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That's true. Thing is, I don't have a great thought-out plan. I sympathize with a couple of ideas from the corner of anarchism or communism (that's why I droppe

That's true. Thing is, I don't have a great thought-out plan. I sympathize with a couple of ideas from the corner of anarchism or communism (that's why I dropped the term free association), but I would strongly hesitate to call myself e.g. a communist, because there has been so much crap running under that term that I can't really identify with it. I find interesting that sometimes technology wants to push society in a certain direction - that can be good, bad, or neutral - and society resists with new technology, and this creates an curious interplay. Like file-sharing made it trivial to share music. Either we change society, everybody can access music for free, and we find a new way to feed and reward musicians. Or we keep society the way it is, invent DRM, and pretend files are material goods. Or for an older, more drastic example, think of the effect of widespread contraception on sexual morality. About changing people, I think a widespread objection against utopias is to say they are trying to create new people, and I think this objection is not entirely unfounded. I'd personally try to change society, so that what's between people and not the people themselves, if you know what I mean. I wouldn't even want to try to put everybody through an ecovillage or a kibbutz etc., although I'm sure it's a valuable experience. Rather make small, incremental changes, and set incentives such that people automatically do the 'right' thing. But, as I said, I have no concrete plans, and fixing human society is a really really hard problem :-)

ZenoArrow 10y ago
Sounds like you have similar ideas to me when it comes to moving towards a new type of society, I like to describe it as evolution over revolution. I recognise that it's not easy, but I do have ideas about how it can be done. The first thing is to start building alternative living arrangements where people can get what they need to survive without relying on money. I do think ecovillages are a good model to start with, though I'd ideally like to see the culture of each self-sustaining village be more diverse. After you have a network of these self-sustaining villages, you move from providing the bare essentials to sustainable versions of luxuries. To give you an example of this, you could class medicine as a luxury (though some would class it as essential). The idea is to make the alternative lifestyle more attractive by making it so people don't have to give up as much. By doing this, more and more people will choose to live in this new way of their own free will, as not only will you be able to live in a sustainable way without giving up on technological progress, you'll also have a diverse range of settlements to live in, and you'd be free to move between them as long as the new village had capacity. Buckminster Fuller once said "In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.", that's the best way forward IMO. I do think the existing network of ecovillages is a good starting point, and I think it's possible to extend this base to cover more of what people want. That's the way I could see a moneyless society emerging.

ZenoArrow 10y ago

Sounds like you have similar ideas to me when it comes to moving towards a new type of society, I like to describe it as evolution over revolution. I recognise that it's not easy, but I do have ideas about how it can be done. The first thing is to start building alternative living arrangements where people can get what they need to survive without relying on money. I do think ecovillages are a good model to start with, though I'd ideally like to see the culture of each self-sustaining village be more diverse. After you have a network of these self-sustaining villages, you move from providing the bare essentials to sustainable versions of luxuries. To give you an example of this, you could class medicine as a luxury (though some would class it as essential). The idea is to make the alternative lifestyle more attractive by making it so people don't have to give up as much. By doing this, more and more people will choose to live in this new way of their own free will, as not only will you be able to live in a sustainable way without giving up on technological progress, you'll also have a diverse range of settlements to live in, and you'd be free to move between them as long as the new village had capacity. Buckminster Fuller once said "In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.", that's the best way forward IMO. I do think the existing network of ecovillages is a good starting point, and I think it's possible to extend this base to cover more of what people want. That's the way I could see a moneyless society emerging.