Capitalism needs a reset, says the Financial Times, accompanied by the CEOs of digital platform giants. But no-one knows how to proceed after such a reboot. We may be on our way to fundamental changes in the structure of our economy.
Peer-to-peer technologies, such as Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs, including blockchains) are providing completely new opportunities to organise our society. However, technologies are just enablers. We must set a direction for these developments. We must proactively conduct large scale experiments with alternative economic structures. The future of our society must rely not solely on ideologies, but on solid experiments and data.
Our Generalised Merits (GMeRitS) endeavour aims to tackle this huge predicament by taking baby steps towards wide scale experiments with alternative economic structures. In particular, our aim is to try and evaluate various anti-rival compensation and governance structures.
Our vision is based on intimate interconnection of three themes: money and debt shaping our collective thinking, market failures especially in the data markets, and the invention of DLTs.
Currently, GMeRitS consists of three empirical cases – REC currency, Mesensei community empowerment framework, and Merits rewarding system.
We surmise that these themes – including societal pressures and technological possibilities – will lead to a very fundamental change in the way we perceive the economy and even ourselves. Careful institutional experiments and design is needed to set a direction for these developments. GMeRitS is carrying out these experiments.