Book of Peer Production

Edited By Johan Söderberg & Mathieu O'Neil

http://peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/JoPP_Peer-book.pdf

CONTENTS

SOCIALLY USEFUL PRODUCTION

 THE CUNNING OF INSTRUMENTAL REASON 

AUTHORITY IN PEER PRODUCTION

 BECOMING MAKERS 

HACKLABS AND HACKERSPACES

Introduction to Book of Peer Production

 Johan Söderberg & Mathieu O'Neil

The Book of Peer Production is an off-spring of the Journal of Peer Production, an open access, peer reviewed journal dedicated to investigating the emergence of peer production as a new mode of production. Characteristic of peer production is that the output is orientated towards the further expansion of the commons; while the commons, recursively, is the chief resource in this mode of production. In fact, the commons and peer production are two names for describing the same thing: a particular kind of labour relation. This labour relation is predicated on voluntary participation and the selfselection of tasks. Participants may be driven by a variety of motivations, for instance, self-fulfilment, peer recognition, developing new skills, or something else again. We may call such motivations intrinsic. The high degree of intrinsic motivation in commons-based peer production is proportionate to a relatively low degree of extrinsic motivation. That is to say, monetary compensation for labour expenditure. This is testified in the willingness among participants to relinquish exclusive proprietary rights over the results of their labour in favour of public ownership licenses. Starting from this ideal type, we set out to scrutinise the inconsistencies and contradictions of peer production, placing emphasis on its hybrid co-existence with dominant forms of (wage) labour and property relations. A key area of investigation are cases where the output of the community is appropriated by a private rights holder. Commons-based peer production is thus turned into a model for exploiting free labour.1 We invite contributions from as many perspectives as possible in this discussion. The overriding goal is to conceptualise what peer production is and could become, as a step towards building a more just and sustainable future. In keeping with the topic of the journal and the book, we seek to position ourselves in-between the grassroots initiatives and discussions taking place on the Internet, driven by practitioners and activists of various kinds, and the theory and critiques coming out of academia. We are thus obliged to say some words about the match, and mismatch, between the concept of peer production and the academic world. This leads on to a much larger and thorny question: the state of the contemporary intellectual landscape. This has been brilliantly mapped by a French sociologist, Razmig Keucheyan, in his book Hémisphère gauche. Une cartographie des nouvelles pensées critiques. Leaning on Perry Anderson's diagnosis, Keucheyan makes two key points: first, it must be recognised that the New Left was defeated by the neo-liberal 1 For a more on peer production, see: Vasilis Kostakis and Michel Bauwens (2014) Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy. London: Palgrave. On the risk of exploitation of free labour, see: (ed.) Trebor Scholz (2012) The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge. counter-offensive. Under the current circumstances, its ideas and tactics are a roadplan for continued failures. Second, it is clarifying to compare leading critical intellectuals of the early 20th century with their contemporary counterparts. Rosa Luxemburg, Trotski, Lenin, Lukàcs, Korsch and Gramsci combined incisive political analysis with the leadership of political organisations. There are still a handful of intellectuals closely associated with far-left micro-parties; in present-day Europe we have the late Daniel Bensaïd in France and Alex Callinicos in the United Kingdom; in Latin America, one may think of Álvaro García Linera, vice-president of Bolivia since 2006, and of Subcomandante Marcos of the Mexican Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional or EZLN). But the overwhelming majority of present-day intellectuals with a critical bent (the writers of this introduction included), are state employees in the service of the university system. From this observation Keucheyan concludes: This does not mean that contemporary critical intellectuals are not engaged, or that they are less radical than classical marxists. But, aside from their engagement, they are academics, which cannot fail to influence the kind of theories they produce.2 The claims about an ascendant mode of peer production seems to point in the opposite direction. As a counterpoint to the academisation of debates and politics, alternative forums and meeting places flourish where practitioners and activists reflect over their practice and its wider, societal implications. No-one personifies this stance better than Richard Stallman. His ideals of autonomy, creativity, sharing, and cooperation have been advanced through the creation of GNU software, the General Public Licence (or “copyleft”) and the Free Software Foundation. Those achievements have been coupled with an independent production of ideas, manifestos, forecasts and strategic plans. Recall the promise for the future that concludes the GNU Manifesto:
In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.3

2 Keucheyan, R. (2010) Hémisphère gauche. Une cartographie des nouvelles pensées critiques. Paris: La Découverte. 3 Stallman, R. (1985) The GNU Manifesto. Available: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/ manifesto.html/

Trained social scientists are bound to react with a wry smile when reading the references to asteroids and robots. Most likely, they will proceed to formulate a critique of the logocentric, techno-deterministic, Western and/or patriarchal hacker culture.4 We invite such critiques as part of our collective undertaking to reflect over peer production. Having said that, a critique is not complete unless the critic includes himself/ herself in his/her analysis. As we saw, the position of the critic largely overlaps with that of the professional academic. One bias of this profession is a generalised anxiety not to be perceived as naive, against which the critical stance serves as an antidote. What is problematic here is that this attitude accords so well with the ironic, post-ideological hegemonic order of the day. In contrast, the convictions expressed by Richard Stallman and like-minded people have been rewarded with striking successes on the ground. The creation of peer production projects such as Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia and the many offshoots of GNU/Linux are some cases in point. Those accomplishments stand out all the more as the traditional left is struggling to come up with an adequate response to the mounting crisis of the capitalist system. Post-1989, the space for thinking and debating alternatives to neoliberal and/or keynesian capitalism is steadily shrinking, also within the left. It is in this light that historically and sociologically informed studies of the peer production model become urgent. Inquiries of the sort have been pioneered by Oekonux and the Peer-to-Peer Foundation. They have been involved in concurrent theory development, free software production and community organising, a mixture that has fostered conceptual creativity. The Oekonux project, originally launched in 1999 in Germany, has been at the forefront of critical theorising about peer production. In the view of Oekonux members and sympathisers, the Marxist critique of the capitalist mode of production (where the proletariat seizes the means of production through state power) is superseded by a peer production critique (where the wage labour relation and commodity production are replaced with commons-based production). The 4 Kreiss, D., Finn, M. & Turner, F. (2011) The limits of peer production: Some reminders from Max Weber for the network society. New Media & Society 13(2): 243–259 proponents of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation share many of the same concerns and analysis without being as closely tied to the Marxist tradition. The initiative to start the Journal of Peer Production came out of discussions at the Fourth Oekonux conference in Manchester in 2009; our ambition was to create a forum that accommodates these different perspectives. It is fitting that the book has been produced in connection with the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS). Since its beginning in 2007, FSCONS has been a rallying point for everyone interested in bottom-up technology development and its wider, societal implications. Equally fitting is it to have the book published on Nordic Summer University Press, a forum for independent thinking and self-organisation for more than 60 years. The same aspiration is expressed by the authors of this volume. In the opening chapter, Adrian Smith documents the story about The Lucas Plan. When workers in the U.K. arms industry faced layoffs in 1970s, they proposed to take over the factory and repurpose it for 'socially useful production.' In the next chapter, Johan Söderberg investigates an open source 3D printing project that set out to abolish the need for market exchanges. The ambitious goal of the project is compared with a longer history of utopian engineering thinking. George Dafermos demonstrates in his study of the FreeBSD project that a complex engineering project can be scaled up without it requiring traditional divisions of labour and associated hierarchies. The chapter by Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell traces the many paths that leads to the adoption of a ”maker” identity. Maxigas' chapter, finally, calls attention to a tradition of Hacklabs, often set up in squatted buildings on the European continent, that predated the latest wave of Hackerspaces. The disappearance of that history in the collective representations of hackers is linked to the marginalisation of the more confrontational politics of Hacklabs. This leads us to a common theme in all of the chapters in this volume. Namely, the need for independent reflection and scholarly work to restore to our collective memory foregone and forgotten traditions of utopian technology development. Restoring that memory is a first step towards bringing about a different future.

Wordpress of Objects: Addressing
Layman Participation in a PostIndustrial Society
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2494091.2499206

Abstract
In this paper a perspective on layman participation in
the design of everyday products is presented. The
development of digital fabrication technologies such as
3D printing enables an increasing involvement of the
layman in appropriating the performance of objects to
their own needs and desires. The question is how
professional designers as well as laymen deal with
openness in product design. An analogy is made with
the content management system Wordpress to discuss
how could be dealt with openness in a toolkit that
addresses multiple skill levels of its users.

Author Keywords
3D printing; Computational design; Mass
customization; Performance-based design; Layman
participation

ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.2 User interfaces: User-centered design

General Terms
Design

Journal of European Technocracy 

Paperback – December 14, 2008

by Ed. Dr. Andrew Wallace PhD (Author)

The Network of European Technocrats (N.E.T.) is an autonomous research organization comprised of volunteer members from around the world. The main objective of N.E.T. is to explore sustainable and novel economic, technical and social paradigms with the aid of theory and empiricism as guides. 
The journal presents some of the thoughts and writing of NET in 2006 and 2007. The articles cover areas such as alternative socioeconomic systems for a future sustainable society, ecology and and alternative to money. 

More information can be founf at http://en.technocracynet.eu.

https://archive.org/details/JournalOfEuropeanTechnocracyVol1/mode/2up

Contents

The European Model	9
Energy Accounting	35
Energy Credits Labour Credits and Money	45
Sustainability and Society	53
Technate as a Network	61
Energy Input Labeling for Consumer Products	73

Creating Life	81
Holons and a Holonic Society	89
A ProtoTechnate	103
Ethics and Constitutionalism	109
Technocracy Government Over Machines	115

TECHNOCRACY THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order 


by Patrick Wood (Author) 
Format: Kindle Edition

https://tinyurl.com/yazkxzdh

In 1974, Trilateral Commission member and academic Richard Gardner wrote an article "The Hard Road to World Order" for Foreign Affairs magazine, predicting the future of the Commission's self-proclaimed New International Economic Order. Gardner spoke of an "end-run around national sovereignty", a "booming, buzzing confusion" and building it from the "bottom up" rather than attempting an "old-fashioned frontal assault."After almost 45 years, it is time to examine the record. In Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order, Wood traces the steps and developments that led to the United Nations' establishment of Sustainable Development as an outgrowth of historic Technocracy from the 1930s. UN programs such as 2030 Agenda, New Urban Agenda and the Paris Climate Agreement are all working together to displace Capitalism and Free Enterprise as the world's principal economic system. As a resource-based economic system, Sustainable Development intends to take control of all resources, all production and all consumption on planet earth, leaving all of its inhabitants to be micro-managed by a Scientific Dictatorship. Topics covered include the devolution of federal governments combined with the rise of global Smart Cities. Tools are examined, like ubiquitous surveillance, collaborative governance, Public-Private Partnerships, Reflexive Law, Fintech, including crypto currencies and the drive toward a cashless society. The spiritual aspect of Sustainable Development is also explored as an important component of manipulation. Looking underneath the cover of globalization, Wood shatters the false narrative of a promised Utopia and exposes the true nature of the deception used to promote this new economic order. Those elite who hate the bedrock of American liberty and its time-tested Constitution have pulled out all the stops to destroy both, and it's time for citizens to stand up to reject them. As always, Wood closes with the nature of effective resistance and the tools that can help to achieve success.

The dark horse of the New World Order is not Communism, Socialism or Fascism. It is Technocracy.

With meticulous detail and an abundance of original research, Patrick M. Wood uses Technocracy Rising to connect the dots of modern globalization in a way that has never been seen before so that the reader can clearly understand the globalization plan, its perpetrators and its intended endgame.

In the heat of the Great Depression during the 1930s, prominent scientists and engineers proposed a utopian energy-based economic system called Technocracy that would be run by those same scientists and engineers instead of elected politicians. Although this radical movement lost momentum by 1940, it regained status when it was conceptually adopted by the elitist Trilateral Commission (co-founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller) in 1973 to be become its so-called "New International Economic Order."]

https://tinyurl.com/yaq3b7u9

In the ensuing 41 years, the modern expression of Technocracy and the New International Economic Order is clearly seen in global programs such as Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Councils of Governments, Smart Growth, Smart Grid, Total Awareness surveillance initiatives and more.

Wood contends that the only logical outcome of Technocracy is Scientific Dictatorship, as already seen in dystopian literature such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1948), both of whom looked straight into the face of Technocracy when it was still in its infancy.

With over 250 footnotes, an extensive bibliography and clarity of writing style, Wood challenges the reader to new levels of insight and understanding into the clear and present danger of Technocracy, and how Americans might be able to reject it once again.

OMG HERE ARE THE SECRET PLANS OF THE NWO

     

Policy Innovations Transformative Change - Local 2030 ...

https://www.local2030.org › library › Policy-Innovations-for-Transformativ...

Oct 4, 2016 - Societies across the world are facing many complex ... Pathways to transformative change for sustainable development ... Chapter 2: New Trends and Innovations in Social Policy ... Government policies are key for upscaling, capacity building and facilitating ... the creation of carbon markets or incentives for.

HURRAH AN ORGANIZATION; TECHNOCRACY THAT BARELY EXISTS THIS GUY SAYS THEY ARE THE NEW CONSPIRACY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD

I LOVE THIS SCIENCE FICTION STUFF AS A HERESIOLOGIST, A HERESY HAS A HERESY OPPOSING IT.

BUT OF COURSE IT ALL BEGINS WITH THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0986373923/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2
This is the documented story of the organization and members of the Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, with the specific purpose of creating a "New International Economic Order". With an small but powerful international membership hand-picked by an executive committee, Commissioners asserted undue influence over America, Japan and Europe. In 1976, Trilateral members James Earl Carter and Walter Mondale were elected to head the Executive Branch in the U.S., thus starting a 40 year hegemony over the greatest economic nation on earth. American influence and position was used to reform international trade, promote globalization and interdependence among nations. European Trilateral members were then instrumental in using the United Nations to create a doctrine of Sustainable Development and Green Economy: See Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (Wood, 2015) for details. Originally written in 1979-1980, Trilaterals Over Washington quickly became a best-seller and over the course of about two years, sold over 75,000 copies internationally. The books were very well received for excellent scholarship and original research, and even became a frequently-used textbook in political science classes at many colleges in U.S. universities. The co-author, Professor Antony C. Sutton, passed in 2002 having authored 24 books during a distinguished academic career that included UCLA and the Hoover Institution at 
Stanford University.

Since at least 1973, the engine of globalization has been the troika of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements. Acting in concert with each other, national barriers were broken down and national assets were often raided with impunity. Biography
Patrick Wood is a leading and critical expert on Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Agenda 21, 2030 Agenda and historic Technocracy.

He is the author of Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order, Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015) and co-author of Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II (1978-1980) with the late Antony C. Sutton.

Wood remains a leading expert on the elitist Trilateral Commission, their policies and achievements in creating their self-proclaimed “New International Economic Order” which is the essence of Sustainable Development on a global scale.

An economist by education, a financial analyst and writer by profession and an American Constitutionalist by choice, Wood maintains a Biblical world view and has deep historical insights into the modern attacks on sovereignty, property rights and personal freedom. Such attacks are epitomized by the implementation of U.N. policies such as Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, Smart Growth and in education, the widespread adoption of Common Core State Standards.


Wood is a frequent speaker and guest on radio shows around the nation. His current research builds on Trilateral Commission hegemony, focusing on Technocracy, Transhumanism and Scientism, and how these are transforming global economics, politics and religion.

THANK FNORD 

Technocracy, Then and Now

The Question Concerning Technology

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

Technocracy, Then and Now

A number of prominent news organizations reported recently that "technocrats" have taken over the governments of Greece and Italy. Oddly, those reports failed to define what a technocrat might be. Slate magazine's Forrest Wickman stepped in with an "Explainer" column last Friday that nicely cleared up the issue.  A technocrat, he said, is:

 An expert, not a politician. Technocrats make decisions based on specialized information rather than public opinion. For this reason, they are sometimes called upon when there’s no popular or easy solution to a problem (like, for example, the European debt crisis). The word technocrat derives from the Greek tekhne, meaning skill or craft, and an expert in a field like economics can be as much a technocrat as one in a field more commonly thought to be technological (like robotics).

Technocracy is something I spend some time on in my book, and I'd like to make a few comments about it here. It's a way of thinking that inevitably gains influence as we increase our commitment to technology, especially in turbulent times. And given that an increasing commitment to technology and turbulent times tend to go together, it's a way of thinking that we'll surely be hearing more about in years to come.

To elaborate on Forrest Wickman's definition, technocracy can be described as the conviction that we will all be better off if we operate according to the rational standards of the machine. A given problem can be solved by the systematic application of a set of principles and procedures. Usually those are principles and procedures only experts can fully understand. It's a philosophy of methodology.

Lucas Papademos of Greece and Mario Monti of Italy both have advanced degrees in economics. Papademos has advanced degrees from MIT in physics and electrical engineering as well. As Wickman says, these qualifications implicitly suggest that they can be counted on to apply the necessary remedial measures without being swayed by anything so irrational as politics or popular opinion.  

In the United States we tend to associate technocracy with the Technocracy movement, which enjoyed a brief moment of national prominence in the early 1930s. In that case the connection to technology was slightly (only slightly) more direct. Americans feared that businessmen and politicians had shown themselves incapable of managing the explosive forces of industrial production, forces that were rapidly and radically reshaping the life and economy of the nation. The general feeling, says historian Henry Elsner, Jr., was that "somehow man had unleashed a monster in his midst – The Machine – which had gotten out of control and was threatening to wreck his civilization."[1]

One avenue of reform proposed was populism, which aimed to restore more control to the people. Another was technocracy, which aimed to focus control in the hands of the experts. This is an instance where we find history repeating itself today, with technocrats being asked to take charge by the established power structure in Europe even as the populists of the Occupy Wall Street movement agitate from street level for greater democratic control.

The Technocracy movement of the 1930s proposed that engineers take over as a sort of priesthood of the new industrial state. It wasn't the machine that was destroying society, they said, it was mismanagement of the machine by amateurs. Properly handled by qualified experts, technology would introduce an era of unprecedented plenty and leisure.

Here's how the Technocrats themselves described their qualifications for the job, in one of their pamphlets:

Technocracy's scientific approach to the social problem is unique, and its method is completely new…It speaks the language of science, and recognizes no authority but the facts. In Technocracy we see science banishing waste, unemployment, hunger, and insecurity of income forever…we see science replacing an economy of scarcity with an era of abundance….[And] we see functional competence displacing grotesque and wasteful incompetence, facts displacing guesswork, order displacing disorder, industrial planning displacing industrial chaos."[2]

The Technocracy movement faded quickly for lots of reasons, among them internal dissension, doubts about the credibility of its leaders, and absorption of its reforms by the New Deal. Technocracy was also hindered by a fundamental contradiction: It hoped to gain popular support for an ideology that was inherently elitist. 

Nonetheless, the temptation to rely on the expertise of the technocrat has remained, especially, as mentioned, in turbulent times. One of the more tragic examples to date was Robert S. McNamara's prosecution of the war in Vietnam.   

McNamara was a technocratic visionary whose evangelism on behalf of rationalism and efficiency took him from leadership positions in the Army Air Force's Statistical Control Office and the Ford Motor Company to the U.S. Department of Defense, which he headed under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. A passage from McNamara's 1968 book, The Essence of Security, described his philosophy:

Some critics today worry that our democratic, free societies are being overmanaged. I would argue that the opposite is true. As paradoxical as it may sound, the real threat to democracy comes, not from overmanagement, but from undermanagement. To undermanage reality is not to keep free. It is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. That force may be unbridled emotion; it may be greed; it may be aggressiveness; it may be hatred; it may be inertia; it may be anything other than reason. But whatever it is, if it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential.[3]

Vietnam showed that, contrary to that philosophy, management by reason does not automatically eliminate the influence of emotion, greed, aggressiveness, hatred, or inertia. McNamara himself learned that lesson well. As he acknowledges in Errol Morris's documentary, The Fog of War, "Rationality will not save us."

Among the foremost advocates of technocratic principles today – in the business of technology, not in politics or in war, as far as I know – are Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. The company's vice president of global communications and public affairs has called them "ideological technologists."

(Given that Google provides the blog space on which these words are written, my comments here may be seen as lacking the graciousness due one's host.)

Here's how Page, now Google's chief operating officer, explained his management philosophy to the journalist Ken Auletta:

There is a pattern in companies, even in technological companies, that the people who do the work – the engineers, the programmers, the foot soldiers, if you will – typically get rolled over by the management. Typically, the management isn't very technical. I think that's a very bad thing. If you're a programmer or an engineer or a computer scientist, you have someone tell you what to do who is really not very good at what you do, they tell you the wrong things. And you sort of end up building the wrong things; you end up kind of demoralized. You want a culture where the people who are doing the work, the scientists and engineers, are empowered. And that they are managed by people who deeply understand what they are doing. That's not typically the case.[4]

This, of course, reflects the classic technocratic conviction that the only person who can properly run the machine is the person who built it, or who knows how to build it. In today's technological society, that leaves a lot of us out.




Notes:

[1] Henry Elsner Jr., The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation (Syracuse University Press, 1967), p. 8-9.
[2] Quoted by Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (U. of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 122.
[3] McNamara's book quoted by Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, originally published 1968) p. 11-12.
[4] Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (Penguin, New York, 2010), p. 227. 

Photo credit: Artist unknown, illustration from Common Ground-Common Sense. 

©Doug Hill, 2012

Technocracy: Building a new sustainable society for a post carbon world

Andrew Wallace

https://tinyurl.com/y7nly4rd

TECHNOCRACY: building a new sustainable society for a post carbon world
by Andrew Wallace
Topics moneyless, sustianbility, post carbon, technocracy
Collection opensource
Language English
How can we build a moneyless, sustainable, post carbon world?
Dr. Wallace presents a proposal for an alternative socio-economic system that has sustainability built in right from the start for a world without oil, a world without money. Taking science as the foundation the applying that to design a society that gives people more time to be human yet results in a high standard of living for everyone.  

\

Contents

Designing the future	3
The technocracy car	17
Foundations	19
Science knowledge and the truth	21
Society its organisation and the distribution of goods	33
A short history of money	37
What does the term price system mean?	41
Growth and its limits	43

What do we mean with the term expert?	55
How do we balance the needs of the Earth with the needs of society?	57
What do we mean with the term energy credits?	61
Why would people work for free?	63
How do we ensure that the system does not become corrupted?	65
How would people live in a technate?	69
How would people get around?	75
What forms the technocratic plan for society?	77

What do we mean distributed and selforganising systems?	45
Technocracy	49
How do we build a new society?	51

How would this become real?	85
What about down side?	103
Technocracy For A Sustanalbe Soc Nov 2008 SLIDE SHOW https://www.slideshare.net/isenhand/technocracy-for-a-sustanalbe-soc-nov-2008-presentation Why Dont We Have Peace? Discussion with Dr Andrew Wallace Speak Easy Talk A discussion at Four Bridges SpeakEasy with Dr Andrew Wallace Research Engineer from HUMLab, Sweden Author: Technocracy: Building a new sustainable society for a post carbon world. New book due out soon Points raised during discussion Our evolutionary baggage of hunter gatherers competing for scarce resources influences our idea of “scarcity” in a time of real abundance. The money to be made from war and post war rebuilding is fuels conflict. The Internet is a distributive system. Millions of local groups are networking together cooperatively to learn and share ideas and inspiration. This is becoming more and more urgent. We will need to have so many interconnections that there is plenty of “redundancy” in the system. We could face a sudden “phase change” in our social and economic system. We need to have alternatives tested and trialled. There is not one organisation or leader – it is important to keep this a distributive, invisible leadership “The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, ‘We did it ourselves” — Lao Tzu

1930s Post-Scarcity Dreams: Remembering the Technocracy Movement

Benjamin Abbott Mar 1, 2013 Ethical Technology


https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/abbott20130301

For a brief moment in the 1933, a radical solution to the Great Depression seized public attention across the United States. Claiming the mantle of scientific authority and well-equipped with facts and figures, Technocracy condemned the economic status quo – the price system – as hopelessly antiquated in an age of abundant energy. Technocrats argued the era of meaningful scarcity had ended.

The movement proposed a technician-run economy of equally distributed prosperity as the only way to prevent ecological and social collapse in the North American continent. In the context of financial meltdown and widespread destitution coupled with overproduction, the country's population proved receptive to the possibility of switching to economic system firmly grounded in material reality and organized by engineers' logic of instrumental rationality.

That transition never happened, of course; the price system weathered that crisis and others that followed. Technocracy fell back into obscurity as suddenly as it rose to prominence. Many historians treat the movement as a curiosity worthy only of ridicule – and not without reason. I've scant interest in promoting Technocracy as such and less still in apologizing for movement figurehead and would-be supreme leader Howard Scott.

However, I consider Technocracy's critique of capitalism and future vision valuable in that comes from an engineering perspective. Through insistent focus on the physical and technical, Technocracy turns on its head economists' claims about the efficiency of capitalism and effectively characterizes the price system overwhelmingly wasteful. Despite their myopia and enthusiastic embrace of numerous forms of oppression, Scott and company's analysis provides insight into the profound contradictions of the industrial world system and the project of cultivating better future.

Here in the twenty-first century, eighty years past the zenith of the Technocracy movement's notoriety, the contrast between actually existing production and human wants stands out as even more absurd. There's so much manufactured stuff around that many affluent folks don't know what to do with it. Few things last; designs routinely assume or ensure rapid obsolescence.

Dumpsters swell and spill over; landfills sprawl across acres and acres. In the Pacific Ocean, trash coalesces into patch of arguably continental proportions. Waste, as miserably processed as vast majority of it is, constitutes as resource for scavengers. Bottle, can, and scrap metal collection forms an important income for impoverished urban residents. I personally survive primarily from food deemed unsellable and thus donated. I know comrades who live off the food people leave on their plates at restaurants when traveling. Between gift markets and friends, I can hardly remember the last time I paid for clothing.

The scavenger economy marginals like me participate in – constrained as it is by gates, locks, and zealous garbage defenders – only hints at the staggering excesses of capitalism. Let's begin with a big-picture view of basic necessities and comforts. First, nutrition. A recent report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers concludes that a third to half of all food produced simply spoils. Next, shelter. In in the United States, approximately twenty-four houses go completely empty for each houseless person. So much more residential space goes unused at the micro level; the other bedroom in the apartment where I stay has been unoccupied for the better part of a month while I search for someone to fill it.

What about transportation? As Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler convincingly show, U.S. car culture approaches optimization's antithesis. You’ve got to work at it to devise a system that squandered more resources than multiton hunks of metal that commonly carry only a single person and spend 95% of time idly taking up space.
Members of the Technocracy movement examined similar dynamics from their time and concluded that it could and had to be done better. Along with Thorstein Veblen's 1921 The Engineers and the Price System, the Technical Alliance's studies of industrial waste appear in any account of the Technocracy movement's origins. The Technical Alliance – a group that included both Scott and Veblen during its 1920-1921 existence – prepared reports from clients such as the Railroad Brotherhood and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Stuart Chase used his research with Technical Alliance as the foundation for his 1925 book The Tragedy of Waste. From a system-design standpoint, capitalist production and distribution looks like an awful, ugly mess.

I find this approach of comparison with the physically possible ideal an illuminating and provocative heuristic device. I heartily recommend contemplating what you want whether it’s possible or not as technique of both social critique and personal understanding, but the materialist-empiricist epistemology employed by the Technocracy movement adds a grounding element to this utopian exercise. If wielded prudently, Technocracy’s extreme reduction of human beings to machines with energy inputs and outputs constitutes a fruitful thought experiment. As sketched above, the ideal here obliterates assertions of capitalism’s efficiency. At best proponents can retreat to the stance that capitalism least bad among a lineup of stinkers.

While Scott insisted on distinguishing Technocracy and the technical mindset he idolized from Leftist revolutionary ideology, Veblen took a less rigid view and happily channeled Marxism in his notorious call for “a soviet of engineers and technicians.” Technocracy promised an old socialist, communist, and anarchist objective: universal comfort with minimal toil. Following Henry Elsner, Jr., I interpret the Technocracy – especially Technocracy, Inc. under Scott’s domination – as an authoritarian Left movement not as far removed from the Marxist spectrum as Scott repeatedly proclaimed. Dreams of egalitarian automation animated Leftists of Elsner’s era; I’m especially fond of socialist-feminist Shulamith Firestone’s cybernetic communism and Valerie Solanas’s plan for complete automation. Today, apart from Technocracy Inc. itself and explicit descendants such as Network of European Technocrats, Technocracy’s influence seems strongest in the Zeitgeist Movement and associated Venus Project.

In relation to the post-scarcity discourse prevalent within transhumanist and Singularitarian circles, remembering the Technocracy movement indicates that we need not wait for nanofactories and artificial general intelligence to terminate human want. The technical ability to create abundance of the basics has been around since the dawn of the twentieth century if not much earlier. Building a post-scarcity society requires political struggle and isn’t likely to happen on its own. There’s no guarantee that increasingly potent productive technology will lead to distributed plenty. As the current intellectual property rights regime demonstrates, governments can manufacture scarcity through coercion.

I conclude with a passage from the soul-searching debate within the Continental Committee on Technocracy that resulted from the split with Scott. The sentiment expressed applies as well to transhumanism and the Singularity movement in my estimation:
Some of us contended that behind the fad, the fantastic figures, and the pseudo-scientific jargon, was a sound idea. And that civilization itself might very well depend on getting this fundamental idea accepted, on proving to the people that the days of material scarcity would be over as soon as they willed it (Continental Committee on Technocracy, Bulletin No. 13, August 1, 1934).

Further Reading:

Akin, William E. Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Elsner, Jr., Henry. The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation. Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 1967.

Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 2005.

Stabile, Don R. “Veblen and the Political Economy of Technocracy: The Herald of Technological Revolution Developed an Ideology of 'Scientific' Collectivism.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 46:1 (1987), 35-48.