Dear colleagues,
After the recent exchanges, let me try a possible way to put economic
things in a more clear sense. It could be through the distinction between
"infostructures" and "infrastructures" --the former built up upon our
symbolic capabilities, neatly informational, and the latter being
productive operations that by themselves involve the usual physical
attributes and laws (not only entropy growth!). Conversely to Marxian
views, the infrastructure would be docilely conduced by the infostructure
(with dense feedbacks, of course, and admittedly following too schematic an
approach). The sort of infoeconomic or infodynamic processes governing the
material part of the economy involve very familiar terms --eg, value-- that
perhaps we can recast by some of the ideas argumented here, particularly
by Bob and Igor. A little story on "the nail found in Zaragoza" may be
illuminating...
In a very hot day, walking along the fields surrounding this very place
(CPS, in Zaragoza ouskirts) a student finds a big nail, very old artifact,
quite rusted, almost scrap. Its value: just as scrap iron, merely around
one cent ---if any of the recycling companies could be interested buying
it. However the student is curious, and takes the nail in order to show it
to some historians. It looks interesting: its manufacture is genuinely
medieval, it bears some marks or signs , etc. The value now ascends: one
hundred euros are offered by these new interested parties. Well, an erudite
archeologist intervenes: those marks are inscriptions that can be
deciphered and become latin & french anagrams, and who knows why, but the
nail is starting to attract big media coverage--- journalists, local
museum, collectors, etc. Now all these new social networks which have been
altered are escalating the value to several thousand euros. Unbelievable,
but the most reputed erudite of this region (Aragon) reports that the nail
itself belongs to... Roldan and Charlemagne themselves!!! To their joint
war-chariot, in their frustrated siege of Moorish Zaragoza millennia ago).
Big, big hysteria: regional and national politicians, journalists and
novelists, all of Spanish and French Media, numerous TVs, Academies,
European museums, Hollywood producers, treasure hunters.... The value
emanating from the massive perturbation of a terrific number of flickering
social networks ("disrupted bonds") is taking the value now to the millions.
Helas, as it frequently happens, it was an elaborated fake. Big scandal,
dense silence. The nail returns to the one cent value ---end of the story
(it literally happened in a museum in Israel, cheated around a King
Salomon's artifact, priced around one million--the source of my little
story on the nail).
Sorry for the bla, bla, bla, and for conflating notions of value and of
price. I just wanted to argue on the need to explore the info nature of
value, reconceptualzed as "ascendancy" derived from the activation of
multidimensional networks, being symbolically proyected onto a single
cardinality, and then becoming "prized". Yes, it deals with a single event,
but when we regiment in markets and accounting systems all the regularity
of social production systems, we keep a strong record of the social
ascendancy of all the parties and processes involved (eg, look at the
enigmatic valuation of "art works" --the most expensive items of
societies). It is along similar lines, I think, that we might re-enter
notions of social entropy and other new ways of analysis, and not literally
as attempted in the present way by some.
We are here, in this list, playing with several important pieces of
knolwedge, from different individual sources, that we must massage and put
together with a lot of patience and common sense. It might be finally a
nicer story than the unfortunate "nail found in Zaragoza"
Thanks for the patience!
Pedro
Pedro
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Thu May 26 18:30:14 2005
