible.

@flyingzumwalt

Do they sell themselves (which implies that an individual can be owned, which is slavery) or do they sell their labor (alla Marx)?

I’d say they sell their time, e.g. if I am employed by a company I agree to spend ~40 hours a week in a place of their choosing, and do what they tell me to during that time.

@flyingzumwalt

What you’re describing here is Wage Labor, which is only one form of Employment.

What other forms of employment do you have in mind?

@flyingzumwalt

I’m not convinced that this section sufficiently describes the nature of capitalism’s success or the causes of that success, but that might not be necessary for this manifesto to work.

An ongoing question for me: how should the manifesto balance between persuasiveness, epistemic completeness, and brevity?

@flyingzumwalt

I’m also specifically curious how you see the Capitalism interacting with the Liberal Democratic project (egalitarianism, pursuit of happiness, reduction of suffering through incremental reforms - “That magical marriage of free individuals and fair laws; of the pursuit of happiness, each to her own joy, with the practice of disinterested justice – everyone treated the same” [Adam Gopnik in A Thousand Small Sanities] ) and, by contrast, how you see SourceCred interacting with that project.

This is an interesting question, and not one that I’ve thought about explicitly. It would be a cool chat to have during a community call.

@flyingzumwalt

Another flaw that most westerners often miss: Facism is a form of capitalism. Facism was the product of combining a capitalist economy with totalitarian states (Mussolini’s government in Italy, Hitler’s government in Germany) who took highly interventionist approaches to managing their economies. That’s not the definition of facism that you’ll find in dictionaries written by modern capitalists but it’s a historically accurate definition nonetheless.

I’m quite interested in how the major political/ideological systems of the 20th century interacted with and related to capitalism. Can you recommend any reading materials on this point?

@flyingzumwalt

You point here to the notion of social capital without using that term. Due to the nature of SourceCred and your overall vision for it, I think it would be good to provide a much fuller treatment of social capital, its meaning, and its role in the creation of healthy economies. This is especially important for you to grapple with because attempting to turn social capital into a quantified asset (ie. Cred ) could actually be counterproductive , depending on how you formulate it and depending on the objectives you’re trying to achieve.

Yes, this definitely merits further thought and discussion. Would you be willing to help kick that discussion off? Perhaps with a post exploring how attempting to turn social capital into a quantified score can be counterproductive.

I will, however, push back on the claim that SourceCred is trying to “turn social capital into a quantified asset”. Cred is not an asset; it is not owned and is not transferrable. (Grain is an asset, but it does not attempt to approximate social capital.)

@flyingzumwalt

This paragraph finishes with a bold conclusion - " Therefore, it has become necessary to change Capitalism ." - but the preceding statements don’t logically add up to that conclusion (though the following paragraphs say more to back it up).

• Why change Capitalism vs. replace Capitalism with something else? How does your argument lead to one rather than the other?
• I want a stronger backing for the claim that " Capitalism is incapable of changing course, even to prevent its own self-destruction"

This is a weaker section of the thesis. The issue is that (in the interest of brevity) I’m actually condensing a broader and more systemic critique of capitalism to focus on a single issue, i.e. climate change. In principle we could get things like carbon taxes to work well enough (or empower external regulators enough) to mitigate climate change while keeping capitalism mostly unchanged.

However, I think that when you look at the constellation of different, seemingly related vital problems that society is facing, you can see how they are all shared symptoms of fundamental flaws in the capitalist paradigm. Stuff like B-corps and Carbon-markets are lower leverage ways of accommodating for paradigmatic issues. We’re adding more epicycles to a system that puts transactional wealth in the center of the universe, when we should be re-orienting to a paradigm where value (as measured by retroactive credit attribution) is in the center, and transactional wealth orbits it.

I basically need to write a separate essay on this subject. I actually already gave it in presentation form at a Protocol Labs event a few weeks ago.