What about ... communism?¶

Marx was a brilliant analyst of capitalism, building on top of the works of e.g. Smith and Ricardo.

Marxism and more generally communism have a diehard fanbase to this day - despite what happened mainly in the 20th century - probably mainly because it represents an utopia of a higly just society, which is attractive for most people.

Problem: A central underlying assumption is breaking away:
Non-material goods don't have the inherent property of scarcity, unlike material goods.
Pre digital revolution, this only affected the realm of ideas. The patent system could be considered a workaround to integrate those into the economic model built material (scarse) goods.
Patents artificially constrain the spreading of ideas (not of the ideas themselves, but of the possibility to "use" them).

Today, share of the non-material sphere in our economy has grown much larger, with the prospect of marginalizing the material sphere sooner or later.
As a consequence, new forms of non-material goods, which is basically everything digital (software, e-books, music, video, 3d-printing instructions, ...) all needed to also have workarounds attached in order to fit into the economic model based on scarcity. So we see DRM technology, licenses, obfuscation technology, geo-based restrictions in systems which are by nature global, etc.

In parallel, a strong movement has emerged around the ideas of free software and commons.
It strongly defends the idea of not making digital good artificially scarse.

A central litigation point in this regard is if and how this ideas are economically feasible. Is this just a playground for those who live in abundance and have the luxury commit to such ideas for - feel-good reasons?
The growing number of economic entities committing to this ideas gives a strong hint that this is not necessarily the case.
For example even the historically vocal opponent Microsoft has turned into an active contributor to the open source ecosystem.

So, there exist economic models not requiring the creation of articifial scarcity.
What's missing is a general theoretical framework which is well understood, spread and teached.

My assumption is that such a model requires a strong looseing of the bond between individual human work and individual economic retribution.
That it requires a strong shift from hierarchically governed organizations to network governance.
That it requires a shift of focus from competition to cooperation.

The competition we need is competition of ideas for mindshare.
A combination of social security and economic freedom can create a context which allows individuals to make choices based on personal beliefs and values.

The scarse thing today in developed parts of the world is attention.
Thus one important aspect is to start understanding and talking about attention economics.
Instead of treating it as a non-thing while allowing brutal exploitation of general unawereness in the form of advertising, pushed by psychological trickery and big-data driven targeting (itself based on lack of general understanding).
Those destroy a lot of human potential by stealing attention and diverting it from things people genuinly care about, to things people are tricked to care about.
A byproduct is overuse of resources and a lot of frustration, recently leading to destabilization of democratic foundations. Lose-lose situation.

Considering the value of attention can give a hint to what chances may be required.
For me a key experience was few years ago, getting angry feedback of a user of our free mobile app, complaining about a usability issue.
My first reaction was: we worked hard, that guy got something for free, and now he complains? A colleage explained that this was perfectly reasonable, because the user had invested time and energy (lets say: attention) into our App and was let down. In essence, while we may have worked for that user, the user also worked for us, contributing attention. A careless user wouldn't have bothered to invest additional time to give the feedback.
It's common for companies to not only offer Apps for free, but actually paying users to use them. This is done indirectly via marketing campaigns, but the effect is just that.

Where this leads me: We see more and more digital ecosystems where users aren't merely consumers of a product, but become an integral part of the product. The product is infrastructure created by some plus content and attention dedicated by others. Question: wouldn't it be fair then to have users co-own the product?
We're seeing this in the decentralisation technology space. ICO's are already going into that direction, but there's still this idea of initial investors taking risk and then taking profit probably forever.
Some projects however also take the step of building in mechanisms for rewarding active participants with kind of ownership tokens (example: steemit). Reputation models - which are by now well known in the digital sphere - can act as distribution keys.
This leads to formation of virtual communities and ecosystems which become a new kind of economic entity, with new models for stakeholder structure.

Summary: Marxism / communism isn't the answer, because it is - just like capitalism - based upon the idea of scarse goods.
But in order to understand and imagine what is and what could be emerging, it is helpful to re-process as many ideas and thoughts as possible, not only those defining the status quo.

Todo: read http://www.zeit.de/zeit-geschichte/2009/03/Oekonomischer-Diskurs