Economy of the Assembly
The economy of the Assembly consists of three main elements: decentralized, but federated, infrastructure; bounded market exchange; and control systems to prevent the concentration of economic power. It is often described in shorthand as “markets without capitalism”, an expression used by Royal in the cover notes for A song for New Day. Today, the same expression stands as the motto of the David Graeber Institute, the Assembly’s semi-official economic think tank and alt-business school.
Origins
The current architecture of the Assembly’s economy evolved as a byproduct of the supply crises brought about by Order 8.3, combined with the communitarian/libertarian orientation prevailing among the first settlers.
The supply crises provided a powerful incentive to disregard ideological posturing, and reward the provision of any solution, as long as it worked. What proved to work fastest was loosely federated systems to generate and distribute energy and food. The same pragmatism prevented this original infrastructure from splintering: the core group around CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION exerted enormous pressure on individual solar fields and farm collectives to stay connected to their peers, immediately sharing anything they produced in excess to their needs. Arbitrage and what the core group considered “predatory pricing” were strongly discouraged, in a last-ditch effort to keep the settlers ahead of severe scarcity. These efforts were deemed too repressive of economic freedoms by some of the settlers, with some choosing to relocate to Libria. However, most chose to stay, in recognition of the fact that renewable energy and food production are subject to inherent fluctuation. This means that the existence of local surpluses is unavoidable, and simple, non-predatory systems to share the excesses de-risks the whole local economy.
From these difficult beginning, the Assembly inherited some capacity to regulate decentralized infrastructure, institutions strong legitimized to do so, and a pragmatic attitude to economic affairs.
Production
Production and manufacturing in the Assembly are organized mainly along cooperativist lines. Baseline production units (for example, in agriculture, farms) form cooperatives to collectively produce those production inputs or services that require a scale larger than that of the units (for example, in food production, most transformation, like mills for grains.
Distribution and trade
Most people in the Assembly subscribe to an ideology of local autonomy. Producing for one’s own consumption is considered virtuous. Energy and, to a lesser extent, food are, to a considerable amount consumed by the same households and firms that produce them. For most commodities this is less true. Anything that is not consumed by the producer is exchanged on markets.
Market prices in the Assembly are free to float, but only within limits, set by citizen assemblies and revised periodically. These limits are enforced by a system inspired by pre-Sundering stock exchanges: when the price of something grows (or fall) too much or too quickly, the e-commerce platforms temporarily suspend exchanges. These institution are known in the Assembly as bounded free markets, or simply bounded markets.
Competition policy
[TODO: dream up a system preventing concentration]
Trade with other Distrikts
The stability, cohesion and relative prosperity of the Assembly comes at the price of a relatively tight control of inter-Distrikt trade. This is achieved with a dual system: natural persons from anywhere in Witness are free to operate in the Assembly, but legal persons are almost always not. Among other restrictions, companies cannot have other companies as shareholders. Foreign direct investment is near-zero, restricted to specific, and tightly monitored, cases. Inter-distrikt trade is limited to the export of small-batch manufacturing industrial products and services – notably creative industry ones, and the import of raw materials and the occasional advanced tech artefact.
Currency
The Assembly does use a currency: the ironically named CTRLcoin, a blockchain-based system that relies on a concept called regenerative proof-of-stake. Instead of ‘mining’, as with most implementations, anyone who comes within the borders of the Assembly is automatically assigned a Wallet and a starting pot of coins.
This Wallet, over time, generates or decays accumulated coins towards a mean so that a) no-one can remain poor for too long and b) no-one can hoard wealth. The mean, or the starting pot, is a decided by a automated, distributed consensus mechanism what pegs the total number of coins to a set maximum. Wallets are adjusted whenever they connect for a transaction (thus, it is theoretically possible to hoard coins, as long as you understand that you cannot carry out a transaction without your Wallet adjusting itself).
This process is handled by the State Machine on behalf of the Assembly, although as with the microgrids, the Assembly has the infrastructure to not rely on this system. CTRLcoin has proven itself critical for the careers of more abstract and scaleable work such as those of scholars, artists and programmers.
Despite strong efforts to prevent it, instances of rent have risen, especially for those parts of the Assembly that cater to tourism from the other Distrikts. Sumer Street is an area where visitors pay rent that is put into a communal treasury; income from bars, coffeehouses and stores also do the same. Similarly, the fruits of CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION franchising income (and those of several popular artists) go directly into common funds and collectives set up by Flo Royal. Currency from the other districts is either spent directly on imports or to purchase space from nearby Libria.
Commerce with Libria is often fraught, as the small-scale DIY ethos of the Assembly has to contend against economies of scale and capital that can sometimes undercut markets to gain strangeholds. Several instances of looming gentrification have been prevented by Revolutionists - in a few instance with the liberal application of Molotov cocktails.
@yudhanjaya @Joriam here is a first stab.