Postscarcity, sharing, and further aspirations
david_c
think it might be very worthwhile to invite people's thoughts on
other, related, issues.
There a number of separate trends that I believe readers here are
aware of and hope to see consolidated. These include
1. postscarcity / abundance in the physical sphere,
2. the free and open-source software/hardware movement,
and for some (but not all) of us
3. sharing / the gift economy, and possibly even
4. the idea of "transhumanism" also.
The thing is, I think all of these trends are vitally important - yet
I don't see any attempt to unite them under a common umbrella. The
ideas of postscarcity and the gift economy, in particular, ought to be
nurtured in such a way as to ensure that they complement and support
each other. Whatever about other people's thoughts or sentiments on
these prospects, I would like to state very clearly my personal view:
the furthering of sharing practices and the gift economy and mutual
aid is just as important as - if not more important than - the
prospect of postscarcity. Even if postscarcity becomes a reality, we
are still going to have to help and support each other on many and
various levels - and my understanding is that at least some of us
desire that this happens outside a monetary or exchange context.
So I would go as far as to even suggest that sharing and the gift
economy should perhaps be emphasised _before_ postscarcity - i.e. that
this be our priority rather than postscarcity. It's not a question
that we need to get hung up about - they are both important and both
need to be nurtured - but there may be instances in which we need to
prioritise one over the other. As far as sharing practices are
concerned, there are some interesting developments in this sphere -
e.g. neighborgoods.net. These are only baby steps, however, and - in
summary - _nowhere near_ enough is being done in this regard.
So, I would love to be involved in a movement which realises the
importance of these separate threads. My enthusiasm wanes for
supporting them in isolation; but to have them evolve in such a way
that they support and complement each other? Now _that_ would be
promising, and _that_ would be sustainable. If such a movement doesn't
exist already (and as far as I can discern it doesn't), I would be
willing to stick my neck out and ask: might there be sufficient
interest to seriously consider this prospect?
The Zeitgeist movement is certainly interesting but I don't think it
is what I have in mind - essentially for the reasons that Paul
Fernhout so eloquently outlined in a separate discussion:
https://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a68e1e2d31ccb33e?hl=en
. (In brief, our reservations arise in response to the idea that moral
issues can be resolved by the scientific method, or - more generally -
the trend towards "scientism".)
Finally, regarding the transhumanist movement ...
My primary concern about the h+ movement - although I admire and
support and agree with a number of their values and aspirations - is
the almost galling self-absorption of some of these people. The
prepared statement in the Transhumanist FAQ regarding the availability
of these new technologies to the "poor", for example, is - IMO - far
from impressive: http://humanityplus.org/learn/transhumanist-faq/#answer_31
. Aside from being quite conservative in some respects (ironically),
the authors' attempt to allay some very valid moral concerns is little
more than perfunctory.
Furthermore, we need to bear in mind that many of the ideas of the
movement are largely speculation at this point - and some of the
technologies they talk about are far from proven. Beyond these
reservations, however, how could anyone not be interested in these
ideas?
Maybe it's not viable that these ideas can be merged in such a manner,
and I'm certainly conscious that perhaps only a relatively small
number of the people who support these separate developments would
support all four wholeheartedly. I believe it is worth exploring
however.
P.S. I don't think the term "gift economy" is entirely appropriate,
and that's something I think we would need to address - but I trust
that most readers will at least understand my meaning.
Paul D. Fernhout
David-
Thanks for mentioning my comments on the limits of the Venus project and
the limits cybernetic planning given values are essential to whatever we
do and values are, in some sense, assumptions or living things, like
Albert Einstein suggests here:
"Religion and Science"
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
I wrote another essay about a year ago on the limits of the conventional
version of transhumanism and also how it is missing low-hanging fruit on
making the world a much better place before any singularity, and that we
should work towards making the world better first because our path out
of any singularity may have a lot to do with our path into a singularity:
"My hypothetical H+ Summit presentation :-)"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/9bcce2dc0c062d28
I agree with the broad issue you raise about different movements being
related, and I tried to connect them in this recent presentation I put
together about a month ago:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and
Theft"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics
and technological change. It discusses five interwove economies
(subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance
will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests
that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence,
and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange
economy that is having problems."
A pdf version of that presentation that is quicker to read is here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
Of course, understanding the chemical structure of amber does not help
*this* ant very much who is stuck in the stuff as much as the next
person. I'm ironically busy looking for some sort of income through the
exchange economy, sadly probably helping yet another company create yet
more "artificial scarcity". (Job offers welcome doing other stuff.)
Ultimately, we need to move out of this trap together. We may see a
sudden phase change though as, eventually, enough people look around and
see others with similar ideas; related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing
I did suggest recently to Richard Stallman of the FSF that there could
be a FSF campaign about free software for studying economics (which I
conveniently suggested I could organize for pay. :-) It could build on
this appeal:
"Appeal of teachers and researchers: Renewing the research and
teaching in finance, economics and management to better serve the common
good"
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
But, I don't know ultimately what he will say.
We need lots of change, but one of the "technically" easiest, in the
USA, IMHO would just be the US President or US Congress just declaring
that anyone at any age could sign up for Social Security payments and
Medicare. That would take about two minutes to do at a news conference
and would totally transform US society for the better as the
implications slowly sunk in. The USA already spends about US$700 per
month per person on social security and disability, unemployment
insurance, and schooling, and the USA already spends more per person by
the government than other countries need to cover everyone with health
care, so the money is close to being there, anyway -- although there
would need to be some new funding sources. The people at Livable4All
just put up one of my related essays that talks about ways to find money
for that, and added some pictures:
"Basic Income from a Millionaire's Perspective?"
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
I also have other funding suggestions here:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
That sort of basic income in turn would let people contribute more to
the gift economy, including both by creating open manufacturing devices
to help with subsistence and having more time for civic participation in
our democratic resource-based planning (while reducing the incentive to
theft from a growing rich/poor divide).
But, as you point out, it could go other ways, like a better gift
economy and better 3D printing will give people more time to do more
civic stuff to get a basic income passed as well as give people more
options for living outside the exchange economy. Or as individuals
become individually and collectively smarter (and healthier) through
transhumanism-like ideas, then individuals can do more in their spare
time to make the world work for everyone physically and politically.
I think we are going to see progress on all fronts, because, as you and
I both point out, these things are interwoven.
My prediction is that it is likely that US unemployment will grow to at
least an official 20% or so by the end of the decade, with demand for
more junk staying limited as industrial productivity continues to rise
from robotics and automation, better design, and voluntary social
networks. About 33% per decade productivity growth has been typical in
the USA, but I predict it may be even higher this decade as robotics and
AI and better design and stuff like GNU/Linux really begins to kick in.
That social crisis is going to drive some of these changes.
I'm just hoping that crisis does not get out of control too fast. The
USA has so already turned so much of its abundance into stockpiled WMDs
(nukes, plagues, killer robots, now software worms like Stuxnet) for
ideological reasons over the years. So, the country is at risk of doing
nasty things globally even just by accident if the US scarcity narrative
holding the country together loses its hold; some people might try to
ensure scarcity remains true by whatever artificial means they can find.
Her is an essay on moving past that ideologically:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
What might be really useful right now is a grant from the gift economy
to spend six months turning all this stuff I've already written into a
coherent, readable, popular CC-BY-SA book. :-) But at least I've put out
a lot of stuff under free licenses so others can build on it, like
Liveable4All did.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
david_c
On Jul 24, 5:31 pm, "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernh...@kurtz-fernhout.com>
wrote:
> USA, IMHO would just be the US President or US Congress just declaring
> that anyone at any age could sign up for Social Security payments and
> Medicare. That would take about two minutes to do at a news conference
> and would totally transform US society for the better as the
> implications slowly sunk in. The USA already spends about US$700 per
> month per person on social security and disability, unemployment
> insurance, and schooling, and the USA already spends more per person by
> the government than other countries need to cover everyone with health
> care, so the money is close to being there, anyway -- although there
> would need to be some new funding sources. The people at Livable4All
> just put up one of my related essays that talks about ways to find money
> for that, and added some pictures:
> "Basic Income from a Millionaire's Perspective?"
> http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
>
> I also have other funding suggestions here:
> http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
> http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
>
> That sort of basic income in turn would let people contribute more to
> the gift economy, including both by creating open manufacturing devices
> to help with subsistence and having more time for civic participation in
> our democratic resource-based planning (while reducing the incentive to
> theft from a growing rich/poor divide).
somewhat blithely dismissed the prospect of a basic income when you
raised the idea. And I have wondered, in retrospect, whether I should
perhaps apologise for this. On further consideration, maybe a basic
income will prove to be an indispensable boon in the times ahead.
Ultimately, I have no idea. All I know is that I, personally, have
very little stomach for petitioning the powers that be for such
changes. And my sense is that, in the _long run_, we really shouldn't
rely on such contingencies.
In the _meantime_, my mind isn't closed to the idea - I just don't
want to spend much time on it (and I also wonder if - metaphorically
speaking - it is akin to "taking our eye off the ball"?).
Paul D. Fernhout
> On Jul 24, 5:31 pm, "Paul D. Fernhout" wrote:
>> We need lots of change, but one of the "technically" easiest, in the
>> USA, IMHO would just be the US President or US Congress just declaring
>> that anyone at any age could sign up for Social Security payments and
>> Medicare. That would take about two minutes to do at a news conference
>> and would totally transform US society for the better as the
>> implications slowly sunk in. The USA already spends about US$700 per
>> month per person on social security and disability, unemployment
>> insurance, and schooling, and the USA already spends more per person by
>> the government than other countries need to cover everyone with health
>> care, so the money is close to being there, anyway -- although there
>> would need to be some new funding sources.
>
> somewhat blithely dismissed the prospect of a basic income when you
> raised the idea. And I have wondered, in retrospect, whether I should
> perhaps apologise for this. On further consideration, maybe a basic
> income will prove to be an indispensable boon in the times ahead.
> Ultimately, I have no idea. All I know is that I, personally, have
> very little stomach for petitioning the powers that be for such
> changes. And my sense is that, in the _long run_, we really shouldn't
> rely on such contingencies.
David-
No apologies necessary. I agree that the appeal to things like local
open-manufacturing subsistence production or a gift economy is in part
that you can just do it, without getting some government to go along
(other than just not stopping you from making useful stuff or giving it
away).
A basic income may not happen anytime soon, and you are right to shy
away from spinning wheels going nowhere, but I think it is closer to a
real possibility than most people think. It is not just a pipe dream
when I can point to a big chunk of the US population that has a basic
income already (see below).
> In the _meantime_, my mind isn't closed to the idea - I just don't
> want to spend much time on it (and I also wonder if - metaphorically
> speaking - it is akin to "taking our eye off the ball"?).
I think the key point often overlooked on a basic income is that, in the
USA, all people over some age (65 or whatever with adjustments) get a
basic income, on the order of US$1200 or so a month per person. And they
get health care, worth probably, guessing, another US$1200 a month or
more if it was an insurance premium; that is just as a wild guess for
what such a premium would cast, considering how much medical services
older people use in the USA, much spent sadly for useless but expensive
stuff:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-triumph-of-new-age-medicine/8554/
which I reference here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2346102&cid=36866796
It is often said that US Social Security is like a retirement plan
people paid into, but the reality is that US "social security" was
always funded as a general tax, with about 10 or so people paying into
it for each recipient originally, down to about 3 people paying into it
now, and just 2 people paying into it projected in the near future.
Also, on average, in the USA, states spend a similar amount per month
per child for "schooling" (which overall shows poor results and
generally harms kids more than helps). The state I am in spends almost
double that average, so obviously some spend less, too.
So, the USA is already spending a low-end basic income's worth of funds
for something like a third to a half of its population (the very young,
and the very old) -- it starts to get fuzzy how many people are covered
if you think about college subsidies and unemployment insurance and what
a government pension means and so on.
So, it's not as much of a stretch to think about a basic income covering
everyone, or for the money for schooling to be redirected given with a
basic income there might not be such a horror of people not being
"employable" in conventional robotic-obedience terms that schools
emphasize in their "lessons".
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
In fact, it would be far fairer to cover everyone in the same way than
to single out the old or young, which is age discrimination. Why should
parents with young kids get left out, when they have the toughest jobs
at the toughest time in their lives, often having to care both for
children and elderly relatives? And clearly there is a lot of human time
wasted and privacy invaded and needy people falling through the cracks
with all these government programs that act as charities in the USA
emphasizing checking people's income to see if they are eligible for
this or that one month and then maybe not the next.
I joked that a basic income is my platform for president just now, in a
reply to a slashdot article on "Internet-Based Political Party Opens
Doors": :-)
"My platform: Social Security and Medicare for all"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2345966&cid=36866862
I don't know what the analogous figures are for the UK for the young and
old, but if you worked them out, I'd be curious what they were per
person and as a percent of the population covered by that already. Maybe
that could be a UK campaign for somebody, someday? Look at what J.K.
Rowling accomplished on a (sort of) basic income that gave her time to
write as well as be a better mother. :-)
Ultimately though, the argument is one about civil rights. There is a
huge individual cost, as in England with the enclosure acts long ago, of
pushing people off the land as it got privatized and then given to
powerful interests, and the same happened in the USA with the natives.
Not being able to go out and hunt and gather on common land then forces
people into the exchange economy, usually at a huge disadvantage
relative to concentrated wealth and information and relevant skills in
business. From that point of view, it is only fair that every citizen by
right of citizenship should get the kind of decent minimum life
(relatively speaking, adjusted for today's collective technological
heritage) that they could have had if they could still hunt and gather
across all the land.
Ultimately, all the property in a country is in some sense held in trust
by the government and doled out based on some sort of social consensus
about how the society should be structured:
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"Property and money are as mythological as Zeus. The first thing they
teach you in law school � and I mean the first thing � is that
�property� is a collection of legal rights. They are mental
abstractions. They were created in more or less their present form in
the middle ages by common law judges. They include things like
�alienability� or the right to sell your rights, �inheritability� or the
right to pass your rights to your heirs. They include the right to
exclude other people from a defined section of planet earth. They
include the right to subdivide or alienate less than all of your rights.
For example, a person who holds �title� to a house, can �lease� it �
that is he can convey the right to �possess� the land for a defined
period of time, while he retains his rights that last �forever�. He only
has that right, because the law gives it to him. Under our system of
laws, the ultimate owner of all �property� is the sovereign � the
government. That is who originally granted your �rights�. Our system of
laws and government defines your rights, and creates an entire
infrastructure to regulate them. There are courts that will �enforce�
your rights � that is send out the local muscle man known as the
�sheriff� to chuck �squatters� off your property. Every state in the
union has a system of publicly recording the documents that establish
your �title� in order to put the world on notice of exactly �owns� what.
So, how are these �property rights� created? That�s easy. They are
created the same way all mythological realities are created � with a
little mumbo-jumbo. ..."
Still, with all that said, I think you are right to be worried that
focusing on promoting a basic income leaves you dependent on some
government, when you could be busy in the gift economy or the
subsistence economy where the government does not have to usually be
persuaded to act (although the government can always poke its nose in if
it wants, like saying you can't raise chickens in the city or can't give
away or use certain plants and so on).
Different people tend to focus on different things in their activism, or
whatever one wants to call it, civic or individual participation. The
more political types around could focus on a basic income, while the
more hands on types might focus on subsistence, and the more social
types on a gift economy, and these trends can work together, like you
said in your original point, or I said here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
So, it's quite fair in that sense to say you have no interest in working
on a basic income yourself, but it still might be a good idea for those
so inclined (but acknowledging a basic income is a longer term thing and
working on it does take away from working on other stuff like open
manufacturing right now).
I think that is another cause of friction on lists like this or open
manufacturing. People can have different interests that connect to
different time perspectives:
"RSA Animate - The Secret Powers of Time"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
I mentioned a short-term book idea previously, but what I think we
really need more is a long term project with a lot of people working
together online in various sized workgroups, using tools for structured
arguments and multiple perspectives to make sense of all this, and then
make better and better plans for related activities. Such as I talk
about here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
Joseph Jackson had started this list with the notion of a "journal" and
I can see the point to something like that, as much as for many other
journals. Still, I think tools and free content used together by groups
(using tools much better than email, more like a semantic desktop) is
going to be much more useful these days than just one more journal
publishing stuff mostly written by individuals, which is what the
journal model kind of implies.
Of course, if by "journal" one means, a Doug Engelbart-like "Networked
Improvement Community", then that's a different story. :-)
http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html
http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/nics.html
"In Doug Engelbart's terms, an improvement community is any group
involved in a collective pursuit to improve a given capability. Examples
include a professional association, community of practice or consortium,
a corporate initiative to innovate management practices, a local task
force to improve our schools, or a medical research community seeking to
cure a specific disease. An improvement community that puts special
attention on how it can be dramatically more effective at solving
important problems, boosting its collective IQ by employing better and
better tools and practices in innovative ways, is a networked
improvement community (NIC). "
And then the issue is, getting back to your original point, how do you
get people with these various different interests productively working
together using some common tools and standards to some common ends?
david_c
I have been having a polite debate with a supporter of the Zeitgeist
Movement over on forum.justfortheloveofit.org (I used the same quote
from Einstein as you did Paul). If you or other readers want to chime
in, the forum is open to anyone.
Link: http://forum.justfortheloveofit.org/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=11430&st=0&sk=t&sd=a#p18775
.