Tokens as a Labor Model

Summary

Two years ago, we published a report on Value in the Commons Economy, in which we analyzed the value regime of a number of pioneering peer production projects such as Sensorica and Backfeed. In that report, we posited a sphere of ‘value sovereignty’, within the sphere of the commons, and a membrane between the commons and the market to govern its interaction.

In the meantime, the token economy has exploded, and despite its many faults and weaknesses, it has brought open and contributive accounting to the mainstream as a practice, via programmable tokens that are divided up exactly as the open source communities decide. We have moved from an economy based on capitalist enterprises, which extracted all the surplus value from the developers, to an eco-system in which contributory competency networks, prepare white papers, crowdfund through tokens, and distribute the value much more widely amongst the contributors.