User:Ziggy/rbe10k

The RBE10K Project original idea and beginnings story is a story of childhood idealism, personal development, social conscience, spirituality, consistency, and Asperger's syndrome. It begins thus. Once upon a time...

Finding RBEM

I believe I have a pretty decent understanding of an RBEM, as per Zeitgeist Moving Forward and Designing the Future, and a pretty decent understanding of why the pursuit of profit is the cornerstone of the vast majority of the social and environmental problems that some or all of us are suffering in these times, as per Zeitgeist: Addendum, and a few seminars and radio shows by Peter Joseph. My understanding does not go much beyond that, it is not really highly educated, I haven't read much or participated a lot in the TZM or TVP structure (even though I was the coordinator of Sydney chapter for a while, and respected in the community). Maybe because of my general understanding of Zen, Taoism, atheism, ecology, biology, phisics, politics, history, hacker ethic, psychology, and especially scepticism, open mindedness, the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and the fact that I'm a graduate of a number of courses in Landmark Education and as a result I no longer dwell on negativity or superficiality, I can tie these basic general background understandings to the concepts described in the Zeitgeist 2 & 3 films, and Designing the Future, to "get" certain concepts easier than some others. Also, because of my Asperger syndrome, I tend to find and "see" patterns on information easier than others, and be more analytic and obsessed with meaning and consistency. Consistency, for me is paramount, and it causes a great deal of frustration and social interaction issues. I feel I always need to be consistent with my principles and values. Before Landmark I also used to be bothered by being consistent with my Normstandards and ideals, but now I understand how wasteful that is, and have swapped that for consistency with my objectives instead. Seeking (or demanding of oneself) consistency can be very paralising, but also very insightful, because it becomes easier, I believe, to spot the problems, the inconsistencies that make a philosophy, proposal, behaviour, or plan unworkable or dubious, or incomplete. And I saw many inconsistencies in TVP, both whilst working with them in the software development team for designing Corcen, and as an activist for TZM prior to the break-up. In the case of TZM, I see inconsistencies in their handling of horizontality, possibly resulting from not having an absolutely clear and unquestionable objective, well defined, as a motto, short and easy to remember, printed everywhere, reminded to everybody all the time, ensuring that everybody understands that TZM has two visions and two objectives only, and the rest is not TZM, nor shoud be associated in any way to TZM. The result of this lack of clear definition (I believe the definition is clear to me, but is not so for many) results in a circus of chapters doing whater they want, deriving interpretations and meanings freely that are inconsistent with the rest of the chapters. I really didn't want to be part of the circus, I wanted to be part of TZM as I understand it: raising awareness about the problems that create the pursuit of profit, and how to resove it through the implementation of an RBEM system. Clear and simple, everything else (technology, permaculture, energy, gadgetery, alternative housing, politics, religion, diet, philosophy, psychology, etc) is not and must not be TZM nor be associated in any way with TZM, IMHO. This is how I left TZM (actually, the Sydney chapter dissolved by lack of voluntary participation and I refused to chase and motivate people to get them to do something productive in concert with the objectives of TZM, as per my understanding of what these objectives are). And seeing myself in love with RBEM and my understanding of TZM core, but left without a functional TZM or a consistent TVP I began entertaining a consistent strategy to implement RBE consistent with TZM's principles of voluntarism and horizontality, and also intended to be realistic and achievable in the short term. I came up with these OCD-based perfect numbers of 10,000 people, $10,000 dollars contribution share, $100 million budget, two years planning, two years testing, exponential growth every two years, and an objective of achieving global voluntarist RBE within a lifetime (40 years), by 2055, so I would have a chance to see it happen. It seemed neat, consistent, reasonable, achievable (in terms of number of volunteers, knowing how many people are participating in TZM internationally and really willing to get on board of an RBE experimental city), a reasonable budget and a reasonable share (at least for middle class in developed nations).

RBEM.ORG Wiki

So I decided to give up with my proposal within TZM to use a Wiki worldwide to document TZM's information, mostly about RBEM and chapter information, and inviting TVP activists to document in it too about their structure and strategies, as I had achieved no popularity and the information I added personally on the Wiki I installed was too poor to be of any practical use, and I was unwilling to continue with it if no one was going to use it. I had registered it as tzmwiki.org (a domain name which still works and points to the same wiki), so I decided to register a generic rbem.org and start working on this idea I had developed as an alternative RBEM implementation proposal to that of TVP's, and called it RBE ten thousand, or RBE10K for short. I documented the general idea and goals to have it clear for myself and ensure it was clearly documented somewhere public, documented terms and conditions of participation in an effort to prevent the same pollution and circus that affected TZM's freedom, horizontality and voluntarism (their terms and conditions are a long document, full of regulations for the activities of chapters, the kind of stuff that only lawyers and people involved in politics are keen to read, and frequently debate over meaning and violation of policies, which allows for a lot of room for boureaucracy, self-appointed leadership and commanding positions of policy awareness and policing, blaming and punishing, and all those nasty nasty un-RBE-like attitudes). Have you seen my proposed terms and conditions? I made them as synthetic and consistent as possible, but yet open to debate and polishing by the community, to ensure consensus, workability, being realistic, and functional. I believe it has to be a short read, in which you can tick through the options according you one's individual values and principles (and standards and ideals for those who still follow those useless, IMHO, parameters), and objectives, and ensure consistency and agreement with at least the great majority, and at most a minor and workable discent in just a few of them. That for me was the beginning of the project and I considered it ready to get started, but it was only November and I wanted to have it be neat, starting 1st of January 2013, so I added more information, developed a few more ideas and a few more pages, gave a seminar on it on a sustainable festival on the 30th of December and the project was well received, so on 1st January I began promoting it. Created the Facebook page a few days later, came up with strategies to have it be more popular, used strategies I had found convenient with the promotion of Sceptic Gaianism page promotion (using interesting pictures/memes with insights, which most people dismiss and share because the picture or meme itself is interesting, but there are those who actually read the text and develop a more profound interest in the page than the pretty pictures, but using this system allows for virality, and virality is a great promotion tool!), so I added a few pictures with insights about my personal vision, both to record it somewhere before it gets lost, and to inspire interest and debate.

Horizontality and Voluntarism

I want this project to be the RBE10K fans community's, and remain as annonymous as possible. It is easy to tell I wrote everything, as the list of changes in the wiki is visible to anyone, and Ziggy is everywhere in all pages, with few little contributions by others here and there. But that is not sustainable, it has to be a community project, I have to pull out of it, allow the community to take the wheel and command, horizontally and voluntarily, and let the project be whatever way the group mind makes it be. The academic, formal, empiric nature of information and the structure it is encoded as a knowledgebase in a Wikipedia-style Wiki hopefully will ensure there is implicit consensus about anything evidence-based and will limit opinion and pointless debate, and I will do my best to ensure that emergent decision making (one of the cornerstone features of an RBEM) will be the decision-making tool of choice, followed by consensus per interest group, followed by direct democracy on things that are personal preference-based. Hopefully, I'll be able to focus on that role, which is where my passion lies, and also in the design and development of the intelligent management of resources, the RPG MMOG-style real life game for the community, and occasional inspirational and vision writing in memes and pretty pictures for the Facebook page. Everything else has to have a life of its own, championed by the community, using the Wiki and Bettermeans for collaboration and coordination of efforts and interest-group projects. If this happens by April or May, then I consider that we'll be on track to achieve our goals, otherwise I'll be concerned about the viability of the project and might try adopting new strategies until I see the results I expect. But so far, by today 10th of Feb 2013, I have reason to believe we're on the right track, with a few self-motivated collaborators already working on their own terms, and many considering beginning to do so soon, and the popularity of the project continues to grow exponentially, and new and recently improved strategies to request participation are showing promising results, so much so that I'm nearly at the edge of exhaustion doing personalised follow up and individualised interested potential collaboration guidance and support. Things are good, I'm proud, happiest time of my life, my childhood dream is manifesting (a construction company kibbutz in Patagonia, with intelligent management of its own resources and automated production systems for quick assembly of homes using pre-fabricated components, having the community consist of construction workers who would develop and support each other whilst not working into becoming architects, engineers, electricians and other specialisations, living in a monetary free commune with their families, leaving the community in caravans of trucks with all the materials for quick home assembly anywhere in the country, get paid, come back, and continue to focus in self development and having the company grow and offer more and more poor construction workers the opportunity to escape poverty and sacrifice; yes, while other children were playing football, dating, going out, dancing, I was the nerd that stayed at home dreaming of a kibbutz, and when I learnt about RBE I realised it was even better, and that my life goal had had an "automatic upgrade" resulting from a new understanding and vision). There is a chance for it to be in Patagonia (after all, so far from the 20 island nations and 7 Latin American countries I contacted to seek information about establishing our community in their territories, only Argentina replied, although dismissively requesting I deal directly with the province involved, of which I'll attempt first be the central Patagonian one, Chubut), and fate might as well have it emerge as the best option, for which my childhood dream would be fully realised! But any other place will have my childhood dream realised as well, as Patagonia was a result of practicality for the kind of project I had in mind, and for being an Argentinian. I'm a resident of Gaia now, and any suitable place will do well.

Epilogue

I apologise for the length of this message and the Joyce-ian stream-of-consciousness style of this message, which may have made it cumbersome and tyring (and possibly even boring) to read! I believe, though, that this deserves being fully copied and pasted into my personal wiki page, even containing this text, to add a degree of comedic recursive and self-referencing ending ;-) Thanks for reading!

PS: I finish this writing at 4:20AM, at my ex-wife's place, who I love as much as I always did, now in the quality of dear soul friends, while visiting on a Saturday to see the kids, sitting on the living-room couch, with my kitty next to me purring, while everybody sleeps. Life is beautiful, and I'm proud of what I've achieved in my life, and happier than ever to see this project take flight and gradually reaching maturity and preparing to leave home and follow a life of its own, to offer the world an opt-out voluntary and peaceful alternative, sustainable, ecological, respectful, promotive of personal responsibility, social responsibility, love and compassion, humility, simplicity, childlikeness, adventure, introspection, generosity, gratitude, pursuit of mastery, full self expression, individuality, and self determination.