#post scarcity

[solar-sunnyside-up]

[greenhorizonblog]

Girl you should not have to work, you should be picking wild strawberries with the girlies on a warm summer day, wearing a linen dress, and ribbons in your hair

[third-nature]

"Usufruct, in short, differs qualitatively from the quid pro quo of reciprocity, exchange, and mutual aid — all of which are trapped within history's demeaning account books with their 'just' ratios and their 'honest' balance sheets...What 'civilization' has given us, in spite of itself, is the recognition that the ancient values of usufruct, complementarity, and the irreducible minimum must be extended from the kin group to humanity as a whole."

-Murray Bookchin-

[ratking-usurper]

I'm trying to fantasize about my perfect post scarcity, utopian life, and realizing I can't. Like, what would I do if I didn't have a profit driven production quota? Without a capital incentive to output labor under the threat of homelessness and starvation, would I do anything?

I, like most people, was raised and trained my whole life to be a worker. It terrifies me how defined by that so much of my identity is. I dont care much for the accumulation of capital, but I do it because it's normal and necessary for survival

We all need to discover and define a self identity divorced from what we do for the systems we were born into or we become an extension of that system without the ability to question it.

I have no clue if this is anything beyond incomprehensible rambling, but I had to put it somewhere.

tldr: Im afraid of how difficult it is for me to envision what I could possibly be or do in a post scarcity world.

[aceobrin]

So when are we doing the Goncharov thing but with like fully automated luxury gay space communism IRL?

[notyourdaddy]

“Clutch’s hormones and Benjy’s HIV meds on a mirror”

2015, 32”x48”, archival giclee print, edition of 10

A collaborative work with T Fleischmann

An excerpt from T’s brilliant book “Time is the thing a body moves through”

My friend Benjy made the gloaming, all-windows building that is on the cover of a book I wrote and that inspired the architecture of the shack I built and inhabited for a while in Tennessee. The cottage he built shines like someone is arriving in the moonlight, but the window framing on my shack is salvaged gray wood, spongy soft and without a good gleam. Before I move to Chicago I take a bus down to Tennessee to visit him. His house is similar, cedar slats and old barn windows for a greenhouse, row after row of flowers I can’t identify, steps up the hillside so the top opens to a garden like the bottom does. Benjy moved here about a decade ago, after growing up in Oklahoma. When I climb the stairs he’s shirtless like he always is, a big beard and a hairy wide chest, and he has a genuine smile that doesn’t seem to go away. “Sterling’s flowers are doing amazing,” I say. It is the part of summer that dips into fall and he shows me one flower, an iris that blooms yellow. It is still hot enough that every step is a bending of grass, white motes of gnats rising. The crawling flower came from Scotland, where Sterling spent the early nineties in an abbey on an island. Our friend Mathilduh visited the abbey after Sterling died, dug up some of the plant, and secreted it back across the ocean. Now it’s in an elevated flowerbed with a bunch of perennials Sterling planted. Near it, off the porch, is an old air-conditioner top he flipped upside down and made into a hanging planter for some aloe plants. They propagate a bounty of baby aloes all summer long, popping out clones asexually. There are more aloe babies than a person would use so some of them end up unplanted, clumps of green spikey leaves with roots dangling out the bottom, on the sills of the screen windows.

Benjy and I have placed a mirror as wide and tall as my arm span on a card table in the flat bit of his front yard. The mirror shows sky, and beside it we set a ladder and his photography equipment. We dump all our prescription drugs onto the reflective surface, bottle after bottle. The pills are tan, light yellow, two shades of blue, one of red, a pale pink, and a paler pink with a purple hue. When they are all mixed together they look like pills, generically, unlike when they are in the bottles and seem direct references to our survival. The mirror’s reflection of sky is both stark and creamy. If I place my hand upon this sky it does not ripple, but there is a fingerprint.

We are here to shape the pills into letters, which takes time, and so we chat all morning about them. Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of medication, they are the most expensive material we have used to make an image. Another in a long series of changes to Benjy’s HIV treatment plan and insurance access in the deeply conservative state means that most of these are not pills he is taking but rather pills he has taken. They are pills that worked, pills he can’t access anymore, cocktails of pills that might or might not act on the body with greater efficacy to suppress his viral load than the cocktail of pills he took this morning. I contribute only three varieties to the mirror, synthetic estrogen and two kinds of testosterone blockers. These pills, too, have been rendered different with the sudden announcement that there’s a shortage of injectable estrogen in the United States, a combination of FDA policies and disinterested manufacturers conspiring to end the production of the oil. I’ve never gone for a shot, and sometimes I mail people pills, just as sometimes friends sent pills to me when I ran out. On the mirror, smooth like the oil is slick, the pills roll with the slightest wind, or when my hip grazes the table edge. My feet, too hard on the ground, make all the blue and white and yellow and tan quake at once. 2015, the beginning of the estrogen shortage, Benjy and I joke.

I count backward to figure out when I started taking hormones—Seattle, Brooklyn, moving away from the South, Berlin with Simon, falling in love with Otelia . . . I land in some summer, I don’t know when. I distrust linearity, but bodies can seem like one of the only linear things—age, getting bigger and then smaller, death. Another reason to appreciate the transitioning body, which ages backward, every person seeming to become younger, with or without taking hormones. It’s a good reminder that the body was never linear in the first place. And anyway, when wasn’t my desire pubescent? I didn’t know what I wanted until I had it, which was just to feel different. And when I swung a hammer, my inner forearm landing against a new, warm shape, I tired more quickly, and was happier for it.

Benjy and I use maybe one hundred pills. Post-Scarcity, they spell out. The word is multihued and large. I hold the ladder while Benjy positions the camera above, and as the clouds pass in their own game of arrangement, he snaps a picture, waits, snaps a picture. The images show only pills and sky, and it appears as though the word is floating above us. Post-Scarcity, it says, composed of more than one body like all bodies are. I use the crook of my elbow to sweep the pills into a bag and we return to the house, sorting them from one another again, putting them back into bottles. Categorization isn’t how we acknowledge difference, but rather its enforcement, difference leveraged to keep things apart that could well be together.

[fortunatefires]

Arguing with men about communism is so fucking funny. Had a dude claim post scarcity is only achievable if we cull the masses and consolidate in cities. Like, wtf Brad?

[yayforpockets]

"Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over."

Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/4wozpJ1

[rei-ismyname]

Imagine how glorious global resource distribution would be under a system that values people over profit? Not having to worry about food, shelter, selling your body and soul to a parasite for the privilege of existing.

People still have health issues, but medical care and information isn't gatekept. And, and, and, so many things!

What would you do with yourself if we lived in a Star Trek style post-scarcity world? Everyone has all their material needs met and you can do absolutely nothing if you wish.

I'd be a writer again I think. Definitely something creative.

[theskepticalleftist]

Red Reviews #35 - Trekonomics

[dank-meme-my-gf-sends-me]

[greenhorizonblog]

Ownership of the necessities for life

I'm sorry but we are never going to talk or negotiate our way to societal change. There I said it. The government and big business don't give a fuck, they only pretend to sometimes in order to pacify you. If pleading and asking nicely, or even protesting and demanding worked, it would have worked by now.

Change is a very real tangible thing. It's about who owns the land, who builds and owns the houses, who grows the food, who controls the water and electricity. The real tangible physical basic need necessities to sustain a human life. If we don't own these ourselves, we will always be at the mercy of authorities. And it's a situation that makes abuse very tempting for said authorities. GH seeks to decentralise power and give it back to communities/tribes. Land and the necessities for life should be communally owned and managed.

This is a main part of our mission. We will seek to raise funds to buy land and then start pilot project eco villages as soon as possible. They will be open to applicants, who will live there free of charge and according to GH principles

GreenHorizon

Hope is the seed of progress

[prole-log]

[ace-and-ranty]

I continued to be extremely pet peeved by the “stealing from blood banks is worse than attacking victims” vampire funny post

Fellas, is it more ethical to attack a passerby with razor blades for their sandwich, or steal off a food bank.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

The Robot That Makes Houses For Free

I have built a robot which creates new houses entirely for free. It's an amazing new innovation, a huge leap forward in robotics and it's going to solve homelessness, probably.

The way it works is the robot goes around to hundreds or thousands of other houses all over the town, and rips out the construction materials it needs from each of them.

But don't worry! It only rips tiny little pieces out of each house, completely insignificant bits which they would never miss, and then it makes this entirely new house for free out of all the little bits and pieces it took. Free houses! How amazing is that!

You just type into the computer what kind of house you want, what style of architecture, how many floors, what kind of floor plan, and it'll just do it - like magic! Out of nothing! For free! What amazing technology, it's incredible what we can do with modern advancements.

Anyway, this recent plague of houses collapsing is really worrying. Apparently they're falling down because they're being slowly worn away by some kind of mysterious erosion? Huh, that's weird.

But it's kind of a blessing, really, because it means now there's a huge market for new houses, so we're going to build even more robots to make those houses, and so long as the traditional old construction companies keep making new houses for us to sample, we can make new houses totally for free forever!

Wait, what do you mean the constant supply of free houses is crashing the market and driving them all out of business?