[p2p-research] Intentional Community 2.0

[Nathan Cravens]

Hi Kevin,


> I'll forward my comments to the p2p list as well later on.


Don't mind if I do?

Thanks for the extensive reflection. I believe this is a document in which
to place P2P/Open Manufacturing into a theoretical framework for community
organization, applicable to existing communities.

OSE already provides the model for the toolset and production standards. The
semantic web interface and basic income platform will encourage global
networking to build a variety of designs to meet each community culture or
personal preference.


> Bookchin's
> Post-Scarcity Anarchism useful if you haven't read it already.


I possess a copy. It contains all forwards written up to the last in the
80s. Each forward was less and less hopeful of realizing post-scarcity. No
doubt he'd be thrilled with the discussions today. Funny, I only read the
forwards. I'll take another hack at it.


> On factory production, about the only forms of current production that
> objectively require a large factory are heavy internal combustion
> engines, jet engines and microchips.


So then could we competitively have mini-mills and metal molds fabricated on
demand at a local fab lab?
That makes sense. Labs therefore need to replicate to meet demand as it is
made practical.
For those on this list knowledgeable of working with metals and
refrigeration.
Is fabbing a Fridge from scratch feasible?
What are the steps and how long would it take with optimal tools and
processes?

I'll address the rest tomorrow. I just want to get this content out there.

We're discussing this document:

Intentional Community 2.0
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg2jzdft_166f9jb4sgb&hl=en

Nathan




> Thanks, Nathan.  It looks like an excellent summary.  I've made too
> many writing commitments to do the ones I've already got justice (I
> still intend to add material at the OS Market Economy wiki, for
> whatever good intentions are worth), so I can't collaborate in writing
>  the document.  But I'll give what feedback I can.  I hope you don't
> mind my cc'ing this to Michel and Vinay, btw.  And if you don't
> object, I'll forward my comments to the p2p list as well later on.
> On the combination of automated industry and decentralized village
> production, you might find the industry chapter in Bookchin's
> Post-Scarcity Anarchism useful if you haven't read it already.
> Ecotopia (Ernest Callenbach) and Communitas (Paul and Percival
> Goodman) also play around with roughly comparable mixtures of ideas
> (they all also dovetail nicely with Vinay's ideas of a low minimum
> cost of buying out of the system, and a guaranteed subsistence
> lifestyle based on standardization and cheap modular design).
> On factory production, about the only forms of current production that
> objectively require a large factory are heavy internal combustion
> engines, jet engines and microchips.  We can probably write off jet
> aircraft altogether as a technology that wouldn't exist if it had to
> internalize its own costs. If automobiles of the current type are
> replaced with light, electrically-powered vehicles serving those on
> the margins of the community transit and regional light rail networks
> (e.g. truck farmers in dispersed areas outside of town, who are an
> inconvenient distance from the closest railhead and need handy light
> hauling transport into and out of town), then Detroit-style engine
> production will probably also disappear.  That leaves microchip
> foundries as the main form of centralized industry.
> Re textiles and such, I suspect that household production (either for
> the self-sufficient homestead, or for exchange with the neighbors)
> with a heavily tweaked and modernized loom, sewing machines, etc., is
> the most efficient model.  Ditto for building furniture and the like.
> Of more specialized forms of production, most of it can probably be
> done by existing small machine shops, or even the better equipped
> backyard hobbyist workshops (with multimachines thrown in here and
> there), networked together or possibly with their resources pooled
> together into neighborhood workshops.  The boundary between this, and
> slightly larger-scale factory production on the Emilia-Romagna model
> with a dozen or so people doing flex manufacturing in a single shop,
> will probably be pretty blurry.    I don't know how feasible total
> automation  would be-- but the total hours of labor required in a
> rationally organized system and the pool of people who enjoy puttering
> around with such things, taken together, would mean it probably
> wouldn't be a problem.
> I'm especially interested in issues of "getting from here to there,"
> with such communities built on the current geographical space and
> using many of the same human and physical raw materials as current
> communities, and with the transition occuring under conditions of a
> "long emergency."  One thing that keeps coming to mind is the rise of
> the manor as a sixth-century "resilient community," in the immediate
> aftermath of Western Roman collapse, and what existing community
> resources might form the building blocks of Vail's and Robb's
> resilient communities in the current collapse.  What are the
> possibilities of such intentional communities being formed on a
> networked basis within the same geographical space as existing
> communities, as opposed to being founded as stand-alone projects on
> new sites?  One interesting thing along these lines is Poul Anderson's
> fictional post-apocalypse "Northwestern Federation" (roughly from the
> Pacific NW through BC, and into Alaska) in *Orion Shall Rise*, with
> fraternal lodges providing police protection, organizing the
> restoration of water and power, and generally becoming the nucleus of
> society.
> I'm skeptical about 3-D printing as a generalized form of production
> technology (although for cheap production of circuitry components it
> might be an excellent part of an overall community workshop).  But I
> think the possibilities of low-overhead production using existing
> small-scale machinery are sufficient to go a long way in blurring the
> distinction between "free speech" and "free beer" when all the entry
> barriers and artificial property rents  and mandated overhead levels
> are removed.
> Your analysis of the institutionalized/professionalized educational
> and personnel system is very good.  Paul Goodman's work on the
> high-overhead, bureaucratically ossified "style" of establishment
> organizations (job descriptions, Weberian procedural rules, prestige
> salaries, credentialism, overhead-inflating specs for purchasing
> materials, and all the rest of it), and his contrast with ad hoc,
> self-directed organizations (he wrote before p2p or network culture
> even existed as concepts) might be useful here.  Ditto Ivan Illich on
> radical monopolies.
> Re homes being taken, if the intentional community develops as a
> successor community within  the shell of the old, with an increasing
> number of the old community's citizens joining but perhaps never
> becoming unanimous, the question of expelling misfits may be
> problematic.  An alternative  might be some model of tolerating people
> who are "in the community but not of it," i.e. who have not
> established the prerequisites for receiving the guaranteed minimum
> income or the services going with membership, but are free to live in
> their existing housing space and engage in exchange with other willing
> parties on their own dime.  That's what the Spanish anarchist
> collectives did in the 1930s, when peasants preferred to operate as
> autonomous small-holders rather than participating in the village
> collective.  They might sell or trade their crops as they saw fit, and
> get some pro rata individual share of common resources, paying for
> anything above that minimum; ditto small tradesmen in the towns who
> didn't want to federate in the syndicates.
> Best,
> Kevin
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
> Anarchist Organization Theory Project
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090408/b8b47b3a/attachment-0001.html>