YouTube - Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft
Paul D. Fernhout
between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and
technological change:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
A PDF file of the presentation is here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
Any post-scarcity society, whether on Earth, Mars, the Asteroids, or
elsewhere would need to wrestle with those sorts of issues. Hopefully
this "Five Interwoven Economies" explanatory framework might be helpful
in thinking through that.
It might even help Google in thinking through the next ten years of
their business strategy. :-)
=== On cheap energy?
I still don't know whether the Rossi/Focardi cold fusion energy
catalyzer is a scam, a confusion, or the real thing.
But there is going to be a big press conference about it later this day
(it's early AM right now my time):
http://pesn.com/2011/06/17/9501849_Defkalion_Announces_Energy_Catalyzer_Press_Conference/
"By now, most people following exotic energy breakthroughs have read
about Andrea Rossi's E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer) cold fusion technology. It
utilizes nickel powder, hydrogen gas, an undisclosed catalyst, heat, and
pressure to produce large amounts of energy. The technology is capable
of producing over 4 kilowatts of thermal power from a reactor vessel
only fifty cubic centimeters in volume (about he size of your fist).
Cold fusion research has been ongoing for two decades, and there have
been thousands of successful experiments. However, Andrea Rossi's
technology is the most promising cold fusion technology yet to emerge.
Andrea Rossi's company Leonardo Corporation has licensed the
technology to the Greek company Defkalion Green Technologies Inc., with
sole purpose to sell, license, and manufacture industrialized
commercially applicable products using the Andrea Rossi Energy Catalyzer
with global exclusivity rights; except the Americas. Defkalion has
recently sent out invitations to certain individuals to attend a press
conference about the technology on June 23, 2011. The invitation is self
explanatory, and is posted below. (Edited to clarify the translated text.)"
If that technology really works, it would probably help humanity move
into space habitats much sooner than without it.
Not to mention it might drive nickel prices into the sky for a time,
too. Until cheaper energy makes everything else cheap.
A related essay I wrote and sent to the inventor:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will
change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the
balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had
(subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled
so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think
about the socioeconomic implications of their invention in causing a
permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will
probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward
greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks
about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the
old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may
be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world
that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where
money does not matter very much anymore. "
Of course, one might say the same about cheap computing and Google. :-)
=== Looking for a job...
We've spent all the resources we've had to make free software and free
content (and homeschool our kid) related to an abundance view of the
world. So now I'm currently looking for full-time employment, ideally
doing stuff related to FOSS, open manufacturing, robotics, public
intelligence, educational simulations, better communications tools,
and/or alternative economics, if anyone knows of any such positions or
even just related funding sources.
Some more about me:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/06/whos-who-in-public-intelligence-paul-fernhout/
I even sent a resume to Google to help support their third-party users
of their APIs (you do what you have to do to feed your family in the
end), but I've posted so many wacky things here like the above that I
can doubt I'm hire-able there. :-)
But at least you get to spend one day a week there working on what you
want vaguely related to Google-ish stuff. Maybe I could keep working on
stuff like this, a collaborative concept mapping tool in JavaScript and
using CouchDB I recently put together as an experiment while working
towards a new version of my wife's Rakontu system; there is an example
there of a scarcity view (William Catton) contrasted with an abundance
view (Julian Simon):
http://pdfernhout.couchone.com/twirlip/_design/twirlip/conceptMap.html?diagram=CattonVsSimon
But in general, I'm probably better at desktop and Android Java
development right now than JavaScript.
Still, maybe my most recent Android app will suddenly sell a hundred
thousand copies and I can go back to more free software and more free
content related to creating a post-scarcity society. :-)
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz
"Have fun breeding new musical phrases with EvoJazz, the Evolutionary
Jazz toy. EvoJazz is a musical toy that amplifies your own natural
musical creativity. It uses a new Evolutionary Jazz paradigm of
generating new musical phrases as variations from existing musical
phrases rather than writing new phrases note-by-note. The application
includes a puzzle option that might improve your music sight-reading
skill. Mark items you like as favorites and later export them to MIDI
files to use as ring tones or in other music software."
But, unlike when I released an Android App when there were only 20,000
other apps, now that there are 200,000 apps out there, half of them
free, and many quite good, paid apps don't get much interest by default
(unless maybe you advertise a lot or something).
I made a promise with that software to put each version under the GPL
three years after release (not that probably many people care about that
but myself). See:
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
And in three years, everyone will be discarding their current Android
SmartPhones for the next generation, and so all the old phones could go
to the materially poor world for free to help them join the global
conversation, as I suggested here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html
"Imagine, Google and Verizon could even make a promise now to customers
-- buy your Droid through Verizon, and in two years, if you continue
your cell phone plan, we will give you the latest Droid version and if
you return the old one to a Verizon store, we'll send it to materially
poor kids loaded with educational software that teaches them how to
read, write, and do math. And with bluetooth, and WiFi, the Droid could
even have some software that works along the lines that Sugar aspired
to do, with kids collaborating together. What a deal -- and it might
greatly boost current sales. :-)"
So, Android may really help the materially poor world a lot, real soon
now. And possibly in a much bigger way than the OLPC project ever could,
and essentially "for free". Our world might really become like in "The
Skills of Xanadu".
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&dq=skills+of+xanadu&hl=en&ei=Z8fXTarjNuTv0gGRk7n8Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=skills%20of%20xanadu&f=false
I've been thinking it would be nice to write an education simulation
about the five economies for Android as a game. Maybe if you play it
well, you get to build a civilization that gets off the Earth and gets
to the Moon, Mars, the Asteroids, and so on. Of course, it probably
wouldn't sell either. :-) I guess I have to figure out how to use
in-game advertising and go with the flow. :-)
--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.