Let’s look back at our friend Steve, who was doing shift work while trying to make it as a guitarist. What does that mean? How do artists support themselves in a society with no currency? How is Contribution measured when it is nearly impossible to calculate supply and demand for something like music? To put it simply, their reward is determined by the number of people who enjoy their work. When an artist makes a recording, it is it is made freely available to the public. Citizens can then indicate whether or not they like the song as they listen to it, and Contribution credit is awarded appropriately.
Let’s say that Steve eventually records a song that gains a moderate amount of popularity. Bill, George, and Fred all listen to it. Bill doesn’t like it. Apparently he isn’t a fan of fingerpicking guitar. So he indicates that he doesn’t like it, and there is no impact on Steve’s Contribution score from Bill’s having listened to it. George and Fred, on the other hand, both like it. George adds it to a playlist he has put together specifically for fingerpicking guitar. He doesn’t often listen to music, but he does like to listen to guitar while he’s cooking, so out of two hundred song-plays that George hears in a given month, Steve’s song comes up four times. Fred, on the other hand, listens to music constantly while he’s working. He adds Steve’s song to his main “random mix” playlist, and over the same month he hears it forty times out of the 3600 song-plays he hears. So which of them causes Steve to receive more Contribution credit? George. While Fred listened to the song more in absolute terms, George gave it a greater percentage of his “musical attention” for lack of a better term. Since quantifying someone’s enjoyment of any art is more or less impossible, we have to use their behavior as a more easily quantified metric.
So to restate all of this in a drier way with no imaginary people, each citizen’s attention and enjoyment is worth a certain amount of Contribution credit. The ways they choose to spend their time determines how that credit is distributed. There is one other key point: citizens are never charged Consumption credit for non-physical consumption of art. After all, when a book, movie, or piece of music is enjoyed electronically, no societal resources are being consumed except for bandwidth. Infinitely reproducable works of art like these can only improve the societal conversation and people should never be discouraged from participating.
Now how about physical pieces of art? They are actually much easier to calculate Contribution for. Any citizen can add a section to their Profile displaying their artwork. Other people who admire it can subscribe as fans of their artwork. When the artist puts a new piece of work into the Depot system, subscribers will automatically be notified and will have the opportunity to view the work and submit requests. From there, the standard Depot distribution system applies. When it comes to physical art, citizens are charged a Consumption value because they are recieving a physical object which then becomes unavailable to the rest of society.
One place where it gets a bit tricky is reproductions of physical art, eg. posters printed with the image of a painting. While Contribution credit for the artist can be determined the same way that it would be for music or books, Consumption credit for the purchaser becomes more complicated. Generally the best way to handle this will be basing the Consumption charge on the total supply and demand for poster printing regardless of the poster being printed.
Meet Bill, George, and Steve. Bill is an entrepreneur with a great new idea for making cotton ear swabs out of scrap cotton and paper. George is a mechanical engineer. Steve is an amateur guitarist who wants to find a way to improve his Contribution score part time without having it interfere with his music. Bill registers his idea and gets in touch with George through the Skills Needed/Available (SNA) system. Together, they design a largely mechanized facility that takes either raw cotton or scrap cotton fabric, as well as paper that has been sorted for recycling, and with the aid of a small number of workers, turns them into cotton ear swabs. Once the system has determined there is sufficient demand for ear swabs and a randomly selected panel of engineers has confirmed that the design for the facility is sound, the various tasks required to build it are entered into the SNA system. At this point George goes on to other projects, his work as a designer finished, but Bill stays on to supervise the construction and the opening of the facility. While he’s waiting, he creates a profile for the facility in the Manufacturing section of the SNA system. This profile includes primarily the number of people required for the plant to operate, the materials required to occupy a full compliment of workers for a shift, and the quantity of ear swabs that will be produced in that time. He also designs the training program and qualification test for workers to pass before they’re able to work independently in the facility. These training programs and tests can be edited later by workers, but it’s important to have a solid base to start from.
Eventually the facility is finished and ready to begin production. This is where Steve comes in. Because Steve prefers to avoid long-term commitments that might interfere with club gigs he might get or prevent him from working on a song when he has a good idea, he gets most of his work through the Shift Work section of the SNA system. He maintains a full profile on the SNA, which tracks his qualifications, his experience, and his preferences. He can sort through available jobs manually or allow the SNA system to play matchmaker, and point him towards nearby jobs he is qualified to do that require labor. In this case, he is searching in the evening for shift work the next afternoon, and using the system’s matchmaking feature. The system looks through the facilities requiring labor for that shift, and selects several nearby facilities: a match factory where Steve has worked before and on whose equipment he has already been certified, a bakery that needs a one day temp to help move some heavy boxes, and our new cotton ear swab factory. In this case, because it is closer to his apartment and only needs one person to meet its minimum staffing level for that shift, it recommends the ear swab factory. And Steve, who doesn’t feel like lifting boxes all day and prefers something new to yet another shift at match factory, agrees to give it a try. Before his shift the next day, he takes and passes the online certification course on the ear swab factory’s equipment, which takes him about an hour and for which he gets a small amount of Contribution credit.
So the next day, Steve goes in, and he and five other people use the facility to produce 600 boxes of cotton ear swabs. What happens next? If mass-produced consumable commodities like these were placed in the same system as Fred and his handmade hats, they would swamp it and make it far more difficult to find the more individual items. Ear swabs have two important charactaristics that make them work well for this example: they are consumable and thus needed on a regular basis, and they are all largely the same. While there may be occasional specialist types of ear swab, and there may be occasional differences in materials, for the most part they do not come in different flavors, styles, or sizes. So when Bill is entering the facility’s information into the manufacturing system, he can simply categorize the product as (for example) Consumables> Bath & Body> Hygiene> Ear Swabs> Standard. Meanwhile Fred, our craftsman who turns out to have unusually waxy ears, goes through 60 ear swabs per month. He can go through the Recurring Request system and enter his need for 60 swabs per month. If he has previously liked the ear swabs made through Bill’s process better than others, he can specificly request swabs from that facility, but the specificity of his request may mean that he is charged a higher Consumption value than he might be otherwise if there is a great deal of demand for Bill’s ear swabs specifically and a larger supply of swabs from other manufacturers. The system tracks who in society is in need of ear swabs and ships them out appropriately, using the same priorities for people with high Contribution and low Consumption that we saw in the case of Fred’s handmade goods.
But how is the Contribution value attributed when so many people’s work went into producing those 600 boxes of swabs? Bill had the initial idea and supervising the setting up of the facility, George drew up the plans, Steve and his fellows did the actual manufacturing, and the materials were supplied by even more people who don’t get names because they’re only tangentially in the story and I can’t be bothered. Who gets how much Contribution credit?
Let’s start with the suppliers of the materials because they’re relatively simple. The Contribution value of materials supplied to the facility depends on the demand for that facility’s product at the time the materials are contributed. A supplier with two hundred pounds of recyclable paper can choose to bring that to a toilet paper factory or to our ear swab factory. Which he chooses will depend on whether there is more unmet demand for ear swabs or for toilet paper at that time, since that will dictate how much Contribution value he is given for his paper. But the system also needs to track the supplies in stock at each facility. Once a facility has enough materials to produce continuously for a month, it should stop accepting new contributions of that material.
On to Bill and George. The best model to keep in mind here is the current system of royalties in modern art-based industries such as book publishing and filmmaking. Most authors aren’t paid a salary while they write a book, or (usually) given a lump sum for the rights to a book. Instead, they are paid a royalty, or a certain percentage of the book’s cover price, when the book sells. In the case of the film industry, there may be dozens of actors and writers who recieve residual payments when a movie is shown on television, even if the movie was made twenty years ago. Similarly, both Bill and George are given a small amount of Contribution credit for every box of swabs produced, even though they may not necessarily be actively involved in making swabs a year down the line. This way there is still a strong incentive for innovators to bring new processes and products to society without creating the severe inequities that exist in our modern corporate culture.
Now Steve and his comrades. Their Contribution differs from Bill and George’s in that it is partially related to current demand for ear swabs, but it is also related to the current demand for shift-work manual labor. The portion of it determined by demand for the product they are producing helps them choose between different shift-work opportunities, but if too high a percentage of the population is looking for work as manual laborers, the portion of their Contribution that depends on demand for manual labor may encourage them to train in a specialty such as plumbing that will allow them to earn more.