>Take note of the goods and services we really need. Things like food, shelter, shoes, etc.

I assume someone must be in charge of determining what products are essential and what products are frivolous consumerism. I assume you have someone in mind for the job. Yourself perhaps?

I'm a big girl. I can make my own decisions on what is essential and what is frivolous in my own life.

No. You’ve completely misunderstood. This is a free market. People decide for themselves what is essential. When a lot of people in a region buy certain machines which they considered essential, that region will have an abundance of those goods. It happens organically. I am 100% opposed to authoritarian control and there is always someone who makes this quip without bothering to actually consider what I have written.

You are conditioned from a young age by the ad industry to want a lot of things that are not essential in your life.

That's one theory. Another theory is that the ad industry is exploiting a human nature that has been there long before ads or industry.

How would we test that theory? How would we test if humans have always wanted things or if nobody wanted things until ads were invented?

I wouldn’t be so dismissive of the public relations industry. Sigmund Freud’s newphew Edward Bernaise is regarded as the creator of public relations, and he wrote multiple books and talked widely about his theories for manipulating the public. These theories have been put to the test multiple times and they proved successful enough that the industry is thriving 100 years later.

https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/02/27/torches-of-...

> This has worked in other human societies before so this should be possible

Which ones?

Many indigenous cultures. The Iroquois native Americans might be one example. There was no notion that a minority got rich off the labor of others.

> There was no notion that a minority got rich off the labor of others.

    Northern Iroquois Slavery
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790

I do not argue that the Iroquois were perfect, but we are not comparing them to a perfect society.

a tangent: I remember reading that historically, Chinese doctors were paid by the healthy people in order to keep the community healthy, and a sick person would not pay until they recovered. I would compare it to insurance, but that's not really the same, it would be of doctors were the insurance providers, but the current model just makes a third party really rich and incentivises the doctors to wish general cough and cold on the community (I'm not saying that doctors are evil, just that the current system doesn't make sense to me) I'd love to hear an opposing view, and why you think that way. cheers, have a great day yall

Any that definitely supported some form of individual rights? As a total weirdo it frightens me to think that I might have been born into a society where my differences may have caused me great suffering at the hands of tradition.

I’m not sure I follow? In today’s society a lot of people suffer because they are different. Disabled people for example, who would have been cared for in indigenous cultures. Yes the Iroquois supported individual rights. They just had a culture where whatever you did, you kept the needs of others in mind and did what you could to help. You were still an individual.

While true, without advancements in modern healthcare, many of the disabilities people go through life with today would result in a much earlier death. Cystic fibrosis for example is to this day incredulously expensive to treat but with a much greater life expectancy than during the heyday of the Iroquois.

I believe we can to some extent have both: a culture that supports all people and also produces high end medical equipment. The point of mentioning other cultures is to point out that human nature allows it.

I'm willing to believe that we could continue to produce the equipment we do today. But what's the motivation to advance?

Take programming: we could all easily cut down our work hours by just maintaining current systems, which do a huge amount already. There are artificial forces that make us continue to trade one-time innovations for the same living standards as yesterday. Why not automate food production etc, and share the minimal maintenance required?

I think the reason societies that stand still in this way haven't stuck around is ultimately that nations compete with each other, and will come and take everything once they advance further.

There are a lot of motivations to advance. Why do we research cancer cures? We use profit motives to encourage the formation of specific organizations but the reason we really care about curing cancer is that we lose loved ones that mean the world to us.

Similarly, the developers of Blender are able to get paid for their work, but it seems that they choose this particular task because it interests them. If they had all of their material needs met, they might take a break and work fewer hours but I’d bet they might still work on blender for fun.

That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m just obsessed with designing new robots because it’s fun. In the last three months I’ve created a four axis robot arm from scratch (each gearbox is custom designed and integrated with the 3D printed frame)[1]. Nobody is paying me. The only reason I do paid work is that I need money for survival. But I would still be working on robots if all my material needs were met by machines. And I’d also teach classes on how they work and how to design them, and I’d be in the shop making new designs because that’s already what I spend all my time on.

And we can automate food production! See my profile for the open source farming robot I am designing. And the robot arm I am working on as a personal project is something I hope I can use in a free food production system. You can make a super healthy vegetable and lentil curry for $2 per dish in raw cost. The machine that makes it can be the size of a van and it doesn’t need human workers. If a community owned such a machine they could all eat a really healthy diet for a few dollars a day.

[1] https://twitter.com/tlalexander/status/1453238105230675976?s...

I took a 100% pay cut to work on D. But there aren't enough people like that to run a society like that, not remotely close.

I think it depends on the society. With automation to reduce absolute labor needs and a people that prefer living in community with the basics to slaving away at a retail job, I think it can be done. People like to work and they like to help one another. We've created a system that isolates people and many of us are sick of it. We would way rather have a hot meal and the company of friends (who are not themselves stuck at some job) than slave away for hours at some retail store that jerks you around for a pittance.

I think if you could build the systems and attract some early adopters, you could prove how much better it is. Once people see it, they would fight to keep it running. They would volunteer their time to keep it going. Or they would agree to a more defined schedule and voluntarily participate in this work agreement to keep it going. The alternative is that they're forced to work for survival so I still think it could be a better deal.

Who is going to clean the toilets?

Same as today. Very little.

Servicing village sized tribes in relatively plentiful biomes, vs nation-level populations (serviced by machines) seem to be very different things.

And how did those indigenous cultures fair when they came in contact with Western systems of resource collection and distribution?

How can a system be both agrarian and strong enough to survive contact with non-agrarian systems? How do you stop 10 people from secretly working hard and producing an extra ration of gruel right under your commie nose?

Well, we just watched the greatest military in the world™ scuttle out of Afghanistan with its tail between its legs, so we know that a primarily agrarian society CAN resist a militaristic society as long as its prepared.

Pre-Colonial American societies were decimated by the biological warfare of the Europeans first. Now America turns its taste for biological warfare on itself. But, anyway, I digress.

> so we know that a primarily agrarian society CAN resist a militaristic society

America did not invade, or go to war with Afghanistan - it was attempting to liberate it, not annihilate it.

America absolutely invaded Afghanistan. I don't see the point of this line of questions but if you want a better example see Vietnam.

I think you're ignoring the context of my comment.

The USA entered alright, but the common meaning of invade is

> (of an armed force) enter (a country or region) so as to subjugate or occupy it.

and subjugate in turn:

> bring under domination or control, especially by conquest.

American did not intend to annihilate Afghans, nor the Vietnamese.

> I don't see the point of this line of questions

That the resistance you describe depends on the behaviour of the aggressor. Could the Japanese resist the atomic bomb? Could German Jews peacefully/non-violently resist the Nazi regime?

False. We learned that an agrarian society can resist democracy and nation building. They were incapable of withstanding military destruction. They didn't even last 90 days.

In fact they've already destroyed the military infrastructure we left them. "Soldiers" are literally parting out $20 million helicopters for $10,000 in scrap metal.

They didn't really resist, because they knew what the long game was. The people who planned the war didn't.

We should have bombed them for 90 days and declared victory and went home -- it would have been symbolic and pointless, but a lot cheaper in treasure and blood.

> Pre-Colonial American societies were decimated by the biological warfare of the Europeans first.

Pizzaro defeated the Incas before the diseases did.

> How do you stop 10 people from secretly working hard and producing an extra ration of gruel right under your commie nose?

I am talking about a voluntary system that works in some ways like wikipedia. I want to get together with others, under a libertarian system of free exchange, and build systems that are designed to meet core human needs as cheaply as possible. Then people can band together and buy those machines if they want, and they can share the output or whatever.

If 10 people want to go do something else, that doesn't affect me any more than Apple affects Wikipedia.

> Anyway that’s my theory

Not really. It's called communism, and it's been tried many times.

Who has tried a voluntary form of communism focused on the use of automation to lower material costs of living?

You cannot have "voluntary communism". The point of communism is to ban certain things -- e.g. make it illegal for private people to own capital. The entire definition requires that it be involuntary.

In capitalism, there are worker-owned companies living side by side with privately and publicly held firms. People can go off and create their own communist utopia and share their wealth. You cannot go off and create a capitalist utopian community in a communist system.

Because capitalism doesn't ban ownership structures (except for anti-trust against monopolies). It doesn't care about the outcome, it cares about the free choice. Economic liberalism -- for all its faults -- really is based on the principles of free association, enforcement of contracts, and voluntary trade. You can argue that the outcomes don't capture externalities, but you can't argue that they are involuntary.

Communism, OTOH, cares only about outcomes -- is this distribution of resources fair -- and does not care about free choice at all. This is because you have to forcefully take stuff from one person to give to another, and forcefully ban someone from running their own for-profit business. Of course communism couldn't do that perfectly -- there was always a black market of people who bought and sold for a profit. But they risked prison time for that, and sometimes were sent to Siberian labor camps.

Under capitalism you can create a contract in which people voluntarily pool resources and then distribute them according to some rule, say everyone gets a fixed payout irrespective of their position in the company. Therefore the economic system in which a group of people can choose to collectively own property is called "capitalism".

> You cannot have "voluntary communism".

> In capitalism... People can go off and create their own communist utopia and share their wealth.

what happens when some people don't want to participate in your voluntary communism and insist on inventing new things and marketing them?

You'll note that membership in intentional communities is quite low.

> what happens when some people don't want to participate in your voluntary communism and insist on inventing new things and marketing them?

What happens when someone decides they do not want to contribute to wikipedia?

> You'll note that membership in intentional communities is quite low.

Which is why I am designing an open source farming robot. Maybe if the work is fixing robots it will be more appealing than laboring in the fields every day. Sure is for me.

Open source tractors and other agricultural equipment have been around for quite a while now, but don't really have much uptake. People still prefer to buy John Deere. Why do you think that might be?

Well I’m not designing a tractor. For large equipment it is probably difficult to compete on the manufacturing side. Luckily our vehicle is much smaller than a tractor.

I would entice you to read Manna by Marshall Brain.

The positive "alternative" presented at the end seems like a friendly veneer over the same dystopia.

Having an AI referee permanently embedded in my spine ready to cut motor functions at the first detected bad behavior sounds almost as hellish as the first scenario in that story.

Maybe I'm just assuming incorrectly, but wasn't that the point of the story?

I’ve come across it but I don’t read much. Most of my learning comes from audio lectures.

This isn’t a dig against you, but isn’t this just an idealized view of a communist society?

...and/or idealized socialism. i agree that consumerism is an issue, but the solution isn't 'end consumerism', as that's just completely unrealistic. it'd be more realistic to think of ways to redirect our esteem-giving activities toward people who produce real and essential goods, and the rest would balance out much better as a result. that's diametrically opposed to our corrent system of giving esteem to the wealthy, which is why this approach is also very difficult, but not impossible.

The way "esteem" is distributed today is if you produce something I want I "esteem" you by buying it. If you don't produce anything I want I "disrespect" you by doing absolutely nothing to you. I don't give you anything, I don't take anything away from you. I simply smile, nod, and move on with my life.

Seems like you want to take freedom of association away from the rest of humanity and put it into your own hands. It's hard for me to imagine a mentality that is more self-centered and more selfish than that.

that's an odd and quite uncharitable interpretation. there's not even a remote connection to (restricting) freedom of association, much less with my own hands (how would that even work?).

the underlying point is that money isn't the be-all-and-end-all of what we value and what we exchange in our socioeconomic lives. money collapses a multidimensional social calculus into a single-dimensional metric, with all the undesirable consequences of that kind of collapse. hoarding wealth is selfish, but it's worse when it also hoards power and esteem along with it.

not many wealthy people deserve respect (or power) along with their riches. people who make stuff with their hands and brains, not passively through wealth (e.g., rents), deserve esteem. that's the point.

Would you change your opinion if you were presented with hard data proving that 80% of wealthy people earned that wealth by delivering goods and services to people who voluntarily paid for it, and only 20% of the wealthy inherited it and that inherited wealth does not last more than 3 generations?

> 80% of wealthy people earned that wealth

More likely they hired workers who created that wealth. And while in today's system we say that the person at the top "earned" that wealth, we could just as easily arrange firms differently so they are cooperatively owned. And in doing so they would not produce super wealthy people but instead a society with broader wealth distribution.

>More likely they hired workers who created that wealth.

More likely they hired workers and everyone created wealth together. A worker can't work until someone builds the assembly line, buys the materials, and sells the final product.

If it's so easy to do the whole process that anyone can do it, what's stopping you? Marxists claimed the capital class denied the funds to the working class to start their own companies. Well since the world went off the gold standard there is no lack of funding. It's the opposite now. Inflation is an attack on wealth. Wealthy people are ravenous to get their wealth out of currency and into "things" like property and businesses. Venture capitalists will fund the most ridiculous ideas in the desperate hope that one of them will "hit".

Nothing is stopping me and I am working on this.

The binary metric you're referring to is simply an answer to the question "are you interested in an exchange?". This question is fundamentally binary. "Consumerism" is just the interaction of private property and freedom of association - which of these would you get rid of to abolish it?

> "Consumerism" is just the interaction of private property and freedom of association

No, you have misunderstood. I am 100% for freedom of association and freedom of contract. "Consumerism" is not just exchange, it is something more specific. It is the idea that buying more is directly tied to happiness and well being. Look.

"Consumerism is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal and that a person's wellbeing and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions. " https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumerism.asp

Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say ending consumerism is completely unrealistic?

just zoom out and really look at the scope of the issue: 7+ billion people in the world want stuff. there's a huge matching problem between the want and the stuff, and a huge geographic/wealth/information asymmetry as well. there's going to be a lot of friction and waste in that huge, inefficient matching process (e.g., 30-40% of US food goes into the trash, 30-40% of stuff is returned to retailers). to achieve your goal, you'd have to be able to control (aka coerce) a majority of those people to want only an arbitrarily narrow set of "acceptable" things. that's just not tenable, even in a small, remote country.

You and I view this very differently. First of all, getting people goods that they need is not consumerism. Consumerism is the idea that buying a new car or a Pepsi will make you feel better. Or that doing so will make you “cool”. So for example most car manufacturers come out with a new model every year and then push the idea that buying a new model is an indicator of success. But I claim we would be better off if cars were more similar year to year so that replacement parts were more common year to year. This would make repair easier and lower waste. The problem is not getting people cars (well, cars in particular are a contentious example…). The problem isn’t getting people goods they need. Is that the companies who make those goods use psychological tricks to convince us we need to upgrade even when our thing is working. And they design their products with the upgrade in mind and it all leads to more waste.

To be honest it’s difficult for me to describe what I mean when I say consumerism. But getting people goods they need is not in and of itself consumerism. Consumerism is like the military industrial complex. It creates problems to feed a bloated production machine that consumes more and more because it benefits those in charge of the whole thing. And so consumerism leads our culture to believe the person with the new watch is cool and we all believe we must work day in and day out to compete in an endless game of consumption.

That is very different than, say, manufacturing electrical transformers and cabling so a new town can have electricity. In the middle the line is not clear but we can focus at first on the extents.

> if cars were more similar year to year

They were like this in the Soviet Union, and it was laughable how much they ended up lagging behind after a few decades. I see the process you describe, despite it's perceived but necessary inefficiency, as resulting in a system that delivers the most progress and the most resiliency. There's a reason that self-driving cars are being invented in one place and not another. The driving force behind that reason is much more important to preserve than any incidental waste or excess along the way.

But in another way, this is exactly how open source works. They do not sell you a new release and push ads showing how stylish you will be if you dump version 13 and upgrade to version 14. They just push a point release as needed. Some software is updated daily and some is updated once every five years. There is no marketing team trying to drum up artificial demand for some python package.

> They were like this in the Soviet Union, and it was laughable how much they ended up lagging behind after a few decades.

The soviet system was an authoritarian one and I am proposing a free market solution. I am basically just saying people can save money if they band together and buy machines which provide for their basic needs. But also it would all be open source, and like software it would be updated as needed.

Actually the example with cars was just an attempt to explain consumerism. I might as well just paste this definition in to this comment like I just did elsewhere.

"Consumerism is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal and that a person's wellbeing and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumerism.asp

i understand your position. i had that sort of idealism once upon a moon. but i now realize that the causation is backwards. people want, full stop[0]. that is natural and universal, and trying to take that away from people is tantamount to stripping humanity of its animus.

given this universal truth, the question isn't 'how do we limit our wants, and our desire to induce others' wants to fuel our own wants?', but rather 'how do we repurpose this innate desire for the greatest collective good?' capitalism tries to provide one answer: redirect greed into productive drive by rewarding economic novelty and efficiency. however, even that idealism has been subverted by the political economy and the complex interactions between government and business, to the detriment of social harmony.

[0]: note that what we all really want is to be at the top of the monkey pile, and everything you're talking about are various proxies for how to tell where we are in the pile. we're never going to overcome that with solutions like 'end consumerism'. you're literally working against human nature with that line of thinking.

For a long time I wanted to be at the top of the monkey pile.

A LOT of that came from received culture growing up in California as a boy in the 1990's. I no longer want to be at the top of a pile of monkeys. I want my daily labor to support others in my community (broadly) rather than working to enrich a few people who will own everything and control our economy.

I think if you grow up in a society that tells everyone "greed is good" then you're going to think being greedy is human nature, but actually anthropologists know that societies have again and again existed based on mutual support of one another. I am simply suggesting we drop this "greed is good" mantra and focus on helping one another. And I think it can be more economically efficient when you value each person's life more or less equally.

no offense to you personally, but that's a naive position. "greed is good" is a movie platitude, not the basis of our complex socioeconomic system, so it's practically useless to argue against it. more crucially, your solution says nothing about the universality of human desire, which is why it's simply a non-starter.

if you really want to improve social equity, distributing esteem more widely[0] will be more fruitful as a guiding light than trying to devise a more perfect, automation-based socialist/communist economic model. extreme automation will inevitably increase inequality as capital will find ways to corner ownership of the machines and hoard the productivity gains, no matter your good intent.

[0]: 'flatten the pile', if you will.

Isn't ending consumerism essential to avoid running out of resources.

If we could mandate that a product can only be sold if the entire lifecycle is sustainable then technically it could continue. This includes the company taking responsibility for disposal and recycling of anything they produce.

The current model of transferring materials from source, through consumers and then direct to landfill where they sit forever can only end one way.

probably not. it's hard to consume lots of stuff en masse by most of the population. in the developed world, we've already largely moved to service economies and have less than replacement population growth, and so in that sense we've "maxed out" on consuming stuff. that's not to say that we're doing a great job at being efficient and frugal in what we consume, but that running out of resources isn't that big of a problem (for the foreseeable future).

I’d say so yes.

I mean yes I do call it libertarian communism, tho I often leave that part out since people will be totally onboard until you mention the name. But also it’s a specific scheme that has the goal of lowering the marginal cost of living. And it’s totally voluntary which is not true for all schemes for communism.

> And it’s totally voluntary

Sure, while you are in charge. But when a more ambitious leader bashes your head in and takes over, maybe not so. How much of Lenin remained when Stalin took over?

There is no one in charge. I am not in charge. This is not a system based on any manner of authoritarian control.

Even a spiritual leader is in charge, if not in control. There still need to be laws, and those often follow from central sources/philosophies.

It's communism that reduces one of the notable downsides of communism, the social loafing aspect, due to reliance on machines instead of your fellow man for productive effort(labor equivalent).

It's a little hand-wavey though.

Who services the machines?

Are the machines centralised in mass-manufacture-scales and products distributed (as they are now); or de-centralised but also less efficient (wrt manufacture and supply chain) as a result. What would the raw materials be, and how are they powered (given the carbon-crisis).

I'd also ask what specifically are the essentials. Food? Shelter? ok. What about healthcare?

I love that you are asking these questions. Indeed I think any writing meant to describe an entire economy in a few paragraphs will necessarily be a bit hand wavey.

I did try to answer one of your questions: the machines are serviced by the members of the collective. In any plan for a society education must be considered. But much the same way that any halfway technical person can learn how to fix a 3D printer, these machines should be designed with repair in mind and along with open source designs there would be freely accessible repair guides.

Production should be somewhat decentralized so there should be many places manufacturing motors etc. but when it comes to putting the machines together I’d expect that different collectives would focus on certain machines and they would trade with people near them. Remember that you can always fall back on “people use money to exchange goods and services” I’m just imagining a model where that isn’t really the dominant way people manage their day to day survival.

I am not sure that decentralization is less efficient.

Getting the raw materials is one of the more serious questions. Generally falling back on non-automated things, firms should be cooperatively run. Also raw material consumption would arguably go down for westerners who move to this model, as there would be minimal waste and the machines would all be designed for repair.

Health care is to me essential but these things would vary from region to region based on cultural ideals and material conditions.

I am an engineer and I love to fix machines. I would rather spend my days fixing machines than working a corporate job to enrich a few executives. People who want to be Doctors or teachers often feel similarly. They need their material needs covered so they can do what they value most - helping others. I basically just think we can really streamline the whole production side of the economy and design things so everyone benefits and actually stops needing to work 40+ hours a week forever.

How would you prevent one of these collectives from, say, inventing an iPhone and monetizing it? And if you don't, aren't you back to square one again?

> How would you prevent one of these collectives from, say, inventing an iPhone and monetizing it?

You don't.

> aren't you back to square one again?

No, why would that be? We live in a world with a million top down owned capitalist corporations. If by some mass movement we get a few thousand collectives to band together, there will always be churn. Groups that dissolve, or change their aims, or seek profit over the cohesiveness of the group. You would do the same thing with them as would have been done at the beginning. Do you best not to trade with them. If you actually need what they have on offer, clone it. But the whole point of this system is to create some semblance of independence. Either people value that enough to stick with it, or they don't. IMO it's worth trying even if it might fail.

But isn't it the profit-seeking capitalists who actually bring innovations to market, to the benefit of everyone? Why would you deprive yourself of the benefit of trading with these groups? "Independence" isn't really a thing in a world with a global supply chain. It's simply not realistic to produce everything that we consume locally for anything approaching a reasonable cost. Economies of scale are extremely powerful.

I think your vision makes sense. It might not be optimal currently but as A.I., automation, and other technologies advance (Fusion fingers-crossed) I can see it becoming plausible and even desirable over the "pure-ish" capitalist economy we currently have.

Just to showcase some of the automation prototypes that makes me a hopeful believer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/14/weedkill... https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/PlayStation-s-sec...

3-d printed homes too

Thank you. I should say that critically, this scheme is not dependent on advancement in technology. It does take advantage of the fact that computers can perform labor for free, but there are examples of the elimination of hunger and equitable distribution of food without using any advanced technology. Specifically the Sikhs in India [1] serve over 1 million free meals a day in facilities all over India, and in Vienna Austria housing is built by the city and distributed equitably [2].

Advanced technology changes what is possible, but we can do this without advanced technology. 3D printed homes for example don’t really solve the problem as framing a home isn’t expensive: it’s the land and finishing the home that cost the most.

[1] https://youtu.be/qdoJroKUwu0

[2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...

Point accepted. Yeah technology isn't necessary, but if tech can do the same amount for the same cost removing much of the labor requirement then that's a tremendous win. Additionally the lower the cost the easier it is to append a welfare or socialist cost on the the tax payer's bill. Providing decent food, housing, and some minimal healthcare at 5% of GDP vs 40% of a nations GDP makes a world of difference.

At thresholds of 5% combined with high automation mean such social programs won't be as vehemently contested and their absence might even be viewed as a unnecessary cruelty.

Some mutant hybrid of what the Sihks do in India, and these automations might be interesting:

https://mobile.twitter.com/TechAmazing/status/14397489959166...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byDmDWq7wc8

+ a quick google of food factory gifs/videos

A hybrid mutant that maximizes yield, minimizes cost and labor, if such a permutation is realistic and technology-wise permitting.

Socialism partially generates such an antagonistic response (at least in the USA) because how much of a burden it is on others, Minimize that burden might change the fundamental collective consciousness to how people view what the government should provide.

Yes!! That is a big motivation. If supporting others is very cheap people are more likely to support it.

And I love that you're on to the food machines. I have obsessed over the idea of automated production based on the Sikh systems. I hope I can build it some day. Or even if I don't, that someone does.

> I am not sure that decentralization is less efficient.

So, maybe your vision of focussing on the essentials - food, shelter etc rules out microchips which definitely benefit from specialised employees, and centralised operations; but that will rules out a lot of future advances wherein microchips are embedded in everything, or at least until a suitable de-centralised equivalent is found.

In the meanwhile, I'd worry of the problem of being over-taken; i.e other free nations that do subscribe to capitalism and the centrally managed resource model outcompete and invade you - which is arguably the fate of many of the American tribes that lacked the weapons to fight colonialism. Not having microchips can cripple any modern army/defence-force, least of all an ad-hoc decentralised one.

Also, things like injection moulding might be out to - modern products manage cheap mass-productions by producing expensive master tools, and using them to churn out millions of items - unless tribes specialise on produce (in which case we are back to trading goods and services) then no more of these items either.

> the machines are serviced by the members of the collective

This limits how complex these machines can be, and or numerous - which in turn limits how prevalent. Also, back to the question; are all the machines going to be bare mechanical contraptions of wood and steel, or can they contain silicon - which unless you have an answer for fabrication/manufacture, cannot be repaired forever, and will need to be replaced. Modern open-source is parasitic to the capitalist economy around it - 3D printers still contain Atmel mcus and intel cpus, not to mention the motors, rotors and precision belt/shaft/bearings.

> Health care is to me essential but these things would vary from region to region based on cultural ideals and material conditions.

Where do the doctors come from? Are we hoping as many people are willing to spend a large amount of time training, or being trained, as surgeons; as there are people who need surgery? Will we still punish negligent doctors, at risk of no-one wanting to bear the burden of liability if we did?

What about law? Would anyone want to be a lawyer if it wasn't well paid? Would many current lawyers do law if it wasn't well paid?

> I am an engineer and I love to fix machines

I feel this is a strong bias colouring your opinion - many engineers love their jobs, and the things they fix/design/repair/manipulate. You seem to be arguing for a society of engineering, based on the manufacture of things (machines and their products) - but society needs more than things, and people are often motivated less by things too; by wealth and status, for example; I'm not sure everyone can find the same joy in engineering as those who select for it.

> Doctors or teachers often feel similarly

Not so sure that's true. Many engineers care more about the things than the help they provide people, and I'm sure doctors are the same too. If feels too much that everyone needs to subscribe to the same philosophy for this to work, and even then there will be some roles that are neglected in favour of more "engineery" ones..

While I do not advocate for a state-based model, I want to point out that the soviets beat the USA to orbit on a centrally planned economy. I see no reason to assume we cannot have machine tools and other high end equipment. Especially because: > open-source is parasitic to the capitalist economy

A parasite harms the host. Open source is symbiotic with the capitalist economy. I do fully expect that these machines will be built by products of the capitalist system at first. The point is that over time these people would rely less and less on the capitalist system for directly meeting their needs. Over time if this works it would behoove them to replace the entire economy they rely on with one they control. But there are first order needs like food and clothing and then there are second order needs like parts for the machine that brings them food. They can gain a lot of freedom by just covering their first order needs with machines they own.

As far as engineering, yes my examples all center around engineering because I am an engineer speaking mostly to other engineers here. But there are other people: therapists, grief counselors, teachers, doctors, librarians, carpenters, etc who would love to provide those services to friends for free if their survival was ensured.

I am imagining communities inside of the USA which simply trade with one another instead of buying from capitalist corporations. So only people who want this lifestyle would actually choose to live there. People who are super selfish and don't want to help anyone can simply keep living in the capitalist world, and see what it's like when no one cares for anyone else.

I’m not sure why you got downvoted. This is completely correct. Providing for everyone by trapping human beings in a giant production machine is inhumane. But machines are (generally) happy to do this for us.

>End “consumerism” behavior where every problem is perceived to have a solution in the form of a quick product you can buy - much of that is a psychological trick played by marketers and rarely solves the real problem.

>Take note of the goods and services we really need. Things like food, shelter, shoes, etc.

>Develop a culture where getting rich is not the goal but making sure everyone has what they need is. This has worked in other human societies before so this should be possible.

There are two versions of this: communism and Religious asceticism (particularly Christian, given the concern for all individuals.)

Yes. One could call this communism and I often do. But note that this is a voluntary system, so it is libertarian communism. It is not based on authoritarian rule as many people who mention communism will associate it with.

Without the authoritarian rule, how does it get started? And what happens when people lose interest in playing by these voluntary guidelines?

> I have a theory that we can eliminate 90% of the required labor in our economy with the following strategy:

Until we had extremely advanced robotics, endless land, and infinite energy/resources, this will never become reality, even then, I have an endless amount of vanity uses of human labor/resources and I could trivially think up. By way of example, if it were the case in which money no issue for me personally, I could choose to then have constant military parades wherever I go, and I shall choose to go anywhere on my 10000 acre plot of gold and diamond covered land.

> End “consumerism” behavior where every problem is perceived to have a solution in the form of a quick product you can buy - much of that is a psychological trick played by marketers and rarely solves the real problem.

This is a quick way to a very poor quality of life. I've been poor, desperately needing basic household items and yet unable to obtain them, it's much, much better from a quality of life perspective to have problems solved with trivial tools that I buy off the shelf. That said, anyone is free to choose this life, buy less things, and retire slightly earlier than our peers. The reality is that cost of most consumer spending purchases is not what at the root cause of preventing people from retiring early, 'stuff' is damn cheap today.

> Take note of the goods and services we really need. Things like food, shelter, shoes, etc. Hmm, I've heard this line of thinking before, it leads to living in abhorrent conditions. I mean, nobody really 'needs' a 2000 sqft living space, why not just put people in a 20 sqft area instead? Nobody really 'needs' carpet or nice decor, lets build with nothing but cheap concrete. Yeah, let's push for living like prisoners! Thanks, but no thanks, I'm fine with working a little extra to avoid the extremes of this line of reasoning.

> Design machines which can produce those vital things in a fully automated or highly automated way. The point of this part is to reduce the marginal cost of one more item as close to zero as possible. This makes sharing easier as it becomes cheaper to share with one more person.

Like we've been doing? How do you think everything is so cheap to begin with?

> Make those machines completely open source, designed for repair and long life. You're free to spend your time making this and even doing it, but it's wasted effort at this point, we already have extremely efficient 'open source', long-life and 'easy' to repair machines. Visit the US patent site and look at the plethora of old machines that you could go build today if you so pleased.

> Create a system where people can acquire equal ownership shares in the machines they rely on. For any given machine those users work together to keep the machine operational and producing.

Or I could just buy shares of a manufacturing company, and we can use that money along with the revenue generated by the machines use to create goods, to keep the machine operational. What you're describing already exists.

> Land must be held in common (the legal device used today would be a public land trust) and housing, farmland, and manufacturing space is allotted to people based on need.

So who, exactly, is getting to decide how to use this land? Because I need about 100 acres to be happy and live on. In your system, would I be allowed to own that? Or would I still be stuck needing to live in a cell? What about 1000 acres? What about 10000 acres? Why should some group of people or laws prevent me from doing so? Groups of people already get together and prevent me from doing what I want with my land, why would I want even more people in power over me?

> Develop a culture where getting rich is not the goal but making sure everyone has what they need is. This has worked in other human societies before so this should be possible.

Or we could just let individuals make up their own choices on how they want to live and consume life. Those that want to become rich will, those who want to dick around all day drawing pretty pictures or writing poetry will do that. Much like we already have. People create a social hierarchy, even if we got rid of money, there are still going to be people that attempt to be at the 'top' socially. How do you deal with that in your system?

> Then everyone shares the output of their machines with their other shareholders. Each person owns shares in many machines.

You're just playing with words and wealth redistribution. Companies are income producing machines, and the business units are the companies individual machines of production. Each unit shares their output by feeding it into the shareholders already. Each person who decided to buy a share, gets that combined output.

> Under this system, there is no ownership class which can suck up all the surplus value. Instead, every person receives the benefit of automation.

And here it is, saw this one coming. This system fails each time it's implemented, from one reason or another. How does your system handle doctors? What about lawyers? There are no machines there, are they expected to not be allowed to benefit? This is a question that more generally extends to service style roles where there are no machines present, those people don't 'benefit' in the way you're describing from this system. In western reality of course, they benefit by being able to purchase items that were historically extremely expensive to produce, for essentially nothing. The multi-thousand dollar chair, made from the hands of a skilled wood worker becomes a $100 and affordable for all. Also under your system, I don't have a way to retire, I have no hope but to work. If I can't own anything, and thus I can't own to be ahead, I am stuck, forever a slave to these machines.

> In such a world I believe the average persons necessary working hours would be maybe 5 hours a week. We could spend our lives with friends and family, or reading and writing, painting or programming. Most of the necessary work would be done by volunteers who enjoy what they are doing. Work that people do not enjoy could be shared in rotation.

In such a world, I know the average person would become a slave to whomever is on top calling the shots, they would work endlessly to supply more and more to wealth to a few people on top. Be it a dictator or an elite political class, I want my life ruled as little as possible from those people.

>It’s all a voluntary and market based system but captures the main thrust of Marx’s critique of capitalism - the problem with an ownership class sucking up all the surplus value in society.

Except it's not exactly voluntary if I can't own anything that would allow me to stop working altogether, I'm still stuck being a slave to the state. There still exists a power structure that both capitalism and marxist systems have.

> We could do this. End consumerism, make everything open source, share land, know when you have enough and work to serve others in your community.

Thanks, but no thanks. I would rather buy what I feel I need than have you telling me what I actually need. I've been around people long enough to know that sharing land is about the last thing I want. People fuck up public places and there is no incentive to clean other peoples shit up. We already decide when enough is enough, it's just that most of us will always want more, welcome to the human condition. I work to serve myself, and my work is paid for by providing value to my community already.

>Anyway that’s my theory.

I don't mean to poke at you personally, don't take it that way. But this is an awful theory that will lead to more human suffering. If YOU want to live this way, by all means, please do! Just don't suggest 'we' should do it together.

> Just don't suggest 'we' should do it together.

Why? Literally what is the harm in sharing my idea for a voluntary automated society and asking others what they think of it?

> Except it's not exactly voluntary if I can't own anything that would allow me to stop working altogether, I'm still stuck being a slave to the state.

You're inventing this. I never said anything about the state because my philosophy is intentionally designed not to need the state and to avoid it. I am literally saying we can and should build facilities in US cities which will produce high quality healthy meals and give them away for free. I am specifically interested in how to marshal the material support to keep something like this going without the use of a state. So that is things like, buying farmland and using the farming robot I am designing to produce large amounts of food for cheap. Or partnering with farmers who want to donate a portion of their food to the free meals program. It is like wikipedia. If it came in to existence it would be because enough people came together with the common goal to provide this service for free to everyone. If some people nearby want to get really rich, they will simply not participate. And we will still feed them!

There is always someone who hears that I want to ensure every person has a hot healthy meal and they see the ghost of Stalin himself in front of them. But feeding each other is what we have done for ages. Since before we were human. I simply want to make it more efficient.

This was fun to read.