Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Napster and Software

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:7/13/2000; 9:35:30 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 7/12/2000
Msg #:18557 (In response to 18550)
Prev/Next:18556 / 18558

Tom Fuerstner The money follows the awareness!!! ( Wow that sounds strange )

It sounds funny because people haven't been well-taught what money is. I remember reading a review of one of Suze Orman's money-management books. The reviewer quoted Ms. Orman as saying something to the effect of "Money is attracted to the confident and powerful; be confident and powerful and the money will find you," and accused Ms. Orman of being half financial advisor, half New-Age fruitcake.

But all your statement, or Ms. Orman's, reflect is that money is neither more nor less than a massively-distributed belief system; it expresses society's collective belief as to what the value of goods and services is. In that context, money following awareness or being attracted to the confident and powerful just means that enough people in society attach value to things they are aware of vs. things they aren't and to confidence and power that the phenomenon is visible at the macroeconomic level. You'd have to be a pretty rigid literalist for this not to make sense.

Given the accuracy of your observation to most people ("it sounds weird") I wonder if we don't need to start adding some basic distributed systems/complex systems curriculum somewhere in our educational system, because whether it's money per se or distributed systems like Gnutella or FreeNet, these kinds of issues are coming up more and more often, and people's intuitions aren't prepared for them.

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