The lunch for Lessig’s keynote at the Austin Convention Center yesterday (NN08) was the standard sandwich box. Each choice had a fancy name. I chose the Wellington. It was pretty good. I’m eating the apple as I blog.

Lessig spent most of the keynote describing the motivation for Change-Congress. On one of his early slides, Lessig noted the problem of socialized risk and privatized profit. In fact, on the day before at the subprime mortgage session, I asked the panel the question I submitted for Nancy Pelosi. Panelist Hale Stewart, who seems like a straight shooter, answered that there’s nothing Congress can do about the conflict of interest of the CEO of JP Morgan Chase making decisions on the Federal Reserve Board to make the public take the risk of the Bear Stearns acquisition.*

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trl5_BCL0qs]
Update 9/20: Extra interviews are generously being made available by themoneyfix.org through this RSS feed. As they become available, I’ll add direct links to the videos from the feed here for those who don’t use a newsreader:

1. Hazel Henderson m4v, youtube
2. Bernard Lietaer m4v

Comments

Author: necronomy

Date: 2008-03-30 13:25:00

Alternative possibility means freedom of choice: < HREF=“http://cromalternativemoney.org” REL=“nofollow”>Crom Alternative Money<>

In the Future of Ideas and Money and Lessig and Lietaer posts, a community currency is compared to the Internet. Both of them form an innovation commons.

Associated with community currency design is protocol. Contrast this with national money where laws generally regulate use.

Protocols on the Internet are generally established by the IETF. Jeanette Hofmann describes this process:

The IETF is open to anyone who is interested, provided they have the necessary technical competence and practical engineering skills. The exclusionary effect of this prerequisite should not be underestimated. The IETF has traditionally understood itself as an elite in the technical development of communication networks. Gestures of superiority and a dim view of other standardisation committees are matched by unmistakable impatience with incompetence in their own ranks.

This is a followup to The Future of Ideas and Money.

Bernard Lietaer reveals the difference between money and currency. What a central authority requires in payment of taxes, thereby imposing it as legal tender, is money. Taxes lock us into money. Money is the Yang. It promotes competition and scarcity created through hierarchy. Currency is whatever a community chooses as a means of payment, thereby accepting it as common tender. Social currency is the Yin.

Kellan suggested that some books are read better together and asks “Do you have favorite pairings?” Following Rich’s post on the Creative Commons, I’ve been thinking about Lessig’s The Future of Ideas and ever since the Naropa Workshop on Intentional Economics, I have thought it would be great to pair Lessig with Bernard Lietaer, author of The Future of Money.

I talked to Bernard about Lessig’s code/architecture as the fourth category of ways to regulate. When a complementary currency is introduced, does it merely fall in the economic incentive category or is it a lower level change to code and architecture?