The New Economy

Posted by: Francis Wu, Firewall Filter

In autonomist space, ancient is now cutting edge. The “new economy” is in truth the gift economy we’ve seen in transhumanity’s pre-history. Everyone gives to the community as they are able; everyone takes what they need. With social networks, nanofabrication, and ubiquitous computing, suddenly every community is a small community again. The previous limitations of resource scarcity, supply chains, and group cohesion have disappeared.

Firewall agents need to appreciate the intricacies of these systems. In Consortium space, credits solve every problem. But in the outer system, acquiring gear and intel is a question of reputation, access, and the community needs as a whole.

An Immigrant’s Story

Roberta, I know I said I would come back for you. But Locus is not the paradise Vangala promised. I now fear for my own survival.

From the day Vangala smuggled me here, it is true they gave me food and clothing for nothing at all. They offered me a muse too, but I declined. I do not trust an AI watching over me every minute like that. With an ecto Vangala gave me, I found a place to stay in a small, creaking neighborhood on the outer rim. I shared a small metal bunker with four bunkmates. You would not believe, one is an actual caveman! I could not stop staring, until she fined me reputation points. Now I do better. But she is so ugly!

The day I arrived, a woman came to me named Big Blue who offered to show me around. I did not accept Blue’s offer, of course. What if she was looking to take the new person for money? Or if she was a Jovian informant who would send me back? I only found out later her offer was genuine, but by then, it was too late.

It is very difficult to find a job when you have no skills people want. But I did find work in the gardens for one day every week, checking the water nutrients, tending to the plants. I kept my head down and focused just on growing. Sometimes I would tell people off who would try to eat the plants before they are mature. I made a little reputation from my work, but never enough to get another trip with Vangala. The other people with me get more reputation points for less work. Maybe it is because they are friends with each other, while I work alone with the plants. I do not know. But things were improving, if I could just be patient.

Then I made a very bad mistake. There is a central space called the Amoeba. As I walked through, I saw very many people having sex, right there! I shouted at them to stop, telling them they should be ashamed and to go masturbate like normal people. I called the militia again and again. Then people started penalizing me! They put nasty comments on my feed, saying I was anti-art. I did not know it was an art project!

Things got out of control. A video went around the station of me yelling. They found out I was Jovian. People started calling me a biochauvinist. They painted “fascists out” on my bunker door. The caveman said I had to go; I was too smelly and brought too much bad attention. When I said no, she penalized me. Then all her friends penalized me too. She said she would do it every day until I left. I called the militia, but they knew me too, and they said penalizing reputation was not a crime. I called Big Blue, but she said she wouldn’t work with Jovian spies. When I went to the gardens, I found out I was fired there too. I don’t know who talked to them, but I think it was the caveman.

Now I work on the outside of the habitat, fixing things the robots aren’t smart enough to do themselves. I’m not very good at it, but I try my best. Every day I come back inside and get treated for radiation exposure. The medtech says they can fix everything but neural damage, so I should back my memories up, that I should get a shielded synthmorph. This is my body! I’m not just going to give up everything that I am to solder antennas together! But until my rep improves, I am having a hard time finding useful work to do.

Love you. I will keep working hard, until I can buy another trip for your escape. Or perhaps a trip for me to go home.

Open-Source Fabrication

The biggest crack in capitalism’s wall is nanofabrication’s undermining of supply constraints. Autonomist habitats make fabbers (both specialized and general purpose) and libraries of free blueprints accessible to everyone, either in their homes or in public maker spaces. Everyone can make almost anything they need, whenever they need it. Feedstock allowances and nanofab time limitations are generally non-existent, though use of rare elements may require the approval of the local residents. Isolated communities that face scarcity of certain resources may set collectively-decided limitations according to their specific situation.

Print jobs that call for massive uses of feedstock and other resource-intensive projects are frowned upon if they have not received prior approval from the local community. Significant social capital is required to justify the resource expense if you want to construct a habitat expansion or need several tons of reaction mass for ship propulsion. Large-scale and infrastructure projects are primarilty the result of collective action, though you do occasionally get individuals who seize the initiative and garner support for their personal projects. As a result, massive engineering projects like ship building are less common in autonomist space, and egocasting and resleeving are the preferred methods of transit.

Autonomist habs are willing to share their public resources with visitors and outsiders — within reason. Everything offered is considered public property, with the expectation that it will be returned when no longer needed. A recognized member of the autonomist community from another habitat is likely to be welcomed and offered full access to the communal stocks. Individuals with low rep, who are members of a hostile faction, or who have been exiled from other autonomist spaces may find their access monitored and limited, but they will still be provided with basic needs, including living space. Even morphs are provided, depending upon local scarcity, though the quality may rely on rep scores, local needs, and the whims of the body bank cooperative.

Of special note to Firewall agents: autonomist fabbers maintain logs of print jobs and requests, open to the public or assigned staff. In some habitats, those logs are monitored real-time for security or abuse of resources. Out of respect for their own safety and survival, habitats may put restrictions on weapons or dangerous items. At the very least, fabbers will be programmed to post public notices or alert the local militia if anything habitat-threatening is brewed up.

Fabber blueprints are stored locally on the machine or in mesh-accessible public libraries and cover almost everything an individual might normally desire. These blueprints are mined from old libraries, pirated from inner-system hypercorps, or created by open-source hacker communities and creative individuals.

Forget Money

The new economy very rarely involves currency — there is no need for it. Autonomists who frequently travel to the inner system or market habitats save credits to cover their needs there. Small autonomist habs retain a collective currency bank for this purpose, which residents may contribute to or draw from as needed, or which the community as a whole may use for transactions with outsiders. Scum-swarm residents practice a gift economy amongst themselves, but exchange currency with visitors. Titanians earn kroner, but its only use is for investing in microcorps and other Plurality-based projects as a way of allocating government resources. Various rep brokers attempt to bridge the economies of the inner and outer systems, maintaining networks that allow them to exchange favors for credits.

Property

As a general rule, autonomists do not respect the concept of private property. Ownership of private property is seen as one person depriving everyone else from the value of what they own. The natural world, resources, the means of production, infrastructure — these are all parts of the commons, to be held and shared by everyone. This is especially true of intellectual property; ideas and culture are to be shared and remixed, not hoarded.

Calm down: this does not mean you need to share your underwear with other people. Autonomists make a distinction between property and personal possessions. The various portable things that you have fairly accumulated over time for your immediate and personal use are yours. No one’s going to bother taking it when they can just make their own anyway (though they might borrow it in an emergency). Everything else is communal, to be borrowed and returned. If there is a scarcity of something, use is determined by greatest need. Hoarding, materialism, and other propertarian instincts are seen as a blight to be stamped out.

Different communities establish different methods for approving use of collective resources. On technosocialist Titan, special requests or changes to allowances are put to an immediate vote over the mesh, based on the value of the request (if public) and the requestor’s reputation. Many habitats have an AI or a review board established to moderate requests. Scum and other anarchist groups rely on more complex, decentralized methods (I know of at least one scum swarm that requires public performances, bake offs, or trial by combat, depending on the day of the week). Public cornucopia machines have simple queues. Those who need priority access politely ask those ahead and hope their reputation wins them some charity. Those whose names appear on the queue too often or who pull too heavily on rare resources without giving back to the community take a hit to their reputation. Disagreements can sometimes end with someone in the healing vat, the winner getting pummeled on social media, and neither getting many favors in the future. Agents should look for and take advantage of ways to jump the line in urgent situations. Otherwise you may find yourself waiting in line to fab your plasma rifle as venerable Uncle Wu is using the machine to print out a thousand tiny robots for tonight’s dance party.

Cooperative Work

Despite the availability of AIs and robots to do the bulk of labor, there are still plenty of duties that require a transhuman mind to complete. In the running of a habitat, everyone is expected to put in time maintaining the space as a cost of being part of the community. How much time depends on the needs of the habitat and can be as few as a few hours a month or a couple of days a week. Usually this involves duties such as checking in on people, clearing issues with robots, facilities maintenance, gardening, party planning committees, militia duty, kids daycare, and so on. Community service is critical for the well-being of the habitat and those who refuse to participate will find their reputation plummet.

Despite the detractors who think people are only motivated by profit, autonomist society is cluttered with work co-ops, collectives, syndicates, ad-hoc task forces, and Titanian microcorps, all engaged in productive labor. The average autonomist works only four hours a day, with plenty of leisure time, as labor is driven by local needs and personal initiative rather than unending profit-driven growth. The most common co-ops are those that fulfill critical habitat roles. Others run the gamut of technological development and creativity, from nanotech research communes and morph-design collectives to hacking crews and collaborative art studios. Smaller work groups network with others in confederations and free unions to coordinate large projects and share and trade resources. Membership in cooperative projects is voluntary, and most are organized without bosses using decentralized, non-hierarchical processes. Turnover can be high and splits over disagreements are common, but most groups quickly coalesce or dissolve as needed anyway.

Classical corporations consolidate power (and rewards) with the corporate leadership and are intrinsically coercive as workers are exploited for their labor. Autonomist cooperatives and mutualist corporations resolve this by super-empowering the membership in acting and making decisions. These flat organizations have nearly the same executive speed as hypercorps, but benefit from better information “from the ground.” Teams can quickly reorganize or retool to respond to events. Autonomist organizations usually form around a core goal or idea, and so can be shorter-lived than hypercorps (which are all bound by a profit motive). Autonomists sometimes have difficulties with long-term projects, as participation initially spikes with interest, then drops off over time or the group gets tied up with political in-fighting. Many cooperatives also suffer from creating monocultures, as individuals with unpopular views are singled out of the social network. Maintaining a diversity of ideologies can be difficult and is expensive in a consensus-driven organization.

Ultimately, distributing the workload across open-source networks does provide a critical competitive advantage compared to closed hypercorps. While a hypercorp is limited to the knowledge and skills of its own people (and the fruits of its espionage), autonomist networks can leverage hundreds of people of different backgrounds, each trying a given problem in a thousand varied experiments and immediately sharing their findings. The autonomist design loop has more throughput at greater speed, which has led to zero-budget autonomist teams making breakthroughs in advance of their profit-driven brethren. The autonomist designs are then shared, at no cost, to the benefit of the entire autonomist network as a public good, further supporting projects that might otherwise not be related.

The Role of Rep

A common assumption is that the new economy is just the old capitalist market with reputation acting as a new virtual currency. This confusion is fundamentally wrong. Reputation is not a thing someone buys or sells. Without currency to buy services from each other, autonomists rely on mutual aid, the free exchange of favors. These exchanges can be straightfoward and even: you fix my motorbike and I’ll code this app for you in return. This works well for small groups where everyone knows each other. Practicing mutual aid on a larger scale, with people you don't directly know, or with an asymmetric exchange, is more challenging. This is where reputation comes in. Rep scores let you judge whether to allocate your time helping someone you don't know and help you acquire support from strangers.

John Venusian fresh off the shuttle can visit a pub and pull from the public stock without a credit check. Ying Martian can hog the station’s telescopes for a few extra hours since she’s helped out the Barsoomians on a few occasions. Wei Hypercorp may expect to get a top-of-the-line biomorph when he egocasts in, but his credits are useless here, so he gets stuck in a case. Eva Anarchista has a solid rep, so she gets collective approval to borrow the hab’s shuttle for a few hours, no questions asked. When the venerated artist A. Germanotta asks to borrow the entire Lafayette habitat for a month, the residents agree, because she is known for creating tremendous art pieces that benefit her participants.

This is the range of reputation. Those who have a need are recognized and provided for. As our peers applaud or condemn activities, we establish a pattern. Community service, works of art, products exchanged, designs released to the public, funny or insightful media content, and even just making a neighbor smile can all boost reputation. Meanwhile, anti-social or destructive behavior, breaking community rules, or harassment can pull a reputation down. It all hinges on recognized contributions to the community.

While the reputation system rewards pro-social behaviors, it does have its flaws. There are a lot of reasons an individual might not get the rep they deserve: an uncouth manner, unpopular political views, timidity, public failures, modesty, overzealous privacy, work going unpublicized, unsavory morphological features, or just bad luck. Social cliques can unbalance reputation networks, as a small group of associates consistently boost each other’s reputation or publicize each other’s work, while quashing others. Bad actors can use sock puppets and conspirators to game the system. Reputation has a tendency to spike, as particular events catch media attention and go viral. Individuals can hire image managers or even abandon an identity altogether. Time eventually corrects imbalances, as the community forgets past events and reputation scores naturally balance out.

Agents beware: using your rep on a mission ties your identity to that location. Sentinels should maintain a second identity for use on operations, and use it regularly, as a false ID with no history stands out more than one with a bad rep. Maintain a strong reputation score by regularly attributing projects and media postings to it. And be ready to throw it all away if it is associated with a travesty of a mission.

Extropian Markets

The Extropian faction differs from other autonomist economies, embracing private property and free markets without governments. Credits and various cryptocurrencies are still used in their market-anarchist jurisdictions; laws are replaced by contracts between individuals and/or corporate entities, enforced by freelance judiciaries. Everything is a commodity: life support, security, housing, etc. Nanofab is unrestricted, however, so anyone with fabber access can meet their basic needs.

This sort of unfettered capitalism is critiqued by other autonomists, who note that it still enables those with wealth to exploit the have-nots, particularly with unfair contracts that support indentured service. The Extropian rejection of intellectual property, however, puts them at odds with inner-system hypercorps; numerous Extropian hypercorps base their business models on pirating IP. Extropian habitats provide a convenient middle ground between the inner and outer system, where both credit and reputation have sway.

A Day in the Inner System

//Begin Muse Log: May 23, AF 10//
//Location: Valles-New Shanghai, Mars//

  • 0600: Up early to auction off freelancer services on CivicNet’s Jobs forums. Get temp gig with Whitman Ephemera LLC. Sign a contract for 8 hours of coding employment, moderate pay, no benefits.
  • 0630: Use kitchen wet fabber to make soy milk, tofu pudding, and steamed bun breakfast. Scroll personalized newsfeeds.
  • 0700: Get the kids set up with the caretaker bots and school simulspace with your group family’s co-parents. Print fresh clothes.
  • 0800: Virtually commute from home to today’s programming gig.
  • 1200: Grab noodles-to-go from a food kiosk as you catch a train to the local clinic on your lunchbreak. Ignore the clanking masses busking and begging for cred.
  • 1205: Mesh inserts briefly compromised by AR advertising malware.
  • 1220: At clinic, pay for morph service pack updates and an ego backup. Note that your insurance deductible has gone up.
  • 1245: On way back, stopped at security checkpoint, harassed for not properly following ego ID scanning procedures. Get rep dinged for holding up the line.
  • 1315: Due to travel delay, rent time at a nearby coworking space to continue work. Wages penalized for exceeding alloted lunch break.
  • 1400: Purchase and download a single-use blueprint for new appliance seen in AR adverts. Remotely instruct home replicator to print.
  • 1500: Employing hypercorp bought out, contract abruptly canceled as position filled by indentures. Auction a new job for 2 more hours.
  • 1700: Telecommute to psychotherapy session for PTSD from Fall.
  • 1800: Get caught up in Wyrmwood AR game when a clan of troll sky raiders attacks your jungle elf fortress.
  • 1805: Ignore muse’s notifications re: city council referendum voting. Muse places votes based on previous preferences.
  • 1830: Call automated taxi aircar to dinner with partner at high-rep restaurant serving actual cooked meals (reservations placed last month). Discuss extending marriage contract another year.
  • 1930: Rent a breather and walk by foot through souks between the domes. Purchase party drugs with anonymized credits from a blackmarket vendor with decent g-rep. Politely decline solicitations from pleasure pod sex workers.
  • 2000: Stop by friend’s resleeving party. Admire new sylph morph. Watch XP of their recent skydiving vacation on Venus. Share drugs. Watch XP of favorite metacelebrities. Exchange socialite gossip.
  • 2045: Remotely check in on the kids, watch the bots tuck them in.
  • 2100: Go clubbing. Choose audio input from a DJ spinning live from a habitat in orbit. Check your health metrics. Dance more.
  • 2120: Spot an ex at the club. Go into privacy mode and use AR to blank them from your sensory input.
  • 2130: Leave early. Outside the club, interfere with a bully who is harassing a neo-chimp. Get punched in the nose, but the chimp and some passers-by ping your rep. Video goes viral, leading to a roller-coaster rep ride over the course of the night.
  • 2200: Take aircar back home. Admire new appliance, but printer infected with ransomware. Switch AR skin to ocean waves to sleep.
  • 2300: Referendum results announced; muse-placed votes support an initiative requiring AGIs to register in a government database before they sleeve into a physical morph.

//End Log//

A Day in the Outer System

//Begin Muse Log: May 23, AF 10//
//Location: Locus, Jovian Trojans//

  • 1000: Wake up at a leisurely time in the polycule’s shared module. Update your socnet profile and AR visual skin and audio playlist.
  • 1030: Take a pullway to a spin module to work out in a gym with gravity. Your morph doesn't need it, but spacer habits die hard.
  • 1130: Clean up in a hygiene pod with waterless soap and shampoo.
  • 1200: Catch breakfast at the local cafe co-op: fabbed muesli but real fruit and homemade cheese and bread. Spend some time chatting with visiting Argonauts about their research projects. Share lifelog excerpts from the time you helped analyze a xenoartifact on Oberon.
  • 1255: Make room for an improvised drone demolition derby racing down the floatways. Ask muse to update hab map to avoid routes.
  • 1300: Spin off a fork to visit old friends on Titan. Place it in the egocasting queue. Watch XP of recent gatecrashing missions.
  • 1330: Answer a friend’s emergency callout to help supervise an outing of kids from the neighborhood daycare. Walk them through a timeaccelerated simulspace of a world with gravity. Show them how to do cartwheels and somersaults. Get your rep pinged.
  • 1400: Join a mesh group chat about your art/weapons collective’s ongoing projects. Get rep dinged for failing to follow through on an agenda item from last week. Reach consensus on new goals.
  • 1500: Hammer out some tweaks in your latest goop gun design. Send the blueprint to the public maker space’s fabber queue.
  • 1630: Get lucky and run into the Roving Tamale Bot for a delicious lunch. Watch shuttles dock on the habitat’s outer spars and rings.
  • 1700: Volunteer shift at the Rusty Golem. Help a person add extra arms to their synthmorph frame. Help another resleeve into a customized galatea with hypersensitive tactile inputs. Work repairs on an arachnoid someone abandoned.
  • 2100: Get caught up in a neighborhood mesh forum argument about how much leeway to give to Jovian expats new to Locus who are still unlearning their bioconservative prejudices.
  • 2200: Meet friends at an exoplanet-themed bar for food, drinks, drugs, and AR games. Try out a new social drug making the rounds, get a nice buzz. Download the open-source recipe.
  • 2300: Respond to an emergency militia call to help break up a drunken brawl between visiting Extropians and brinkers. Ding their rep. Spend some time babysitting drunkards while conflict-resolution volunteers patch things up.
  • 0000: Pick up your printed goop gun from the maker space. Grab a new outfit and stunner sidearm from the free exchange store.
  • 0030: Reintegrate your fork, which just egocast in from Titan. Catch up on memories of hanging out with friends in a VR there. Schedule a session at an implant clinic to get a ghostrider module installed tomorrow so your friend’s fork can visit and spend time with you.
  • 0100: Don a vacsuit and take some friends outside to test the goop gun. As planned, launched pellets rapidly expand in vacuum, coating the helmets and sensors of targets to blind them.
  • 0200: Join a zero-g dance party by the Amoeba to celebrate.
  • 0300: Your partners are already all in bed, so use an app to find a hookup for the evening. Meet a cute scum triad who invite you back to their ship to check out some of their homemade XP and play.
  • 0400: Crash out.

//End Log//