Actually Perky Pat is a rather interesting way of handling scarcity. Every time I see Kim Kardashian I think it might be the way we are choosing to go as a society.
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Excellent point. But not sure how Perky Pat is that different from Zeus Olympian or Enki: in the end, humans like to tell each other stories about other humans (or simulations thereof. Apparently this is hardwired into us by group selection, and it has been exapted to create more or less out of thin air a common ground, and a consequent feeling of belonging together, well beyond the Dunbar numbers.
(Yes, SF-Economics should have a lot of biology in it, methinks).
Speaking of Perky Pat:
https://reader.howtospendit.com/2019/11/01/could-this-gaming-app-change-the-way-we-shop/
If that’s not economic (science?) fiction, I don’t know what is 
(As someone said, reality and fiction differ only in that fiction has to make sense…)
Heads up to @joelfinkle: a year and a half later I changed my mind. You were right. I have now made an entry for the Culture series in the main wiki. Good on you!
I looked for a place to put this link to Asimov who, so teh feature in NATURE “spent more than half of the twentieth century cultivating that transformative unity of art and science”. I guess that you, @alberto, @nadia, @hugi and other edgeryders are interested- regards, Martin
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Cory Doctorow has a new newsletter. Here are the details. Anyone can subscribe gratis.
Hello, fellow locked-down participants in the 2020 timeline. I hope you,
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In late January, I left Boing Boing, on my 19th anniversary with the
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Hi ECON-SF fam, i thought this would be a relevant group to ask Let me know if you want me to post the question in some other way or separate thread. I am now looking at virtual economies where it could also be from games. My aim is to understand and set DAO (decentralised autonomous organisations) economies.
Where i shall look for for imagined and executed economies ? I am thinking of game play in nature is helpful but also MMO (massive multiplay online stragtey games, and what other decentralised real time economy and decision making?
Hi @dadabit! Not a specialist in the area but a good place to start is Eve Online:
Eve Online - Wikipedia
It’s perhaps the oldest online game with a fully fledged economy, so it’s a good hook to fish for relevant literature.
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Welcome back, @dadabit, its been a while!
If you speak of DAOs in the “smart contracts” sense, like The DAO, my favourite example is Economics 2.0 in Charles Stross’s Accelerando. Spoiler: you are not going to like it. Stross goes straight to the endgame which is an economy where software agents produce for, and sell to, other software agents. No humans needed, we are just too slow. On the side, this produces a plausible explanation for the Fermi paradox.
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I think this is the best example. Thank you. Especially to prevent warlordism which is the key for Eve as i understand.
Thank you! it has. Exactly like the DAO and now it is the spring of DAO with more examples springing - some are not autonomous like only decentralised organisations. (i.e aragon, metacartel, daostack, colony)
Thank you so much for recommending Accelerando. This is spot on for the autonomous part.
I’m unclear as to why The Dispossessed is not elevated to the economics section. As well, I do not see any books (nor can I think of any at the moment, aside from The Dispossessed) that deal directly with the care economy. By this I mean how we “care” for our children and elders, and ourselves to some degree. The care economy is being completely disrupted by COVID, and since this economic system often falls to women, it is ignored. In the linked summary of the book The Dispossessed, this entire aspect of the storyline is not mentioned, but as I recall (having read the book 20some odd years ago), children are not allowed to grow up with their biological parents. Figuring out who cares for our children and our increasingly aged population is a critical economic issue, and one that sci-fi needs to weigh in on.
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Welcome @ckrez, nice to meet you.
Several people have made this point. This categorization is mostly my own fault: when I read the book, it looked like Le Guin had simply dragged-and-drop Anarres’s economic system from the planned economy playbook, and focused on imagining a story set at the interface between a “capitalist” planet and a “socialist” one. She writes in the early 1970s, when planned economies had their own university courses and journals. They were also not sci-fi at all, as about a third of the planet run a planned economy of one type or the other. Then, no one has bothered to edit the wiki and move the book up into the “SF economics proper” section. But my opinion may be a minority one: the entry has a link to this blog post with an economic analysis of Anarres. So, maybe it is indeed time to move The Dispossessed into the main section. Do you want to do it yourself? Just click on the “Edit” button at the bottom of the post.
This is interesting, I think it has not come up yet. Can you say more about why you think that Anarres in The Dispossessed is a care economy?
No argument!
Thanks for the welcome! Happy to have found your corner of the internet. Fair point on the dragging and dropping of existing systems. She at least addresses the question of a care economy by answering the basic questions of who is taking care of whom and how (no decision by the individual, central authority, etc.). Ted Chaing has a short story (Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny) on a personal level dealing with mechanical objects / AI as a caregiver, as well as another (The Lifecycle of Software Objects) on humans who care for their AI creations, but neither is a system-level view that asks or answers the who cares for whom and how question. I’m sure they are out there though!
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Happy you found us
As I said, any contributions to the wiki – especially in this direction – are more than welcome, a true gift.
EVE Online is one of the best examples of what you’re looking at. Some personally interesting research papers:
Taylor, N., Bergstrom, K., Jenson, J., & de Castell, S. (2015). Alienated playbour: Relations of production in EVE online. Games and Culture , 10 (4), 365-388.
Carter, M. (2015). Emitexts and paratexts: Propaganda in EVE Online. Games and Culture , 10 (4), 311-342.
Carter, M., Bergstrom, K., & Woodford, D. (Eds.). (2016). Internet spaceships are serious business: An EVE Online reader . U of Minnesota Press.
I would also highly recommend Empires of EVE: A History of the Great Wars of EVE Online by Andrew Groen. https://www.amazon.com/Empires-EVE-History-Great-Online/dp/0990972402
Confession: I play a lot of MMOs and know some of the players mentioned in Empires. If you need, I can possibly get you an interview with a guy who ran an interstellar bank.
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At the risk of indulging in crass self-promotion: “The State Machine,” a short story by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne.
The creation of a nation-state governed by a caregiver AI - more Big Mother than Big Brother, at least.
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@alberto given that this virtual agent thesis is becoming more an more important in the context of data rights and privacy as well, do you think we should have a distrikt based on Accelerando-style interaction for the Extremistan project?
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Excellent idea! Maybe “proto-Accelerando”: machine-to-machine economy + some chickenized labor + some executive parasitism.
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