Whuffie would be a terrible currency

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Wait, people read DAOITMK as utopian?

MeowMeowBeenz summed up a reputation economy nicely:

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It works out if the only value is celebrity.

Well, I liked it that a bunch of randos owned Disneyworld instead of a giant corporate entity.

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Its ok, you can tell us you’re talking about Trump, we can take it.

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It was a fun read, but not exactly an ideal society.

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in reality, many people are delighted to treat such jerks as “strong, decisive people who tell it like it is.”

Got anyone in mind here, Cory?

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Reminder: the guy who coined the word “meritocracy” intended it to be a pejorative.

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The problem with one reputation based currency is that it will force opinions to be only of the “majority approved”, with dissent - real or imagined - being punished hard and fast. Non-approved opinions would then have to be discussed in secret, in hushed whispers and dim light.

And then there would be guilt by association pushed, so if a friend says something “wrong” you would have to choose between losing “wealth” or cutting the contact. This would further enforce the social compliance, by threat of effective banishment/excommunication.

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Added one Like to your Boingboing reputation score. Use it wisely, because I can take it away again.

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Whatever happened to that Peeple app? The “yelp for people”

That issue applies similarly to professional reputations generally, right?

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But, but, but, I inspired many people to work really hard on that project!

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I always find it interesting that authors of supposedly utopian fiction almost never see their own fiction as utopian.

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Hrm
 I recall @doctorow praising the idea of a reputation economy back in the last decade.

Anyway if he’s changed his mind then “yay”. He’d be Scrooge McDuck rich and I’d be J. Wellington Wimpy poor. Cette inĂ©galitĂ©!

I’d say no. I have several kinds of professional reputations for unrelated skillsets but aside from being unable to use either to buy groceries, they dont translate into greater hiring opportunities even indirectly as there are so many other soft factors which go into hiring and pay decisions.

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Wrote that one before Trump entered the race, as it happens!

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Sounds like Gandalf in Nippon. :slight_smile: No professional licenses? Certifications? Degrees? Title to assets?

It’s hard and expensive to credibly appraise fair market value of an asset like professional goodwill.

The job is maybe not as hard as coding a Whuffie algorithm but still 
 @doctorow was writing fiction.

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They’re actually implementing that in China.

Yes. Voluntary so far. Once they get critical mass, it will be mandatory.

Matter of time until it gets here too. It is a bit too useful population control method to pass on.

This is a topic I’ve been pondering a lot lately. Post-Industrial futurism is a hobby of mine and I was in the early P2P discussions about digital currencies that led to Bitcoin. Recently, I wrote a paper for a Tallinn U project that explored reputation based economies built on Semantic Web technology as an alternative to inherently problematic numeric abstractions. I’ve long followed the development of Social-Semantic Network concepts like Netention and sought to envision the integration of networked production infrastructures with Social-Semantic networking to ‘weight’ the distribution flow of resources in the built habitat according to associative analysis of the congruence between individual and societal intention. And so I devised what I call the Digital Tao; an internet that knows you as a person and has a ‘pronoia’ imperative–a secret digital conspiracy to help you and everyone else. Sadly, my paper was rejected (I’m an amateur, after all) but it did help me fight my recent depression.

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