<story><title>Build Unix, Not Uber</title><url>https://thesephist.com/posts/legacy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>An alternative to the corporation is the chaord. This is an idea that went nowhere. Except that Visa International was a chaord. A chaord is useful when you have a shared resource that&amp;#x27;s needed by competing entities. That&amp;#x27;s exactly what Visa International was set up to be. It&amp;#x27;s an operator of a data network and a standards body. It doesn&amp;#x27;t issue cards. It doesn&amp;#x27;t handle money. It just transmits transaction data between point of sale, merchant&amp;#x27;s bank, and card issuer&amp;#x27;s bank. It&amp;#x27;s in the interests of all the banks involved that it work well, be a neutral party, and not cost too much. A chaord is useful when you have something that&amp;#x27;s a natural monopoly, but the customers don&amp;#x27;t want it charging monopoly rents. It&amp;#x27;s not idealistic. It&amp;#x27;s a practical solution to that class of problems.&lt;p&gt;Dee Hock, an executive of a minor bank, set this up. The big banks wanted someone relatively neutral in charge of the Visa system. (He died just two weeks ago, I just found out.)
His optimistic book, &amp;quot;Birth of the Chaordic Age&amp;quot;, is still available.&lt;p&gt;There used to be a &amp;quot;chaord&amp;quot; article on Wikipedia, but it was merged into Dee Hock&amp;#x27;s article after Visa became an ordinary corporation.</text></comment>
<story><title>Build Unix, Not Uber</title><url>https://thesephist.com/posts/legacy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>abathur</author><text>At the risk of saying something dumb and meta... it&amp;#x27;s ideas all the way down (for a really long time now).&lt;p&gt;The individual corporations are ideas, and then of course there&amp;#x27;s the idea of the corporation itself. As the post notes, corporations only work because of other ideas about property rights and scarcity. But more fundamentally they only work because they&amp;#x27;re an idea quite a few people already believe in.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a little fuzzy on the level at which the post means &amp;quot;autonomous ideas&amp;quot; will steer society--do they mean autonomous ideas like Unix? Or autonomous ideas like governments and corporations and pope-less religions?&lt;p&gt;I think the post helps draw a latent curiosity out of me that I probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t have put quite like this, but: &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; we better identify and allocate resources towards good ideas that don&amp;#x27;t make market sense?</text></comment>