Difference between revisions of "The RBE10K Project"

Revision as of 22:04, 28 November 2012

RBE10K (R-B-E-10-1000 or /ˈɑrˈbiːˈiː/ /ˈtɛnˈθaʊzənd/) is an primitivist or eco-communalist experiment project implementing the basic tennets of a Resource-Based Economy (RBE). It intends on operating side by side in a collaborative way with other transition sister projects like The Venus Project, and collaborate and support awareness-raising movements like The Zeitgeist Movement and The Free World Charter.

The RBE10K project can be seen as a hands-on bottom-up experiment to test a RBE socio-economic system for two years, directly by 10,000 volunteers/experimenters. The project has two distinct phases: planning and execution, each with an intended duration of two years. The planning stage spans the years 2013-2014, whilst the implementation stage will span, upon success of the planning stage, the years 2015-2016. Each of the two stages of the project has objectives that are expected to be valuable to science as well as the community of RBE supporters, providing the world with a real-life example of a type of functional RBE.

Criticising the project

If you were requested to give some feedback about RBE10K Project, please note that a comment like "I think the idea is great" may appear to be helpful but it contributes very little. It is still better than a negative remark like "it won't work" or even "this is a farce", which provide a lot of information about the person making the comments but none about the project itself. It would be very helpful if you could provide us with feedback in the form:

• I agree with most of it except for X because of Y
• I'm concerned with X because of Y
• I think you've not thought out very well the issue of X, which may lead to Y
• I'd like to recommend also you look into X, as you may benefit from Y outcomes
• I want to participate actively in the project! where/how do I begin? (hehehe)

Who can participate of the RBE10K?

Everybody is welcome to participate of The RBE10K Project. Nevertheless, there are a number of requirements that need to be met in order to have a positive (rather than a negative) participation. Should those requirements not be met, there are plenty of other similar projects that may be more adequate for participation instead, such as The Venus Project, Transition Towns, or even a political party or a church.

How is this project different from others?

Differences with The Venus Project

Unlike The Venus Project, RBE10K does NOT:

• seek to collude or influence governments and corporations to give up their monetary ways
• intend to impose a change on anyones' lifestyle
• require expensive hi-tech machinery to get it going
• expect or envisage large high-tech round cities
• promulgate a grand-unified global system with a centralised administration body
• promote a homogeneous global culture
• expect technicians as a class to dominate the decision-making process
• focus on technology as the core solution to any problem in society

Differences with The Zeitgeist Movement

Unlike The Zeitgeist Movement, RBE10K does not:

• choose to wait until the conditions are ripe
• have an interest in discussing about technologies of the future or problems in the current society

Differences with Transition towns and other sustainable approaches

Unlike sustainable projects like Transition towns, RBE10K is not:

• a more sustainable, or less wasteful community
• a community intending on isolating from the rest of the world

Differences with mainstream and/or crowdsourced RBE notions

This is a stub and a work in progress, please help clean up

1. Sustainability
2. The Earth and all of its resources are considered the common heritage of all of the world's people
3. Authority can be given, but only at the personal level, and never taken, imposed, or delegated
4. An assumption of shared responsibility for having all the world's people's needs met
5. Agreement that society as a whole is causal and responsible for any aberrant behaviour an any individual
6. A preference for a supportive rather than punitive attitude towards those who manifest aberrant behaviours
7. A preference for access rather than property
8. A reliance on abundant resources only
9. A reliance on automation for current processes that can be automated

Main sources of inspiration for this transition approach

The Venus Project and the Zeitgeist films trilogy

This project would not be possible if it had not by the vision and creativity of Jacque Fresco of The Venus Project, and the clarity and professionalim of Peter Joseph in communicating why a RBE is needed and its main notions. It would also not be possible without the millions of people who have seen the films and are already participating of The Zeitgeist Movement and The Venus Project.

Biology

The inspiration for devising a system that could have a chance to start small and have any chance to be successful in changing the world came from biology, specifically from the effectiveness of DNA and bacteria for their capability to grow very rapidly from a minuscule unit to colonising the world. Using the DNA and the bacterium of metaphors, a centralised knowledge-base system (currently this knowledgebase) would be the DNA, and a community of 10,000 people would be a bacterium.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)

The hope for the success of this project comes from the knowledge about the success of FOSS projects like the Linux operating system, the GNU compilers and tools, the PostgreSQL database, or the MediaWiki wiki system, all of which are not only essential for running this particular knowledgebase for free, but also and most importantly knowing that such quality, complex and immensely popular software have been developed by enthusiasts for fun, pleasure, interest and passion alone, without expecting getting any monetary gain in exchange. If projects like these exist, project like RBE10K has to have a chance of success.

Wikipedia and other successful Crowdsourcing enterprises

Today the greatest and most trusted source of information comes from the informally and democratically built Wikipedia, the most sucessful, popular and respected crowdsourcing project. Despite this project being not for profit and relying only on volunteers to introduce information in it, who like FOSS developers participate without a monetary gain incentive, the project grew in just than a decade from a crazy dream into a massive encyclopaedia with articles written in 275+ languages, 35 million registered contributors, and 23 million articles, most of which have such a high degree of quality that commercial encyclopaedias like Encyclopaedia Britannica see their business incrisingly difficult and soon probably totally redundant. If they could create such quality crowdsourced material without pyramidal power structues, so surely can this knowledgebase.

Google and other zero-cost service providers

Even in capitalism, some companies have become immensely successful by giving away for free what can be given for free for having a negligible cost, even when there is a market for it and customers who would gladly pay for such service. A company like Google would provide the same quality of products and services entirely for free in a non-monetary system, and they wouldn't have a shortage of volunteers to help develop or improve their products also entirely for free, provided their basic needs are covered for, just because working for Google is incredibly fun and fulfilling!

Runescape and other similar MMORG fantasy games

The MMORG game Runescape was a higly significant source of inspiration, not only because it provides countless hours of fun entirely for free for non-member gamers, but because of the notions of abundance of resources, the freedom experienced within the game, in which there is work that can result in a pay off, but there are no jobs, and the in-game life becomes very fulfilling in terms of the great variety of fun things to do. Despite the fact that these games make use of trade (e.g. the Grand Exchange) and money (gold coins), there is no property (other than personal belongings), no loans, no interest, for every type of in-game-object there is an abundance that enables enough for everybody to access them, and there are no power structures or out-of-game monetary incentives. Yet many players spend countless hours in these games, for they provide a kind of freedom and fulfillment that could not be achieved in any system in real life other than a RBE.

Freecycling, squatting and freeganism

Freecycling, squatting and freeganism are great examples of the degree to which it is possible to live with minimal or no money at all, even in a monetary system, just by refusing to participate in consumerism. People who have any experience participating in any of these lifestyles are likely to enjoy participating of a the first settlement of the RBE10K project, because of their already achieved sense of satisfying their needs without taxing their freedom.

Objectives

Primary objectives: short term, one off RBE experiment

The objective of the project is to test the predictions by the theories behind the Resource-Based Economy from a social standpoint, i.e. the ability of a community to live and thrive without trade, property or authority, and the capability of its citizens to self-govern and contribute to the community's goals, supported by a systems infrastructure based mainly on open computer software. There are a few main goals in this respect:

1. the ability to raise interest of enough people to make the project viable
2. the ability to define within the 2-year timeframe all the information necessary for the success of the settlement stage
3. the ability to obtain the resources necessary for a successful settlement
4. accomplishing the settlement in a safe location and with all the people and resources required
5. maintaining a functional and productive society for the 2-year long duration of the experiment
6. learning from any conflicts or problems and update the knowledge-base with relevant information to reduce impact in further occurrences
7. maintain the health, safety and personal growth of all its inhabitants
8. at the conclusion of the 2-year long experiment, achieve a willingness of the majority of the inhabitants to sign-up for another 2 years in the experiment

Secondary objectives: long term, expansion of the RBE10K settlements

Each RBE10K city would have three secondary objectives, in the following order of priorities:

1. provide for the basic needs (as per the knowledge-base) of all its members using exclusively its own resources, sustainably, and privileging those resources that are available for it in great abundance
2. constantly improve its own knowledge-base, relying for it as much as practicable on the methods of science
3. founding a new RBE10K city every two years (inviting 10,000 people living outside RBE10K cities to populate roughhly half of the old and half of the new cities)
4. automate anything that can be automatable, and contribute to the development of science and technology

Participation in the project

Participation of the experiment as a knowledge-base contributor

Participation of the experiment as a settler

RBE10K cities would require each newcomer to bring some of the necessary materials and resources to help build the community, for a value of roughly 10,000 units of their currency (€, £, US/NZ/CA $, or roughly equivalent), non-refundable, and as per the requirements specified in the knowledgebase, using a system to establish allotments and administration priorities. Every newcomer would also be required to agree to a simple list of terms and conditions for life in a RBE, including giving up rights to property, trade, blame, personal opinion outside matters of personal preference, etc (such terms and conditions would be an essential building block of the knowledgebase). Newcomers would also be encouraged to commit to a minimum of two years participation in the community, while engaged primarily in assisting with one or more of the three main objectives of the city.

Long term view and potential of the project if wildly successful

In terms of maths, starting with one city in 2015 and keeping to plan, the whole humankind would migrate to a RBE10K city by 2055 (i.e. a 40-year long project), which would reach around one million and be the home of the 10 billion people that would be on Earth by then. Because of the primary concern with sustainability, it is not expected that population or number of cities would increase ever again from this number.

Drawbacks and considerations

One can expect life to be harsh in RBE10K cities during the first 16 years of the project, while growing towards the first million RBE inhabitants and dealing with all the strange new world issues of a community with severely limited resources, educated and raised in our uncivilised/miscivilised culture, having to adapt to much simplified and possibly inconvenient lifestyle characteristics, without law and order, institutions, leaders or authorities. However conditions would rapidly catch-up and also surpass those of the current non-RBE culture, as a result of automated systems and processes, lack of waste of time and resources, increased psychological and emotional health, and having people contribute exclusively in areas of their most strongest interest and passion.

Project schedule and timeframe

The project will launch formally in 1st January 2013, aiming at the first colony somewhere safe and isolated in the world two years later, and in those two years will engage primarily at recruiting the interest of a first community of 10,000 RBE enthusiasts and activists, creating the first draft of a knowledgebase in this wiki, initially in English but ideally finished and used in Esperanto (encouraging everybody to learn and contribute in Esperanto as an equaliser and normaliser universal language for RBE10K cities), and building and gathering all the resources that would be necessary for the settlement, ensure full self-sufficiency for two years, and enabling a capacity for remaining full self-sufficient thereafter. The total budget per RBE10K city would be US$100 million. Each settlement would also require a wide enough variety of skills to cater for self-sufficiency.

Criticism

Concerns

Advocates and activists of The Venus Project generally emphasise the need for having a concerted, global effort, instead of a multitude of transition styles (one of which would be RBE10K) occurring at various spots in the world.

Advocates and activists with The Zeitgeist Movement generally emphasise the importance of not progressing into transitions just yet, that the best strategy at this time is help raise awareness within our communities in an effort to reach critical mass and act when the time is ripe.

Some of the criticism received includes the following notions:

• An RBE settlement must not be experiment
• We need to transition globally to RBE much quicker than 40 years
• The inclusion of money pollutes the concept of an RBE
• RBE must be a global initiative, and not a mix of various styles of transition (TVP view)
• RBE cannot be implemented low-tech
• If the project doesn't succeed it may cause a negative perception of RBE in the general population
• It is essential that an RBE city has all the basic comforts people are accustomed to

Addressing concerns

The RBE10K Project intends on address all concerns raised, dealing with conflicts by documenting reasons for each claim and dispute, researching and quantifying the validity for each reason, and arriving at the best possible outcome to maximise the degree of consensus.

References