The state of survival in advanced civilizations today is a joke. Isn’t it interesting that with ever increasing technology, and productivity yields beyond the imagination of people 100 years ago – that we still have to work harder and harder to make a living? Something has gone incredibly wrong. The average industrialite works longer and longer, while reaping benefits of decreased quality of life, and eroding freedoms on top of that. Hello, what happened here? This is not to mention increasing poverty and deprivation elsewhere.
Gandhi said that there’s enough room for everybody, but not enough if there is even one greedy person.
Survival should be trivial today. Food, shelter, energy, housing, and technology should be available to anybody for the asking. This is possible if the economy is decentralized, not power-concentrated. It’s time for colonialism in all its forms to disappear.
The greatest tool that the world has developed to date to address this issue is the open source method of development. If applied to the development of physical products – starting with basics such as high quality and affordable food, housing, energy, and other technologies – then we have a possibility of transformation.
Developing such an economy has political consequences. Change the underlying economic paradigm – and a change in politics follows. This requires smart, empowered people – not wage slaves and bureaucrats.
Survival should be trivial. For only then do we have the option to pursue higher goals – beyond today’s base levels of Maslow’s pyramid. We can all evolve to freedom.
-Joseph Dolittle
I’ve written a book discussing how the open source method of production (peer production) can be extended to the production of physical goods: “From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World” (infos download: http://www.peerconomy.org/ ). You might want to take a look (it’s freely availably under a Creative Commons license).
Thanks for the great theory book, it’s really hot off the press.
I am interested in further collaboration with your Berlin team, and would like to visit the next time I’m in town.
We have a peer production effort up at http://openfarmtech.org/. We are working on recruiting a development team for the site. Right now, the technological progress is in the definition stage, and will enter the rapid resource development stage hopefully in the next 2 weeks.
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