8 Reader Responses

1. Tim Boucher Says:
   September 30th, 2007 at 6:05 pm

   Has anyone heard or used this Singapore company, Cherry Credits or Cherry Exchange or whatever the hell it is? Seems pretty interesting as it is targeted to a youth market who doesn’t have credit cards or bank accounts.

   Attach that kind of shit to some social lending sites and you have a pretty difficult to trace way of exchanging money online:

   http://www.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/

2. Tim Boucher Says:
   September 30th, 2007 at 6:06 pm

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_lending
   http://www.centernetworks.com/social-lending-web-2-0

3. cadeveo Says:
   October 1st, 2007 at 4:51 pm

   My…Dobbs…Zopa is like Proudhon’s mutualism dream come true!

4. Tim Boucher Says:
   October 1st, 2007 at 6:02 pm

   Never knew too much about Proudhon, but was just looking that up: it parallels perfectly an idea I had this morning which I will write about tonight or tomorrow.

   Nutshell version:

   Shared value communities form legal and financial unions (corporations) in order to protect the values they share. How that would work, I’m not quite sure. But I think it could have to do with owning collective data patterns on the internet: like between all of us, we have individual data profiles and averaged out collective profiles based around certain keyword patterns, language and image usage, social customs, and so on.

   It would almost be like if every sub-culture that arises formed itself as a corporation. Then, each sub-culture shared value corporate collective data entity could license aspects of its data profile to other corporate entities: marketers, manufacturers, etc - people who would classically be seen as “co-opting” sub-cultures by stealing their language and selling products to the market each sub-culture opens up. But the sub-culture would have a degree of autonomy, conscious control over how that process is done - instead of just being strip-mined and destroyed. And the marketers/manufacturers would win because there would be a mechanism by which they could directly interface with each sub-culture to find out what they really want and need as products and how best to communicate with them.

   It would almost be like sub-cultures would form local or state “governments” while mass manufacturers and marketers would act almost as from a more federalist stand-point…

   Any of that make sense? The ideas sort of coalesced haphazardly for me this morning after a red eye flight out from Seattle… More work needs to be done on them, really.

5. cadeveo Says:
   October 1st, 2007 at 10:31 pm

   Makes sense. Proudhon and mutualism are exactly what this sounds, like…’cept updated for our century. Semi-autonomous mutual aid societies interacting with each other and taking the place of centralized, authoritarian governmental structures (be they actual States or mega-corporations). And under this structure, perhaps rather than corporations cannibalizing and destroying cultures in order to exploit their members and their values, the corporations and marketers will have to become more and more like semi-autonomous mutual aid societies, otherwise they will not be able to survive.
   How’s that for some peaceful jujitsu?

   It could work. Who knows how? I guess we all learn by trying?

6. cadeveo Says:
   October 1st, 2007 at 10:32 pm

   Wait. Replace “trying” with “doing.”

7. Tim Boucher Says:
   October 2nd, 2007 at 1:40 am

   Art of Peace - where it’s at. Mutually inspired abundance.

8. Removing indieKarma - T[ip oBuclhe]r Says:
   October 31st, 2007 at 12:54 am

   […] Nothing happened with it whatsoever after a month. Not willing to test out a web monetization product for longer than that with no results. Read Similar Articles: […]