[p2p-research] [Abundance] Re: Fwd: Launch of Abundance: The Journal of Post-Scarcity Studies, preliminary plans

Fri Feb 13 03:12:14 CET 2009

Fascinating debate, thanks Kevin and Nathan.

Regarding the paragraph on free energy, Vinay's point that there is no such
thing as scarce energy, is intriguing and provocative,

my little blog entry on the topic:

(
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/can-distributed-renewable-energy-solve-the-energy-crisis-right-now/2009/02/20
)

>From my research for the P2P Foundation, I have come to the conclusion that
a P2P-based society would be based on a set of inter-related
infrastructures:

- a distributed communication and coordination infrastructure, which we
essentially already have, despite its imperfections (some would argue we
need a distributed decision-enabling infrastructure on top of that, but I
think that a virtual infrastructure is not essential, and that the tools for
open and transparent government are also essentially there)

- a distributed money infrastructure: we need civil-society based mutual
credit and open money systems that can be used both locally and for online
affinity groups. Many of the tools are already available.

- distributed agriculture and manufacturing: this is the part which has been
emerging with open design communities, on which Marcin Jakubowski is working
with his Open Source Ecology project. I think we need about 15 more years
for substantial achievements in this area.

If I have not forgotten anything else, this leaves one more important
infrastructure: peer to peer energy, i.e. the ability to produce energy at a
hyperlocal scale.

Readers who will have read Mike Davis take on global
warming<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/only-democratic-and-green-cities-can-save-us-from-climate-catastrophe/2009/02/17>,
may be convinced that our efforts in renewable energy and carbon capping are
failing.

But amongst our network of experts, Vinay Gupta of Global Swadeshi takes a
rather radical point of view. While it does not negate the damage that can
be done through our continued use of fossil fuels, it does suggest that Peak
Oil is not such a fundamental drawback for the next phase of civilisation
based on distributed renewable energies.

In fact, says Gupta, these alternatives already exist, and just have to be
implemented:

"There's no energy crisis. If we work on scaling plastic solar panel
manufacture, we'll cut human CO2 emissions by 40% (the proportion currently
produced by coal) in 20 years because it will simply be uneconomic to keep
the coal plants burning."

For evidence, he points to Nanosolar <http://nanosolar.com/>, about which he
gives the following, rather amazing figures: "*Panel cost of manufacture is
said to be $0.30 per watt. Panel cost at retail is around $1. Price of a
machine which will print panels: $0.16 per panel per year*."

And this is just the beginning, a competing project, Konarka
Technologies<http://konarka.com/>,
*"thinks their panels will be about 1/3 the price of nanosolar. In about a
year or so."*

WorldChanging reports
<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009415.html>that a same kind of
promising development may be about to happen in
windpower:

"The Jellyfish will do for the wind power industry what the personal
computer did for the computer industry. Although the engineering community
likes to think bigger is better, Maglaque said, we should remain open minded
about using both big and small turbines to power the renewable energy
revolution."

*"A mere 36 inches tall, the plug-in wind appliance can generate about 40
kilowatt hours each month, that's enough to light a home using
high-efficiency bulbs, said Maglaque. And although micro-wind is nothing
new, at $400 a pop, the Jellyfish's price and simplicity make it a fresh
face in the market."*

The participative, peer to peer, aspects of this potential new distributed
energy are well described in the article:

*"Maglaque hopes that the Jellyfish
<http://www.clariantechnologies.com/>will soon be an item you can
purchase at any local hardware store, just like
a vacuum or blender. And with the combination of access, affordability and
easy assembly, he hopes that eventually we will see his invention on every
rooftop. While that level of ubiquity is, of course, the hope of any
inventor, Maglaque also has a bigger vision: bring massive change to our
relationship with energy creation. No longer would energy be something that
we switch on mindlessly, and utility bills something that we begrudgingly
pay monthly. Instead, personal wind power would allow us to generate energy,
involving us in the process instead of just delivering uncontrollable
results. *

*As with other personal renewable energy tools, this one could help us
create energy, sell it back to the grid, watch as our energy bills drop and
hopefully witness the creation of a better, more reliable grid system
through our investment in the utility. *

*One vision that Maglaque shared was for the Jellyfish to help enable
district wind energy co-ops. Imagining thousands of personal wind turbines
all creating energy for the grid. He said neighbors could join together to
work collectively with the power utilities.*

*"Say you've got 10,000 units in one city. If you connect those units on a
server, and generate power together — managing and regulating that power —
you are in a position to work with power utilities," Maglaque said. "This is
good for customers because it provides a marginal return, and utilities like
this as well because a: you have on demand power, and b: you free up funds
to be allocated to the grid network that needs expansion and repair."*

*Another hope of Maglaques's is for the Jellyfish to help people in
developing countries leapfrog over dirty energy and jump more quickly into
renewables."*

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 5:48 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2/10/09, Nathan Cravens <knuggy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >  Labor, given a productive technology remains static, can be measured
> more
> > easily than a material resource. Yet, because someone, somewhere, is
> > ingenious enough or has access and interest in the production knowledge
> to
> > want to tinker with the productive technology in a manner that captures
> > labor value, it becomes difficult to measure a labor's worth over time. I
> > also think it is difficult to assess labor's worth because of the
> > subjective, or better, the varied absolute sentiments of value itself
> from
> > person to person within an environment.
>
> Adam Smith, faced with a similar question about how the cost of
> schooling, difficulty and unpleasantness of work, etc., could be
> factored into wages.  He argued that this would be done by the
> "higgling and bargaining of the market."  Thomas Hodgskin, a market
> socialist heavily influenced by Smith, argued that this "higgling"
> process would result in wages that reflected such factors, if a free
> market existed in which the propertied classes lacked the
> legally-enforced privilege that enabled them to charge artificial
> scarcity rents on land.
>
> And if I can throw another name in there, Franz Oppenheimer (a
> Georgist of sorts) argued that, absent monopoly rents on land and
> capital, the produce of labor would automatically distribute itself
> among workers in proportion to their subjective disutility.   In cases
> of work that was more onerous or unpleasant to some than to others,
> people would eventually sort themselves out into new lines of work,
> until the subjective satisfactions and dissatisfactions were equalized
> between employments with wages reflecting the average level of
> disutility.
>
> Another question comes to mind: "Would
> > the labor plus the productive technology that captured and continues to
> > capture it be factored as labor value?" Perhaps this tricky question to
> > answer is the reason marginal value theory is used in place of labor
> value
> > theory, seemingly, to avert the issue of labor value vs technological
> > capture and (perhaps?) the right to possession this serious developing
> issue
> > generates.
>
> Absent artificial scarcity rents on capital, the individualist
> anarchists argued, the price of capital would reflect only the cost of
> retiring the past labor embedded in them.
>
> >  To provide a rough estimate of labor value, might we refine this into a
> > formula: demand vs scarcity. Demand can be measured rather accurately.
> > Scarcity in labor terms can be reduced to: "At what percentage does a
> > populace lack in this specific productive knowledge?" Increased demand
> may
> > well provide the factor for scarcity of applied knowledge, yet to ignore
> > scarcity would mean to acquiesce to continued conditions of scarcity. I'm
> > curious to know what labor theory you would put stock in, Kevin. I am
> > largely ignorant of the giants that dwelled in this territory.
>
> Far from disproving or replacing the LTV in classical political
> economy, IMO marginal utility theory simply described the mechanism by
> which it operated.  The classicals, Smith and Ricardo, saw the law of
> value as describing the natural value toward which actual prices were
> always fluctuating.  But this gravitation toward natural value took
> place *through* supply and demand.  The marginalists are right that
> value is determined, given the snapshot conditions of supply and
> demand at the point of exchange at any particular time, by marginal
> utility.  This is, as Simpson's lawyer Lionel Hutz put it, "the best
> kind of true:  technically true."  The part it leaves out is that
> supply itself changes over time in response to price, for goods whose
> supply is elastic, until the marginal utility of the last unit
> produced equals the cost of producing it.
>
> The classicals had two separate paradigms, one (the law of labor value
> or the law of cost) for goods in elastic supply, and the other
> (pricing by scarcity) for inelastic goods like rare collectibles, or
> food in a city under siege.  The marginalists took the scarcity
> paradigm and applied it to all goods.  But to make it work, they had
> to abstract the time factor and treat the calculation of marginal
> utility as something that took place at a point in time, rather than a
> dynamic dependent variable over time.
>
> >  It would be an interesting exercise to say, "Okay, what if energy where
> > free?" If the aim is to capture the Sun's abundant energy to power
> devices:
> > free energy is the result. I'm curious to see how this would affect
> current
> > costs, even with the misappropriations, divisions, monopolies, and the
> egos
> > that insist on being depended on for productive knowledge.
>
> It would probably cause a collapse of much of the corporate economy,
> as the scarcity its profits depended on ceased to exist.  But it seems
> to me that, absent some radical breakthrough working on new scientific
> principles, the available replacements for fossil fuels are either
> available in limited quantities, or have a much lower energy return on
> energy invstment (EROEI), or both.  In that case, the best path to
> energy abundance is to reduce the need for energy as an input,
> following Amory Lovins soft energy path.
>
> >  Ponderousness aside, this brings up a discussion between Marcin
> Jakubowski
> > and I that largely relates to this conversation. Let's introduce what I
> call
> > "efficiency through recursion."  The test subject for this model is: Open
> > Source Ecology: Global Village Construction Set: Compressed Earth Block
> > Press: melting and casting from scrap metal vs purchasing caste parts.
> This
> > process can be called a form of "productive recursion," an open source
> form
> > of production from the bottom-up, produced more efficiently to generate
> more
> > value than top down proprietary methods. The "efficiency through
> recursion"
> > theory assumes a 5:1 ratio of value generated to labor used in the
> > theoretical case presented. This may mean more labor time to produce an
> > artifact than purchasing assembled materials elsewhere, yet the financial
> > cost (waste) saved means less toil or wage labor in the long run to
> generate
> > the same item: therefore: a recursive acceleration in production
> efficiency.
> > In theory, this will mean more leisure time as a result when proven in
> > practice: for one that chooses to construct the item oneself at a
> community
> > generated Fab Lab or when purchasing the same item from an agent that
> > applied similar methods of production. This means the time to manufacture
> a
> > product through community supported manufacturing or personal
> fabrication,
> > whichever is most efficient, will receive highly significant productive
> > increases, and when proven by results, will become adopted. This theory
> can
> > be proven many times over when communities can easily acquire the
> knowledge
> > and materials to assemble the meta-tools or Open Source Fab Lab to
> generate
> > productive tools that reduce toil and increase leisure. Inspired by our
> > e-mail conversation and my stay at Factor e Farm, Marcin developed a
> working
> > formula to test the theory of "efficiency through recursion" here:
> > http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Recursion
> >
> >  As these methods of recursive production acceleration are determined
> viable
> > and applied, economic growth in the financial (waste) sense will then
> > dwindle rather than accelerate. Agents that compete with one another to
> > reduce cost to zero play a game I call "zero-point competition." Because
> the
> > work of community supported manufacturing and personal fabrication
> > accelerate this form of competition, I am in support of it. Debts, as it
> > were, will become paid. If we are to remain alive on this planet "living
> > well," I believe the present "mixed" economic model (monopoly government
> vs
> > monopoly free market) must power down rather than move forward.
> >
> > Clearly, Kevin, we would both agree we must abandon presently accepted
> > economic models altogether over time, however increasingly questioned, as
> > inefficiencies of the proprietary means of production and its subsequent
> > regulational methods are opened, translated, and rooted out. It can be
> put
> > this way: The best form of management does not require a manager.
> Therefore,
> > the most stable economies do not require external force known as
> government
> > as presently understood due to the self regulating nature of localized
> and
> > personal economies.
> >
> > I assume built-in responsibility and accountability will be generated
> from
> > personal ties generated by local and personal economies. This is
> nourished
> > from empowered methods of labor, less abstract and alienated, to give
> deeper
> > reason for one's activity and that of members of a personally committed
> > community. If this assumption is correct generally, it reinforces self
> > regulation as economies become localized through local production, thus:
> > external governments power down as previous economic growth models power
> > down. The new form of economic growth will be in a new form of
> centralized
> > production: personal fabrication. All the roads I observe seem to be
> > threshing toward this destination. The result: effortless economy.
> >
> >  The theory of "efficiency through recursion" will be far more
> significant
> > once it is proven by the developments at Factor e Farm, or other
> community
> > supported manufacturing methods, or once fossil fuels become too costly
> and
> > force local and personal production into action. It will likely be a
> variety
> > of influences that bring production inward where it began. I'm sure,
> Kevin,
> > you've already noted the trends that demonstrate the in-source (P2P)
> > movement of production.
> >
> > From my perspective, the alienation of the Industrial out-source method
> is
> > of some benefit to a degree. The insecurity that comes of a deskilled
> person
> > demands and has generated machines to do what one cannot. The great issue
> > with alienation (other than violence) however is a lack of knowledge to
> > understand how these tools are used to appropriate leisurely livelihoods.
> > This may be why doomsday scenarios are so avidly distributed in
> Industrial
> > societies: 1) to keep people dependent to generate higher rates of
> exchange
> > value for a self, and 2) the classical model in general is taken for
> granted
> > as the only model available with its disastrous consequences at least
> > intuitively felt enough to generate the feelings of anxiety, dread, and
> > finally: DOOM. That is, if "certain death," a lifeless notion, can be
> felt
> > as a most extreme form of a lived emotion.
> >
> >  I'm certain this issue will be alleviated when communication
> technologies
> > like the web are used to present productive knowledge in a manner most
> can
> > easily understand. The technology is already available today to
> accelerate
> > this knowledge transfer. I briefly outline a method for transferring this
> > technical knowledge here:
> > http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Replication
> >
> >  The argument for localized production would be deeply enriched by your
> > knowledge of political economy as applied to the working theory of
> > "efficiency through recursion." If you are interested, I would like to
> your
> > comment on this posted to that wiki or by e-mail.
>
> I think I grasp the gist of the Recursion page at Open Farm Tech wiki,
> although I got it mainly from the text rather than the formulas, not
> being a math person.  If I understand you correctly, I suspect the
> reason for that 5:1 savings in substituting labor on-site for purchase
> is all the hidden markups in the bought product (including overhead
> costs from administration in a conventional business firm, rents on
> IP, fixed job categories, failure to optimize choice of
> cheap/vernacular/locally available materials, etc.--all the stuff Ivan
> Illich and Paul Goodman wrote about).  More generally, it results from
> the superior ingenuity available when the  intermediate steps between
> design, decision and execution are reduced, and the person doing the
> work is free (and has the incentive) to tweak design so as to minimize
> cost.
>
> I totally agree with your point about cost savings being passed on
> through competition.  This is the normal process in a free market:
> for the cost-saving benefits of technological innovation being
> "socialized" through competition.  One of the main functions of
> artificial property rights, whether in land or in ideas, is to enable
> a privileged class to appropriate the free gifts of nature (inherent
> productivity of the land, the power of the sun, the elasticity of
> steam, etc.), or to appropriate the productivity benefits of
> innovation.  Compare your and Marcin's model for replication with
> James Watt's exercise of his patent rights over the steam engine.
>
> I wrote about this in a chapter of my org theory book:
> Chapter Eleven:  The Abolition of Privilege
>
> http://members.tripod.com/kevin_carson/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/Chapter11.pdf
>
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> 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
>
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>

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