[p2p-research] Fwd: P2P Energy Economy: request for critical feedback

[Florent]

>> let scalable/distributed "city" models exist
> Are you saying Capitalism (or "The Free Market", or whatever
> 'governance' is currently running) doesn't *let* scalable/distributed
> "city" models exist?

Not really. At least, not scalable in a durable way. More that the
perverse effects of capitalism's scalability are that primary, locally
needed resources (food, energy, ...) tend to get always more
centralized (giant supermakets, death of local commerce and
production, death of hand manufacturing and specialties (culture !),
privatization of community goods and services ...).

When separating the local and global scales, maybe the local layer can
be more locally-operated and ovoid centralization, both in favor of
durable development and robustness (e.g. to natural disasters), while
keeping the positive global effects and optimizing it's
infrastructures in tomorrow's technological context (which i call
"overlay layers").

Of course this is a personal point of view, but i wouldn't mind if:
* i don't own my car but have a way to get one when i need it ?
* i don't own my house but still have a right to occupy one ?
* i have daily community chores that i get rewarded for (e.g. the 2
forementioned examples)
Then i need to find a place that operates on these principles. But why
can't i find these models in the wild, while these are only local
matters ? Because my mega-state thinks otherwise ?

These are purely local needs, and with the current loss of feeling of
belonging to a local place/culture (i think, partially linked to
privatization of common goods and supersizing of state organizations)
we shall otherwise all end by wearing the same clothes and eating the
same food produced by the same corporations. Since nature shows that
the best strategy always is diversification and interoperable
standards, it looks like the best answear to have incentive for local
belonging and participation is to let people realize they are in a
human-sized community, thus the need for downscaling and reclaiming
them.

Another interesting aspect of studying micro-cities is if this model
is kept open enough to let the communities that live within them to
operate the "rules" of their community, but sharing the same
infrastructural substrate : there would be units that share the same
ideology (fully commonly owned local resources, local culture), as
well as less "restrictive" ones... Yet still interoperable (energy
sharing, trading, ...). Again, diversification might be the key to
adaptation. Another example is that depending on the geographical
conditions the local autonomy's requirements would be very different,
so there has to be room for flexibility. If you have one, single city
model for an entire country, you will inevitably have a proportion of
the cities that are not adapted to local nature or culture. In this
sense, i feel this is some kind of reasonable return to the past when
cities had their own specialties and were built on top of them because
of local resources (e.g. mining, food, ...). Of course this time,
controlling the availability and renewability of these resources is
critical, which i think is not possible to do on a global scale but on
local scale.

Of course this scientifically-oriented approach to studying local
community models (based on needs/resources flows and network-derived
principles such as scalability and robustness) can easily appear as
non-ethical/technocentric/arbitrarian. It is not it's aim in my
opinion, because it refers to local, practical scale matters only,
defining a substrate/framework for decentralized city building without
resorting to full isolation. And my point is, the local could possibly
be autonomous and the global stay on it's track to full
web-globalization. See the Global Village initiative among other
similar principles.

> The deepest failing of our current economic kernel (the way we
> structure tax and trade) is the problem it has with our success.

Yes, and the entities that are built on it (like, megacorporations)
and that'll do everything in their power to slow/reject the adoption
of alternatives ; this is what happens when you fire CEOs for 2%
growth drops... Il looks like the only way to revert this pervert
"lets consume our not-really infinite resources" effect would be that
the monetary system is indexed on real, quantified available resources
pool, thus the goal of mark's proposal.

>> Also, does anyone know of virtual/software tools that can be used to
>> simulate scenarios (some open source SimCity) ?
> It's funny you mention that specific game, as it was recently
> relicensed (Jan-10-2008) to GNU GPLv3 and renamed Micropolis. --
> http://DonHopkins.com/home/micropolis
>
>
> Here are some other Free Software games we we might harvest ideas and code from:
>[...]

Wow, thanks for this impressive list !

Cheers

FLorent