Nothing New

Two blasts from the past I’ve come across recently:

Dovester, a post at A Pre­pon­der­ence of Evi­dence demon­strates that the latest think­ing in the social soft­ware field is not as brand new as you might think:

The oldest club in Europe, an exclu­sive French soci­ety of dove breed­ers, used social net­work­ing tools since the late 17th cen­tury to con­nect its mem­bers via a hand­writ­ten newslet­ter, cir­cu­lat­ing from member to member, and being amended along the way. A spe­cial trust metric had been estab­lished, which allowed each breeder to rate his peers, a process in which each vote car­ried weight based on the cast­ers own rat­ings. In addi­tion to the mail­ing, which took roughly one year to travel each of the mem­bers, short­cut routes were estab­lished, usu­ally between coun­ties, through which smaller groups could reach other groups. To create the short­cuts, each breeder was required to name at least two “sponsors” and four breed­ers he spon­sored. Com­mu­ni­ca­tions between unlinked indi­vid­u­als had to be estab­lished by find­ing a con­nec­tion via ones own sponsor.

And alter­na­tive cur­ren­cies have a long his­tory too, as noted by Phil Gyford of Pepys’ Diary fame:

There was a dire short­age of coins of small denom­i­na­tions, such as a house­wife needed for every­day shop­ping. This had been an increas­ing prob­lem since James I’s day. It had reached such pro­por­tions that some­thing was about to be done about it when the [Eng­lish] Civil War broke out. Shop­keep­ers evolved a prag­matic solu­tion: trade tokens. In the 1660s, there were 3,543 ‘tokeners’ in the City, the sub­urbs and Westminster.

So 17th Cen­tury London was on the LETS band­wagon. See also this fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with Bernard Lietaer on money, com­mu­nity and social change (another link pinched from Phil).

Posted at 2am on 03/02/04 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
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Tags: culture, history, money, web