BitShares Forum

Main => General Discussion => Topic started by: legendface66 on August 10, 2014, 04:18:52 am

Title: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: legendface66 on August 10, 2014, 04:18:52 am
This is a discussion Delulo and I have been having which seemed suited to a forum post. . .

Incidentally, I think the only way to achieve a shift in the equilibrium of capital concentration is through technology. It's the only wild card that can sufficiently alter the landscape. The capital shocks at the start of last century were the biggest social and political events the world has seen, they evened things out but we are trending toward the old concentration again. What political, social, geological changes could potentially result in persistent wealth distribution?
Quote
The capital shocks at the start of last century were the biggest social and political events the world has seen, they evened things out but we are trending toward the old concentration again.
Do you mean 1929 here or 2007?

By "persistent wealth distribution" you mean a more even one?

I'm referring to the two world wars and also the great depression.
During these events capital was destroyed and appropriated, resulting in an increase of the labour force's relative share of GDP through reduced total private capital holdings and also an increase in public capital holdings (in some cases, don't quote me). So what I really mean is that non-private capital earners commanded a greater share of economic activity and enjoyed greater relative income.

As established, capital necessarily concentrates. Following those shocks it has done just that in non linear fashion "compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe". The curve is becoming hyperbolic right now.
Familiar, off hand numbers:25-49.9th US household wealth percentile, average wealth 1989: 30.9k, in 2007: 52.7k. 90-100th percentile for the same years: 1009k, 3,619.6k

The US is particularly bad but Europe is somewhat similar. To my knowledge the 2008 crisis in no way resulted in a change or even a slowing down of this trend. look at this telling graph:http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2013/04/09/a-rivarly-graphed-how-carlos-slim-overtook-bill-gates-as-number-one-richest-in-the-world/

"Persistent wealth distribution" is very sloppy and the wrong phrase. I mean an equilibrium state where the distribution of income from all sources across the socio-economic spectrum is flatter.

And the point of all this is that blockchain tech provides the opportunity to experiment with the design of economic systems which may lead to the discovery of some that tend toward such an equilibrium.

I myself would start by introducing dilution of 2% per year.

Bring on the trolls with their torches and pitchforks!
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: toast on August 10, 2014, 04:21:15 am
Quote
I myself would start by introducing dilution of 2% per year.

And give the printed stake to whom?
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: luckybit on August 10, 2014, 04:38:09 am
This is a discussion Delulo and I have been having which seemed suited to a forum post. . .

Incidentally, I think the only way to achieve a shift in the equilibrium of capital concentration is through technology. It's the only wild card that can sufficiently alter the landscape. The capital shocks at the start of last century were the biggest social and political events the world has seen, they evened things out but we are trending toward the old concentration again. What political, social, geological changes could potentially result in persistent wealth distribution?
Quote
The capital shocks at the start of last century were the biggest social and political events the world has seen, they evened things out but we are trending toward the old concentration again.
Do you mean 1929 here or 2007?

By "persistent wealth distribution" you mean a more even one?

I'm referring to the two world wars and also the great depression.
During these events capital was destroyed and appropriated, resulting in an increase of the labour force's relative share of GDP through reduced total private capital returns and also an increase in public capital returns (in some cases, don't quote me). So what I really mean is that non-private capital earners commanded a greater share of economic activity and enjoyed greater relative income.

As established, capital necessarily concentrates. Following those shocks it has done just that in non linear fashion "compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe". The curve is becoming hyperbolic right now.
Familiar, off hand numbers:25-49.9th US household wealth percentile, average wealth 1989: 30.9k, in 2007: 52.7k. 90-100th percentile for the same years: 1009k, 3,619.6k

The US is particularly bad but Europe is somewhat similar. To my knowledge the 2008 crisis in no way resulted in a change or even a slowing down of this trend. look at this telling graph:http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2013/04/09/a-rivarly-graphed-how-carlos-slim-overtook-bill-gates-as-number-one-richest-in-the-world/

"Persistent wealth distribution" is very sloppy and the wrong phrase. I mean an equilibrium state where the distribution of income from all sources across the socio-economic spectrum is flatter.

And the point of all this is that blockchain tech provides the opportunity to experiment with the design of economic systems which may lead to the discovery of some that tend toward such an equilibrium.

I myself would start by introducing dilution of 2% per year.

Bring on the trolls with their torches and pitchforks!

Economies aren't designed. Economics are a form of communication. Money exists to communicate needs or demands. It's really nothing more complicated than that.

Capital assets indicate ownership. In this case we are talking about share dilution which is not the same as diluting money. Money is generally worthless but capital assets are another matter.

So while you can print new dollars to continue the delusion and people might accept it, it's also not the same people who would hold assets. So I don't agree with dilution and the only argument you could make to get me to agree is to show that it can somehow make my assets gain in value.

I'm not convinced that we need dilution for Bitshares X. In fact I will go even further and say we should definitely stop using words like dilution, inflation, and similar "evil" words.

Other DACs might want to set aside something for development via pre-allocation but I think dilution schemes come off as being sneaky and have the connotation of the sort of scheme as what Bernie Madoff did. This isn't to say that you don't have a legitimate reason but it just starts to look and feel like a Ponzi scheme or Pyramid scheme when you try to convince people to accept dilution, inflation, or any of the negative ideas that fit those memes.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/PyramidSchemeMS.jpg)
Quote
A pyramid scheme is an unsustainable business model that involves promising participants payment or services, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, rather than supplying any real investment or sale of products or services to the public.[1][2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: legendface66 on August 10, 2014, 04:47:45 am
Dunno. Delegates maybe? Then  the ultimate destination of the added stake can be voted upon. There is the problem that the more stake a party controls the greater control they have over the destination of the issuance. Kind of a nature of the beast thing really.

The answer may lie outside of DPOS

Ignoring the suggestion of dilution though, the goal has to be to achieve that equilibrium. Otherwise the system will organise itself into a critical state and potentially become compromised. This is a world economy I'm talking about not necessarily a bitshares one.

@luckybit Yes, I get what you say about economies and have no well considered answer but I dissagree about A) pyramid schemes - they do work in practice just not in theory. B)Dilution - we need to have a way of reducing the stake of early adopters or we risk severe concentration.
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: luckybit on August 10, 2014, 05:40:11 am
@luckybit Yes, I get what you say about economies and have no well considered answer but I dissagree about A) pyramid schemes - they do work in practice just not in theory. B)Dilution - we need to have a way of reducing the stake of early adopters or we risk severe concentration.
I disagree with you on B). I don't think concentration is inherently evil. I think investment comes from people (not the government). I think in any industry it helps if you have experience and in our case we are some of the only people with the DAC experience to understand where money should go.

Ethereum raised a lot of money and will benefit the ecosystem. Does it matter to me if they got all that money from Satoshi Nakamoto himself or from 100,000 different people? Yes it does matter but it doesn't matter as much as whether or not innovation gets funded. I believe more innovation is being funded by Bitcoin early adopters and will continue to be funded far into the future which is the only way to grow a new industry.

I don't think the goal should be to redistribute people's wealth. The goal should be to encourage people to reinvest or to invest capital. There is never going to be economic equality because it's not possible according to physics (the earth and ecosystem have limits). Some resources are scarce and typically something is an asset because it's value increases over time.

Making it so no one can keep wealth doesn't make everyone else richer. All you're doing is redirecting capital assets from one ideology to another. It becomes political and in this case the early adopters may be the only people who understand the technology, who understand the vision for the industry, who know what a DAC is, who grasp the important concepts.

Setting all politics aside, there is no one else in the world with the unique combination of knowledge, expertise, interests, passions, philosophical understanding, at this time. The people who got involved first like it or not are either the most brave, or the most knowledgeable, and the best way to avoid concentration amongst these people is to build ways for them to diversify out.

In 5 years it may be us who are the most knowledgeable people. I agree with you that in 5 years it would be terrible if we are the ones still holding on to the majority of the shares. The ideal situation is for us to be able to keep whatever wealth we earned from this and diversify out as we crowd fund the new industry. If we don't own these industries then it will be owned by people who truly don't care about the technology or understand it.

Dilution does not reward any particular kind of investment or diversification. It's not proven that it's necessary. The whole idea should be that if the economy works as intended then there will be plenty of opportunities to cause early adopters to want to hedge their bets. Nxt for example or Ethereum.

So I do not support any dilution of wealth. I understand it's concentrated but I don't think the answer is to take wealth from people who know an industry and put it into the hands of people who care the least as proved by the fact that they are late adopters. If you're late to anything you shouldn't be rewarded for it.

I do support the idea of symbiosis though. I think the way to make wealth circulate is to adopt the bee pollination algorithm. We should pre-allocate a "community enrichment" fund where a certain percentage of shares will be awarded to people who participate in the community. This amount of shares should be capped.

In my concept of the bee pollination algorithm which I've talked about elsewhere the way it's supposed to work is that we have to look at the computing resources as the land. The decentralized apps or DACs as flowers. The users as bees in a swarm. The shares or crypto-equity as pollen.

Nature shows that you do have sustainable growth when all elements are in symbiosis. The symbiosis comes from the fact that the DACs themselves are in a symbiotic relationship with the users of it. For example if attention and early participation are rewarded with shares it benefits the DAC(flower) because it markets the DAC(flower) to the other users/bees in the swarm. The purpose of pollination is to spread the DNA of the flower (to spread the source code of the DAC technology).

The symbiosis comes from the fact that the DACs (flowers) support the lives of the users (bees) by allowing them to eat in exchange for advertising. They need each other to grow and thrive and that in my opinion is how we should be looking at how humans interact with DACs. Human beings should be able to make a living participating in a DAC (participation can mean many different things depending on the DAC).

So here is a list of points to remember.
1. Users are like Bees.
2. DACs are like Flowers.
3. Computation resources are like Land.
4. Source code is like DNA.
5. Shares/crypto-equity is like Pollen.
6. The Community of users are like a Swarm.

It all must be self sustaining, in symbiosis. Early participants should be rewarded because that is how it works in nature. Bees that discover the flower early on are rewarded with an abundance of pollen which they then take back to their hive but in the process they touch many other flowers which improves the gene diversity and reproduction of the different species.

In the case of users the DACs need the users in order to evolve. Users provide all meaning, all feedback, etc. DACs can pay the users for attention, for feedback, for improvements to it's source code, for advertising. As the users get more effective at doing this the DACs will take on greater utility, the value of the shares will rise, and everybody wins.

An example of a flower pollination algorithm for further study
http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5673
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: luckybit on August 10, 2014, 05:55:56 am
Consider this. We are the bees in this swarm.

Our role primarily is to bring resources back to our community in the form of shares, opportunities, or whatever.

But our secondary role is to spread the DNA of the DAC technology itself. This means the most important thing we can do to grow our industry and encourage symbiosis is to encourage the use of the Bitshares toolkit. The Bitshares toolkit is the primary DNA for the family of DACs which most of us will be making a living from whether it is as delegates or whether as entrepreneurs.

DACs have to be pretty, they have to be attractive, they have to smell good, to catch the attention of the bees and invite the swarm. That means the DACs have to give the bees something that they want or need. A hive is just another word we can use for a community and I'm deliberately trying to avoid getting political.

I define our community as the decentralization community. We are looking for decentralized ways of life. One of the lifestyle patterns of the decentralized way of life is the swarm activity and in my opinion if we provide incentive for swarm activity we can create self sustaining symbiosis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: Stan on August 10, 2014, 01:00:31 pm
@luckybit Yes, I get what you say about economies and have no well considered answer but I dissagree about A) pyramid schemes - they do work in practice just not in theory. B)Dilution - we need to have a way of reducing the stake of early adopters or we risk severe concentration.
I disagree with you on B). I don't think concentration is inherently evil. I think investment comes from people (not the government). I think in any industry it helps if you have experience and in our case we are some of the only people with the DAC experience to understand where money should go.

Ethereum raised a lot of money and will benefit the ecosystem. Does it matter to me if they got all that money from Satoshi Nakamoto himself or from 100,000 different people? Yes it does matter but it doesn't matter as much as whether or not innovation gets funded. I believe more innovation is being funded by Bitcoin early adopters and will continue to be funded far into the future which is the only way to grow a new industry.

I don't think the goal should be to redistribute people's wealth. The goal should be to encourage people to reinvest or to invest capital. There is never going to be economic equality because it's not possible according to physics (the earth and ecosystem have limits). Some resources are scarce and typically something is an asset because it's value increases over time.

Making it so no one can keep wealth doesn't make everyone else richer. All you're doing is redirecting capital assets from one ideology to another. It becomes political and in this case the early adopters may be the only people who understand the technology, who understand the vision for the industry, who know what a DAC is, who grasp the important concepts.

Setting all politics aside, there is no one else in the world with the unique combination of knowledge, expertise, interests, passions, philosophical understanding, at this time. The people who got involved first like it or not are either the most brave, or the most knowledgeable, and the best way to avoid concentration amongst these people is to build ways for them to diversify out.

In 5 years it may be us who are the most knowledgeable people. I agree with you that in 5 years it would be terrible if we are the ones still holding on to the majority of the shares. The ideal situation is for us to be able to keep whatever wealth we earned from this and diversify out as we crowd fund the new industry. If we don't own these industries then it will be owned by people who truly don't care about the technology or understand it.

Dilution does not reward any particular kind of investment or diversification. It's not proven that it's necessary. The whole idea should be that if the economy works as intended then there will be plenty of opportunities to cause early adopters to want to hedge their bets. Nxt for example or Ethereum.

So I do not support any dilution of wealth. I understand it's concentrated but I don't think the answer is to take wealth from people who know an industry and put it into the hands of people who care the least as proved by the fact that they are late adopters. If you're late to anything you shouldn't be rewarded for it.

I do support the idea of symbiosis though. I think the way to make wealth circulate is to adopt the bee pollination algorithm. We should pre-allocate a "community enrichment" fund where a certain percentage of shares will be awarded to people who participate in the community. This amount of shares should be capped.

In my concept of the bee pollination algorithm which I've talked about elsewhere the way it's supposed to work is that we have to look at the computing resources as the land. The decentralized apps or DACs as flowers. The users as bees in a swarm. The shares or crypto-equity as pollen.

Nature shows that you do have sustainable growth when all elements are in symbiosis. The symbiosis comes from the fact that the DACs themselves are in a symbiotic relationship with the users of it. For example if attention and early participation are rewarded with shares it benefits the DAC(flower) because it markets the DAC(flower) to the other users/bees in the swarm. The purpose of pollination is to spread the DNA of the flower (to spread the source code of the DAC technology).

The symbiosis comes from the fact that the DACs (flowers) support the lives of the users (bees) by allowing them to eat in exchange for advertising. They need each other to grow and thrive and that in my opinion is how we should be looking at how humans interact with DACs. Human beings should be able to make a living participating in a DAC (participation can mean many different things depending on the DAC).

So here is a list of points to remember.
1. Users are like Bees.
2. DACs are like Flowers.
3. Computation resources are like Land.
4. Source code is like DNA.
5. Shares/crypto-equity is like Pollen.
6. The Community of users are like a Swarm.

It all must be self sustaining, in symbiosis. Early participants should be rewarded because that is how it works in nature. Bees that discover the flower early on are rewarded with an abundance of pollen which they then take back to their hive but in the process they touch many other flowers which improves the gene diversity and reproduction of the different species.

In the case of users the DACs need the users in order to evolve. Users provide all meaning, all feedback, etc. DACs can pay the users for attention, for feedback, for improvements to it's source code, for advertising. As the users get more effective at doing this the DACs will take on greater utility, the value of the shares will rise, and everybody wins.

An example of a flower pollination algorithm for further study
http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5673

It is like old Siamese saying.
 
A girl is like a blossom, with honey for just one man.
A man is like a honey bee and gather all he can.
To fly from blossom to blossom a honey bee must be free.
But blossom must not ever fly from bee to bee to bee.


-- The King and I, 1956
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: Empirical1 on August 11, 2014, 11:19:47 pm

I myself would start by introducing dilution of 2% per year.

Bring on the trolls with their torches and pitchforks!

I'm not a fan of inflation/dilution

Imo, forced inflation/dilution creates a misallocation of capital in whatever area it is directed and results in the funding of uncompetitive businesses/people & ultimately hurts those people and the others employed by them the most. Inflation also leads to a loss of purchasing power and decrease in the personal savings rate. (less incentive to save & if wages don't keep up with inflation have to dip into them too.)

Mild deflation leads to an increase in purchasing power and an increase in the personal savings rate as well as only competitive businesses or people being funded.

----

So an inflationary economy will experience a lot of booms and busts and a deflationary economy will be more stable imo

Looking at the 1929 crash, it came after the roaring 20's. A lot of uncompetitive and unsustainable businesses had been funded. Since 1913 and the creation of the federal reserve the US had an inflationary economy where workers experienced a loss of purchasing power and there was a decline in the personal savings rate.

So when a correction occurred...

The correction was big, lots of people found themselves out of work, this lead to a deflation, but without much savings the recently unemployed couldn't get by even with increased purchasing power, and those employed had little savings too, and had to use their wages to support themselves and the many unemployed. (So a painful crash and a long slow recovery.)

Had there been a mild deflation leading up the correction.

It would have been less severe as less unsustainable businesses would have been funded and therefore less people would have been out of work. Those that were out of work would have had greater personal savings which had now increased in purchasing power which would help them get by.  Those in work would have greater savings now increasing in purchasing power so would sooner have excess to re-invest and stimulate the economy. (So a less painful crash and a quicker recovery.)

 
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: legendface66 on August 15, 2014, 03:48:38 am
@Stan - Let the blossoms fly I say!

@luckybit - I think the pollination metaphor is a great conceptualisation of the path ahead. Probably worth working into an article if you have the time and inclination.

To address the idea that economies are grown rather than designed, let me direct your attention to commercial horticulture. A contemporary commercial stone or pip fruit tree may be trained to grow with a single trunk with four branches intersecting the trunk at elbow height another tier at about eight feet. In the eighties and early nineties you saw more double trunks that cambered out with wider rows but similar stratification of branches. Before that you had quad trunks.

Each of these tree structures were born of the times. Specifically, intensifying production per hectare over time (single trunks mean more trees) and different mechanical tools (ladders work well with multiple trunks, cherrypickers allow easy harvesting of the second tier of branches).

These trees are trained to grow in an exact and highly replicable fashion through pruning and other techniques. Economies are the same. Subsidize the farming sector and you'll get disproportionate growth there. Tax it and it'll shrink.

Most of us are feeling the pinch right now. I'm a traveling person who follows the money. In the last two years I've lived in the States, Australia and now New Zealand. The fact that New Zealand is where I've wound up says a lot about the labourers lot in the world. Because, put simply it's bloody shit here just not quite as bad as everywhere else. (plenty of exceptions)
We are already seeing two income families falling below realistically livable income levels and as illustrated in the original post, this is happening at an increasing rate despite an "improving" economy.

This state of affairs is the result of the labourer (worker) enjoying a reduced share of total income.

We need growth in this part of the economy and we need to prune the bloated part.

This will never happen due to the proof of stake style of the fiat system but in growing (verb) new economies we need to be cognizant of these issues which are are inevitable if not addressed we can patch the jumbo jet in flight or grow it for the conditions we know it will encounter.
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: legendface66 on August 15, 2014, 04:04:46 am
Incidentally, it is my assumption that this state of income distribution will lead to an inefficient and fragile economy. It's not a humanistic plea.
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: thisisausername on August 15, 2014, 04:24:06 am
I think you are on to a much bigger issue than problems with the money system, namely the coming (and continuing, and accelerating) irrelevancy of humans to production.
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: legendface66 on August 15, 2014, 04:41:57 am
I think you are on to a much bigger issue than problems with the money system, namely the coming (and continuing, and accelerating) irrelevancy of humans to production.

I hear what you are saying but that is a different issue. It just looks very similar to this one. We are still a labour driven civilization. Still, that is another issue that should be considered when designing the system of incentives that the new economies grow on.
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: santaclause102 on August 15, 2014, 09:06:04 am
Quote
I myself would start by introducing dilution of 2% per year.
The question is how would you enforce it. You can have that 2% dilution if everyone is forced to use this money. If not your money is competing with other money...

Quote
distribution of income from all sources across the socio-economic spectrum is flatter.

This is very hard to achieve but worth thinking about!
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: legendface66 on August 15, 2014, 11:33:05 am
Enforcement might be solved by building it into the structure of the successful platform as platforms that don't incorporate it would be less efficient and more fragile. Losing in the long run. (assumptions) Be better from the start through innovation and incorporate a system to counter wealth accumulation/centralisation for success in the long run.

Didn't Dan say at some point that the goal was to produce a structure that did not require ongoing support?

Shouldn't this be the goal in designing the "growth training program" of new economies?
 
A system which reaches an equilibrium with more even income distribution would be more efficient and robust right? I mean, the timeline is effectively infinite. Even if the decay toward centralisation was impeded somehow this should make the system more competitive in the "real world" than more rapidly decaying systems.
Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: luckybit on August 15, 2014, 03:08:26 pm
Incidentally, it is my assumption that this state of income distribution will lead to an inefficient and fragile economy. It's not a humanistic plea.
If the cost of living gets cheaper at or around the rate of Moore's law then everything is fine no matter what incomes are. Inflation seems to be the source of the problem because in the technology industry we seem to be able to get more with less consistently every year guaranteeing that the future is brighter than the present day.

The better designed economy will rely on automation and particularly the role Bitshares is to dramatically increase the efficiency in some of the most inefficient parts of our economy which is mainly the corporate sector. Corporations claim to be efficient and compared to governments they seem to be but are not really.

Mainly because it's centralized in a way which doesn't result in lower costs or greater efficiency. For example if you don't need all the middle management of traditional industry then you save a lot of money. In that case decentralization improves efficiency and we can see that in certain industries which are being disintermediated.

Income distribution isn't really important. Equality of opportunity and access to wealth are important. Income is not wealth. Wealth is what generates income. Wealth is the land and commodities which can come from it (not fiat income). Our land is computation resources and we already know that Moore's law is creating immense wealth via deflationary tech trends. Income will result from owning land and digital assets/commodities or virtual real estate.

Human beings are a source of value but the problem is more human beings don't understand how valuable they are. It does not help that society, the media, and modern culture, does everything it can to make the average human being feel worthless. All value comes from the human though and it starts with attention.

Attention is the scarce resource because time is limited yet the most valuable resource of all.

Human attention is something everyone wants and will pay to get.

Ads basically steal attention and don't pay the human beings for it.

Facebook takes our data and does not compensate us for that.

As a result human beings are harvested for their value by large corporations (many of which have government contracts giving them unfair competitive advantages).

Ownership of land, decentralization and your own personal currency can help you to exchange value on your terms.

Title: Re: An opportunity to design the perfect economy.
Post by: luckybit on August 15, 2014, 03:22:13 pm
I think you are on to a much bigger issue than problems with the money system, namely the coming (and continuing, and accelerating) irrelevancy of humans to production.

I hear what you are saying but that is a different issue. It just looks very similar to this one. We are still a labour driven civilization. Still, that is another issue that should be considered when designing the system of incentives that the new economies grow on.

I see no reason to create incentives for human labor. Let the machines to the work and let humans sell attention, exchange knowledge, create, and bring meaning.

Labor only exists to provide life support for civilization. If we are at a phase in our civilization where a super computer with drones can do all of that then great. There will be more fun stuff for people to do.

But the one scarce resource that people have is attention. Labor is not actually scarce. If labor were scarce it wouldn't be getting cheaper. Attention actually is scarce which is why corporations are resorting to stealing it without paying the owner (you) for viewing the ads. Quality information is also always in demand but people give it away for free because they have no privacy left to give them the leverage necessary to sell it.

So the problem isn't that human beings aren't worth anything. The problem is corporations are stealing value from human beings without giving value in return. That is the problem with the hamster wheel model. http://www.benjamintseng.com/2013/11/the-facebook-hamster-wheel/

The reason Facebook has value is because the data human users generate creates the network effect. But those humans creating the network effect is what allows Facebook to monetize and profit. Facebook acts as a parasite in a way because it sucks value away from the producers and gives it to shareholders of Facebook. This would be fine if the users of Facebook could become shareholders or somehow could earn shares by using it but that isn't the case.

So the idea I have is that the users should earn shares in the products they use so that the users who create the network effect benefit directly from it. This is why Bitcoin seems to be able to work, or why Bitshares works, and the bee pollination algorithm would make it work even better. The more early and frequently you use the app the more shares you should receive so that when late adopters get on board you're earning the sort of money currently being passed along to Facebook employees.

All of this is possible if the community owns the land (computation resources). SAFE Network, Storj, these are attempts to take back the land. Once the community has the land then a Facebook can be built in a decentralized manner, run on the cloud, with users earning shares in it so that when ads are shown the users get paid.

If you own the tokens in the decentralized app or DAC then you own the virtual real estate which increases in value, whether through the so called network effect, or from profits paying dividends.
If labor has to be done then you'll have bounties, you'll have delegates, operators, there will always be some work to keep the DAC or decentralized app operational, maintained, evolving.