Joi Ito writes an interesting thought piece on Blogshares, an online fantasy stock market for blogs.
Given my personal interest in markets and efficiencies, I've always been interested in these fantasy markets. Joi exposes the number one problem I have always had with them, however: it doesn't work like a real market if the value created and exchanged in the marketplace isn't "real" value.
"Real" value has to be transferable to other goods or services. The reason we don't still (for the most part) have a barter economy is that "money" is far more efficient. I'll trade you ten dollars for your bushel of apples, and then you'll take my ten dollars and trade them for a couple of magazines. You don't care that I also want to get rid of an old sack of potatoes, and you weren't about to trade your apples for my potatoes, since you weren't sure the guy at the magazine stand even liked potatoes.
With Blogshares, or generally any fantasy market, the value created isn't transferable outside the market, and therefore isn't useful.
But Joi brings up a really good idea. Take that value and make it transferable not in terms of wealth, but in terms of influence. Interestingly, in the real world, wealth and influence are sometimes linearly correlated also. I think this is a very promising direction to explore.
However, Joi is reluctant to fully endorse this idea because as he says, "voting shares is [market] oriented, but not really 'democratic.' It's about as democratic as wallstreet [sic] and the millionaires would control the blogs."
At the risk of evoking the response of "yeah, you would say that," I'll respond to Joi's concern by saying, "Yes, that's the way it's supposed to work."
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