- Justin Elkin
- Savannah, GA
- United States
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What are any quarrels regarding the remodeling of civilization on Earth with ideas from The Venus Project?
This is a broad question. Well worth the looksee. Here is the link to the website
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
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Mitch SMith 50+
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK6k4NbxPRw
Barry Palmer 50+
Mitch SMith 50+
Justin Elkin
Mitch SMith 50+
Government seems to form up by default.
It is very likely that it's a computational artifact.
To do anything about that one has to understand the system that produces it
i.e. the medium and the active partical that arranges the medium.
And then understand that the system IS the medium - a system of systems.
This is the continuum of the open system.
The instant that you close it, you invite accellerated local entropy - ensuring a "snap-back" as surrounding entropic balance exerts the universal flow - by a rupture of the closure.
So our artifacts must acknowledge the artifacts that surround them.
The universal flow of entropy drives all systems.
Life, and other organising principles modulate entropy - they do not cancel it out.
Efficiency, by that definition, must fail.
A successful system would have to gain an appreciation of the limits of efficiency.
It must therefore be porous - and, I suspect become chaotic because of that.
But chaos is "potential" - one must know the thresholds at which a system becomes unstable. ANd these thresholds cannot be determined in advance.
All one can do is initiate a system that is adaptable enough to encounter chaotic thresholds and survive them long enough to codify them.
This is where the Venus idea fails - it is too static and mal-adaptive.
It also lacks the sytemic "seed" required to catalyse the desired result.
Currently, we are in the grips of a system-closing system called "money" that results in a system dynamic called "economy" - it is certainly adaptive and has survived for a few millenia.
A much more intelligent way to "fix" the problems in humanity would be to tweak the monetary system to eliminate the toxic "efficiency" in it.
I.E. to make it porous to surrounding systems.
In other words, to re-open humanity to interact with the environment.
The caveat is that it must include adaptability in the wider frame.
Justin Elkin
Mitch SMith 50+
I've been looking at the Venus project, Zietgeist and RBE ideas for a while.
But my entry point might differ a little.
I enter at the point of social capital.
Martin Pearson evokes the "folk crowd".
This is a phenomenon I've been observing for about 8 years. It is almost entirely social-capital based. Small cities "errupt" periodically at things called "folk festivals". And they are entirely different from other "festival" events. A folk festival requires a lot less regulation and produces a far more coherent community dynamic than you will see in default settlements or interest gatherings such as pop-festivals. I think this occurs through the significance of the "attractor". Folk music has imbedded in it a thread of tradition - not a formal tradition, but a lineage of history and value. It is automatically imbued with the dynamic of value propogated through the medium of community. Those who have become acquanted with this rolling community can very easily percieve the power of anarchy - how there is a need for structure, but not a lot of need for hierarchy - mostly only needd in the organisation of voluntary contribution - for many, the payment for their contribution is the event/community itself. In fact, hierarchy seems to be a transitionary imperative in the context of a deeply hierachial social environment that currently surrounds.
Entropy enters the "folk-festival" social system in the form of money, but becomes a lot less relevant within the event itself.
This is where I identify 2 things:
1. Community is a default dynamic that requires little, if any, imposed hierarchy.
2. Money is a non-porous value system - a true community has no requirement for strict efficiency in value exchange - because value itself is independent of exchange - it is an artifact of community, not individuals.
We could collaberate on designing a new system that might result in something like the Venus project - but is must be evolutionary - not ideological.
Mitch SMith 50+
What I propose is to design a system that results in a 'Venus-like" outcome, but has a system dynamic that achieves the result rather than a top-down design definition wich required external imposition?
To begin with, the new system has to have a defined "membrane" to determine inside/outside of the active community, but a membrane designed to expand by bringing outsiders in. It has to have a method of modulating entropy without cancelling it, and it has to have an energy/value exchange mechanism that is based on community multi-flows rather than binary transaction (money).
Where to from there?
Justin Elkin
All the proposals are from a sort of intellectual evolution. In America, Mr. Fresco more or less had to put a name to this intellectual property but the ideas are from a consortium of wisemen both alive and dead and their work as well as Mr. Fresco's. I like what your saying, Mitch, especially of a new community driven use of money but we have to realize the ease of backsliding and inherent dangers in money itself.
Mitch SMith 50+
However, one uses an ideal only as a landmark to measure progress .. or a template to measure fit.
Once the system is up and running, it will go towards the ideal under its own power without the need of the ideal to sustain it.
We can know a couple of its components:
* flexible exchange beyond simplistic binary.
* Adaptive range within the template (or because of it).
* Expanding membrane.
* Chaotic dynamics understood - i.e. entropy modulation cycles controled by self-limitation to driving parameter - keeping it centred in a stable periodicy. In other-words, avoiding boom/bust.
It will need another thing:
The ambient system is not linear - it's "lumpy" containing many other systems, some of which are robust and potentially hostile.
There are only 2 ways to kill a community dynamic - either by obsolescence, or by direct extermination. Most of our ambient social systems maintain their membrane through murderous violence (millitary and police).
The new model will need to have an adaptive membrane to deal with this. SO it might need transitory military, subversive and camoflage techniques - that are inherent in the system.
The closest model I can think of is the Ottoman empire. And I think islam itself was an attempt to do exactly what we propose. The trick will be to have the system instantly mobilise defenses at need, which disolve when not needed. Pre-emptive challenges might be countered by superior pre-emption - as in the ninja code. SO the best membrane defence would be to contain a prize that no one will attempt to destroy - and anyone who does is attacked by their own community.
AS you can see, the model is looking a lot like a religion - and I propose that all religions are exactly this - based on the assumption that our ancestors were, at least, as intelligent as we are.
Justin Elkin
Mitch SMith 50+
From the resulting definition, you could then identify which bits people agree to easily, and which are harder. Then work on the hard bits to make them easier - the goal would be to have a system into which people just default into - or have direct imediate benefits that cannot be easily ignored.
Ethics .. well, by Aristotle, that's "the kinda guy people say you are". I don't think it's a good basis for a community because it can be falsified so easily .. I think a better definition of ethics would be based on something a bit more demonstrable - something that does not attach to single individuals. The understanding we currently have of Ethics/reputation is a form of property - which might be a good replacement for other forms of property .. perhaps. At the moment, the only thing that can be defensively owned is one's time .. or more idealistically, one's potential agency. I would like to see the notion of potential agency replace the word "freedom", and "advantage" replace "free-will" - and "fitness" replace "strongest".
If nothing has value in the present, it has no posterity. The thread of tradition and culture must be unbroken and capable of adapting to unknown circumstance - while still delivering value.
If such a seed model were to be successful, I can't see the current notion of "god" having any part of it .. any such deity would require sigificant re-definition to remove the toxic baggage attaching to the old modes. That done, one could then consider the re-unification of church and state.
But to get it rolling, one would need a demo community. from there it would just subsume everything.
Mitch SMith 50+
Where is your image of "Burning Man" coming from?
Justin Elkin
Mitch SMith 50+
I suppose that's an extreme example. But some of these guys cross over into fanciful nostalgia - like the medieval fairs. I'm thinking more of the folk music festivals - a lot of celtic music gets played, and that's a living tradition. I just got back from one.
No, I don't think anything needs to be so radical that it can only be expressed as an exception.
With our Celtic music, the festivals kinda don't stop with the events, we all attend local music sessions that get attended once a week - there's one in most towns in the western world.
There's a kind of fractal separation going on in human society - threads and whorls of culture, and if you are not in a particular thread, you can't see it - and these threads are all inter-mixed .. a bit like the whorls of smoke that rise from a cigarette. These threads have different qualities, but I've found with the folk music thread that there is no pretense and little observance of the binary transaction culture that we call globalism, even though we are global.
Tradition is a gret spine for a culture, but it has to be forward looking to become any more than dead bones.