But torrenting also gave rise to private trackers, which punish leeching off of the system and promote contribution through positive/negative ratios. I was considering this system and thought of what would happen if we applied it to a real-world economy.
Let's say that democratically, a commune democratically decides on what is the most required job. Let's say this job is agriculture, because the commune is running out of food. Working in agriculture, in this sense, would improve your "ratio", allowing you to get food from the communal storage, at the price of a hit to your "ratio". This could possibly be applied to other commodities as well. Of course, ideally, one's ratio would decrease very slowly if they were to take a lot of food out of the communal storage if there was an overabundance of food, and less food if there was a shortage.
What do you think, Holla Forums? Of course there's some issues, such as how you calculate the ratio cost of commodities, though perhaps that can be done democratically.
Holla Forums - applying bittorrent mechanism to politics
Nolan Gonzalez
>>>/gnussr/
Andrew Turner
There's no point in this when we already have Cockshott's works and the further development of the issues dealt with in the Soviet Cybernetics thread. We already have the cookie algorithm and also a proposal for a sortition-like system to call up collective groups of labor when needed. This BitTorrent idea is putting the Law Of Value under a different name because it doesn't abolish value production. Production must be carried out purely on the basis of collective needs. This would work better than Cockshott's pseudocurrency while being about as easy to compute (if not easier), though, so I'm saving this idea. Good work. We discussed lexicographic tiers for various products in the SovCyb thread - you might want to go there and Ctrl+F that. If you could create an algorithm to assign products this automatically as proposed there, your system would work.
"Critique Of The Gotha Programme" and "Towards A New Socialism" both discuss them.
You say that like it's a bad thing!
Isaiah Martinez
Yes, and just like how you can donate, you can contribute what you don't need in exchange for what you do, or cost your ratio less.
Torrentday has a really cool system, it's 'bonus' system. Whereby having files seeding, available for others to download, slowly generates a bonus currency which can be exchanged to improve your ratio in bulk. This results in a greater spread of files having seeders available than not, rather than a lot of onpopular files having 0 seeds. The equivalence of this is harder to relate, but I have a few ideas. Basically we can say that we can be creative with ways in which people can be useful and merit resources as reward. For example having skills or a trade which isn't the most commonly demanded - can give you some sort of 'bonus' too, because although you don't get requestts to perform your more uncommon trade for people very often, you are acknowledged as being valuable to the group because of the extra diversity of skills you give to the collective.
Also with certain private trackers you get other rewards for being a high ratio user. So particularly hard-workers or highly or broadly skilled individuals may get special rewards, this may be qualifying for first-dibs on certain luxury goods that are fairly scarce, we can be quite creative with this. Nobody will lose out by having a reward system like this, but it acknowledges and encourages those who are able, to gain difficult to acquire skills, to broaden their skillsets, or to simply work harder than others.
Jason Morales
good idea, but i have a better, more efficient one:
give everyone his own private property there, no resources wasted in calculating ratios everyone could moderate himself, if you want to work more you can work more, if you dont want to work you can use what you saved up, if you want to save up and learn a more demanded skill you can, etc
Dominic Bell
Not him, but as I understand it, you'd receive labor vouchers in response to how many hours of work you do. It's different from traditional money in that they're non-transferable, are destroyed after use, and expire if not used for an excessive amount of time. Ideally, all jobs would give the same number of vouchers per hour, but if some jobs are in greater demand than others, you'd adjust wages to pay those jobs more, and scale the wages of other, less necessary, jobs to pay less so that the average number of vouchers distributed stays the same. And of course, you can also adjust prices to take care of shortages/surpluses.
Seconding on reading "Towards A New Socialism"
Ryder Ortiz
consider suicide
Owen Gomez
literally utopianism
James Parker
Why try to figure out tortured ways to reproduce the price system? Just wait for full automation.
Gavin Green
*as opposed to constant meetings, Also, I should mention that OP's system does, IMO, constitute a step forward from labor vouchers and is on the same level as a scarcity-based pseudocurrency because it's on a productivist basis rather than a work-based one. This means that such a system would have a much easier time than a voucher-based system in eliminating the Law Of Value if you wanted to rework it.
Production must still be coordinated by some means, and scarcity will never go away for certain products (there will always be something shiny and new and in short supply).
Wyatt Bailey
By the time that full automation is possible, there will probably be some AI that can do the coordination for us.
Dylan Kelly
Nick Land explores that road in greater detail, and it's a dark one. If we want to survive, we cannot let AI coordination of society become a reality under capitalism, as it would mean capital discarding its human host and becoming truly sentient and all-consuming. We're already working on a coordinating system which relies on a simple neural net (the simplest form of machine learning, a far cry from AI) to act both as a planning mechanism in the future and right now as a means of replacing corporate management schemes with something more decentralized and ultra-exploitative. The only way out of capitalism is to accelerate its own self-destructive tendencies to the point that they must consume the rigid violence-monopolizing hierarchies which allow it to survive. We already see this happening with the gig economy and the necessity of FOSS to keep up software development. The next logical step is to further advance this perverse ultra-exploitative photonegative of communism, with its subsumption of play to work instead of vice versa, into the most elementary levels of capitalist reproduction, that of manufacturing. To this end, we must create cooperatives managed by the cybernetic calculator and organized internally by free associations of producers like with Valve or WL Gore & Associates - we must also embrace novel, disruptive technologies such as 3D printing. Marx's dialectic, sanitized by Schumpeter as "creative destruction" and finding a further distortion as Silicon Valley's call for "disruption", must be seized once more by the Left - the process itself is the critique, and it must be advanced as such until it negates its own negation that is the proletarian condition, accelerating with the predestined end of crashing and burning to leave behind only communism. Capital must eat through its statist eggshell and thereby commit suicide before it develops in the next few decades and hatches fully conscious to gobble up humanity. The only way out is through, but there are different ways to go about this.
Cameron Hernandez
We're supposed to drastically reduce the workload by distribution of labor and at the same time ensure that there is enough produced for everyone despite the reduction in work hours. If you work, you will work to produce something everyone needs, and you work the hours that the gigantic increase in productive manpower resulting from the abolishment of busy-work, divided up equally. Kropotkin states:
"When we take into account how many, in the so-called civilized nations, produce nothing, how many work at harmful trades, doomed to disappear, and lastly, how many are only useless middlemen, we see that in each nation the number of real producers could be doubled. And if, instead of every 10 men, 20 were occupied in producing useful commodities, and if society took the trouble to economize human energy, those 20 people would only have to work 5 hours a day without production decreasing. And it would suffice to reduce the waste of human energy at the service of wealthy families, or of those administrations that have one official to every ten inhabitants, and to utilize those forces, to augment the productivity of the nation, to limit work to four or even to three hours, on condition that we should be satisfied with present production."
Those hours were what he thought were necessary back in his day, on his level of technology. Our modern advancements could reduce the number even further, but the question that needs to be answered is "How do we redistribute the work load?" I say we impose a policy of "Keep the factories at work, not the worker". Split the day evenly for each person working each position.
Then we have to answer "How do we distribute the product of these means of production?" I don't believe labor vouchers are the solution, since we already are capable of producing at a quantity that creates so much surplus, giving each person an equal share of this production is completely feasible to the point where doubting it despite seeing all the fat that our consumerist society is burdened with is insane, even with a minority of freeloaders.
Brayden Perez
Ad Block is Commuism.
Oliver Lee
The fact that I have an insane amount of bandwidth and it doesnt cost me extra (both in money and performance) to use it all the time makes seeding a non-issue to me. I'm seeding dozens of torrents at any one time.
Daniel Morales
This seems like a useful system, although there is a lot of evidence that incentives for intellectual labor don't work and actively reduce productivity. Plus, how do we measure the importance of scientists and the like? Are they the first to have their labor be advanced into something more communistic, being given "consumption passes" akin to very generous rations? OP's proposal and your development of it presume that there is a direct correlation between incentive and output, which is true for both torrent-seeding and manual labor. A not-insignificant portion of today's economy, however, is based around white collar work of all varieties, for which this isn't true.
We need a system to allow for people to self-organize and determine what works best. We can't have a machine or abstract mechanism like capital determine things instead. If we automate this process entirely to spread out work as much as possible among those qualified, it will reach its limit and come across new problems. Your basic sentiment of "keep the factories at work, not the worker" is the best solution, but how to go about making it a reality is a little more complicated. As far as purely communistic varieties of distribution go, cookie method is by far the clear winner. Random dictator works as well, but it's just not as good. OP's system is not communistic, but it would also work.
Matthew Nelson
...
Logan Garcia
why you're not streaming & making a youtube channel man? get well read & do that please.
Hunter Morgan
Internet piracy is quite literally an example of communization; a movement which has transformed exchange values into a circulation of free use values.
Mason Martin
You wouldn't download a car.
Connor Thompson
Let's assume that there is less desire for labour in the agricultural sector due to an overabundance of food. When these desires are met, the ratio cost of food would decline, especially in cases of overabundance. In my view, this would mean that other types of labour become more valuable.
In my mind's eye, I imagine a sort of list of jobs, sorted by "most required" to "least required", the "most required" improving your ratio the most per hours worked and the "least required" improving your ratio the least. Lets say the agricultural needs are met, and the position of agriculture as a form of labour drops from its #1 position to, i dont know, #10. This would open up different forms of labour such as Science, Art, Engineerings, Architecture, Education, Sanitation, White-Collar work etc to be perceived as more valuable.
I think democratically voting on what jobs are the most necessary would be the ideal way to weight value of labour in this ratio-based system. Everyone has a vote, and everyone can vote on the job that is perceived to be the most necessary. This would affect how much your ratio would increase per hour worked on any specific job.
The only downside of this might be that art and entertainment might be perpetually considered low-ratio jobs, but ideally basic necessities will not cost too much ratio given our current overabundance of them.
Another issue might be that farmers might say "fuck it" after agriculture becomes a low-ratio-increase job and just skip a year's harvest, casuing the amount of ratio gained per hour for agriculture to increase.
Ryder Turner
Private trackers are the cancer ruining filesharing
