Cross-posted at Sentient Developments

There is a long list of crises that we need to face and I won’t waste time boring you by listing them. As our brightest minds admit they were wrong, I hope that I can say, without qualification, that big changes in our thinking are required. Unfortunately, we haven’t made that “Change” even though we now have some new faces in power, and a bunch of old faces out of business or in prison.

There is still an unquestioned belief in the need for major public transportation projects, global supply chains, large scale social programs, and economies of scale. These have become so integral to our way of life, that they are hardly ever questioned. Granted, Wal-Mart is often used as a public target for venting our frustrations at these things, but virtually all business nowadays is conducted using global supply chains, economies of scale, and so forth.

Thus, our political discourse usually revolves around ways to prop up these very systems, since these are the only ones we know. We believe we require trillions in “infrastructure” funding. We believe that we must “create jobs.” We believe we must become “competitive” in the international marketplace. All of these assumptions are echoed in academia, merely using fancy jargon as a substitute for insight.

Let me first say that I accept the logic of comparative advantage and economies of scale as it applies to the capitalist mode of production, and it can truly be the most “efficient” allocation of resources in a quantitative sense, though not always. Yet, as Peter Drucker once said, there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. I do not accept that the inevitable centralization of power from this sort of production is a good thing. Centralized powers are able to create artificial scarcities, in order to inflate profits at the expense of everyone else. This invariably requires things like corporatism, regulatory capture, secrecy, and rent seeking.

None of these things are very amenable to true progress, which requires openness, peer review, constructive criticism, and creativity. The types of innovations that occur under these centralized systems, even if they take on a bourgeois bohemian quality and aren’t bland and soul-crushing, are incredibly stifling of progress. Open standards are shucked in favor of closed proprietary ones whenever a corporation can get away with it. Parts are never interchangeable. The production processes are so far removed from our daily lives that we have no idea about the processes involved in the creation of the product, and indeed breaking open the gizmo more likely than not voids the warranty…. though I’m not sure you’d even want to open it up considering the high density of toxic crap trapped inside.

All of this has had corrosive effects on our culture, as well as our environment. Our hyper-consumerist culture encourages us to get the latest and greatest stuff. We follow a sequence of fads specialized to our exact niche market (hipster, redneck, emo, rock, punk, goth, anime, whatever). We indulge in enormous quantities of unsustainable, non-renewable, and disposable products. Even more discouragingly, many companies use engineered obsolescence to artificially increase output at the expense of the environment.

We are now lamenting the fact that none of us have a clue about what it actually takes to produce tangible, concrete things which improve our lives. We are too busy answering phones, producing ad campaigns, and writing paperwork. Thus, instead of becoming active participants in the production of our culture and economy, or even informed consumers, we have become totally and completely dependent upon forces far beyond our control. As the market swings out of control, so do our jobs, our homes, and our very lives.

Yet, a revolution has occurred right under our noses whose effects have yet to be fully explored, and most of us are completely unaware. Digital communications technologies, especially the Internet, have enabled new modes of production and organization, such as Open Source and P2P, which have never before been possible. If we can learn to harness the power of these systems, we can escape the path our current world is on where each labor-saving device seems only to cause us to work longer hours. Where social programs seem only to foster dependence. Instead of innovating in accordance with the logic of centralized power and artificial scarcity, we can innovate in accordance with human needs and wants.

We can collaboratively build all the necessary life support systems needed, but have it be on a self-contained and local scale. It cannot be known whether the shape this takes will favor truly scale invariant systems, like the hyper-local RepRap project which is allowing production right in your living room, or whether it ends up fostering a new urbanism where production takes place in vertical farms, factories, and community hackerspaces. Talk about vertical integration! It also cannot be known how it will reshape our communities, since each community would be redesigned in a participatory fashion by the members of the community itself. Some may opt for small scale pedestrian-friendly towns in harmony with nature, while others may opt for sustainable urban metropolises, and others may ditch both for self-sufficient mobile homes and yachts.

In each of these cases, the means of production will likely have been placed in the hands of individuals, and drudgery will be automated away much like how open source software projects collaboratively eliminate bugs and expose flaws in wiki articles. Considering all of this, it may be useful to begin talking again about incentivizing local production. “Import substitution,” has long been a naughty word among economists. It is the process of breaking free of foreign dependence by incentivizing local production. Usually via tariffs and other measures. However, this would be a misguided way of going about this.

We don’t need to incentivize local production of just any type. We need to incentivize open and collaborative production. For example, creating prizes for contributing to the Commons. In 2007 there was a proposed bill called the Medical Innovation Prize Act which sought to incentivize patent-less medical inventions. If only it was this sort of mentality that guided us for the past few decades, then we wouldn’t have ever had such a monstrosity of a healthcare system. The same mentality could guide any industry. A useful exercise would be to think how it could guide the industry you are currently involved in. Finally, the creation of new local credit systems could also incentivize collaborative local production. There are lots of new concepts along these lines.

I also suggest you check out some of my previous work on decentralization. It is this sort of thinking which is required for a peaceful transition to a new era for our civilization. It will allow us to become resilient to the converging threats which face us from ecological destruction to market failure to terrorism. Global supply chains have shown themselves to be exceedingly vulnerable to these shocks. I hope we can overcome these by localizing production by utilizing global knowledge sharing so we can all enjoy the type of future some of the previous guest bloggers have been talking about.

Filed under : Decentralization, Economics, Post-Scarcity

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Social Ecology is a philosophy which states that environmental, social, and economic problems all have the same root: namely, the way people treat each other. By this same logic, if we can establish new structures and norms by which to operate, we can alleviate many of these problems.

There are a few different ways to apply this in the real world. One way is to build communities which seek harmonious relationships between people and the environment. Based on similar thinking, thousands of “intentional communities” have sprung up. These include everything from eco-villages to religious communes to survivalist enclaves. There are even some more tech-based communities such as CyborgSociety.

Now, each of these communities believes that their mode of interacting with one another is the most sustainable and desirable, and perhaps there is room for all of these communities. Live and let live. Decentralized communities have a distinct advantage when it comes to resiliency. Much less information is needed to govern a small community than a large one, and having multiple models functioning simultaneously ensures all of our eggs aren’t in one basket. Nevertheless, it would be instructive to examine what a truly sustainable community would look like.

In the name of resiliency, clearly there must be some attention to self-sufficiency. Now, insular autarkies are notoriously unstable, but so are economies that are completely dependent upon foreign trade for basic necessities. The ideal situation is clearly somewhere in the middle between those extremes. What we need is largely self-sufficient communities which are at harmony with nature and engage in voluntary trade with neighbors.

This same way of living could be applied by individuals or families operating within the community, to further decentralize production. If individuals, including urbanites, were given the tools for automated growing of food and simple manufacturing, imagine the potential for automatic wealth generation. Not to mention the environmental benefits of local production.

RepRap is dedicated to building open source desktop fabrication machines which can make the majority of its own parts using local materials such as fermented organic matter. Their version 1.0, codenamed “Darwin,” is a working proof-of-concept, and version 2.0 is already in the works. As such machines become more mature and more efficient at self-replication, it could soon eliminate the necessity of wage labor for survival.

Using such techniques, communities are already forming. Factor e Farm is dedicated to building such communities for all sorts of productive purposes. They have already set up one self-sufficient community using alternative energy and processed rainwater, and they are interested in building many more decentralized communities with a high quality of life. On their website, they claim, “This quality of life is based on efficient operation, plus 100% voluntary lifestyle, based on transcendence of material constraints. When resource constraints become a non-issue through wise choice of technology, skill, and open source knowledge-enabled flexible production systems for self-sufficiency – then freedom and human creativity are unleashed.”

What is especially inspiring is the potential this has for eliminating poverty. As they say, give a man a fish and he can eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he can eat for the rest of his life. As the tools for local production continue to drop in price, we can likely enter into a post-scarcity world. As we speak, there is already more than enough food being produced to feed everyone on the planet. The problem is the logistics of distributing it to everyone. Capitalism as it is currently practiced distributes in an unequal fashion, and no matter how much philanthropy we do, it is not feasible to ship resources to remote regions. What we can do is provide the tools for people to produce locally.

We are just now witnessing the beginning of what is surely going to be a huge wave of self-sufficient communities, enabled by the new modes of production made possible by the Internet and communications technologies. The prospects for this are enormous for everyone, but especially those in poorest and most dependent places on Earth.

Filed under : Decentralization, Post-Scarcity, Sustainability

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A majority of unskilled jobs are completely unnecessary even with current technology. We are already very much a Robotic Nation; ATM Machines, industrial robots, automated checkouts, e-commerce, computerized help desks, and vending machines have replaced millions of workers. The burden of most unskilled labor can and will be shifted to machines, and the same is true for even a great deal of skilled labor. Yet, currently, it is as if human beings are taking on the role of machines, grinding away day-in and day-out in dead end jobs, all the while, the middle class is shrinking and unemployment is growing. If something isn’t done, there will be some major class warfare.

Leisure is a good thing! Even for our economies it is a good thing. If it wasn’t for the norms and government regulations in our society that produce more leisure time such as weekends, holidays, child labor laws, minimum wage, overtime laws, and so forth, there wouldn’t be nearly as much demand to fuel the enormous industries surrounding music, art, sports, movies, entertainment, etc.

Unfortunately, we have been infected by the Protestant Ethic meme which sanctifies work. This sort of mentality is prevalent among most of society, from CEOs to workers’ unions. Unions fight for the “right to work” and are deeply fearful of their jobs becoming automated. Ironically, many of the policies they push for make human labor more expensive, which gives further incentive for automation. I argue that workers should rejoice at the possibilities created by human labor becoming obsolete. We should speed up the process. Screw the right to work, we need the Right to be Lazy!

Employment is only valuable if it is performing a necessary service. If we can get our basic needs taken care of sufficiently, unemployment could be a perfectly reasonable option. There are plenty of worse things in the world than doing nothing. Being a marketing executive or politician, for example.I would argue, though, that under conditions of abundance, we should seek to find joy in ways that benefit others as well. Volunteering one’s time to nonprofit charitable endeavors would certainly be one example. Creating art, music, comedy, poetry, movies, video games, and so forth would also be valid ways of contributing to the world.

Thus, as automation progresses, we should gradually and continually strengthen laws regarding overtime, retirement, minimum wage, welfare, universal healthcare, importation from sweat-shop-ridden countries, and so forth, all in the name of making human labor more expensive, and compensating for the displacement caused by mechanization of labor. We should consider simultaneously giving positive incentives, such as tax breaks, for businesses that make strides toward automation, and fund research in that area.

I would go so far to say that once a sufficient amount of our production of basic necessities is automated, unemployment would be a good thing. We shouldn’t just have welfare, but a Guaranteed Minimum Income system. (even Hayek would agree)

Once liberated from needless toil, we will be free to spend more time enjoying the fruits of our material abundance by creating art, playing sports, and loving one another. Maybe our GDP won’t be growing quite as quickly at first, but some things are more important than the quantity of stuff we produced this financial quarter. Feel free to share your thoughts. Is the End of Work near? If so, what should be done about it?

Filed under : Economics, Post-Scarcity, Technology

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