Chapter 12: Production, Distribution, Advertising, Transportation and Community

It only makes sense that the highest priority of any socio-economic paradigm must be the well-being, happiness, quality of life, freedom and fulfillment of every individual and the community. The dominant paradigm, in contrast, places prime importance on the movement of currency and the generation and consumption of goods and services. Cultural myths in such societies postulate that those criteria generate abundance, freedom and quality of life. In practice, this paradigm generates scarcity, chronic escalating stress, and virtual enslavement for all but the few modern feudal lords who reap the harvest of the efforts of the rest of us.

The current paradigm is also extremely wasteful and inefficient. Competing companies vie over market share, stock prices and profits. Developers are forbidden to share any information between companies. This creates wasteful duplication of efforts and generates goods and services that are all inferior to what would come if collaboration were encouraged. Competition is a lot more about marketing, advertising, and predatory business practices than it is about the quality of goods and services. In fact, reinforcement is in place to produce inferior goods designed to not last long. Why sell one car that will last a lifetime if you can sell fifty cars that last two years? For example, electronic devices are built with built-in batteries that can’t be replaced without destroying the device, forcing consumers to buy an expensive new device instead of a relatively cheap battery. There is absolutely no technical advantage to this kind of design. Thus we see a self-devouring cycle of artificially forced overproduction and overconsumption, creating along the way massive unnecessary pollution, depletion of natural resources, waste, and soul-crushing pressure on folks who work in production facilities.

The “law of supply and demand” becomes a feudalistic control mechanism when those who control the supply create scarcity and artificially force and manipulate the demand.

The solution is to eliminate hierarchical profit-driven production and distribution models of competing profit-and-market-driven corporations and replace them with autonomous consensus-run, peer-based enterprises in which engineers, developers and producers from former competing companies work together to pool and amplify their knowledge, skill and expertise. These enterprises will run as public utilities under public oversight. The new mandate will be to produce the best goods and services that the state of the art permits, to make them easily serviceable and upgradeable with quality and longevity in mind.

As everybody is supplied with enough of goods and services, production will scale down to the trickle necessary to cover breakage and population growth. The work-week will plummet. People working in all sectors will experience a dramatic reduction in stress and increase in time to devote to other pursuits, while enjoying a level of quality of goods and services superior to what was previously reserved for only the modern feudal lords. In that paradigm, automation will no longer deprive people of livelihood, but will fulfill its original promise of improving quality of life. Products will be user customizable and adaptable, and will be designed to last as long as possible.

Competition that drives innovation won’t cease. Instead of competing for market share and stock price, which are irrelevant to product quality, innovators will compete for the best design, implementation and processes. A lively online dialog between producer enterprises and the public will ensure that actual consumer needs and desires are met, and that no demand is artificially created or inflated. Instead of a bewildering selection of parallel inferior products, there will be one line of products that reflects and responds to consumer needs and desires at the highest level of quality.

Upgradeability will become universal. Form factors will be agreed upon so that, for example, if a new improved kind of car engine is created, existing cars will be upgraded by simply replacing the old engine with a new one. No need to change the whole car. This paradigm shift will be replicated in every industry and sector.

Advertising and marketing will become obsolete and disappear. The public central webspace will allow people to locate what they need. Thus resources currently devoted to advertising and marketing, which often rival and exceed resources devoted to development and production, will be conserved. There will be a massive decline in auditory and visual pollution – no pop-up ads, no advertising billboards, no commercials in any media. Hype will be replaced with clearly-stated specs. The current unending sensory assault that we all endure will end once and for all.

Current outlets, dealerships and retail facilities will be repurposed as distribution centers where anybody will be able to come to pick up what they want or need. Some degree of reasonable limitation will be necessary to prevent misguided, enterprising individuals from snatching up truckloads of TV’s and selling them in countries that still use the current paradigm. Currency of all kinds will be obsolete.

In transportation, emphasis will be given to expanding public transportation in efficient, comfortable and practical ways and replacing damaging technologies such as internal combustion with sustainable alternatives. Parallel, alternative road systems will be developed to accommodate bicycle, foot, horse, skate board, scooter and other forms of small-scale transportation, complete with rest stops, food courts, and access to everyplace served by the existing automobile roads.

Where possible, emphasis will shift from large central production and distribution to small-scale local production and distribution. Certainly this applies to food and power generation. This restores control and autonomy to the people where they live and reduces the disparity of influence and empowerment that comes with an emphasis on large central facilities. Community, enterprise and home gardens will be actively encouraged and developed. A large percent of food will be produced and consumed locally. Power generation will largely shift from mammoth central generation plants to a diverse grid of home, block, neighborhood and regional generation making use of wind, solar, water wheel, geothermal, tidal and other local energy sources. Some modifications to the grid will be necessary; but the technology exists and is well understood. Self-composting toilets will increasingly replace traditional toilets, vastly reducing the burden on waste-processing plants and converting human waste into fertilizer for local and home gardens. This will be most strongly felt in big population centers. An emphasis on recycling organic waste will similarly be a double win for everybody.

The emphasis on local production and distribution will also reduce necessary commuting and restore the interdependency among people that fosters a sense of community and connectedness that is difficult to impossible when our lives are fragmented and spread out over large areas. As social humans, this is fundamental to how we function best. When each of us is an island stretched across a fragmented landscape of disconnected living, we experience alienation, disempowerment, isolation, and profound dysphoria. It becomes hard to impossible for people to act in concert even for mutual good. It becomes difficult to trust. We come to live in a state of perpetual anxiety, knowing that if we fall for any reason, we fall utterly alone. Such a social environment makes it easier for us to perceive each other as rivals and threats than as allies and friends. It also dissipates potential social energy that could come to a focus to take decisive action to non-violently force a change of paradigm.

Individual is pitted against individual, and individual against society. When we decommission the current paradigm and replace it with one designed to foster a win-win symbiosis which reinforces working for mutual benefit while valuing and respecting each person’s uniqueness, we will all experience a dramatic improvement in quality of life, of relationships, and of peace. We will finally be living in a paradigm that works with, rather than against how we are evolved or designed to function at our best. When we are stakeholders in an undertaking, our motivation and engagement is much higher than if we are forced to serve those who are stakeholders when we are not.

Readers are encouraged to read “The Green Book” by Muammar Qadaffi. Regardless of what one may think of the man himself and whether or not he actually embodied the principles in that book, it does contain some observations and ideas that are worth the time to read and consider.