ian is mainly talking about Banks’ The Culture, an advanced society where there is no money, no crime, and the inhabitants mainly fill their days with games, art, working for the fun of it, and changing sex whenever they feel like it.

The Algebraist is a non-Culture banks book, ‘Player of Games’ is a Culture book, and so is ‘Consider Phlebas’ and ‘Look to Windward’ both excellent.

“I’ll knit you winter clothes in exchange for firewood all winter.”

I support the farmers market and I do my best to not buy imported food and goods. Oh boy do I look forward to the summer time for boiled peanuts to be sold by the road-side.

If the total production exceeds the need for the products it really all boils down to the problem of distribution. Modern communication technology should be able to fix that. You need some fruits for next week? Send Fruittown an e-mail. Fruittown needs wood for building something? They send Woodtown an e-mail.

Another problem with money/the idea of labour? Technology makes people suffer if they need to work their asses of to survive. If one machine can do what you do(or 100 of you) and cheaper, too, guess who will be used. Less work to is actually BAD. This is crazy!

Less work to do means more free time means more time to do what you want instead of what needs to be done. But what the hell, you cannot, even though the free time would be there!

Labour is something which should, on the whole, be reduced instead of necessary to get stuff.

I apologize, as English isn’t my first language either.

Good and useful are relative terms anyway. Some people find some things more useful than other things. Some people think Correl or Photoshop is useless trash, some people think toasters are useless. People reward the people they want to reward.

It’s democracy of wallets. It’s the worst system except for all the others that have been tried.

People buy toasters because they’re too lazy to whip out a frying pan and toast their bread on the oven. People buy shitty wal-mart dvd players because they think they’re entitled to have a DVD player in their home even though they can’t afford one that isn’t going to break.

This brings me to another point. The market is set up not to reward the people who make good useful products, but to reward people who make the cheapest product the fastest.

I love these discussions, they’re great fodder for cartoons.

Sorry this is in English, if it makes you feel better, you probably understand it better than I.

Oh and Jeremy, don’t forget about the thing called “added value”.

@Korna: This is a good argument. On a personal level I could see it being hard to place a value on my cartoons. I couldn’t see anyone trading cartoons for eggs, but maybe there’s a way to get rid of the companies that don’t provide any kind of value whatsoever.

Actually, in the end I believe those companies will fail but it sure does take them forever sometimes, and what to do about the path of destruction they leave?