I am writing this post to explain to you how I see a day in the life of an everyday person … someone who presently (if they’re one of the lucky ones with a decent job): gets up, goes to work, does their job, makes money, and looks forward to the evenings, weekends & holidays when they actually get to do their own thing.
PLEASE NOTE: I am ignoring here the transitional period between the present status-quo, and this hypothetical future … not because I couldn’t describe that too, but just to simplify the conversation for the sake of explaining the vision.
WAKING:
Ok, so you’ve just had a good night’s sleep, and you’ve woken up … normally you’d HAVE TO go to work for someone else, to earn the money to survive and pursue your interests … but now you’re in the fully functional future of Open Empire … and since you’re an equal partner in all things with all other people & species, there’s no boss, no hierarchy … so you stay in bed for a while if that’s what you want, or you get up & go do your own thing for a bit … maybe that’s some morning yoga, maybe that’s playing with the dog in the park … no big deal whatever you choose, it’s your choice, and there’s no rush.
WHY does your day start like this? Because you choose to have it start like this, and there’s no longer a currency based economic paradigm driving a constant need for growth & resource consumption.
EATING:
After a while you decide you’re hungry, so you go have some brunch … you might have a home veggie garden, swap veggies with neighbours, or you might go to a supplier who provides you with what you need. Since food is easy to grow so long as you have water, soil, sunshine & an understanding of ecological principles, there’s plenty of food to go around … food is not a scarce resource, the only thing that is scarce about it, is the labour supply to grow whatever you cannot grow yourself … and since everyone else also gets to do whatever they want, some people have chosen that their contribution to society is feeding people, because they enjoy it and it interests them. So this person gives you what you want, you take it, you trade nothing in return, and in fact all that either of you do is to agree to record the fact that you took whatever food you did, and which record goes into a computer system for purposes explained later.
SO YOU MAY ASK: what motivates them to do this if they do not HAVE TO do it? The answer to which is quite simple … they do it because while everyone can have as much of anything that is NOT a scarce resource as they want, people do “compete” for access to resources that ARE scarce, and the way they compete is not via exploitation of resources, but by ensuring their actions do the least ecological & social harm, and provide the greatest ecological & social benefit … so by feeding you, the farmer & distributor of the food (who may or may not be the same persons) is thus effectively partly responsible for keeping you alive, and this has social value … the manner in which they farm produce is done in the most ecologically sensitive way, because this would otherwise not play well with their statistics in terms of competing for the aforementioned scarce resources … and to the contrary of the present system, in the world of Open Empire, it is considered greater value to reduce the scarcity of a resource, than to increase the scarcity of a resource … so if your actions cause the creation of scarcity, this means you will have a reduced chance of access to ANY other scarce resource … but if your actions reduce scarcity, you have a greater chance of access to resources that remain scarce.
For the same reasons, cafes & restaurants will still exist, because again this is something people can enjoy doing as a contribution to society … the difference being the cafe will not be a whole bunch of workers making one person rich while working for crappy wages & living off tips … instead it is a collaborative exercise, where everyone’s contribution is valued according to the same principles which are based not on currency or economics as we know it, but based on scientific principles which are independent of the values & perspectives of individuals. So if you decide to go out to a cafe, you can do that too … and you don’t “pay” you simply go there, eat, drink, and acknowledge what you have taken so that it can be recorded by the Open Empire computer system which is doing all the work in the background of quantifying how much resources we consume, how much ecological & social harm our actions cause, and how much ecological & social benefits they create.
PLAYING:
So it’s a sunny day and you have a full belly, and since the contribution you make to society can be done at any time, you decide to head to the beach … other people contribute to society in technical areas, and in logistical / operational endeavours with transport systems … so you have plenty of options for getting around … and you won’t get stuck in a traffic jam, because there aren’t millions of vehicles racing around desperately fulfilling economic activity which has no real purpose anymore, and we’ve begun to dismantle & replace the old modes of transport which caused so much ecological damage, with more sensible things that don’t need to be propped up by economic & political power, because they just make more sense (and that’s all we care about anymore).
So you get to the beach, you have a great day … and then you finally head home.
WORKING:
You have a home office set up, because you’re a designer, or inventor, or consultant, or counsellor, or writer … and what you contribute to the world comes from that intellectual space … and you design the things you design, with computer systems recording the actions you take in your design workflow, also recording the actions of others you collaborate with … and eventually when you have a finished product, one of two things happens:
- If the resource you produce in your work IS NOT SCARCE, you simply give it to people who ask for it, and it is recorded that they took it for personal use … or;
- If the resources you produce are scarce (there is more demand than you can produce supply), then you get advice from the Open Empire computer system on whom (or what) is the most worthy recipient of those resources;
Part of this decision about the worthiness to receive resources is based on how well you contribute to society, including how you minimise the ecological & social harm your activities cause, and/or increase the ecological & social benefits resulting from your actions … but it can also be affected by such things as:
- Reducing scarcity (as previously mentioned), hence ecological conservation efforts now have great “economic value” in this non-currency paradigm … in fact if you can save a species from extinction, you’ll probably have generated so much value you’ll have a high priority for receiving scarce resources for the rest of your life;
- Helping others to improve their methods of production & consumption in both ecological & social terms … so for example, if you can develop a better method of doing something, which causes less ecological &/or social harm, &/or creates greater gains, then you’re partially responsible for all future benefit created by anyone via these methods … so you’re both motivated to do it AND to go out there & get people to make the changes;
- Doing things that have significant consequences – eg: if you make a piece of art, but you hide it away in a shed, it hasn’t achieved much in the way of consequences … but if you allow that piece of art to be put on display, then it affects everyone (to some degree) who sees it AND even people who do not see it, but are nonetheless impacted by the environment it helps create in (for example) an events venue;
SO … with everything we do, produce & consume being recorded, and the consequences of all these actions being calculated in ecological & social terms … we are thus motivated by this system to do the least ecological & social harm, and to achieve the greatest ecological & social gains in all of our activities, thus also motivating us to be responsible rather than irresponsible (in stark contrast to the present economic system). In this way, we gain access to resources that are scarce, and we are motivated to reduce rather than increase scarcity of resources.
SLEEPING:
So you’ve had a great & unstressful day, you’ve done only as much work as you felt like doing, you’ve eaten plenty of good healthy nutritious food (because people are motivated to farm it), you’ve enjoyed life, and you’ve now gone to bed in your very comfortable bed, because someone else was motivated to be the person who creates great beds for people, and to make them freely available, because in doing so they realised they can have a gigantically significant impact on the health & well-being of others, and this means they have a quantitatively gigantic social impact, which gives them a high priority for access to scarce resources.
DID YOU NOTICE SOMETHING ABOUT THIS SCENARIO (?):
It’s so easy … it’s EASIER than life with money … all we do is go about our day.
Computer systems are doing all the leg-work of calculations, all we need to do is properly record what happened, and much of that is automated for us.
MOST IMPORTANTLY … which world would you rather live in … the one where most people are miserable slaves (if they’re lucky), the unlucky ones are starving to death, and most other species are at risk of extinction because we keep taking & destroying the only habitat they have … or the one where we’re not pissing 99.9% of our resources away to service a completely flawed currency trade & property based economic model, in which scarcity is valuable so it is artificially manufactured on purpose to raise prices & thus profits (?)
Our present scenario is insane … it makes no sense to keep it.