Towards an Adventure Economy
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The Center for Adventure Economics at CouchSurfing.
"Radical vision and running code."
— econometrics — trust and reputation systems — free life —
Contents |
A fundamental connection between Adventurousness and Hospitality
Many of us want to live lives of adventure: We want a variety of diverse experiences. We want to be able to mobilize resources and we want to be aided by many people as we pursue our dreams and ideals. We want to seize the day, changing our whole direction as new information and new desires arise.
We want these things not just for ourselves, but for our society and our organizations. When individuals are able to change their minds about what is best, and to mobilize diverse resources quickly in response to new information, we all stand to benefit from this flexibility. When each individual attends to a diversity of resources, each resource is attended to by more people, and the overall quality of perspective may increase.
Intuitively, we recognize that when we enter into agreements that limit our ability to make ad-hoc decisions later on–for example, when we sign employment contracts–we limit our ability to live adventurously. Yet it is generally through entering into these contracts with strangers and corporations that we achieve their cooperation. This means that we are less able to seize each day, less able to have a diversity of experience, but more able to mobilize resources in the limited domain in which we operate.
If our cooperation with strangers is contractual, it limits our ability to live adventurously. If we don’t obtain cooperation from strangers, that too limits our ability to live adventurously. Therefore: hospitality, or non-contractual, voluntary cooperation among strangers, is a necessary condition for any economic system in which the participants can live adventurous lives.
What else is necessary? A strategy for the mitigation of risk.
(i.e. redundancy)
Generating non-contractual, voluntary cooperation among strangers.
What are the barriers to this kind of thing?
To review
Without hospitality we must resort to either of: (a) state-mandated cooperation By this we mean to include not only the act of being kind to someone just because they are a stranger, but also acts of kindness and sharing with a stranger because they
