Micropayments Standards: An Economic Imperative for the Knowledge Age
The history of societies are often told in terms forged through the lens of how and who, got the gold.
When reviewing history & instrumental artefacts such as the doomsday book catalogued an audit that was done for a specified purpose which led to some aspects being made intentionally, left out.
‘No surveys were made of the City of London, Winchester, or some other towns, probably due to their tax-exempt status.’ source: wikipedia
Yet this is easily missed by historians, alongside many other related aspects.
In more recent times, the emergence of a middle class was highly influenced through consequences brought about by trade labour movements that lobbied for better work conditions through movements such as those that sought an 8 hour day.
Whilst the foundations for this movement date back sometime, incorporating the history of guilds and livery companies (that are still in existence today)…
The Post WW2 era brought about a raft of changes that led (in Australia for instance) to Universal Healthcare (medicare), a time of free (university) education, workers cooperatives and many other societal pillars that are (almost) all, under threat today. The problem is said to be that there’s simply not enough money, to go around… and without proper consideration of the impacts that relate to economic distribution this may be said, to make sense.
There is an array of sources online from the IMF article noted above, to the visualisation produced by ‘visual capitalist.com’ showing ‘All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization’ showing how our monetary system is not today, yielding very good results.
As this occurred, one of the many industries that developed was that of the recruitment or HR industry offering services to outsource the task of finding new employees.
The combination of these two factors alone might reasonably be considered to have both made the age-old practice of seeking or getting a job far more expensive than was the case in the past. This and many other workforce changes, that now sees the introduction of a ‘gig economy’ as is now part of new types of ‘temporary work’ that hazards to strip away protections of the past; yet in all too many cases, useful work, particularly online is now unpaid.
Another problematic quality is that statistics relating to unemployment in the 1950’s-70’s related to a very different workforce environment. Those that were categorised as ‘employed’ (in some way) more likely fit into traditional labour hire frameworks; such as ‘casual’, ‘part-time’ and moreover ‘fulltime’ employment types, that were with a sole employer. This was in-turn associated to workers rights and obligations, that supported our needs.
Today, as may be considered both in terms of statistics from the USA and Australia, whilst the statement of unemployment is still high the other problem is that these statistics are not likely fully disclosing the implications of new types of work, as a person who works a few hours — it could be said, is part of the statistically relevant group shown to be ‘employed’.
Implicitly, i am drawing an association between the growth of advanced global telecommunications services, a set of troubling yet fixable lack of modern economic tooling & the problems shown as ‘economic debt’.
When looking at how to link acts of ‘work’ with the concept of ‘gainful employment’; one of the older resources i found was noted in relation to the work on webcredits (now some years ago).
Implicitly, the problem is that if you have a percentage of the ‘working age’ population at around 5% who are not earning an income (and then add to that children and the elderly); then there’s expenses incurred whether a society cares for their needs or not.
Whilst the numbers are likely to be higher, some ways institutions have tried to address this issue is by hiring more people who are paid to care for those who are isolated from a gainful wage. This practice can become nonsensical as it may lead to unintended consequences of a workforce who require others to live in poverty as to justify their own wage; alongside other issues of economic inefficiency, poverty and at times — the worst of moral poverties.
In the industrial era, people were able to make things and if someone wanted them they could buy them from whoever made them. The means to defend producers from bad actors who sought to steal work derivatives, was relatively easy to seek, as to obtain lawful remedy.
This is not the case with work done online.
The other distinction between new types of work and the old, was that the means to form an economic ecosystem of transactions moreover related to few parties. If someone wants to buy something from a shop, the purchaser and seller are fairly easily identified. The product cost x, and x is provided to obtain the product.
This isn’t the only way it can work for trade, online.
There is an opportunity to support both the recognition of a workers contributions online, as well as the means to articulate the beneficial use of their works consumed by others online; if micropayment standards emerged.
The amount any one person may pay, might be a fraction of a cent. But when this is accumulatively considered in relation to many beneficiaries; the ability to use micropayments as a means to articulate economic trade for knowledge assets & equity, brings about a means to better rationalise the role of economy, in association to its means to support human activity, and the middle class.
An OECD Publication on Knowledge Based Asset growth reflects somewhat clearly the complete lack of participation by natural persons.
If we are to mend our economies and the means of them to support our capacity to resolve problems in reality, in our real-world; this underlying economic problem needs to be properly addressed, as a foundational requirement. The opportunity to do so has been around for a while, but it’s just not been adequately considered an important part of the agenda.
People who work for free, can only do so much…
Whilst groups such as Libra may offer the fastest path to bring to market real-world solutions that can be made to work; the future is in standards and new socio-economic tools decided by governments worldwide.
Whilst not all payments should be micropayments, an important part of the financial instrument mix should be found if they were made to be included.
In many ways, the Web Advertising CPC/CPM systems are micropayments based. So, i’m not sure why it should be made so hard, to value human work.
An instrumental part of how this best be done should consider the very important design implications embodied as ‘permissive commons’ and from my point of view, the broader merits of empowering a human centric web.
Therein, there are complex differences between a resource based economy, where the economic frameworks secure economic distribution based upon the means to produce and consume (natural world) resources; and what i’d call a ‘knowledge based economy’ where resources still need to be consumed, but that there’s improved means to assert value to human work activities, as to provide a means that can transit between the production of disposable resources as to support resource based trade; and something else,
that’s more about the merits of how people do things & the longer-term value that creates for others.
On an ethical basis, it’s about whether or not, what people do, matters.
If you’d like to read more about my ideas; on how to solve these sorts of big problems; checkout my seminal article on Human Centric Web, the reason why human creativity should be better supported and some examples of how that might be achieved both in the HyperMedia sector, and more broadly using Micropayments. I’ve also written about my studies on banking, knowledge banking & related history, the need for permissive commons, and the prevalence of the tools (i was involved in making) available today by our Global ICT industries; and have exampled a means to make use of them, to better explore any given topic in the form of a knowledge cloud.
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