[p2p-research] RC JOURNAL: Accelerating the Development of Resilient Communities

[Kevin Carson]

  Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader: RC JOURNAL:
Accelerating the Development of Resilient Communities via Global
Guerrillas by John Robb on 11/17/10

One of the major attributes of resilient communities is that can
locally produce most of what they need (food, energy, and products).
Needless to say, the transition to local production won't happen
overnight. Let's explore this.

Most of the efforts to increase local production, to date, have been
either:

- The result of community action. Efforts like the transition towns
movement.
- Development driven. Communities that have built from the ground up
with resilience in mind, i.e. agricultural urbanism.
Unfortunately, these early efforts have been sporadic and the results
haven't reached what's needed to become fully resilient. Why? The
reason is that these efforts are being attempted early in the cycle,
before the trends that make transition inevitable have fully matured.
These trends include:

- Expensive energy. Energy costs are climbing (with occasionally
spike), but they haven't reached a level that makes local production
much more attractive than global production, yet. They will.
- Technology. The costs of producing goods locally is rapidly
decreasing due to new technologies. For example, with desktop
fabrication, we are right at the cusp of a rapid increase in
efficiency/capability -- the equivalent of 1980 in the personal
computer industry.
- Disruptions. Shortages, panics, and cascading failures. We had a
taste of a big one in 2008 in the financial industry and lots of small
ones. More to come since the global system is only becoming more
interconnected and unstable as time progresses.
- Economic failure/D2 (the second global depression). There's a strong
argument that we are already in the midst of a second global
depression. As economic failure intensifies on the global stage (debt,
default, income stratification, fraud, etc.), the need for local
economic activity will intensify.
- Global guerrilla insurgencies. Low grade, crime fueled insurgencies
that spread like the plague. Think Mexico. Shootings, kidnappings,
hijackings, etc.
- There's many more (political chaos, the inevitable global pandemic,
sovereign default, the disappearing middle class, etc.), but these are
some of the top ones.
Fortunately, there may be another way to get resilient communities off
the ground faster than waiting for the trends driving their development
to become inexorable (and in the process lose many, many people to the
encroaching failure). The fastest way I can think of is to use the
Internet to build a system that fosters their development (what other
method can go from scratch to 500 million participants in three years).

The system I propose is a fully functional economy built as an Internet
service. I believe that almost all of the elements need to build this,
launch it, and gain widespread adoption are already available today.
Further, there are people ready to build it. The only limitation is the
funding needed to exploit the opportunity.

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