The Post-Scarcity Economy (Posted by Jim) by der Augenblick

There's a fascinating article in the Spring 2009 issues of h+ Magazine (link takes you to the online version—the article starts on page 37).

The author, Jason Stoddard, claims the current financial crisis is the first step on the way toward a post-scarcity economy in which our notion of value is overturned.

But what if advances in manufacturing efficiencies make it possible to live well, simply by interacting with friends and going about your life? What if below-replacement-level birth rates and advances in biotechnology meant you could check out of the system by claiming a piece of unused desert and planting a house? This surveillance economy might be a very easy place to live.

Stoddard is raising a possibility I raised in my earlier post on automation and capitalism, namely that advances in our current social networking technologies, combined with the seamless interface between computing and reality that will come with the internet of things (listen to this talk for more information), will revolutionize the way we both produce and distribute surplus-value. This will happen before we reach a post-scarcity economy.

The possibilities once we reach a post-scarcity economy (through nanotechnology or something else) are almost limitless. What few people are saying—Stoddard stops short of saying this, too—is that capitalism is unintelligible under such circumstances. If necessary labor consists in—to put it bluntly—screwing around with your friends and having a good time, if that's the way we acquire our means of subsistence, then there effectively is no barrier between ourselves and social wealth. If one can take the current emerging paradigm of decentralization emerging now and extrapolate it a decade or two into the future, a paradigm of radical democracy and effortless participation takes shape. It would be a self-sustaining, self-growing, undirected, democratic and organic communist system.

Timeline for Accelerating Political/Social Change (Jim) by der Augenblick

It's a lot of fun reading timelines for things like the technological singularity or even just the implementation of robots in our economy. But have you ever wondered what a political/economic/social timeline would look like? I decided to put a short one together, just for fun.

2010 - We show signs of emerging from the recession we're currently in, but the rate of job growth is less than what it was at the beginning of the recession, i.e., another "jobless recovery".

2013 - We begin to enter another recession, deeper and longer than the one we're currently in. Tremendous job loss forces the federal government to take larger role in ensuring people have necessities, though relative weakness of the government compared with social democracies makes this difficult and somewhat inefficient. Still, we get by.

2017 - Again we recover from the recession, but recovery is again less than it was last time. This is owing to the vast number of jobs that have been automated. New jobs in the information technology sector are not sufficient to make up for it.

2019 - The economy enters recession again. Unprecedented job losses seizing the entire world. Unprecedented interventions from world governments manage to keep the economy going, though they are incredibly inefficient compared with the market forces they are attempting to replace.

2020 - Period of perpetual economic crisis begins. Permanent recession. Internet 3.0, the "internet of things", is ubiquitous. Production processes increasingly automated but also democratized through the next generation of social/material networking technologies.

Mid 20s - Capitalism is in severe crisis. It can't prop itself up anymore by means of market forces alone. The state can no longer prop it up in a way that is profitable. This is not localized either but is global. Growing demand for the basic necessities of life, but a smaller and smaller role left for the state. Needs are increasingly met through an organized though decentralized process which takes place over the "internet".

2025-2030 - Drastic fall in the cost of means of subsistence. Large portions of the means of subsistence are removed from the value-form all together. By the 30s food, housing, and medicine are free due to the ease with which they're produced by automated labor. Due to exponential increases in information technology and robot design, work becomes obsolete. "Unemployment" nearing 85% of the global population makes the category almost meaningless.

2030 - Though there are perhaps isolated markets, capitalism as a world system no longer exists. Neither markets nor state control of production even approached the efficiency with which the fully automated, open source economy operates. The state still exists, though it is more and more restricted to policing information, protecting against identity theft, etc.

2040 and beyond - There is no longer any state or economy as we understand them now. Society is fully "online", though the distinction between the internet and the world (and indeed machine and person) no longer exists. Flow of information and personal identity completely impossible to protect or regulate from the outside. World intelligence system totally self-regulating and communistic.

Obviously I'm just making this up—even Marshall Brain doesn't think we'd have that much automation that early. But I really haven't seen a lot of timelines like this alongside the technological ones. People seem to assume that capitalism will coexist indefinitely with this kind of explosion, and that just seems preposterous to me. But I think this is something we need to start thinking about. We need to extrapolate political, social, and economic change into the future just like we do with technology.

What's your timeline look like? Post it here.

Legacy of communism: MOAR COMMUNISM?? (Jim) by der Augenblick

Meanwhile, the collapse of communism may turn out to have been an essential contributor to the collapse of the world capitalist system:

The world capitalist economy is collapsing. The rightist pro-capitalist regimes that have been ruling these countries since the early 1990s are imposing severe cuts on the remaining social safety-net programs. As a result, workers are rising up in protest.

And workers are occupying factories in Ukraine:

Workers have occupied an engineering plant in Ukraine demanding payment of owed wages, nationalisation of the plant, and production of socially useful machinery. Today at 9.30am more than 300 workers occupied the administrative building of Kherson Engineering Plant. The workers are demanding payment of wages, nationalization of the plant without compensation to its owner and have declared their intention to occupy the building until their demands are fulfilled in full.

Factory guards did not resist seriously, and no workers were hurt. A council of workers elected the previous day is in charge of the building.