I share Stephen Downes’ view (repeated here: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=47753 ) about efforts afoot to convert public wealth into private (and increasingly stateless) wealth. Actually the agency is too passive in that phrase – there are people working hard at it. PayPal is an example of an explicit attempt to engineer this. “One solution: move control of money from the government to individuals. But you can’t do this via plebiscite. If there was a form of money that government couldn’t measure or track, you’d have a powerful alternative. This insight was genesis of Paypal in late 1990s.” (http://tinyurl.com/brrqkt)
When I read Stephen’s post, reporting an observation by George Siemens (here: http://tinyurl.com/cwnn5l) I thought, holy cow! George Siemens thinks this way, too. But, that is not what his post says. Siemens takes a more cautious position, only suggesting that the digital technology-economy might enable creative nodes otherwhere than in the traditional geographical nodes of “cities and regions of creativity”.
This suggests that we are still seeing the absence (can you see an absence?) of much real critique of the fundamental status quo ante the “crash” of 2008 (bar the familiar: Chomsky, Monbiot, 2 citations here: http://georgeroberts.livejournal.com/35814.html) and more particularly no attempt to do anything but put the familiar economic order back in place with a few rich men forced to wear dunces caps for a day or two. Education, e- or otherwise can surely help at least to open this discussion. How about a MOOC (http://tinyurl.com/cxxhwf) on rebuilding wealth in the commons?
rWorld2 