Transparency, again
In this post, I introduced two variations on a definition of transparency:
you pay for and it is known to you what you are paying for it. Seen from this standpoint, surprisingly, one of the more transparent transactions in which you will ever engage is the purchase of gasoline. They put the price on a great big sign out front; the price even includes all federal and state taxes; and you control the trade at every step. You could argue that it is less than transparent since the amounts explicitly going to the state and feds are not usually spelled out. But since everyone in the local area has the same burden built in, what difference does it make where it goes? It's the cost to you that matters.
The opposite of this might be the purchase of a house: first you negotiate with the previous owner, then you negotiate with the bank, then you have to pay title insurance, mortgage insurance, transaction fees, flood insurance, and possibly a few other things before you take possession. Later, you find that there are tax advantages and disadvantages (depending on where you live). Other complex deals are comparable: the purchase of a cell phone with a plan and a car with financing involve bundling, hidden costs, fees, taxes, and so on.
For the most part, though, purchasing stuff in a modern economy has become so much more transparent than it was here in the past, or the rest of the world even now. Most of my daily transactions are closer to the gasoline. They post a price, you select the standardized product, you swipe your debit card, your bank transfers the exact amount to their bank, and everyone is happy. Quite different from the bazaar trade in which you weren't sure of the price or the quality/quantity you were getting, and it was risky just carrying your cash on you.
On the other hand, the modern world has made such transactions the opposite of transparent when looked at from another angle: you don't really have any idea what you are getting or how it got here. How much Nigerian or other blood was spilled bringing that gasoline to market? Were those khakis sewn by kidnapped children in India? How many pesticides and effluent went into the production of your spinach? I'm not going to link examples to each of these or the many other stories we hear on a daily basis. You know them as well as I, perhaps better.
I just thought it was worth pointing out that modern crypto has made the money part of our transactions incredibly secure, so secure that we may soon be able to carry on large swaths of economic activity in cyberspace and outside the surveillance of our insect overlords. However, the actual creation and transport of matter, of things in meatspace, cannot be secured with the intelligent application of prime numbers and collision-free hash algorithms. So, how does one create transparency in the creation of hardware?
There are a few open source hardware movements. The Economist just highlighted some of them (may be a $ link). In it, they mention the Chumby, the Neuros OSD, the RepRap (not mentioned in the article, a comparable project is Fab @ Home), the Tuxphone, OpenMoko, GumStix, and Eric von Hippel's book, Democratizing Innovation. Additionally, I have come across a large number of open source Wi-Fi projects, including this mobile hotspot (but the parts are not OS), this solar-powered grid project to bring the tubes to kids in the developing world (an idea complementary to the $100 laptop), and especially the Linksys WRT54G router. And let's not forget open source automobile projects Oscar, Society for Sustainable Mobility, and c,mm,n (I proposed a framework for how an open source car project might work here).
When you can fire up the matter compiler and build your own car after paying for the matter with a secure transaction, the world is going to be a very different place.
PS: I ran into this article in Wired immediately after posting.
- How are decisions arrived at? Who has the decision authority? What is the basis of a decision? How may the decision be appealed?
- Authority and responsibility must lie at the same locus.
you pay for and it is known to you what you are paying for it. Seen from this standpoint, surprisingly, one of the more transparent transactions in which you will ever engage is the purchase of gasoline. They put the price on a great big sign out front; the price even includes all federal and state taxes; and you control the trade at every step. You could argue that it is less than transparent since the amounts explicitly going to the state and feds are not usually spelled out. But since everyone in the local area has the same burden built in, what difference does it make where it goes? It's the cost to you that matters.
The opposite of this might be the purchase of a house: first you negotiate with the previous owner, then you negotiate with the bank, then you have to pay title insurance, mortgage insurance, transaction fees, flood insurance, and possibly a few other things before you take possession. Later, you find that there are tax advantages and disadvantages (depending on where you live). Other complex deals are comparable: the purchase of a cell phone with a plan and a car with financing involve bundling, hidden costs, fees, taxes, and so on.
For the most part, though, purchasing stuff in a modern economy has become so much more transparent than it was here in the past, or the rest of the world even now. Most of my daily transactions are closer to the gasoline. They post a price, you select the standardized product, you swipe your debit card, your bank transfers the exact amount to their bank, and everyone is happy. Quite different from the bazaar trade in which you weren't sure of the price or the quality/quantity you were getting, and it was risky just carrying your cash on you.
On the other hand, the modern world has made such transactions the opposite of transparent when looked at from another angle: you don't really have any idea what you are getting or how it got here. How much Nigerian or other blood was spilled bringing that gasoline to market? Were those khakis sewn by kidnapped children in India? How many pesticides and effluent went into the production of your spinach? I'm not going to link examples to each of these or the many other stories we hear on a daily basis. You know them as well as I, perhaps better.
I just thought it was worth pointing out that modern crypto has made the money part of our transactions incredibly secure, so secure that we may soon be able to carry on large swaths of economic activity in cyberspace and outside the surveillance of our insect overlords. However, the actual creation and transport of matter, of things in meatspace, cannot be secured with the intelligent application of prime numbers and collision-free hash algorithms. So, how does one create transparency in the creation of hardware?
There are a few open source hardware movements. The Economist just highlighted some of them (may be a $ link). In it, they mention the Chumby, the Neuros OSD, the RepRap (not mentioned in the article, a comparable project is Fab @ Home), the Tuxphone, OpenMoko, GumStix, and Eric von Hippel's book, Democratizing Innovation. Additionally, I have come across a large number of open source Wi-Fi projects, including this mobile hotspot (but the parts are not OS), this solar-powered grid project to bring the tubes to kids in the developing world (an idea complementary to the $100 laptop), and especially the Linksys WRT54G router. And let's not forget open source automobile projects Oscar, Society for Sustainable Mobility, and c,mm,n (I proposed a framework for how an open source car project might work here).
When you can fire up the matter compiler and build your own car after paying for the matter with a secure transaction, the world is going to be a very different place.
PS: I ran into this article in Wired immediately after posting.
Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that's one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.Food for thought.
Labels: change, Open_Source, philosophy, solar, trade, transparency
<< Home