Ryaki network : Workers in favor of technological progress.

  In a previous blog post of mine, I had proposed a new rule that would give the right to those that consume an X amount of money, to work to regain the same amount of money. This , I proposed, would change the behavior of agents to consume as much as the infrastructure allows. We would have full utilization of infrastructure and thus a tremendous reduction in production costs and thus reduction of the cost of living. You can read about it here  , though the algorithm is a bit outdated.

  In this article, I want to point out that we will also have a secondary effect. Workers will stop having an aversion toward technological progress that endangers their jobs and their income. This is very important, because we want to avoid the need to create a structure / organization that forces technological progress in the production process . Instead workers / consumers will autonomously welcome progress.

I think that it is important to see how things work in Capitalism. In capitalism, workers or worker power is a commodity. Companies simply want to buy as few of it as they can, and for this reason, they adopt productivity increasing technologies. On the other hand, workers do not want to lose their jobs since they do not have the right to work, other than the one given by their employer.
It is for this reason that a secondary group in the company should take these decisions, whose interest aligns with the company itself. I think this is called the management team.

For worker cooperatives, member workers have the full benefits of capital investment. But if a non-member worker wanted to join the cooperative, those benefits would have to be split with him too. In other words, technological progress is welcomed by member workers but other workers are not.

Now, let me point to you what happens with the proposed ryaki network:
There are two rules that need to be taken into account :

A. You have the right to work the same amount that you consume. Thus you get priority with regards to others that haven't consumed as much on positions that you both qualify.

B. Each production unit has specific positions that need to be filled, but those positions do not belong to a single person. They belong to multiple people that take turns to work there. Workers are eligible to work in multiple posts.

Because workers can work in multiple positions and they have the right to work in any of those positions, their income remains stable when an organization adopts a new structure that reduces their hours of work , or makes their position obsolete.

Unicorns and Television : A dichotomy of personalities.

I will describe here two types of people. I will do it with two examples.
( My prose is influenced by Patrick's Rothfuss books which I have been reading lately.)

Example 1 :

Consider that one is asked whether he believes that electromagnetism exists, the theory that explains , among others , how electricity works.

Type A would say that , of course , electromagnetism is correct :
"Every day, I watch television, and television needs electricity to work.
If we didn't know how electricity worked, we wouldn't be able to have a functioning television.

Type B would say that I will have to think about it.
He would read the theory and will try to verify that the theory is self-consistent. Then he would check whether there were experimental data that are consistent with the theory, then after a week he would say :
"Under similar conditions to those that it was experimentally tested , the theory is predictive."

Of course, type B is infuriating , he avoided saying the decent thing, that the theory is true. Not only that, type B lost a month studying for something that was obvious. And that is only one theory. Society is build on hundreds of thousands of theories. Imagine wanting to heat your food in the microwave, but you do not do it because you do not know how it works .


Example 2:

Consider that one is told that unicorns exist and fairies use them to travel long distances, especially when dragons are nearby, because dragons are afraid of their magical horn. Then he is given a twelve book  treatise full of mathematics and experimental data.

Type A would immediately start laughing, being amazed at the level of naivete that the questioner is exhibiting.
"Noone has seen a unicorn, everybody knows that they do not exist."

Type B would say that he is not sure this is true. He would get the twelve books and start reading them. As before, first there would be a logical analysis, then a review of the experimental data, the dissections of dead fairies that were found on the Amazon forest and the bones of Dragons that were found in the Alps.
Type B would then say what he said in the previous example,
"According to the data, you are right, unicorns do exist."

Type A is infuriating, he is arrogant as hell. Because it is common knowledge that they do not exist, any other theory is plainly stupid.
The interesting thing with example 2 is that the next week, a dragon came near their village and ate type A. Type B had learned the calling sound for unicorns and managed to find one that helped him escape.

Replacing the Web : The importance of social context to information.

While creating a language to encode and compute p2p social structures, I was thinking that parallel to those digital social structures, the Web would remain the same, used to store and retrieve information.
I am starting to believe that this is wrong. We need to encode the social contexts/structures around information. For now, they are either implicit or entirely missing.

Information is created by a social structure and it is used in other social contexts. Thus information has a social function. It is the input to other social processes.

If information provides a service to society or to some group of people, making this relation explicit also results in creating a feedback loop where those groups finance the creation of that information.

As you can see, information is not different from any other production process. A social structure produces a product, and that product is consumed by a specific group, which , if production was democratic, finances and guides production with participatory social structures.

Currently, information , on many occasions, lacks a social purpose and noone takes responsibility for the accuracy of that information. In the future I envision, information has a purpose and someone is responsible for it, for ex. to update it to make it more accurate or clear.

In need of a generic fail-safe organization.

For every solution to a problem , we have assumptions about the state of the environment with which we interact. Those assumptions can stop being correct. What do we do when that happens?

  Let us further assume that the problem is a societal one, and the solution is a social organization. If we define rules under which this social organization functions and we require the environment to respect some restrictions, then when it doesn't, we end up with no social organization that can solve the issue.
  If the organization was mediated with software , then that software will be thrown away, and new forms of organization need to be developed from ground zero. Writing specialized software is time-consuming, thus practically, for a long period of time, the organization will need to use non-digital methods to preserve its structure. This, for many reasons, is both impractical and unacceptable.

  The things get even more difficult when we understand that social organizations depend on each other. If one is not able to perform its role due to a change in the environment, all other dependent social organizations will collapse as well. Thus, sometimes, we can end up with catastrophic failures.

  How can a system be able to adapt to such environmental perturbations? Here , I mean adaptation under conditions it was not designed for.

  In my opinion, we need to define a generic type of organization that can act as a fail-safe mode, it will try to fulfill the imminent problems and at the same time it will create the discussion space for the creation of the new organizational forms that will replace the failed ones.

  What characteristics should this generic organization have? This is a question I need to answer.

Freedom and Democracy as a Welfare Service

Freedom is not free. It has an economic cost that depends on the material conditions that enable it. The same is true for Democracy. At the same time Freedom and Democracy are fundamental human rights. Without exceptions, all must afford those rights. Thus, any proposed social system must create mechanisms that provide those rights to its participants.
 
My exposition will start by analyzing previous movements on freedom and Democracy and possibly discuss their limitations.

Digital Freedom and FSF

 

One cannot discuss Freedom without talking about the Free Software Foundation. FSF supports the freedom of the users of Software It believes that the users have the right to understand how the software works and to modify it to better support their needs. It is important to understand software as an intermediary between the hardware and the user. It gives the user an interface to interact with the machine. It enables the user to perform certain actions or it restricts him. In this sense, the interface that the software provides is similar to a legal system that allows or disallows certain actions.
  Thus , one could say that FSF supports the right of the users to change the digital system, rather than simply picking among the actions that are possible within the provided software. In this sense, FSF is consistent with revolutionary thought.

  From a materialistic point of view though, this is not possible. Users almost never change the software to suit their needs. In fact, proprietary software might even be more perceptive of its users needs, because the users are also the customers. Free Software provides freedom as long as you are a hacker, and even then , it is very difficult to perform a change. Only the writer of the software and a select few that maintain it are able to make changes. As software becomes more and more complicated, developers only understand parts of the software and only together can they support it.
  In order to have actual democracy and freedom, we need to create a welfare service that is free for all to use, that allows users to vote on changes about the software (or fork it and create alternatives) and provide funding so that the developers of the software will perform them.
  In conclusion, digital freedom requires the existence of a welfare service.

Material D&F : Democracy and Freedom viewed from the Revolutionary Left.

The revolutionary Left had always had Democracy and Freedom as the goal. For the RL , social relations and the economy should be determined by the will of the people. But similarly to the digital case, there is an intermediary between the citizens and the execution of actions. The interface here is the rules that each community , group or society has demanded to be respected.

  The type of rules can depend greatly on the context. In production, there is a specific workflow that must be respected. The use of machinery requires specific handling to avoid damaging it. Coordination in a community about social issues requires specific methods of decision making and types of actions to choose among.

It is in this context that the RL supports the right of the citizens to change the rules, the interface that each user will need to respect. Here though, we have the same problem, the citizens know what they want , but they have no knowledge how to acquire it. Can citizens change the rules themselves?

Consider the case of a nuclear plant. A community might decide that it wants to reduce the nuclear waste that goes to the environment. The community perceives the externalities of the nuclear plant. For the change to happen, it must interact with a group of nuclear scientists that will provide the new rules about the functioning of the nuclear plant.
Similarly, assuming that you eat at a restaurant, the customers can vote on changes of the food quality or provide directions on what type of food they prefer. Only a trained chef will be able to turn those directions into rules of cook-making that the cooks must abide by.
  In conclusion, material freedom does not only require the right to vote but also the support of trained professionals that will provide the solutions, and will create the new rules that certain members of society must follow to have the desired results.
  Since freedom and democracy is a universal right, this service must be provided to everyone, thus it must be a welfare service.

Cyber-physical systems : The elimination of the cyber physical barrier.

I have discussed digital and material freedom and the need for the existence of a welfare service that enables them. Digital freedom has been proposed by the FSF, material freedom by the Revolutionary Left. The interesting thing is that the cyber-physical barrier is starting to collapse. (And one of the goals of my work is its collapse.) The examples are many. ERP systems had been used in production for many years. Our interaction with the State has been digitized. New p2p systems start to emerge, such as airbnb and Uber, that use software to determine the interactions between the customers and the providers of a service. Blockchain and smart contructs promise to digitize part of the interactions we have as a society.
  Software starts to determine our social relations and the economy. The interface that citizens use start to increasingly become digital.
The rules are written in software.
  It is in this context, that the notion of Digital Freedom and Material Freedom start to blur and start to become the same thing. The RL has to start thinking about Free Software and Digital Freedom and translate its ideas to this new world.

Freedom as a welfare service

Any group that supports freedom as a universal right needs to understand that freedom requires maintainers. It requires a service that takes user input and produces changes to the rules and the software that create that user interface. That service needs to be free and it needs to be productive.

We need to measure the productivity of the service in order to determine the degree of freedom that it provides. If users propose changes, the service needs to interact with the users, provide guidance and actually perform the changes that the users want.

The group must find ways to support such a welfare service. In order to understand the magnitude of the cost, Research for new products or production methods need to be part of this welfare service, thus the cost is greater than the current cost on Research. This amounts to 2% of the GDP.

Freedom is not free but it must be free for everyone.

Multi-level selection and Cultural Evolution

I recently had the chance to learn of a new theoretical model on Evolution called multi-level selection. I will try to describe it and provide my first impressions on the different interpretations / uses of that theory from the community and its rejection from mainstream social sciences.
( I wanted to make a more thorough research on the subject, but currently it is not possible.)

Now, the main idea of multi level selection is very simple but this simple idea has profound implications for our society. It goes against mainstream theories that were built to support the premises of Capitalism, basically, the notion of the individual selfish actor. Social sciences have thus been victims of the system they belong to.

Let us first describe the mainstream mechanism of Evolution.

A. The actor is an individual organism to whom we attach a fitness function with which we measure its ability to survive.

B. We perform a simulation and then compute the fitness results with which we remove actors that have not performed well. This could mean for example that those actors have not been able to acquire enough food to survive.

C. We introduce random mutations that change the behavior of actors.

D. We perform the above multiple times.

We assume that natural selection works in the same way. Actors that have favorable mutations increase in number while others perish.

The important thing to note is A. The fitness function applies on the individual. This means that behaviors that increase the fitness of the individual are the ones selected. This leads us to conclude that only selfish behaviors are evolutionary selected.

This is consistent with the mainstream economic theory of an actor that is super rational and selfish. Since it is on our nature to be selfish, any other  theory that does not conceive the individual as the actor leads to failure.

Consider the case where we have a common piece of land where everyone can herd his sheep. Since the amount of grass is limited, it is best for each individually to overgraze his sheep. This eventually leads to the destruction of the land, not providing grass to anyone and the whole economy around it collapses. It is because of this that it has been suggested that individual property is the only way to govern resources.

Now, this is not true. Let us start with genetic evolution before switching to cultural evolution. Random mutations can propose any form of behavior, and it is selection that promotes those that increase survivability. Consider then the case that a specific mutation leads to an increase in the fitness of another organism whose behavior also increases the fitness function of the other. An increase of of the population of one organism leads to an increase of the other and vice versa. This is an example of a selection process that promotes a non-selfish behavior.

Mainstream evolutionary scientists will tell you that this is reciprocity, thus this only proves the selfishness of the individual actor. Note though that this is incorrect. Organisms do not necessarily have the capacity to judge actions. A selfish action here is defined as an action that directly increases the fitness of itself.

Multi-level selection thus proposes that a specific number of individual actors interact in such a way that their survivability depends on other. In such a case, we could consider the group as an actor that behaves in a specific way and which has its own fitness function. Individual mutations that increase the fitness of the group are thus selected while those that that do the opposite perish because the group perishes.

This formulation of evolutionary theory allows the existence of altruism, something that obviously exist in Human Society.

If we now return our gaze into culture , we will see that the main ideas of multi-level evolution also apply here. Elinor Ostrom's work is important here. Elinor studied communities whose livelihood depended on a common pool of resources like the one I described before. She found that depending on the case , the members created rules to govern the common resource. They imposed restrictions on its use and they checked that each member behaved accordingly. Some groups were more effective than others. This lead to an evolution of the rules of governance based on a group fitness function.

Let me now link the above ideas with my work. It is only recently that I learned about multi-level selection but it is directly related to what I am searching.

In essence, I am searching for a digital language that describes the rules of a group / community , that will have the same functionality as the DNA in organisms.

A. The DNA is interpreted so as to determine the structure of proteins
    This language will be compiled to create communication tools that permit the behaviors that the rules allow.
B. DNA can be copied and transfered into another organism.
     The digitization of the rules will permit a group to copy the institutional rules of another without any errors.
C.  DNA contains information about the organism that is subject to the effects of evolution.
      Similarly, each group will be able to mutate its rules and will be subject to a fitness function.

What I hope with this is that the complexity of the rules of community institutions will increase to the point that their effectiveness will surpass that of the state or the undemocratic corporations.
This digital language is hoped to increase the speed of the cultural evolution of institutions.

Unfortunately for me, the rules describe the concurrent interactions of agents and there isn't any widely accepted theory around distributed concurrent execution.
Thus my main research is on Computer Science rather than on Social Sciences.

Financing Research in a non-profit Economy - a distributed solution.

For a long time now, I have been thinking about ways to finance research in a non-profit economy like the Ryaki Economic Network. The only method I could find was a centralized one. Here I will propose a decentralized one. Since this is a new idea , I except it to be revised in the future.

Let me first define how a non-profit economy functions. In a non-profit economy, the revenue from the sales of a commodity is distributed to the workers that participated in the production process of that commodity.
  In contrast, in capitalism , a percentage is kept by the firm which constitutes its profits.


Thus, in a non-profit economy, two problems arise.

A. How do you finance new capital expenditures?
B. How do you finance research?

The solutions we find need to distribute the decision making to as many people as possible. Thus, they need to be distributively democratic.

The first problem has been solved by Ryaki. New capital expenditures are financed by workers because they are the only way of storing value in the system. The value  is retrieved back in the future as production uses the capital to produce goods.
  This solution works because identifying the processes that took part in production is easy, Secondly, the risk of investment is low enough to attract investors.

Can the same be done with research? No it can't.

Scientific research is characterized by the search into the unknown. Predicting the outcome of a research inquiry is most of the times impossible.
Many fail to produce any results at all, while others do not produce anything other than new knowledge that has no applicability to production. The usefulness of a research project can be found after many years when a composition of scientific results creates a new method of production, or a new product.

Any financing of research needs to take into account that research failures and practically useless new knowledge are important in the long run They need to be financed.

Here lies the problem. In a non-profit economy, workers are compensated the total amount of revenue. At the same time , we cannot use ryaki, because the risk of investment is too high.

Let us look at one solution. One solution to this problem is to have people democratically decide on the percentage (per) of value that is to be spent on Research. For any product bought at price (p),
per * p is to be spent on research. One could then say that this amount is kept in an special account that belongs to the consumer. The consumer can only use the money to finance research.

This solution depends on the centralized democratic choice of the people with regards to the percentage. At the same time, the decision might not be optimal. Which percentage is the optimal one? If we don't spend money on research, then we reduce our current costs as a society. At the same time, we abandon the probability of future reduction in production costs due to automation.

Is there a way to remove the centralized part from above and find a somehow optimal way to spend money on Research?

Let us assume that the optimal ratio of total research to productive research  is (rs).

Then let us suppose that we have a productive research of value (vr).
The change in production cost of a commodity due to this research is (d).

old price =  op
new price = np
 d = op - np

(Our research here decreases the production costs.)

Then one could finance research by increasing the price by (fr) such that

fr < d

for an amount of products (q) such that

fr * q = rs * vr .

Given that research is unpredictable, productive results can not be guaranteed to arrive when we need them, One could create a buffer of financing of new research. Secondly, if the reduction of costs is higher than
the cost of research we need to increase research. We do both by adding a multiplier (bf).

fr *  q = rs * vr * bf


The outcome of this equation is that research increases when it reduces costs. Financing is constant for many years and it allows researchers to fail, or in other words try to solve difficult problems.


I think that one more question needs to be addressed here. How is this different from the capitalist firm that extracts value in the form of profit?


The difference is that firms extract value through exclusion. They maintain exclusive control over resources and research results is one such thing. The patent system is used to maintain that dominance. On the other hand, the wages of researchers is determined by the labor market. Given that they cannot produce research on their own, it requires laboratories and numbers, their wages do not reflect the value that they create for the firm.

Given that in an open value network, resources are democratically shared as long as they are used to produce useful things, anyone can be a researcher if he has the qualifications. Anyone can use a lab and form research teams.
The customers decide on the direction of the research but not on the individuals that will perform it, individuals will be selected purely on effectiveness.

Thus, the income of researchers will not vary substantially from other professions. Their income is independent from the total reduction of costs in production due to their work. (though the total reduction of costs consitutes an upper limit).


I have described a distributed democratic method of research financing that determines both the intensity and the type of research. At the same time, the model is dynamic because it reacts to the effectiveness of research to reduce production costs. This is just an initial version which will eventually need to be improved upon.