Some thoughts as I catch up on the list
Paul D. Fernhout
started by Edward Miller with his insightful comments on "The End of Work or
the Renaissance of Slavery", consolidated from some previous writings of mine.
Money is essentially a control system for coordinating what is produced and
who gets it (as a form of rationing). Kibbutzim and other communal efforts
spend a lot of time discussing things (enormous time in public discussions)
because discussion is replacing money (or, rather, private decisions about
spending money) as the control system for what the community emphasizes in
how people spend their time. Discussions can consider externalities (both
positive and negative external costs) in ways that money can't. In that
sense email and web pages and even twitters are a replacement for money as a
control system for economic activity. Remember, there was a time before the
formalism of money, when stuff still got made and children got raised. So,
it is not clear how important money is anymore when you have the internet
for discussions of what to do and how to do it.
The GNU GPL copy-left license is a "constitution" for cooperation and
collaboration (share and share-alike). There may be other licenses that
work, and it may have issues, but it has been effective. So, it is more than
a license for others to use your work; it is saying how a community can work
together. Non-copyleft licenses like the BSD license need more social
organization or cultural values to replace what the GPL provides as a formal
structure. Although again, it is not clear if you need the formalism of the
GPL when you have the internet to propagate culture and have such
discussions. Unfortunately, the GPL is incompatible with many other
licenses, and to some extent, the GPL is incompatible with itself, given it
has fragmented into dozens of somewhat incompatible licenses (for example,
you can't use regular GPL 2 code in a GPL 3 project, or GPL 3 with a
classpath exception code in LGPL project, etc.) which is part of the problem
of trying to use a formalism like a license or like money to handle complex
social issues about identity and community and equity and charity and so on.
We can't systematically rethink how things are produced cradle-to-cradle
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
without having open access to the *designs* of the means of production.
(Thus, the need for "open manufacturing" as part of moving forward.)
There are also good points to the current system we should not deny. One is
Julian Simon's point as the human imagination as the "ultimate resource",
inventing new resources as there is a perceived need for them or to
substitute for other resources get scarcer (one can argue about whether
money is the best way to perceive needs). Another is that there has been
increases in efficient production of things and there has been increases in
better design for less resource use driven by the current economic system.
Whether we could have had those improvements under other economic frameworks
is a different issue. The "Story of Stuff" video misses out on acknowledging
those good points, but if you want to bring many people on board a movement
for change, you need to acknowledge those ideas about the current situation,
otherwise you risk being dismissed as unknowing or unappreciative.
As unemployment rises, it is more profitable as well as easier to work
existing fearful-of-losing-their-jobs employees harder, because of fixed
costs per employee from health insurance, pensions, and management. That
also increases unemployment. Someone bigger needs to step in and create
shorter work weeks in that situation (or workers need to do it somehow).
"Kellogg's Six-Hour Day"
http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1155_reg.html
Or the entire playing field needs to change (like somehow moving beyond the
notion of "jobs"). The Triple Revolution memorandum from 1964 had some other
ideas on this, arguing that automation (and I'd add better design) was
breaking the rationale for a link between productivity by effort on the job
and having a right to consume.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Hoc_Committee_on_the_Triple_Revolution
There is a big difference between being a worker, or even an owner, and
being a citizen. You can be disenfranchised as a worker (firing) or owner
(bad investment), but you cannot be disenfranchised as a citizen (short of
global war).
The US currently has a basic income guarantee as well as universal access to
health care. Seriously. The USA already does. About forty seven million US
Americans are living *exactly* the way some here are talking about in terms
of a basic income guarantee, which is about 15% of the US population. Why
does this lucky 15% have a basic income guarantee and free-to-the-user
health care when the rest of us don't? What makes them so special compared
to the rest of us in the USA? (Hint: I'm not talking about the wealthy top
few percent of the USA who also effectively have a basic income guarantee
without having to work.)
--Paul Fernhout
Edward Miller
and egg problem in the sense that there would be much more people
working on Open Source projects if they weren't so busy spending all
their time creating artificial scarcities for corporations. Yet, Open
Source is also supposed to free us from work. So it both requires
freedom from work and creates freedom from work. Thus, in order to
effectively bootstrap it, we need State power in the form of shorter
work days and a Basic Income.
Despite by strong anti-authoritarian tendencies, I think one
legitimate use of State power is to create frameworks upon which we
can make a better life. A great example is the Internet. I doubt we
could have had the Internet, and the resulting mode of production Open
Source, without State funding and regulation. Computers and networks
were all created in government labs because fundamental research just
isn't seen as all that profitable in the private sector. How many
private particle accelerators are there, for instance? none.
Technically it could be possible to have a global mesh network without
any state regulation, though we don't even have the technology for
that right now, so without the State we would just have had to do
without the Internet for the past few decades, and perhaps the next
century. Yet, I'm not even sure such a thing wouldn't have been
capable of being imagined without all the government-funded research
into transistors, networks, and so forth.
Thus, to those on this list who think Open Source can out-compete
capitalism on its own without some external bootstrapping, you're
dreamers.
On May 14, 10:04 am, "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernh...@kurtz-
Kevin Carson
> Despite by strong anti-authoritarian tendencies, I think one
> legitimate use of State power is to create frameworks upon which we
> can make a better life. A great example is the Internet. I doubt we
> could have had the Internet, and the resulting mode of production Open
> Source, without State funding and regulation. Computers and networks
> were all created in government labs because fundamental research just
> isn't seen as all that profitable in the private sector. How many
> private particle accelerators are there, for instance? none.
> Technically it could be possible to have a global mesh network without
> any state regulation, though we don't even have the technology for
> that right now, so without the State we would just have had to do
> without the Internet for the past few decades, and perhaps the next
> century. Yet, I'm not even sure such a thing wouldn't have been
> capable of being imagined without all the government-funded research
> into transistors, networks, and so forth.
You're probably right about digital computers. The basic idea was
suggested as early as the Jacquard loom and the Babbage machine, but I
doubt anyone would have imagined the benefits from immediate
applications as being sufficient to justify development of
miniaturized electronics, had not the government been heavily
subsidizing the development of the technology for military purposes.
As for networks, I'm not so sure. Given the existence of digital
computers and the invention of microprocessors, it's likely something
like the homebrewers would have invented the desktop. And given
desktops and home computer enthusiasts, it likely would have led at
the very least to the invention of the telephone modem and last-mile
meshworks at the local level. There might not have been a
high-capacity, many-to-many network at the global or national level,
but there would surely have been a capacity for cheap and fairly
convenient one-to-one transmission between computers (like
transmission of CAD files), and many-to-many networks at the local
level. And given such local networks, the piecemeal introduction of
private institutional servers piggybacked on the phone system could
probably have supported a much lower-volume national network.
So even without the federal role in creating a high-volume Internet,
it's likely the minimal necessary infrastructure for OS manufacturing
would have been there.
--
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
Edward Miller
slower as a result of the reduced network effects of the lower volume
networks.
I really would love someone to prove me wrong though
On May 17, 1:13 pm, Kevin Carson
<free.market.anticapital...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalismhttp://mutualist.blogspot.com
> Studies in Mutualist Political Economyhttp://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
> Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspectivehttp://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of....
Paul D. Fernhout
resources (by current standards) on either local networks or larger networks.
The system that started them all was Plato in the 1960s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO
Then there was Augment on a network also in the 1960s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_System
In the early 1970s Chile had Cybersyn, which some say was so successful and
radically dangerous that the US government staged a coup in the first
September 11 (1973) to destroy it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersyn
In the 1970s was Smalltalk and the Alto at Xerox Parc with Ethernet, which
could in theory have become the standard by itself (so, no TCP/IP).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)
In the 1970s there was Forth powered multitasking and networking for radio
telescopes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)#History
If I had to build from scratch, I might start from there, since Forth-based
CPUs are easy to make, too, just a few thousand gates. But Lisp and
Smalltalk would be good languages to run on top of that CPU too, as they are
more self-documenting. We really don't need more than those three computer
languages, and these languages themselves could have been the higher level
data-exchange languages. :-)
In 1979 there was Usenet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
In 1981 there was Bitnet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitnet
Then in 1982, France had Minitel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
Any one of these, and others, could have grown to become the internet, with
issues getting solved along the way. And Forth could have supplied the CPU
power in an easy to make and non-proprietary way.
So, without the US government's involvement, and without TCP/IP (from around
1974), we would likely have something else. Maybe something better?
With that said, I think government investment in open R&D is one of the best
things a government can do.
--Paul Fernhout