Onor

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Onor is a respect currency originally designed to distribute respect for actions reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Nowadays it is more about the respect given when someone gives information for other people to be freely used. R↻

Onor is just one of the possible respect currencies. Each society may respect different things and therefore distribute respect in a different way. There is no single universal way of giving respect and thus each society may have different respect currencies. In practice, the methods to exchange onors to money will have a major impact on the respect ecosystem in which onors (or another respect currency) will work. For example, let's imagine that the Finnish government is the only actor who distributes money to people who have gained onors. The government is only interested in the production of information to be used as policy guidance on the national level. People could actually gain money by developing ideas for improving the national health care system or giving advice on the number of new nuclear reactors that should be built in Finland. In contrast, the Government would not pay anything for people who compose operettas or write detective stories or draw cartoons.

What would happen? Composers and authors and painters are welcome to join a mass collaboration society to work and share their products. However, it is likely that there would be much more people interested in health care of energy policy. The focus of the group would reside on those policy issues instead of on producing art, and this would also drive the focus of the participants and the use of onors. The detective stories would get lower respect and lower onors (and no money), and the authors and composers and painters would be likely to go elsewhere where their talents are respected more.

There is no reason to think that arts would be disrespected in this mass collaboration society. They would just be out of focus because of lack of incentives (other than onors). But things would change if the Danish government decided that they would pay money for those earning onors by creating free art. This reward would stimulate artists and increase their participation. Cartoonists and composers would get onors for their freely distributed work, and the Danish government would pay for that.

Although the Finnish and Danish governments are interested in completely different things that are not easily comparable such as information about nuclear reactors and free music, these very different things can be measured with onors, just as well as the price of a nuclear reactor and the price of a musical ticket can be measured with euros. This works because the society has a shared mutual understanding about the respect for nuclear information or cartoons. This understanding is broadly (although not necessarily completely) shared by a large fraction of the participating population.

But it is important to understand that not all people fit under one respect currency because of different views of highly respected things. For example, the government in Saudi Arabia may completely disagree with the Danish government about what is a respectable cartoon and what is not. They would develop an own respect currency for muslim values rather than use a respect currency that goes against their own views in important points.

See also