PropertyModules

ThoughtStorms Wiki

ChrisCaston is speculating about a new kind of capitalism he calls OpenSourceCapitalism over on FeudalismCapitalismOpenSourceCapitalism

So I was trying to get some more detail on this and one way I understood him is talking about a new kind of property.

You can think about alternative types of property in several ways.

to change the money, ie. the network protocol which assigns PropertyRights. (See AltMoney for more on that)

to change the boundaries around the parcels of property. This, of course, maybe what SystemInflowRights was kind of getting at. And what suddenly excites me here, is that we can tie up questions about property with questions about Modules (See OnModularity) There's even the prospect of asking whether what's wrong with some economies is that property as defined is a ModularityMistake. :-)

Examples of weird counter-intuitive, "artificial" property modules. Not saying these are bad, just that they are clearly pragmatic pieces of political machinery, not NaturalRights or the only way to carve up the world at it's property joints.

in the UK : leasehold, freehold and the 99 year lease.

options, futures and other derivative "rights" to buy at certain prices

I think the criticism of LearningObjects over on LearningNetworks is really an issue of how learning is modularized for the convenience of the market and institutions rather than the learners.

Counter

Yep, but it's always the case that modules incur some inefficiencies. But they make up for it in the greater efficiencies that allows the packages to be more easily manipulated. Think about ShippingContainerization (where the cargo shipping industry moved to one standard "container" size / shape pattern) between the 50s and the 80s. Sure, sometimes you ship a half empty container across the world. But the gains due to the ease of manipulating every container at every port, outweigh this cost.