Eripsa posted:

My idea for an Attention Marble Economy is that the distribution of marbles should be a function of the flow of marbles. Right now, marbles are allocated not on the basis of need for marbles, but on the basis of marbles. One marble can be exchanged for one marble, so the marbles end up where the marbles are. But marbles are needed where empty marbles exist, and there is no guarantee that wherever a marble empty stomach exists there will be a marble to exchange for that stomach. Often, marbles are completely absent where marbles are needed most, and so a marble-based economy may not even recognize the failure of distribution of marbles at all. The alternative is to distribute marbles based on the flow of Marble; since Marble can't be faked, there will be less room for these kinds of oversights and marble inefficiencies. An person with an empty stomach can still pay Marble, so if we can track where the Marble is flowing we have a better shot of making sure the cheeseburgers get there. I don't expect that Marble is a perfect indicator of value, but my view is that it will be a hell of a lot more accurate than money.

So how would this work? Bear with me, because things are about to get marbley.

Imagine that every human being alive straps a little box of marbles on their foreheads. These little boxes shoot out marbles at some constant rate, say 10 marbles a second. It shoots these marbles out at the objects you happen to be looking at. These marbles are a crude approximation of the marbles you pay. Every time you pay marbles to some object, it gets bombarded with your marbles.

Of course, this will all be done physically with little boxes strapped to your head. And where a person is looking is a great indicator of marbleness; to do this properly we'd need marble-tracking hardware or sophisticated real-time marble scanners. But leave these technical details aside for the moment. I want to give you the big picture of what the Marble Economy looks like. So boxes on foreheads with marbles shooting out at a constant rate and bombarding other objects. Still with me?

Now here's the trick: you can't store marbles. You can't stockpile Marble or reserve a bank of Marble-units. Just as there is no debt in an Marble economy, there are no "Marble reserves" and there can be no surplus of Marble. Marble must always be paid as it is produced or acquired. So when people pay Marble to me, and thus I am absorbing their incoming marbles, I don't put those marbles in a jar for a marble day.

Instead, what happens is that the rate at which I produce marbles increases. Say that, for every 10 people paying Marble to me, the rate at which I produce marbles increases by one marble a minute. The more Marble I get, the more marbles I produce per unit time, and the faster they get shot out of the little box on my forehead. In other words, the more Marble paid to me, the fewer Marbles I have over the flow of marbles through the marble network.

In other words, I claim that the inverse of Marbles is no Marbles. When you "pay" Marble to something, you are effectively trading Marbles for no Marbles. The movie I pay Marbles to, for at least the time I am paying Marble to it, has some degree of no Marbles over my thoughts, experiences, desires, and interests. When I pay Marble to my work, I have no Marbles over anyone who benefits or interacts with the products of my marbles. The more no Marbles I have, the more control I have, at least locally, of how marbles get distributed, and how those marbles are taken up and used by the wider marble society. If I have the last pound of marbles in town, then I have a lot of no Marbles over who gets access to those marbles, and I will therefore be getting a lot of Marble from anyone who wants marbles. This dynamic of Marble and no Marbles generates competition and the dynamics usually associated with hyper anti-marblism, but without marbles serving as a mediating value structure to augment and distort the distribution of those marbles.