RESHARED POST FROM GIDEON ROSENBLATT

Money is a bad organization framework. It worked well enough when society was organized around the presumption of private ownership and trade, which accounts for roughly the last ten thousand years or so; its really a legacy issue from the Agricultural Revolution. Remember, that’s less that a fifth of our existence as behaviorally modern humans. The digital age can do better.

Digital societies are organized around the dynamics of collaboration and publicity, and those dynamics are better modeled by economies of attention than economies of financial transaction. We need to understand that the #attentioneconomy provides an overall more productive and stable organizational framework than money will ever provide. Money distorts the way we think, and this distortion is literally killing us. The digital age must do better.

Moves like these from Google and Apple are early attempts at playing with money as an organizing framework. It’s smart that they are doing something since it is fairly clear that we will be transitioning to cashless economies soon enough; we’re mostly there already. But if we are going cashless anyway, we should at least explore some attempts to go moneyless and start rethinking our organizational strategies from the ground up.

More on why markets are counterproductive in the digital age:

http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/2012/05/digital-politics.html

Reposted comment from OP

Gideon Rosenblatt originally shared this post:

The Future of Paying for Things is Apple (and Google)

The company that controls mobile is also likely to control the future of paying for stuff. Everything that this article says about Apple is also true for Google. The only real difference is the massive iTunes user base, but Google is working hard on that and has advantages of its own because of its stronger online shopping position.

What will Amazon’s response be? I don’t know, but they better be working hard on one. The real battle is around identity and payment and it will be a slugfest between banks, mobile operators and the software providers. If I were a betting man, I’d be looking towards the software for the edge.

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