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Hello, my name is Frankie. I work also with an organization called The
Zeitgeist Movement as you already know. And I'd like to welcome everybody right here
and from far and wide, everybody that has come, thank you very much.
I'd like to take this opportunity to especially thank the teams of The Zeitgeist Movement.
teams meeting, the linguistic team, the web team, the technology team, the activism team
and also of course the project team that coordinated this project right here.
The whole German chapter did a huge great job with establishing this event right here
within a month so I'd like to thank everybody personally
and good to see you here. I think Peter Joseph doesn't need any introduction,
I think everybody knows right here who he is
so short and precise, thank you and I hand the mic over to Peter.
And you can turn this mic off because I'm not going to use it.
Ah, so it's the other... hi! How's everybody doing?
I really appreciate you all being here and I want to thank Frankie and the Berlin
team for moving so fast, its really phenomenal having put on many events
myself over the years, it's not an easy task. And I'm always reminded when I travel these
days that the Zeitgeist movement is truly a global phenomenon at this stage. Right?
And no matter where any of us end up on the planet you don't have to go very far to find
friends who share similar values and this pursuit
of a better world. The title of this talk is "Economic Calculation
in a Natural Law / Resource-Based Economy". For the past fire years or so, the Zeitgeist
Movement has put out quite a bit of educational media
with respect to it's advocation and the learning curve has been rather intense
and their's been a tendency to generalize with respect to how things actually work technically.
This is the content of this presentation and in part one and two I'm going to refine
the inherent flaws of the current market model regarding why we need to change
along with relaying the vast prospects we now have to solve vast problems,
improve efficiency and generate a form of abundance that could meet meet all human needs.
The active term which has gained a good deal of popularity in the past couple of years
is called "post-scarcity" even though that word is a little bit misleading semantically
as I'll explain. And in part three I will work to show how
this new society generally works in its structure and basic calculation.
I think most people on the planet know that there is something very wrong
with the current socio-economic tradition, they just don't know how to think about the
solution, or more accurately, how to arrive at such
solutions. And until that is addressed, we're not going
to get very far. And on that note, in a number of months, a
rather substantial text is going to put into circulation,
available for free and also in print form or download format at cost. It's a nonprofit
expression. This will be finished hopefully by the first
of the year and this will be the definitive expression,
at least in the condensed form of the movement, something that's been long overdue.
It's called "The Zeitgeist Movement Defined" and it will serve as both an orientation and
a reference guide, and we'll have probably over a thousand footnotes
and sources. Once finished, an educational video series
will be put out in about 20 parts to reduce the material,
along with a workbook to help people who want to learn to talk about these ideas
because we basically need more people on a international level to be able to communicate
as I try to do. It's a very important thing and I think the
movement, basically the future of the movement I should say
rests, in part, on our capacity to create a well oiled international education machine
with consistent language coupled with real design projects and their interworkings.
[Part 1] So why are we even here?
Is this type of large scale change, what the movement advocates, really needed?
Can't we just work to fix and improve the current economic model, keeping the general
framework of money trade, profit, power, property, and the like?
The short answer is a definitive no, as I'm going to explain.
If there is any real interest to solve the growing public health and environmental crises
at hand this system needs to go.
Market capitalism, no matter how you wish to regulate it or not regulate it depending
on who you speak with, contains severe structural flaws which will
always to one degree or another perpetuate (a) environmental abuse and destabilization,
and (b) human disregards and caustic inequality. Put another way,
environmental and social imbalance and a basic lack of sustainability both environmentally
and culturally is inherent to the market economy and it always
has been. The difference between capitalism today and
say the 16th century is that our technological ability to rapidly
accelerate and amplify this market process has brought to the surface consequences which
simply couldn't be understood or even recognized during those early, primitive times.
In other words, the basic principles of market economics have always been intrinsically flawed.
It has taken just this long for the severity of those flaws to come to fruition.
So let me explain a little bit. From an environmental standpoint.
Market perception simply cannot view the earth as anything but an inventory for exploitation.
Why? Because the entire existence of the market economy
has to do with keeping money in circulation at a rate which can keep as many people employed
as possible. In other words, the world economy is powered
by constant consumption. If consumption levels drop, so does labor
demand. And so does the available purchasing power
of the general population and hence so does demand for goods as money
isn't there to buy them. This cyclical consumption is the life blood
of our economic existence and the very idea of being conservative or
truly efficient with the earth's finite resources in any way
is structurally counterproductive to this needed driving force of consuming.
And if you don't believe that, ask yourself why virtually every life system on this planet
is in decline. We have a ongoing lost of top soil, ever depleting
fresh water, atmospheric and climate destabilization, a loss of oxygen prodding plankton in the
ocean, which is critical to marine and atmospheric ecology,
the ongoing depletion of the fish population, the reduction of rain forests, and so forth.
In other words, an overall general loss of critical biodiversity is occurring and increasing.
And for those not familiar with the critical relevance of bio-diversity,
billions of years of evolution has created a vastly interdependent biosphere of planetary
systems and disturbing one system always has an effect
on many others. And this of course is no new observation,
in 2002 192 countries in association with the United Nations
got together around something called the Convention on Biological Diversity
and they made a public commitment to significantly reduce this loss by 2010.
And what changed eight years later? Nothing.
In their official 2010 publication they state: "None of the twenty one sub-targets accompanying
the overall target of significantly reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010
can be said definitively to have been achieved globally".
"Actions to promote...biodiversity receive a tiny fraction of funding compared to infrastructure
and industrial development". Hmm, I wonder why?
"Moreover, biodiversity considerations are often ignored when such developments are designed...
Most future scenarios project continuing high levels of extinctions and loss of habitats
though out this century". In a 2011 study published which was in part
a response to a overall general call to isolate and protect certain regions
to insure some security of this bio-diversity, found that, even with millions of square kilometers
of land and ocean currently under legal protection, if has done very little to slow the trend
of decline. They also made the following highly troubling
conclusion, "Combining this trend with the state of our
resource consumption, the access use of the earth's resources or
overshoot is possible because resources can be harvested
faster then they can be replaced. The cumulative overshoot from the mid 1980s
to 2002 resulted in an 'ecological debt' that would
require 2.5 planet earth's to pay. In a business as usual scenario, our demands
on the planet Earth could mount to the productivity of 27 planets by 2050".
And there's no shortage of other corroborating studies that confirm to one degree or another
[that] we are indeed greatly overshooting the annual production capacity of the earth,
couple with pollution and collateral destruction caused by industrial and consumer patterns.
Again, this kind-of research has been published for many decades now
and why is it that with all this mounting data
we can't seem to curb life support depletion and our overshooting consumption trends?
is it because there are too many people on the planet?
Is it because we're just utterly incompetent and have no conscious control over our actions?
No. The problem is that we have a global economic tradition still in place
rooted in 16th century pre-industrial handicraft oriented thought
that places the act of consuming, buying and selling as the core driver of all social unfolding.
The best analogy I cant think of is to consider the gas pedal on a car,
the more consumption of fuel, the faster it goes,
and buying things in our world is the fuel. If you slow down the consumption economic
growth slows, people lose jobs, purchasing power declines
and things become destabilized and so forth. So I hope it is clear that the system simply
does not reward or even support environmental sustainability in the form of
conservation. In fact, it doesn't even reward sustainability
in the form of any kind of earthly or physical efficiency
as I will talk more at length of in a moment. Instead it rewards servicing, turn over and
waste, the more problems and inefficiencies we have,
not to mention the more insecure materialistic needy the population becomes,
the better it is for industry, the better it is for GDP, the better is for employment
regardless of the fact that we may literally be killing ourselves in the process.
My friend John McMurtry, a philosopher in Canada
refers to this state as the "Cancer Stage of Capitalism,"
a system which is now destroying it's host, us and the earth,
almost unknowingly because very few today really understand
how unsustainable the core driving principles of the market really are.
The second structurally inherent consequence I want to mention
is the fact that market capitalism is indeed empirically socially destabilizing.
It creates unnecessary and inhumane inequality along with resulting unnecessary humane conflict.
In fact I would say capitalism's most natural state is conflict and imbalance.
And I would categorize two forms of the conflict in the world: national and class.
I'm not going to spend much time on the causes on national warfare as it should be fairly
obvious to most of us at his point. Sovereign nations which are in part protectionist
institutions for the most powerful forces of business
have often engaged in the most primal act of competition, systematic mass ***,
in order to preserve the economic integrity of their national economies and select business
interests which invariably comprise the political constituency
of any given country. All wars in history, while often conveniently
masked by various excuses, have predominately been about land, natural
resources, or geo-economic strategy on one level or another.
The state institution has always been driven by commercial and property interests,
existing as both a regulator of the basic day to day internal economic operations in
the form of legislation and as a tool for power consolidation, and
competitive advantage by the most dominant industries of the national
or even, in fact more importantly, global economy.
And of course there are many people in the world that still look at this causality in
reverse, in some economic views, state government is
deemed thee central problem, as opposed to the self interest and competitive
advantage seeking ethos inherent to market capitalism.
As the argument goes, if state power removed or reduced dramatically,
the market in society would be free of most of it's negative effects.
The problem with this argument is that it forgets that capitalism is just a variation
of a scarcity driven, specialization and property-based exchange system.
A system which actually goes back millennia in one form or another.
Early settlements naturally needed to protect themselves as resource and land acquisition
moved forward over time. Armies were created to protect resources from
invading forces and the like. At the same time people were working to engage
agriculture and handicraft and it revealed labor and exchange value in
a very primitive form. Hence property value, in the midst of this
scarcity, demanded regulation and laws. Not only to protect property, but to protect
commerce and also avoid scams and fraud in transactions.
This is the seed of the state! The market is a game and people can cheat,
you need regulation. This is the basic problem.
The market also allows, and hears the punchline, that regulation to be purchased by money.
Therefore there is no guaranteed integrity. The state and the market both battle each
other and compliment each other. You will always have regulatory power centers
in a market economy. The state and the market are inseparable,
they go hand and hand. Now, as an aside, people often challenge this
reality with moral or ethical arguments, which, I'm sorry to say, are entirely culturally
subjective. In a world where everything is for sale,
where the reward reinforcement, the operant condition, is directly tied to seeking personal
advantage and gain, who is to say where the lines should be drawn
in that process? This is why moral principles, without structural
reinforcement, are useless. In the end, the question isn't what is morally
right or morally wrong, the question is what works and what doesn't.
And sometimes is takes a great deal of time for the truth of such patterns to materialize.
For example, most people rightly so see abject human slavery historically as a morally wrong
condition, but lets dig deeper into the characteristics
and think more deeply. I think it much more productive to recognize
that slavery didn't work in the sense that it was culturally unsustainable.
Bigotry in all forms is not just ugly, it is culturally unsustainable because it generates
conflict. I'm not aware of any slave owning society
that did not undergo large slave rebellions, its unstable and again, therefore, unsustainable.
And Market capitalism is on the same path. There are more slaves in the world today,
operating within the bounds of the market economy then anytime in human history.
And I have little doubt that if we get through this rough period of time without destroying
ourselves by war, uprisings, or ecological collapse,
people in the future will look back at our world today with the same disgust
regarding our human rights violating economic systems,
as we today look back upon the period of abject human slavery.
[Class Warfare] This leads us well into the subject of class
warfare and socio-economic inequality. The long history of so called "socialist"
outcry has largely been about this constant and inhumane
imbalance on one level or another. A great deal of time has been spent by many
critics of capitalism, describing how it is indeed a system of exploitation,
which inherently separates a society into stratified economic layers
with a higher class given dominance over the lower structurally, it's structurally built
right in. And if you're one of those people that doesn't
agree with this reality, ask yourself why there has been one labor
strike after another in the past 300 years, why worker unions even exist,
why CEO's often tend to make hundreds of times more money than the common worker,
or why 46% of the world's wealth is now owned by 1%,
which are almost exclusively of what we could call the capitalist-ownership class.
Inequality and class separation is a direct mathematical result of the market's inherently
competitive orientation, which divides individuals in small groups
as they work to compete against each other for survival and security.
It is entirely individualistic oriented, driven by a core incentive system based around
isolated self-preservation, assuming the need to constantly reinforce
one's financially security since the market climate, the environment,
gives no certainty of well-being in and of itself.
[Fear and greed] The rich get richer because the model favors
them and the poor basically stay the same because this system works against them by
comparison. It is structurally classed.
Those with more money have more options and influence than those with less.
You are only as free, as they say, as you're purchasing power will allow you to be.
And the credit system is perfect example. Money is treated as nothing more than a product
in the credit system, in the banking system. Money is sold by banks via loans for profit
which comes in the form of interest. If you miss payments or violate your contract,
often the interest rate, does what? It goes up
because you are now consider a "higher risk" consumer.
If you fail to meet that interest or future payments, you might default on the loan.
Your punishment is the ruining of your credit rating or reputation in the financial circles,
and once that happens your financial flexibility is even more stifled as your economic access
is limited. People see this as just "the way things are"
but they don't realize how insidious this is.
This pounds the lower classes to stay low for reasons and forces of coercion that are
built into the structure that are beyond their control.
And I could give many other examples. Everything in this system works against you
if you're not affluent in this society and guess what, these financial policies were
created by self-interest oriented market logic, not some politician or some government.
And I wont even go into the fact that the interest charged for the sale of money today
doesn't even exist in the money supply itself which creates a kind of system based social
coercion, forcing the inevitability of credit default over time.
Along with acts of economic desperation such as selling property you'd rather would not
to meet your basic needs or taking labor positions, fo course, that
you do not appreciate. The market generates desperation as its methods
of coercion. And this leads into another very common "free-market"
confusion I often see in the very popular laissez-faire community.
They talk about free trade as trade that is entirely voluntary,
as though such a thing could ever exist in an empirical sense.
All decisions to trade come from influences and pressures.
Only perhaps the super rich, who literally have no need to worry about basic survival
due to their wealth could possibly be said to engage in the act
of voluntary free trade. For 99% of the world, we either trade or we
don't survive. And that pressure is empirically coercive.
And no, it doesn't have to be that way which is the whole point of this new social model.
So with all that aside, and with this understanding that wealth inequality
is inherent to capitalism itself, can't regulate it out,
he main issue I want to address here has to due with what class separation and social
inequality does to us in the context of public health.
It isn't just a simple issue of some having more than others, then others suffering the
mere material inconvenience or pressure to engage in labor or trade they'd
rather not have to. It goes way beyond that.
Socio-economic inequality is a poison, a form of destabilizing pollution
that affects people's psychological and physiological health in profound ways.
While also very often accumulating anger towards other groups and hence that generation of
social instability. The best term that I know of that embodies
this issue is "structural violence". If I put a gun to someone's head, say a 30
year old healthy male, and pulled the trigger and kill him,
assuming an average life expectancy of say 84,
you can argue that possibly 54 years of life was stolen from that person in a direct act
of violence. However, if a person is born into poverty
in the midst of an abundant society where it is statistically proven that it would
hurt no one to facilitate meeting the basic needs of that person,
and yet they die at the age of 30 due to heart disease
which has been found to statistically relate to those who endure this stress and effects
of low socio-economic status, is that death, the removal of those 54 years
once again, an act of violence? And the answer is yes, it is.
You see our legal system has conditioned us to think that violence is a direct behavioral
act, the truth is that violence is a process, not
an act and it can take many forms. You cannot separate any outcome from the system
by which it oriented. And again this is virtually absent from the
way people think about cause and effect in a socio-economic system.
The effects of market capitalism cannot be reduced or, I should say, cannot be deduced
logically from a local or reductionist examination.
It's like this are working like a clock. The market is a synergistic system, the economy
is a synergistic system, and the behavior of the whole,
meaning large scale social consequences such as the perpetuation of inequality or violence,
can only be assessed in relationship to that whole.
This is why there has been one big dichotomy between what market theorists think is supped
to happen in their world and what's actually happening.
For example, there is no doubt that poverty and social inequity is and has been causing
a vast spectrum of public health problems. Both in the context of absolute deprivation,
which means not having the money to simply meet up with basic needs such as nutrition,
and in the context of relative deprivation, which is a psychological phenomenon related
to the stress, the psycho-social stress of simply living
in a highly stratified society. One of the greatest predictors of reduced
public health is now to be found as social inequity, social inequality.
If you compare developed nations by the level of wealth inequality
you will find that those more equal nations have much better health then those with less
equality. This includes physical health, mental health,
drug abuse, educational levels, imprisonment, obesity,
social mobility, trust or social capital, community life, violence, teen pregnancies,
and child well being on average. These outcomes are significantly worse in
more unequal rich countries. And yet, again if you tried to reduce and
analyze a single person for any of these noted public health factors,
you could never know for sure if that person is actually a victim of the psycho-stress
or the absolute or relative violence condition itself.
The causality can only be understood on the large scales, probabilistically.
Which is the importance of statistical analysis. So, again, the market can only be perceived
as a whole to gage the truth of its effects. This is why our legal system, of course, is
so base and primitive. Now, that aside, I would like to detail a
few more examples of structural violence as it obviously takes many more forms.
When we see 1.5million children die each year from diarrheal diseases,
an utterly preventable problem that isn't resolved due to finical limitation across
the world we are seeing the *** of 1.5 [million]
children by a system that is so inefficient in its process
it cannot make the proper resources available in certain regions, even though they are there.
Drug addiction which has become a plague of modern society across the world,
not only causing death, but also a spectrum of suffering has been found to have roots
in stress. It has to do with a lack of support which
creates a psychological chain reaction that leads to fill your feelings of pain with
self medication. You will rarely find a study on addiction
patterns that does not see a direct correlation to unstable life conditions and stress.
And what is perhaps poverties most dominant psychological feature?
Feelings of insecurity and humility. Even the vast majority of behavioral violence
as we know it arises due to preconditions which have been
tied to poverty induced deprivation and abuse. Former head of the study of violence at Harvard,
Dr. James Gilligan, was a prison psychiatrist for many decades
analyzing the reasons for extreme acts of *** and the like.
In virtually all cases, high levels of deprivation, neglect, and abuse occurred in the life history
of the offenders. And guess what? Poverty is the single best
predictor of child abuse and neglect. In a United States study, children who lived
in families with an annual income less than $15,000
are 22 times more likely to be abused or neglected than children living in families with an annual
income of $30,000 or more. Aristotle said, "Poverty in the parent of
revolution and crime". Gandhi said, "Poverty in the worst form of
violence". And the interesting thing about all this is
is that we are all possible victims of its effects
or every time you hear about an act of theft, violence ***, or the like
chances are the origins of that behavior were born out of a preventable form of deprivation.
I say preventable because today there is absolutely no technical reason for any human being to
live in poverty and resource deprivation. Solving social inequality is not just a nice
thing to do, it is a true public health imperative. Just like making sure our water isn't polluted
so we don't get diseases. And each of us have no idea when we might
be subjected to say the violence bread by this deprivation.
It's a form of blow back if you will. Just like how some social theorists think
about the reasons for modern terrorism from abused countries,
a country like the United States bombs some town, the people in that town lose everything,
certain people are deeply affected and find no other emotional recourse but to act in
the most violent way that can in revenge. And the next thing you know a bomb explodes
at a coffee shop in your city killing your sibling.
In short, if you want to produce a violent criminal or gang mentality,
let them be raised in an environment where they are reinforced with the sense that society
doesn't care about them. And, hence, they have no need to care about
society. This is the trademark, this is the core characteristic
of the capitalist-social order. And as a final aside before I move on,
I find it incredibly interesting that the vast majority of the civil rights institutions
today or human rights institutions today which still demand more race, gender, creed,
and political equality tend to do very little to address the roots
of economic equality. It's a very interesting contradiction. I'm
firmly convinced that as times moves forward economic equality will morph into the same
role as gender and race equality. Where meeting human needs and facilitating
a high standard of living will be an issue of human rights,
not market expedience, sort of a social darwinism to which it is based.
[Part two: Post Scarcity] I would like to spend a moment clarifying
what an "Abundance Focused Society" actually means
and give some tangible statistical extrapolations to confirm this potential.
A Natural Law Resource Based Economy is not a utopia.
The Zeitgeist Movement seeks a high, relative sustainable abundance reliving the most relevant
forms of scarcity. Of course many who hear such distinctions
immediately dismiss such qualifications as mere opinion, right?
The fact is, it's not opinion when it comes to life support or empirical human needs.
Relative sustainable abundance means seeking more than enough to meet all human needs and
beyond while keeping ecological balance.
The most relevant forms of scarcity means we differentiate between scarcity as it relates
to human needs and scarcity as it relates to human wants,
as they are not the same. Unfortunately market logic pretends that they
are. The market cannot separate needs from wants.
And this gets to the root of the life blind value system disorder which continues to distort
our culture. The logic goes like this: if there exists
any form of scarcity of anything on any level, then we need money and the competitive market
to regulate it. Let me explain this a little bit more.
One of our international lecture team members, Matt Burkowitz, did a radio interview with
a very popular Austrian economist a little while back
and when the subject of scarcity came up this economists responded with "Not everyone can
have a fancy steak or a Farrari!" This was his definitive view of what scarcity
means. Now, that may be true.
not every human being can have a 500 room mansion with 3 jets parked in the front lawn,
with half the continent of Africa as his or her backyard.
You see, in theory, we could conjure up anything and use such luxury-based scarcity defenses
to support the existence of the competitive market.
So what are human needs? Are they subjective? Human needs have been created by the process
of our physical and psychological evolution and not meeting these virtually empirical
needs results, as noted before, in a statistically
predictable destabilizing spectrum of physical, mental, and social disorders.
Human wants, on the other hand, are cultural manifestations
which have undergone enormous subjective change over the course of time
revealing in truth something of an arbitrary nature.
Now this isn't to say neurotic attachments can't be made to wants so much so that they
start to take the role of needs, thats a phenomenon that occurs readily in
our materialistic society in fact and his is exactly why the previously noted
wealth imbalance issues, namely the psycho social stress response
resulting from social comparison is what is. It's a part of our evolutionary psychology
in many ways. But this is partly why more unequal societies
also are the more unhealthy societies, because we perpetuate it.
So the Zeitgeist Movement is not promoting an infinite universal abundance of all things
which is clearly impossible on a finite planet. Rather it promotes a post-scarcity or abundance
world view, with an active recognition of the natural
limits of consumption on the planet while seeking equilibrium.
And what separates the worlds today from the world of the past
is that our scientific and technological capacity has reached an accelerating point of efficiency
where creating a high-standard of living for all the world's people
based on current cultural preferences in fact, is now possible within these sustainable boundaries
without the destructive need to compete through the market mechanism.
This is made by what has been called "ephemeralization" a term coined by engineer, R. Buckminster
Fueler. And the recognition is very simple.
The amount of resources and energy needed to achieve any given task
has constantly decreased over time while the efficiency of that task has increased
paradoxically. An example is wireless satellite communication
which uses exponentially less materials then traditional large gage copper wire
and of course is more versatile and effective. In other words we are doing more with less
continually and this trend can be noticed in all areas
of industrial development from computer processing or Moore's Law
to the rapid acceleration of human knowledge or information technology.
And it isn't just physical goods, it also applies to processes or systems.
For example, the labor system via automation today shows the exact same pattern.
Industry has become more productive with less people,
ever increasing machine performance with ever decreasing and material needs over time per
operation. Now, as a brief tangent,
some might have noticed I keep saying this phrase "High Standard of Living."
What does that mean? Who is saying what a high standard of living should be?
The answer is not who, it is what. And what determines our standard of living
is the current state of technology in many ways
and what is required to keep, of course, social and environmental sustainability on a finite
planet. That's basically the equation.
If we as a society wish to keep the value of constant materialism, growth, and consumption
promoting the virtue of having infinite wants then we might as well just kill ourselves
right now as that going to be the end result if we continue
to push past the limits of the physical world with respect to our resource exploitation
and the loss of bio-diversity. So I want to make it very clear,
this new economic proposal isn't just about seeing how the market is obsolete per say
given our new powerful awarenesses of technical efficiency,
it is also about the fact that we need to get out of the market paradigm as fast as
we can before it causes even more damage.
Ok, post-scarcity. The four categories I want to cover in detail
regarding this are food, water, energy, and material goods.
And please note that for food, energy, and water this is actually a very conservative
assessment using statistics and measures based only on
existing methods that have been put into industrial use
not theoretical things that people talk about all the time.
And all I'm going to do is scale this out, applying a system's theory context.
[Food] According to the United nations, one out of
every eight people on earth, nearly one billion people,
suffer from chronic under nourishment. Yet, it is admitted that there is enough food
produced today by traditional market methods alone
to proved everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories per day
which is more then enough to maintain basic health for most.
Therefore, just in principle right now the existence of such a large scale number
of chronically hungry people reveals, at a minimum, that there is something
fundamentally wrong with the global industrial and economic process.
According to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, quote,
"It is estimated that 30-50% of all food produced never reached a human stomach
and this figure does not reflect the fact that large amounts of land, energy, fertilizers,
and water have also been lost in the production of foodstuffs
which simply end up as waste." And while there is certainly an imperative
to consider the relevance of these waste patterns, it appears that the most effective and practical
means to overcome this global deficiency entirely is to update the system of food production
itself with the most strategic localization in order to reduce the waste caused by inefficiencies
in the current global supply chain. And perhaps the most promising of these arrangements
is something called vertical farming which I assume many are familiar with.
Vertical farming has been put to test in a number of regions
with extremely promising results regarding efficiency and conservation.
This method of abundant food production will not only use less resources per unit output
causing less waste, have a reduced ecological footprint, increase
food quality and the like, it will also use less surface of the planet,
uses less land area than we're doing today. It can even be done offshore, it's that versatile.
Enabling types of food as well, that certain climates simply couldn't produce because it's
enclosed. A vertical farm system in Singapore for example
custom built a transparent enclosure, uses a closed loop automated hydraulic system to
rotate the crops and circles between sunlight and a organic nutrient treatment,
costing only about $3 a month in electricity for each enclosure.
This system also has reported to have 10 times more productivity per square foot then conventional
farming. Again, using much less water, labor, and fertilizer.
Students at Columbia University in the U.S. determined that in order to feed 50,000 people
a thirty story farm built on the size of a basic city block would be needed
which is about 6.4 acres. If we extrapolate this in the context of the
city of Los Angeles, California with a population of about 4 million, with
a total acreage of about 318,000 it would take roughly 78 structures to feed
all residents. This amounts to about 0.1% of the total land
area of Los Angeles, to feed the entire population. If we apply this extrapolation to the earth
and the human population of 7.2 billion, we end up needing about 144,000 vertical farms
to feed the whole world. This amounts to about 921,000 acres of land
to place these farms which, given about 38% of the Earth's land
is currently being used for traditional agriculture, we find that we only about 0.006% of the Earth's
existing agricultural land to met production requirements.
Of course lets be a little bit more consistent, within that 38% used statistic land for agriculture,
much of that land is also used for livestock cultivation, not just crop cultivation.
So, if we were to theoretically take only the crop production land currently being used,
which is about 4 billion acres, replacing land based cultivation by dropping
these 30 story vertical farms side by side in theory,
the food output would be enough to meet the traditional needs to feed 34.4 trillion people.
Given that we only need to feed about 9 billion by 2050,
we only need to harness about 0.02% of this theoretical capacity
Which, it could be argued makes rather mute any seemingly practical objections common
to the aforementioned extrapolation. In short, we have absolute global food abundance
potential. [Water]
According to the World Health Organization about 2.6 billion people,
half of the developing world lack proper sanitation and about 1.1 billion people have no access
to any type of clean drinking sources. Due to ongoing depletion by 2025
it is estimated that almost 2 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity
with 2/3rd's of the entire world population living in water stressed ares.
The cause? Obviously waste and pollution. But I'm not going to talk about that,
the details in causes and prevention, that's not the point of this
rather, lets take, again, a technological capacity approach only,
considering modern purification and modern desalination systems on the macro industrial
scale. [Purification]
The average person today globally uses about 1,385 cubic meters of water per year.
And this factors in all industrial activity as well, such as agriculture.
For the sake of argument, lets consider what it would take to purify all the fresh water
currently being used in the world on average annually.
Given the global average of 1,385 cubic meters in a population of 7.2 billion,
we arrive at a total annual use of about 10 trillion cubic meters.
Using a New York state U.S.A. UV disinfection plant at a base measure
which has an output capacity of roughly 3 billion cubic meters a year,
taking up about 3.7 acres of land, we would need 3,327 plants to purify all the
water used by the entire global population taking up about 12,000 acres of land.
Now or course, needless to say there are many other factors that come into play,
power needs, location, and the like. That's fair enought.
However, this is a minor inconvenience. Twelve thousand acres is nothing compared
to the 36 billion acres of land on the planet earth.
To give this a more practical example, United States military alone has about 845,000 military
bases and buildings I should say as well.
This has been reported to take up about 30 million acres of land globally.
Now only 0.04% of that land would be needed to disinfect the total fresh water use of
the entire world if that were even needed, which of course
it is not. [Desalination]
Now let's run the same theoretical extrapolation on desalination.
he most common method of desalination use today is called "reverse osmosis"
and according the the International Desalination Association
it accounts for 60% of the installed capacity globally.
Of course, there are a lot of other methods that are emerging quite rapidly with high
levels of efficiency [that] can move water much more quickly
but I'm not talk about that because I want to stay only within the common method applied
today. Keep in mind that everything I'm speaking
of, has dramatic improvements coming very soon.
There's an advanced reverse osmosis sea water desalinization plant in Australia
that can produce about 150 million cubic meters of fresh water a year
while occupying about 50 acres. Given the total annual water use of the world
today is about 10 trillion cubic meters again,
it would take about 60,000 plants to produce current global usage in total.
Using the dimensions of that plant, which is quite large,
such a feet would take about 18,000 miles of coast land,
or about 8.5% of the world's coast land. Now obviously that's not really ideal, that's
a lot of coast land, but this exercise is about proportion.
Clearly we do not need to desalinate all water used once agin,
nor would be bypass the use of purification processes
or ignore the vast reforms needed to preserve efficiency in fresh water
or, equally as important, the reuse schemes that are coming to fruition where buildings
are able to use water in multiple ways by recycling water that comes from the sink
into toilets and other mechanisms that unfortunately go
unused for the vast majority. So, lets do a slightly more practical real
life extrapolation combining only purification and desalination
with actual regional scarcity statistics. On the continent of Africa, roughly 345 million
people lack access to freshwater. If we apply the noted global average consumption
rate, again of 1,385 cubic meters a year, seeking to provide each of those 345 million
people that amount we would need about 480 billion cubic meters
produced annually. If we divided this number in half
and used purification systems for one section and desalination for the other,
the desalination process would need about 1.9% or 494 miles of coast line for desalination
facilities and only about 296 acres of land for purification
facilities which is a minuscule fraction of Africa's
total land mass of about 7 billion acres. So this is highly doable even in this crude
example. And obviously, in this case and all cases
we would strategically maximize purification processes
since it is clearly more efficient while using desalination for the remaining
demand. In short, it's absurd for anyone on this planet
to be going without fresh water. Not to mention as an aside, 70% of all fresh
water used today is used in agriculture in our grossly wasteful
agricultural methods. Seventy percent!
If we, for example, apply again vertical farms system
which have been noted to reduce water by upwards of 80% in comparison,
we would see an enormous freeing up of this unnecessarily scarce resource as well.
[Energy] We live in one massive perpetual motion machine
known as the Universe. The fact that we still use polluting fossil
fuels stores in the earth or the incredibly unstable nuclear phenomenon
which gives very little room for human fallibility is truly frightening.
There are four main, large capacity, "base-load," as they would say, renewable energy means
which are currently most ideal as per our current state of technological application.
These are geothermal plants, wind farms, solar fields, and water-based power.
Due to time, I'm not going to explain what these mediums are as I assume most know.
I'm just going to run through the abundance comparison.
[Geothermal] 2006 MIT report on geothermal found that 13,000
zetajoules of power are currently available in the earth,
with the possibility of 2000 zetajoules beings harvestable with improved technology.
The total energy consumption of all the countries on the planet
is only about half a (0.55) zettajoule a year, and this means literally thousands of years
of planetary power could be harnessed in this medium alone.
Geothermal energy also uses much less land than other energy sources.
Over 30 years, the period of time commonly used to compare
the life cycle impacts from diferent power sources,
it was found that a geothermal facility uses 404 meters squared of land per gigawatt hour,
while a coal facility uses 3632 meters squared per gigawatt hour.
If we were to do a basic comparison of geothermal to coal
given this ratio of meters squared to gigawatt hour,
we find that we could fit about 9 geothermal plants in the space of one coal plant.
And that isn't accounting for the vast amount of land that is currently used for coal extraction.
You know, those huge holes that we see in the earth.
And by the way, the beauty of geothermal and in fact all of the renewables I'm going to
speak of is that extraction or the harnessing location
is almost always the exact same place as processing for the power distribution as well.
All hydrocarbon sources on the other hand require both extraction and power production
facilities almost always in separate locations, sometimes
refineries as well in separate locations. In 2013 it was announced that a 1,000 megawatt
power station was to begin construction in Ethiopia.
We're going to use this as a base theoretical for extrapolation.
If a 1000 megawatt geothermal power station operated at full capacity
24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would produce 8.7 million megawatt hours
a year. The worlds current annual energy usage is
about 153 billion megawatt hours a year which would mean it would take an abstraction
of about 17,465 geothermal plants to match global use.
There are over 2,300 coal power plants in operation world wide today.
Using the aforementioned plant sized capacity comparison
of about 9 geothermal plants fitting into one coal plant,
the space of 1,940 coal plants would be needed in theory to contain the 17,000 geothermal
plants or 84% of the total in existence.
Also, given that coal accounts for only 41% of todays current energy production,
this theoretical extrapolation also shows how in 84% of the current space used by coal
plants geothermal could supply 100% of total global
power supply. [Wind farms]
It has been calculated that today with existing turbine technology, which is
improving rapidly, that Earth could produce hundreds of trillions
of watts power. Many more times than what the world consumes
overall. However, breaking this down using the 9.000
acre Alta Wind Center in California as a theoretical basis,
which has an active capacity on 1,320 MW of power,
a theoretical annual output of 11 million MW/h is possible.
This means 13,000 / 9,000 acre wind farms would be needed to meet total global demand
of 153 billion MW/h. This requires about 119 million acres of land
or 0.3%, of the Earth's surface to power the world in abstraction.
However as some may know off shore wind is typically much more powerful then land based.
According to the Assessment of Ofshore Wind Energy Resources
for the United States 4,150 GW of potential wind turbine capacity
from off shore wind resources are available in the United States alone.
Assuming this power capacity was constant for a whole year
we end up with an energy conversion of 36 billion MW/h a year.
Given the United Staes in 2010 used 25.7 billion MW/h,
we find that off shore wind harvesting alone could exceed the national use by about 10.6
billion MW/h or 41%. And axiomatically, extrapolating this national
level of capacity to the rest of the world's coast lines,
also taken into account the aforementioned land-based statistics,
it is clear that we can power the world many times over with wind, and quite practically.
[Solar Fields] If humanity could capture 0.1% if the solar
energy striking the earth we would have access to six times as much
energy we consume in all forms today. The ability to harness this power depends
on technology and how high the percentage of radiation conversion
is. The Ivanpah Solar Electric System in California
it's a 3,500 acre field with an annual stata generation of about 1,000,000 MW/h.
If we were to extrapolate using this as the theoretical basis as we had before,
it would take about 142,000 fields or about 500 million acres of land
to theoretically meet current global energy use.
That's about 1.5% of total land on earth. Deserts cover about 1/3 of the world
or about 12,000,000,000 acres and they tend to be fairly conducive to solar
fields, while often less conducive to life support
for people. Given the roughly 500,000,000 acres theoretically
needed to power the world as noted, only 4.1% of the world' s deserts would be
needed to contain these fields. Land that pretty much just otherwise sits
there. [Water-Based Power]
There are five dominant types of water driven power:
Wave, tidal, ocean current, osmotic, ocean thermal, and water course.
Overall, the technology for harnessing [the] ocean in general is in its infancy
but the potential is vast. And based on traditional estimates,
here is what the accepted global potentials has been estimated at,
using existing methods we're not applying advanced technology that's
not in application yet. This all figures up to be about 150,000 TWh/yr
or 96% of current global use of the 0.55 ZJ. Pretty much enough to power the world in one
medium alone if applied. However, to give a sense of growing technological
potential because I think this is important considering how, again, technology and water-oriented
power is deeply in it's infancy, recent developments in 'ocean current' harnessing
technology, the current's that go underneath the ocean,
which can embrace much slower speeds now than they used to,
is has estimated that ocean current alone could now theoretically power the entire world
if applied correctly. So, let's recap.
Wind, solar, water and geothermal have shown, as large scale, base-load renewable energy
mediums, that they are capable, individually,
of meeting or vastly exceeding current annual global energy consumption at this time.
And obviously a systems approach, harmonizing an optimized fraction of each
of those renewables, stratigically, is the key to achieving a global, total energy
abundance. For example, it is not inconceivable to imagine
a series of man-made floating islands off select coastlines which are designed to
harness, at once, wind, solar, thermal difference, wave, tidal
and currents all at the same time and in the same general
area. Such energy islands would then pipe their
harvest back to land for storage and distribution. It is only up to our deign ingenuity to figure
this like this out. [Localization & Reuse]
The final energy factor I want to mention, which builds upon this systems thinking explicitly,
has to do with localization and re-use schemes. Localized energy harnessing isn't given a
fraction of the attention it needs today. Smaller scale renewable methods which are
conducive to single structures or small areas find the same systems logic regarding combination.
These local systems could also, if need be, connect back into the larger base-load systems,
creating a total, mixed medium integrated network,
which happens sometimes today with solar [energy]. There are many localized systems out there
which can draw energy from the immediate environment. Of course there's solar power arrays; there's
small wind harvesting systems, localized geothermal heating and cooling...
and even architectural design that just simply makes natural light and heat/cool
preservation more efficient. Buckminster Fuller was great with his dome
structure and how they actually contain energy quite
well, same idea. Extending outwards to city infrastructure,
we see the same wasted possible efficiency almost everywhere.
A simple technology called piezoelectric is able to convert pressure and mechanical energy
into electricity. It's an excellent example of an energy reuse
method with great potential. Existing applications have included power
generation by people simply walking on these engineered floors and sidewalks,
streets which can generate power as automobiles cross over them
and train rail systems which can also capture energy from passing train cars through pressure.
It has been suggested by people who have studied this
that a stretch of road less than one mile long, four lanes wide, a highway,
and trafficked by about 1,000 vehicles per hour
can create about 0.4 MW of power, wichi is enough to power 600 homes.
Now, extrapolate that out to the bulk of all the highways in the world,
you have a very very powerful regenerative energy source.
Overall, if we think about the enormous mechanical energy wasted by vehicle transport modes
and high traffic walking centers alone, the potential of that possible regenerated
energy is quite substantial. And it's this type of systems thinking that
is needed in order maintain sustainability, while also pursuing this global energy abundance.
And the final and more complex subject, energy aside, will be the subject of [Material
Abundance] and creating life-supporting goods. Now, unlike the prior,
more simple post scarcity categories of food, water and energy,
the creation of a broad material abundance of all basics goods
which comprise the current average, you could say,
of what is culturally considered a "high standard of living" today,
is substantially more radical in its need for industrial revision and change.
As expressed before, the current highly inefficient methods we
use in industrial design, production, distribution, and regeneration
is one of the main reasons we are in a constant state of global resource over-shoot
and destabilizing biodiversity loss. Also, as noted prior,
there is no market incentive for advanced states of efficiency,
as efficiency always reduces the amount of labor, resources and service needs
for an existing purpose, and hence reduces monetary circulation.
I can't reinforce that enough. Therefore a new, synergistic, systems view
of industry, focused explicitly on material and labor efficiency,
along with an optimized strategy for sustainability, of course, is in order.
For the sake of time, and as a lead in to the final section on calculation,
I'm going to focus on a few principles or protocols
and how each protocol assists efficiency towards this post-scarcity abundance.
Otherwise it would take an enormous amount of time,
it's not as simple as the prior extrapolations. However, in this book that I mentioned there
will be a whole chapter dedicated to this issues in great detail.
[Access not property] A property-based society incentivizes the
preference to "own" a given product rather than rent or gain access to as needed.
I'm a filmmaker and while I do rent some things occasionally,
it's much more cost effective and smart to buy things because they have resale value.
This incentive of universal ownership is incredibly wasteful when we examine actual "use time"
of a given good. Facilitating means of access, where things
can be literally shared, will allow many more to gain use of goods
they otherwise could not along with their being less production of
those goods in proportion. In a Natural Law / Resource-Based Economy
we seek to create an access abundance, not a property abundance, which is inherently
wasteful. And as an aside, it's also important to note
that property is not an empirical concept, only access is empirically valid.
Property is a protectionist contrivance. Access is the reality of the social and human
condition. In order for you to truly, say, own a computer,
In order for you to truly say, own a computer, you would have had to, alone,
come up with the entery technological process that made that thing,
along with the ideas that comprise the tools you might of used to make that computer.
This is literally impossible, and is what destroys the early labor theory
of value property stuff put forth by classical economists.
There is no such thing as property there is only access and sharing, no matter
what social system you employ. [Designed in Recycling]
Contrary to our intuition, there is no such thing as waste in the natural world.
Not only from the standpoint of the biosphere which reuses everything in its process
the 92 main, naturally occurring elements [from] the periodic table that comprise all
matter cannot be exhausted.
Humanity has given very little consideration to the role of material re-generation
and how all of our design practices must account for this recycling.
In fact, as some may know, the highest state of this recycling will eventually
come in the form of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology will eventually be able to
create goods from the atomic level up and disassemble them right back down to the
almost virtual starting point. Its the ultimate form of recycling.
And by the way, I'm not suggesting this, I'm not suggesting that nanotechnology is
even needed at this time, as though that's what we're doing right now.
It's just [that] this is is a great principle to reference as far regenerative importance.
Today, industry has little sense of synergy in this context.
Recycling is an after thought. Companies continue to do things such as blindly
coat materials with chemical paints and the like
that distort the properties of those materials, making the material less salvageable,
maybe completely unsalvageable to current recycling methods.
It happens all the time. So long story short, strategic recycling just
might be the most core seed of a continued abundance.
Every landfill on earth is just a waste of potential.
Number tree, strategic conformation of good design to the most (a) conducive & (b)abundant
materials known. You will notice this efficiency qualification
in what I just said. Conducive and abundant.
Conducive means most appropriate based on the material properties.
Abundant means you weigh the value of conduciveness against the value of how accessible and low
impact the material is compared to other materials which may be more or less conducive.
This is a synergistic efficiency comparison. I'm sorry for the language sounding a little
bit complicated. Probably the best example of this is home
or domicile construction. The common use of wood, brick, screws, and
the vast array of parts that is typical of a common house,
is comparatively vastly inefficient to more modern, simplified, prefabrication or molded-able
materials. A traditional 2000 f² home requires about
40 to 50 trees, about an acre. Compare that with houses can be created in
prefabrication processes with simple, earth friendly polymers, concrete,
or other easily formable methods. 3D printing for example systems is on pace.
These new approaches have a very small footprint as compared to our destruction of global forests
which continue for wood. Home construction today is one of the most
resource intensive and wasteful industrial mediums in the world
with about 40% of all materials collected for construction ended up as waste in the
end. Number four, design conducive-ness for labor
automation. Now this is very foreign to many.
The more we conform to the current state of rapid, efficient production processes,
obviously the more abundance we can create. If you read texts on manufacturing processes,
they typically divide labor into three categories. There's human assembly, there's mechanization,
and there's automation. Human assembly means hand made,
mechanization means machines assist the laborer and automation means no human action.
Imagine if you needed a chair and there were three designs.
The first is elaborate and complex, and could only be done by hand.
The second is a more streamlined where its parts could be made mostly by machines,
but would need to be assembled by hand. The third chair is produced by one process,
fully automated. The latter chair design would be the design
goal in theory of this new approach. What this would do is reduce the complexity
of the automation process with little to no human labor.
Imagine a production plant that not only produce cars,
it can produce virtually any kind of industrial product comprised of the same basic shared
materials. This is very feasible.
This would increase output substantially. In other words, we are optimizing the means
of production. And as an aside, many who see stuff like this
they think that this means there's not going to be any variety in the future,
that it's just going to be cold and uniform and everyone get's the same thing.
No, I am just using this as an example to make an efficiency point.
Being conducive to automation does not mean universal uniformity of design
because the incredible amount of variance possibility
in our current automation technology is amazing and accelerating.
Modular robotics, their's many different self changing machines
that can create a great amount of variance. All this means is the existing processes in
their current state should be respected to ease production.
So please don't confuse this with the idea everyone just gets the same everything.
What they get is the same basic sustainability principles
which come in many different forms, if you can understand that.
So, these four parameters set in motion along with the basic intent to assist the
trend of ephemeralization on all levels there is little doubt that every human being
could have a very high standard of living. It is simply about converting all of the inefficiency
we have straight into productivity, strategically. I will conclude this section by noting that
R. Buckminster Fuller is probably the only human being that has
ever attempted to account and quantify the state of resources
and their potential within the past hundred years
and, while primitive, he was able to arrive at the following conclusion in 1969.
"[Man] developed such intense mechanization in World War I
that the percentage of total world population that were industrial "haves"
rose by 1919 to the figure of 6%. This was a very abrupt change in history...
By the time of World War II 20% of all humanity had become industrial "haves".
At the present moment the proportion of "haves" is at 40% of humanity.
if we up the performances of resources from the present level to a highly feasible
overall efficiency of 12% [more] [increasing by 12% holistically, on average,
all humanity can be provided for]". The exponential increase in information technology
since 1969, along with the applied technology and advanced
synergetic understandings we have today, I suspect, it now far exceeds,
we are way beyond the 12% efficiency increase that he saw as needed.
The problem now, in part, is conforming to industrial conduciveness appropriately
which is currently not done. And this leads us to part tree.
[Economic Organization & Calculation] Now, if you are wondering why I spent so much
time on the prior points of post-scarcity and those two core problems inherent to market
capitalism, social imbalance and environmental imbalance,
its because you cannot understand the logic of the economic factors involved in this model
without those prior awarenesses. A Natural Law Resource Based Economy is not
just a progressive outgrowth of our increased capacity to be productive
as a species as though we would just gradually evolve out
of the market system, step by step, into this approach.
No. The dire need for this system's removal needs
to be realized, once again. It has to become a part, in fact, of the incentive
structure of the new model the historical understanding that if we do
not adjust in this way we will revert right back into this highly
unstable periods we are in right now. An economic model is a theoretical construct
representing component processes by a set of variables or functions, describing
the logical relationships between them. Basic definition.
If anyone has studied traditional or market based economic modeling
a great deal of time is often spent on things such as price trends, behavioral patterns,
utilitarianistic functions, inflation, currency fluctuations and so forth.
Rarely, if ever, is anything said about public or ecological health.
Why? Because the market is, again, life-blind
and decoupled from the science of life-support and sustainability.
It is simply a proxy system. The best way to think about a this new economy
is not in the traditional terms but rather as an advanced production, distribution,
and management system which is democratically engaged by the public
through a kind "participatory economics" that facilitates input processes such as design
proposals and demand assessment while filtering all actions through what we
will call "sustainability" & "efficiency" protocols.
These are the basic rules of industrial action set by natural law... not human opinion.
As noted prior, neither of these interests are structurally
inherent in the capitalist model and it is clear that humanity needs a model
that has this type of stuff built right into it for consideration.
[Structural System Goals] All economic systems have structural goals,
which may not be readily apparent. Market Capitalism's structural goal, as described,
is growth and maintaining rates of consumption high
enough to keep people employed at any given time
and employment requires, also, a culture of real or perceived inefficiency
and that essentially means the preservation of scarcity in one form or another.
That is its structural goal and good luck getting a market economist to
admit to that. This model goal is to optimize technical efficiency
and create the highest level of abundance we possibly can,
within the bounds of earthly sustainability, seeking to meet human needs directly.
[System Overview] One of the great myths of this model is that
it is "centrally planned". I'm sure many of us have heard this.
What this means, based on historical precedent, is that it is assumed that an elite group
of people basically will make the economic decisions for society.
No. This model is a Collaborative Design System
(CDS), not centrally planned. It is based entirely upon public interaction,
facilitated by programmed, open source systems, that enable a constant, dynamic feedback flow
that can literally allow the input of the public on any given industrial matter,
whether personal or social. Now, a common question when you bring that
up they say "Well, who programs this system?" The answer is everyone and no one.
The tangible rules of the laws of nature, as they apply to environmental sustainability
and engineering efficiency, is a completely objective frame of reference.
The nuances may change to some degree over time- but the general principles remain.
Over time, the logic of such an approach will become more rigid as well because we learn
more as we perfect our understandings
and hence less room for subjectivity in certain areas that might have had it prior.
Again, I'll be describing this more so in a moment.
Also, the programs themselves would be available in an open source platform for public input
and review. Absolutely transparent.
And if someone noticed a problem or unapplied optimization strategy, which
would probably be the case, it is evaluated and tested by the community.
Kind of like a wikipedia for calculation except much less subjective than wikipidea,
without the moody administrators. Another traditional confusion surrounds a
concept which has become, to many, the defining difference between capitalism
and everything else and it has to do with whether the "means of
production" is privately owned or not. And this is replete throughout tons of traditional
literary treatments on capitalism when they describe how it's the ultimate manifestation
of human behavior in a society. If you don't know whist this means,
the means of production refers to the non-human assets that create goods,
such as machinery, tools and factories, offices and the like.
In capitalism, the means of production is owned by the capitalist
by historical definition and hence the origin of the term.
I bring this up because there has been an ongoing argument for a century
that any system which does not have its means of production owned as a form of private property
is just not going to be as economically efficient as one that has or maybe not even efficient
at all. This, as the argument goes, is because of
the need for price, the price mechanism. Price, which has a fluid ability to exchange
value amongst virtually any type of good due to its indivisibility of value
creates indeed a feedback mechanism that connects the entire market system in a certain narrow
way. Price is a way to allocate scare resources
amongst competing interests, for sure. Price, property, and money translate, in short,
subjective demand preferences into semi-objective exchange values.
I say semi, because it is again a culturally relative measure only
absent most every factor that gives true technical consideration to a given material or good.
In other words, it has nothing to with what the material goods are, it's just a mechanism.
Perhaps the only real technical data in fact I would say that price embraces, very crudely,
relates to "resource scarcity" and "labor energy,"
Resource scarcity and labor energy, you can basically find that in price.
So, in this context, the question becomes, moving on,
is it possible to create a system that can equally, if not more efficiently, facilitate
feedback with respect to consumer preference, demand,
labor value, and resource or component scarcity
without the price system, subjective property values, or exchange?
And of course there is. The trick is to completely eliminate exchange
and create a direct control and feedback link between the consumer and the means of production
itself. The consumer becomes part of the means of
production and the industrial complex, if you will,
becomes nothing more than a tool that is accessed by the public to generate
goods. In fact, as alluded to prior,
the same system can be used for just about any societal calculation,
virtually eliminating the state government in fact and politics as we know it.
It is a participatory decision making process. And, as an aside,
as far as the fact that there will indeed always be scarcity of something in the world,
which is the very basis of existence of price, market, and money
human beings can, again, either understand the dire need to exist
in a steady-state relationship with nature and the global human species for cultural
& environmental sustainability... or not. We can either continue down the same path
we are now or become more aware and responsible to the
world in and each other seeking post-scarcity and using natural law
rules of sustainability and efficiency to decide how to best allocate our raw materials
or not. But I think the former is the most intelligent
path. I state that because, again, this resource
argument always comes down to the abstraction of resources,
it never, excuse me, the abstraction of scarcity, it never qualifies what scarcity is in certain
contexts. It doesn't separate scarcity, and that's its
fatal flaw, between human needs and human wants.
Also, I want to point out another fallacy which of this "private ownership of the means
of production," a fallacy of this broad concept is its culture
lag. Today, we are seeing a merger of Capital Goods,
Consumer Goods, and Labor Power. Machines are taking over human labor power,
becoming capital goods, while also reducing in size to become consumer
goods. I'm sure most everyone in this room has a
home paper printer. When you send a file to print from your computer,
you are in control of a mini-version of a means of production.
What about 3D printers? In some cities today, there are now 3d printing
labs, which people can send their design to print
in physical form. The model I am going to describe is a similar
idea. The next step is the creation of a strategically
automated industrial complex, localized as much as possible,
which is designed to produce, through automated means,
the average of everything any given region has found demand for.
Think about it. On-demand production on a mass scale.
Consider for a moment how much storage space, transport energy, and overrun waste
is immediately eliminated by this approach. I think the days of large, wasteful, mass
producing economies of scale are coming to an end. Well... if we want them
too. This type of thinking
true economic calculation, by the most technical sense of the term,
I can't reiterate that enough. We are calculating to be as technically efficient
and conservative as possible, which again, almost paradoxically,
is what will facilitate a global access abundance to meet all human needs and beyond.
[Structure and Processes] So, I'm going to walk through the following
three processes. 1) Collaborative Design Interface and Industrial
Schematic 2) Resource Management, Feedback, & Value
3) General Principles of Sustainability and the Macro-Calculation.
The collaborative design interface is essentially the new "market".
It's a market of ideas. This system is the first step in any production
interest. It can be engage by a single person;
it can be engaged by a team, if you have friends and you want to put it together
sort of like how businesses think; it can be engaged by everyone.
It is open source and open access and your concept is open to input from anyone
interested in that good genre or anyone that's online that cares to contribute.
Obviously, it comes in the form of a website, as I've stated.
And likewise whatever exists as a final design, whatever is put into production
even though, in theory everything will be under modification at all times
but what has been proved, if you will, is digitally stored in a database
which makes that good available to everyone. Sort of like a goods catalogue.
Except it contains all of the information digitally that is required to produce it.
This is how demand is accessed. It's feedback, and it's immediate.
Instead, of course, of advertising and the unidirectional consumer good proposal system,
which it is that we have today where corporations basically
tell you what you should buy with the public generally going with the flow,
favoring one good, component, or feature using price of course so if they don't like
something then clearly that wont produce it anymore
to weed out supply and demand. This system works almost the opposite way.
The entire community has the option of presenting ideas for everyone to see and weigh in on
and build upon and whatever isn't of interest, simply wont
be executed to begin with. There's no testing here, such as you would
see in marketing, It's incredibly wasteful. It is as simple as that.
The actual mechanism of proposal would come in the form of an interactive design
interface such as we see with Computer-Aided Design
or CAD as it's called or more specifically Computer-Aided Engineering
which is a more complicated synergistic process. And, as an aside, some see Computer-aided
design programs as they exist as having an enormous learning curve, and
of course they do. But just as the first computers were very
difficult code-based interfaces which were later replaced by small little
programs in the form of graphic icons that we're all so familiar with
the future CAD type programs could be oriented in the exact same way
to make them more user friendly. And obviously, not everyone has to engage
in design. Some people, like most people today, they
appreciate what's been created prior they absorb and would use what other people
come up with. So there's a diminishing law of returns in
a lot of ways, if you will, not everyone has to get in there and have
some role to do this, but many will and many will enjoy the process.
And of course you can customize things as you go which is a great point,
there's minor things that can happen with a product that someone doesn't know anything
about but maybe they just want to change the color
and that's it. Obviously, that doesn't take a lot of education.
More importantly, technically speaking, the beauty of these design and engineering
programs today is they incorporate advanced physics
and other real world, natural law properties, so a good isn't just viewable in a static
3d model, it can be tested right there, digitally. And while some testing capacity might be limited
today it is simply a matter of focus to perfect
such digital means. For example in the automotive industry
long before new ideas are built they run them through similar digital testing processes
and there is no reason to believe that we will not eventually be able to digitally represent
and imitate and set in motion virtually all known laws of nature in time,
and being able to apply them to different contexts.
Similarly,and this is critical... this design as proposed of this system
is filtered through a series of sustainability and efficiency protocols
which relate to not only the state of the natural world
but also the total industrial system in as far as what is capatable.
Processes of evaluation and suggestion would include the following.
a)Strategically Maximized Durability b) Adaptability
c) Standardization of Genre Components d) Strategically Integrated Recycling Conduciveness,
as I've mentioned before and e) Strategically Conducive designs themselves,
making them conducive for Labor Automation I'm going to go through these each quickly.
Durability just means to make the good as strong and as long lasting as relevant.
The materials utilized, comparatively assuming possible substitutions
due to levels of scarcity or other factors, would be dynamically calculated
likely automatically in fact by the design system
to be most conducive to an optimized durability standard.
Adaptability. This means that the highest state of flexibility
for replacing component parts is made. Has anyone seen this thing called phone blocks?
Where there, yeah, brilliant. In the event a component part of this good
becomes defective or out of date of any good wherever possible the design facilitates that
such components are easily replaced to maximize full product life-span.
Standardization of Genre Components. All new designs either conform to or replace,
if they're updated, existing components which are either already
in existence or outdated due to a comparative lack of efficiency.
Many don't know this but a man named Eli Whitney, in 1801,
was the first to really apply standardization in production.
He made muskets and back then they were handmade and they were un-interchange.
So the musket parts, if anything broke, you couldn't take apart from something else.
He was the first actually to make the tools to do this
and he basically started the entire process of standardization
and the U.S. military was now able to buy high things of muskets and interchange them
in much more sustainable way even though we were killing people.
Which is interesting for the military, because if you think about it,
the military is one of the most efficient systems on the planet,
because it's absent the market economy. If you really want to look towards where industrial
efficiency was born, as much as I dislike it, the military is where
it becomes, where it's been harnessed the most.
So, anyway, this logic not only applies to a given product,
it's applied to the entire good genre, standardization. And by the way this efficiency will never
happen in a market economy with its basis in competition
as proprietary technology removes all such collaborative efficiency.
No one wants that, no one wants to share everything like that.
Otherwise, people wouldn't have a need to go back to their company and buy the part,
they would go somewhere else where they have access to it and other means.
Recycling Conduciveness. As noted before, this means every design must
conform to the current state of regenerative possibility.
The breakdown of any good must be anticipated and allowed for in the most optimized way.
And Made Conducive for Labor Automation. This means that the current state of optimized,
automated production is directly taken into account
seeking to refine the design that's submitted to be most conducive to the current state
of production with the least amount of human labor or monitoring.
Again, we seek to simplify the way materials and production means are used
so that the maximum number of goods can be produced
with the least variation of materials and production equipment.
It's a very important point. And these five factors are what we could call,
in total, the Optimized Design Efficiency function,
if you want to be technical. Keep this in mind
as I am going
to
return
to
it in a moment. Moving on to the The Industrial Complex, the layout.