Where would we be without the internet? Could we live without Google for a day even? Well they tried that and found there are plenty of other engines out there worth looking at. But the real question for me was not whether we could live without Google for a day but whether Google is still the future of the internet.

This is a more challenging question. As Branton Kenton-Dau, my colleague over at VortexDNA, notes the internet is a self organising system constantly feeding off the energy provided by creators and imaginators. So far Google has kept this energy focused through itself by either developing new services or simply buying in what they like.

There is no problem with big…..big can be good but big requires a lot more energy to self-sustain. The beauty of the web is that it reflects demands so quickly. It is essentially democratic in its processing, beautiful and free…well not quite. It has the capacity to be controlled and regulated which we have seen all too frequently.

But i have a feeling that the internet as we know it may reorganise itself by deconstructing and coming back to life in a different form. This may well be opposite to what we have now where we go out to look for things. In the next stage of development things will come looking for us. We will be the filter for our web and we will be the center of it.

There will be no more ranking only relevance decided by us. We will configure the web to ourselves with no one interfering with or controlling what we see. I’m excited about this vision because it offers so much.

How we get there is anyone’s guess but that’s the beauty of systems.

In a previous post Does Money Grow on Trees? i looked at how money comes into existence but in a broad sense of the word.

In his paper, The Nature of Money, John Kutyn examines in detail what money is starting from the late 16th century. He explores the development of what we know as bank notes from their early days as accommodation bills and the establishment of the Bank of England as a way of funding a war against France.

 He follows the development of money and banking primarily through the legal process andlooks at numerous cases in law of challenges to the meaning of money and the transactions it is used for.

He challenges the banking system to show that it is not acting fraudulently in law when it uses deposits as money and actually creates money via new loans. Of course only a Reserve Bank can create money or so the law states. So is true? Well i suggest you read his paper and draw your own conclusions but he makes a compelling case.

Not content with that he then moves on to looking at the economic impacts of the current system which has a built in imperative for growth resulting in continued boom bust cycles. He argues that this is down to the interest burden and that debt free money is the only way a stable economy can be achieved.

 As we approach yet another global bust and possible depression it is worth relfecting on the themes in this paper.

Barely a week passes without a new campaign in the UK around the issue of food miles and NZ produce. Though this has been thoroughly debunked by the report from Lincoln University the story continues to rumble along.

This is just the beginning of a more serious debate on the issue of environmental costs otherwise known as externalities. Food miles is just a simple way of engaging the public and media just as the phrase “think global, buy local” has always done.

We all like to support our local farmers whether in NZ, UK, France, Japan or the US. However we all like to sell as much as our produce into markets where we can achieve a better price (even after taking account of transport costs). NZ is heavily geared towards exporting and with a large productive base and small local market it is more exposed than many other larger countries.

Stepping away from the hype and hysteria we can see that the Food Miles debate is both important and necessary. Consumers should be paying the full price for the goods they buy and that includes the basic inputs of energy and matter as well as ecosystem goods and services.

Whilst food miles comes across as a marketing ploy and is somewhat simplistic in its formulation, it can be seen as the start of a serious attempt to bring Trucost pricing into the mainstream economic system. Of course it makes sense to buy your veggies from the farmer down the road but the supermarket system is all pervasive and has driven costs down so far that they have been able to get away with an international supply chain as well as shipping domestic produce many miles further than necessary.

Pricing ecosystem services in at the primary level would see a vastly different pricing mechanism: one which included the price of nutrient and effluent run off, mining run off, soil depletion, air quality processing, clean water provision and the numerous other services which have enormous economic value.

If this happens then maybe we can relax a bit as the produce in our supermarkets and farmers markets will be priced on the same basis.

Only then will we really know which is really cheaper.

It’s a new beginning but hopefully we can get some dialogue going here. The rules are simple: all comments are welcome but this isn’t a place for ranting and raving (there’s plenty of other sites for that); it’s a space for constructive conversation about a wide range of issues; papers, articles and any scraps of thought are welcome and if suitable i will gladly post them in the research section; if you want to post your link up then just let me know.

 Feedback is always appreciated.

Best wishes

Raf