Open-source Education and Knowledge Liquidity
Open educational resources (OERs) are fungible functional units that are expressed in Ethereum.[1] OER functional units are akin to neurons wherein wider collective systems such as crowds and markets—and in physiology, brain and nervous systems— utilize units both as currency and building blocks.[2]
As the idea of currencies go, note that financialization is not unique to humanity. The arithmetic of debits and credits occur in chemistry, as various bonds and chains will trade in the chemical motifs and themes called “functional groups.”
Recall that finance is the application of calculus to the arithmetical doctrine of present value (PV) the idea that having a sum of money is more valuable in the present because it will be used to create more value, and therefore will more than pay for itself in the future.[3] However, in material terms, a society cannot very well invest its entire aggregate effort into building for the future without taking care of present requirements (feeding its people, making other decisions about resources). Therefore, there is a line in which financialization can lead metastases. Douglas Rushkoff often notes that nothing in the natural world grows the way tech startups are expected to (exponentially): except for cancers.[4] In human physiology, toxic hepatitis occurs when the liver develops inflammations and cannot endure the poisonous “costs of doing business with medications.” The liver’s ability to metabolize (biotransformation) pharmaceuticals can only bear the costs for so long before the organ begins to degrade. Similarly, finance can only take up so much of an economy before the “services” grow redundant and self-defeating.
The real value in cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum’s Ether currency, isn’t in the currency mechanism itself, but in the opportunities for programming degrees of fungibility and functionality into “units.” The relatively flat paradigm of currencies has overstayed its welcome in ultradimensional modernity, a present that requires depth and richness in data. OERs expressed in Ethereum are the signature precursor to the fundamental digital transformation that is taking place in society.[5]
[1] Namely ERCs (Ethereum Requests for Comments; smart contracts) that are transacted within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
[2] More on functional units. How about this quiz question: Why is the cell called the functional unit of life?”
[3] Any financial operator or engineer worth his or her weight can muster the systems to express what he or she wishes; in the same way that the exact same office, the Supreme Court in the United States, can overturn a 50-year-old interpretation about the exact same case law (Roe v Wade). See also “pitfalls of financial creativity” in “Enron and World Finance.”
[4] “Why humans must band together to fight the tyranny of tech.”
[5] The first test is in education, where legacy legal risks are minimized, as opposed to, say, finance — where cryptocurrency and decentralization innovators have put the cart before the horse. Later, open source science resources (OSRs), open source legal resources (OLRs), and others will follow education’s path from the flat paradigm of static contractualism that served its highest utility in commanding literal fiefdoms in the 10th century.
