Abundant Maker Driven Culture

I may not know you. I may not agree with you. In fact, I probably don’t agree with you or many of the things that you believe in. But I will fight to my death that you have a life where you get to do what you want to do and in return you will do the same for me

According to Leifur Thor, member of the press team for Open Source Ecology (OSE), that is the mindset of someone living in a world of abundance and something sorely lacking in our society that holds scarcity as its’ most deeply held belief. OSE has an ambitious plans in the Global Village Construction Set to open-source the blueprints of 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch, and they aspire to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village for under $10,000. If you haven’t already, watch the fantastic TED.com video on the GVCS with OSE instigator Marcin Jakubowski. This open source hardware project is one of the first of a coming wave that wants to foster an abundant maker driven culture.

Show Notes

Leifur Thor’s OSE wiki page- pronounced like “safe” except with an L, not like a leaf on a tree (which I do an admittedly and apologetically bad job on during the intro and outro)
Global Village Construction Set 50
Current status of items in current development including the Compressed Earth Block Press, LifeTrac skid steering tractor and PowerCube.
Factor e Farm: Where Marcin is working on the GVCS and aims to be the world’s first replicable post-scarcity resilient community.
The successful GVCS Kickstarter Campaign and opportunity to become a True Fan.
“GVCS is the hardware & OSE is the software piece. The hardware piece is pretty straight forward. Provide open source hardware, make it less expensive than what industry would charge & then engineer it in such a way that it is harder to skim the profits off the people that are producing. But the software piece is harder to explain & educate people on because it is contradictory to the operating model of capitalism.”
Capitalism has scarcity as an inherent principle of its operation.
A little bit of history and the impact of Thomas Malthus
The mindset of someone living in a world of gift economics – “Whatever comes into my possession must be temporary to hold any value at all. I must either use it or pass it along to someone else. To withhold giving is withholding breathing or being apart from the world. People who hold onto as much as they can are considered sick and separate. If they can’t and it gets really bad, we have to annex them. This is also how communities stayed healthy. If you weren’t a contributor to the community in some way, you were given the boot.”
Sacred Earthonomics
Our belief in scarcity is the biggest barrier to living abundantly
The magic of digital economies and how people are waking up to the fallacy of the Internet destroying the financial safety of artists. This is just a natural extension of “learning to do ever more with ever less”
City-state culture was created out of growing complexity and creates an opportunities for people to take advantage of the lack of direct connection between all members of a community.
How much changed in 5,000 years from 3,000 BC to 10 years of 1980 to 1990 and the creation of the Internet.
“We’re just now leaving the model A stage of the Internet where we are beginning to communicate with each other using the Internet in really beautiful and nutritive ways that it is designed for.”
The Stop Online Privacy Act and American Censorship
Patterns of Control: Top 1% own 40% of wealth and top 5% own 75% of wealth
Open source software reduces company costs but not price – good thing money is not the only option
“Things are changing at such a rapid pace that it is going to be hard to keep up to it. One example is when we go to a search engine and plugin a search, ‘I want to see jumping monkey videos’ and you get a list of jumping monkey videos. What most people don’t realize is you’ve just approached that search engine exactly like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz approached the great wizard behind the curtain. You’ve stepped up to the curtain, asked your question and are waiting for a reply. You’ve just treated a computer exactly like you treat a person.”
People are starting to see the power of the Internet as a response to de-evolution that comes from the corrupting influence of power
“When you look at the Internet now you may notice a lot of people have a lot to say. Comments. You can find comments on anything; everything. People are participating. They are throwing in their 2 cents. It’s as if we are all in this giant auditorium and everybody has no problem with sharing their opinion on something. And that is all great. Now, we all need to share our opinions, but what we really need to do is turn that into a vehicle of change. Turn it into a vehicle that people can co-ordinate change rather than simply talking about change.”
How to motivate someone to dig a ditch
How intellectual property is antithetical to innovation and what are reasonable alternatives
Alternate definitions for wealth beyond financial. The great example I provided comes from Extraenvironmentalist Ep #29: Creating Wealth with Gwendolyn Hallsmith, “The measure of wealth is the situation in which our needs are met and we have a sense of well-being”
How do we reboot society where money is not the dominant means of exchange and scarcity is not the strongest belief system?
“Those who hold the throughputs control the power
“When we control the throughputs, we put an end to the tyranny of the city-state culture and taxation which is that pattern that has beat every odd for the last 5,000 years. The Internet has finally provided for the first time a realistic tool that the population can use to self-govern and make city-states irrelevant. By doing so they can also make federal taxation, at a minimum, irrelevant so that it is only done at a local level”
The automotive industry influence on urban design as example of industries working to maintain their control on throughputs, not because it is necessarily the best course of action for society, but because it makes the most profit for them. See End of Suburbia for a good summary of the history in this capacity.
Waves of abundance vs scarcity
4 minute clip from Cory Doctorow from Command Line Podcast including the great tag, “There is no copyright policy; there is only internet policy and there is no internet policy there is only policy”