Tuesday, January 22, 2013
This was a letter sent by YouTube user JacqueFresco to lengthyounarther:
"In this response I clarify the role of innovators, correct your claim of a "State", address anarchism in both a free enterprise and an RBE, and replace the price mechanism with new methods.
THE SOCIAL ALGORITHM AND INNOVATORS
The concept of ownership is not only tricky, it is unjustifiable. No argument can demonstrate the validity of the concept. Even if the validity could be demonstrated, it has no authority. This is because human life is not governed by intellect, by which concepts are validated. Human life, and all life, operates *ESSENTIALLY.* -Meaning that everything occurs necessarily. To say, "I own this," or, "This is my property!" really has no basis in the reality of human life. Without a single governmental sovereign state and its laws, "property" and "ownership" has no means of persisting. In the free-for-all enterprise system, property becomes what Hobbes described. Property is anything and everything that one can wield power over, even the bodies of others. Indeed, at some point, it could become essential, i.e. necessary, to own the "property" of another person, as well as the person, regardless of whether it is voluntary or not. No intellectual agreement will change this. If it becomes necessary, it will happen. To believe that anarchism is possible in a free enterprise is not only a dangerous thought, it is overloaded with a dumptruck of problems, and with burden of explanation for the contrary of this claim.
The scientific perspective reveals that property and ownership do not exist, but instead exist within the delusions of human imagination. "Ownership" and "Property" are the products of humans attempting to conceptualize phenomena in the world they experience. The closest description of the same phenomena, in scientific terms, is to describe the movement of material by the behavior of the human organism, often referred to as power or control. If property and ownership is rooted merely in power and control, then the basis of property and ownership is war and victory, NOT consent and contract. And if it is war and victory, then no one "earns" their property. The concept of "Earn" is again a delusion of the human imagination, and does not actually exist in a world that operates *essentially". Anything "earned" is subject to the encroaching power and control of someone else.
The result is: no one has any "right" to anything whatsoever, OR the alternative is: every person has every right to everything. Ownership is inapplicable to an RBE. Instead, "Usership" exists as a purely natural and demonstrable concept. Usership occurs at all levels of nature, whereas ownership does not. All resources are not the property of a "central authority" as you say. What is the central authority you speak of? The authority is the algorithms built into the computer systems with which humans have an interface for input and feedback. The flow of information is the government. The global technological complex facilitates this flow. Money is no longer necessary as an information processing technology. All processing occurs in a different technology, and in the terms of new metrics of accounting - no longer by Price.
Regarding the projects of innovators, When you say, "the ideas it approves", what do you mean by "it"? There is no "IT". The approval of projects comes from the degree to which a project satisfies criteria. This criteria is predicated upon principles upon which all people will likely agree, one being: minimum expenditure : maximum gain. See Fuller's concept of Ephemeralization. This is the formula for abundance. Expenditure and gain is measured only in scientific units (the only means by which one can be sure to yield practical results). And if an innovator cannot fashion his project in these terms, then how the hell is he going to succeed? and what the hell is he trying to produce? In a free market, projects are not defined in terms of units that measure the project's contribution to the social system. This is why I say it is haphazard. Instead, they are measured in financial terms used only for individual self-preservation, not system gain and system preservation. As you said, "Entrepreneurs do not need the assent of the world state to act. They can act whenever they manage to voluntarily exchange for goods." However, the projects of these entrepreneurs have unaccounted costs that they do not pay for. Therefore, they essentially steal from other people without anyone realizing it, usually not until much later. Fortunately, in an RBE, these costs are accounted for by calculating the total gains and losses for the total system, according to the information available at that time.
In "vetoing" ideas/projects, innovation is not stifled. This is due to our estimations of how people will behave when their basic needs are satiated. If our estimations of human nature are correct, then under proper conditions people will become innovative, creative, and productive. A population of self-actualized people will give rise to projects with a wide range of variations, just as it occurs in a free market. These projects will have varying performance ratios. Those at the top (those with min. expenditure and max. gain) will be granted execution. Just as in a free enterprise where projects with minimum expenditure and maximum gain (for both producer and consumer) ultimately prevail over other projects.
The very fact that a person's proposal is rejected gives them incentive to improve it! Bolster their intellectual capital (for which all information is free!) so that their project can once again be proposed with improved performance ratios.
If an accepted project failed, then it was a waste indeed. (In fact, the accounting system considers all projects as waste until the projects succeed). But it can't be any more wasteful than a free enterprise where so much information is monopolized and secretive. In an RBE, all information is shared. Therefore, waste from failed projects will be far less often and the decision systems are far less likely to be in error. There also won't be duplicated projects.
In a free enterprise, where an entrepreneurs project fails, not all of his capital is reallocated. Indeed, much (not all) of the material, human, and financial capital is reallocated. However, so much of it loses value. And sometimes the material capital has no utility and hence destroyed. In addition, much of the information capital is not reallocated. Research information is often destroyed.
When an entrepreneur does succeed, society is not always better off. I'm not sure society is better off by an entrepreneur successfully selling toys and candy (or fastfood, alcohol, tobacco, etc. anything adverse to health). They succeed at this because they have situated themselves to answer demand. However, there are tremendous costs unaccounted for in this affair. Regardless of such costs, society is not improved by these industries. These industries are essentially parasitic. They prey on irrational demand. Though such demand is perfectly natural, it does not contribute to the health of the social system.
Meanwhile, in an RBE, though there is likely also irrational demand, there is no incentive to answer it! This is because there is no exclusive individual profit that benefits self-preservation. No one's life is secured or maximized by developing a project to produce lollipops; not the creator nor the consumer. Therefore, there arises a tendency to only answer rational demand, in which the innovator satisfies his complex needs by seeing his project come to fruition, and consumers satisfy a need by the utility of the product. Feel free to give me an example in which an innovator will have incentive to produce a product objectively detrimental to people or the environment.
An innovator has incentive to improve inter-continental transportation simply because his needs are satisfied by conquering the problem, or because he simply wants improved transportation for his own utility. Execution of this project benefits both himself and anyone else wherever it is utilized. The innovator does not need to "own the fruits of his labor" because his self-preservation does not depend on it. His existence is assured and secure by the providence of abundance and the innovators that manage to conceive of production and distribution systems with superior performance ratios. The only vested interest an innovator might have is the imperative of having his own complex needs satisfied. Therefore, such vested interest might lead him to sabotaging the project of another innovator who's project proves superior due to his enormous intellectual capital. However, the innovator, seeking to sabotage the other, will sabotage his own existence, because he loses out on the benefits the other innovator could have provided via his superior project. However, even if this did happen, a similar project with second best performance ratio falls next in line for execution. And the sabotaging innovator may be no closer to having his project executed than before. Therefore, the more prudent answer is simply to improve his own design. The likelihood of sabotage is up to you to judge.
Furthermore, the only differential advantage that might exist arises from an innovator's intellectual capital. This is because he accumulates nothing else, and therefore cannot harness anything else other than his own sheer intellectual competence against anyone else. Lastly, there is simply no more self-preservation orientation. Instead, people become oriented toward self-actualization/cultivation. All interest turns toward that when basic needs are satiated.
There is no "appeal" to the "state." A project is granted execution if it succeeds in maximizing its performance ratio above others. Submission of the specifications of the project and its performance ratios activates sequences in the technological complex that initiate the development of the project. Ripples flow through the entire global technological complex as the innovator inerfaces with the consultation system, and the project nears its completion. Availability of the innovation is announced. Utilization can thus commence. Coordination, synchronicity, interactivity, only possible by instant information and automated processing systems.
CALCULATION PROBLEM
Regarding the calculation problem. There are several methods proposed for overcoming the problem. One has been to obligate a consumer to work in proportion to the sumtotal of their consumption of resources. Essentially, they are billed in terms of work hours. They could be assigned to general management of data processing centers, or more ideally, assigned to problem solving, i.e. reversing the scarcity of those resources they consume. Thus, the degree to which they value their free time and the degree to which they value consuming a particular item will determine how much they consume. Due to great abundance and low cost, work hours would still be very little. Perhaps 4 hours a week. Items priced in Milliseconds of work time, the amount depending upon their absolute scarcity. With this method, corruption is much less possible, because there is no currency that is traded. The only problems might be one person stealing items from another person who has been billed for those items, so that the other person can avoid going to work. BUT, because all items for individual consumption are produced on demand, therefore reducing people's tendency to stockup, the chances of a person having the opportunity to steal another person's items is quite low, because a person will demand the item and use it soon after.
Another proposal has been to implement an artificial daily, weekly, or monthly point system, in which points symbolically represent a person's consumption, waste, reuse, and generation of resources. This is similar to the Technocracy system in which energy credits are proposed. In this case, a person is given a set amount of points, and as production capacity and efficiency increases, everyone's purchasing power (points) increase in proportion. Eventually, it is believed that the abundance of resources used to satiate basic needs will be so great, that the points a person is given would far exceed what they would ever practically consume. With such a point system, consumption rates can be calculated against the supply of resources. Some items may still have high cost, due to inefficiencies of production or scarce resources, and people would indeed be limited by the point/credit limit. However, it is precisely this high cost that motivates innovators to submit their projects for execution, if they believe they can reduce the costs by powerful innovations. Such innovation projects do not subtract from the individual innovator's point allowance. Instead, the project is taken on by the system, in a separate domain of valuation and criteria. Resources used for projects are more likely to be less abundant and more vulnerable to exhaustion. The resources withdrawn for Projects are calculated by a difference system of appraisal. Therefore, the individual point system no longer applies. This method is better, but efficacious only if resources are as abundant as estimated. However evidence today suggests that even the presently existing production capacity is sufficient to satiate the basic needs of people. Therefore, thanks to Captialism, we can now satiate people's basic needs all over the world, and now reorganize our social system so that it may anarchistically rests in the hands of the higher levels of human nature, in which new needs, tendencies, and behavior eclipses the historical self-preservation that once interfered with social cooperation and individual cultivation. We believe Capitalism has produced sufficient security for the reorganization we propose.
Lastly, another proposal answers the calculation problem, and could incorporate the point system mentioned above, though not necessarily. In this case, supply is tracked in two ways. One way is to seek to always maintain a supply always above a fixed threshold. For instance, maintaining a secure supply iron would consist of measuring the total supply of iron against the average of all withdrawal. The availability of a resource can then be accounted and conveyed in various ways. One way would be to tag every item/resource with a availability expectancy. For example, perhaps, given the rates of consumption for a shower head, and given the consumption rate of all other items that draw from the same raw and recycled resources, a shower head might have an availability expectancy of 5 years before the supply begins to fall below the secure threshold. By that time a new innovation will be needed to render unnecessary the materials used in the shower head by either obsoleting such a technology or developing substitute materials. As a supply is threatened and approaching the secure threshold, this becomes an issue of public alarm. Such indications prompt the projects of innovators, which are completely voluntary. A shower head is perhaps a poor example, because its necessity is disputable. In a voluntary system, rescuing shower heads may be no one's priority. Therefore, my next point is indicated. In such a system, not only is rational demand answered, the innovations that emerge will most likely be oriented toward necessities. Innovators would more likely feel prompted to find substitute material for food automation systems rather than a shower head, because their own existence is threatened by neglecting the food problem, and because the projects of those innovations are more likely to be favored in the cost-benefit analysis criteria.
Furthermore, merely indicating estimated/projected availability expectancy is not enough. A concrete measurement of an item's burden on total supply must be measured and indicated, much like a Price does. If our premise is accurate, then it should be possible to account for all resources on the planet by conducting a survey of global conditions. If an inventory can really be composed, then measuring the resources withdrawn in producing an item should be possible to measure by means of deduction. Therefore, the aforementioned shower head will have an additional tag that indicates the percentage of resources withdrawn from the total supply. This would be expressed in a numerical sequence dependent upon the composition of the shower head, as well as the scientific understanding of the time. The best expression is still something to be debated, but can be worked out just as all other scientific standards have been. I'm sure you can theoretically conceive of a chart that communicates the composition of the shower head and the individual percentages that it withdraws from the respective resources of the global supply. But because a chart would be inconvenient, all of the percentages can be unified as one single numerical expression by *weighting* the quantities withdrawn to the relative quantities in the total global supply for each resource. Therefore, a cumulative weighted percentage can be given to every single item produced, as long as we can account for all production input and account for the total quantities of all resources. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, innovators will be prompted to propose projects that reduce the resource withdrawal percentages if such percentages begin to rise above safe thresholds. As long as sufficient information and feedback can be supplied, Innovators become the immune system protecting against scarcity.
Though items will be tagged with other calculated information, only those mentioned above are among the proposals intended to replace the functions of prices.
Lastly, items that depend upon scarce resources are less likely to be consumed on the individual level, not only because there would likely be a social stigma against doing so, but because of time factors. The excavation and recovery of scarce resources is often more difficult. Production of goods requiring such scarce resources will also utilize recycling systems as much as possible. Therefore, the production process for items using scarce resources will be of longer duration than items that use abundant resources. Therefore, because much of an RBE is a computerized "que economy," consumers will be dissuaded from ordering such goods by their OWN decision! This is because, TIME is finite. Time comparisons become a new, important metric of valuation. If a consumer places an order for a item that uses scarce resources, and the wait time is announced as 3 days, then they will most likely find an alternative, or perhaps, if they foresee themselves needing to order the item often, even going to work on eliminating that problem by submitting designs for a similar item that uses less scarce resources, if they happen to be motivated to do so. However, again, the use of scarce resources in innovation projects is a different scenario than in the scenario of individual consumption. If gains are great enough, lengthy production times might be tolerated by the innovators who have been granted execution of their project.
REMARK
Though a free market may not have artificial scarcity, it does restrain the levy of abundance for all people by keeping profit exclusive and keeping the control of resources diffuse This is not to mention it guarantees social turbulence due to its darwinistic imperatives of self-preservation, and many other problems about which economists know nothing. Knowing how to solve such problems is the only way to design a social system to operate without dysfunction, and absence of consideration for these problems is the weakness of a free enterprise. Cumulatively, an RBE solves more total system problems than a free enterprise because an RBE's considerations are broader in scope. Thus its sumtotal gains are greater. Such is broader and greater because we look at all phenomena of the earth as precisely a system. This is unlike economists who look at only isolated phenomena. When the earth is viewed as a system, new priorities emerge and new methods for social management become necessary. Economists are unscientific because they fail to look at all aspects of the earth as a total system.
ANARCHISM
There is no state. An RBE is anarchistic. It is an anarchy of innovators whose individual power resides only in their competence and intellectual capital. These innovators are emergent just like capitalists. The difference is that innovators are far more transitory because they develop no individual state (b/c they have no property, no self-preservation, and no material differential advantage). Their inventions, their ideas, their proposals, their discoveries are quickly superseded by other innovators pursuing their own project driven by the most resilient and powerful motive: passion onset by complex needs. On the other hand, in a free enterprise, there exists a multiplicity of capitalist states. Though indeed they are superseded by others, their static presence exists far longer than the the projects of innovators in an RBE. The longer the static presence of a single capitalist's state, the greater the detriment to a society. It is a detriment for the same reason national/political states are a detriment. The multiplicity of capitalist states function analogously to the current situation of political states. The only difference is that capitalist states war economically (though political states are learning to do this too). (And I wouldn't doubt capitalist states would war militaristically if left to themselves after political states were abolished). Nevertheless, any static existence is detrimental to the social system. The only thing that must remain static is the mechanism that assures everything else will remain emergent and changing. And that is the foundation of an RBE. An RBE exalts the mechanism that assures no formation of static entities. To assure this mechanism rules, human operation has to be reorganized along the lines drawn by TVP.
That which you have referred to as a "state" is really not an entity. If anything, it is a mode of operation in human relations, a social algorithm, that is supported by a global infrastructure of technology. In other words, the infrastructure becomes the "laws of physics" of society, so to speak. And as all people have access to information, and as all have access to the infrastructure (much like open-source phenomena of today), the infrastructure is never vulnerable to monopoly of use, manipulation, or corruption.
The foregoing has been a description of aspects of a conservative RBE.
I would like to move to criticism of a free enterprise at some point. Weaknesses of a free enterprise are far numerous than an RBE, and I'm curious to hear your defense."
