building a house ecosquared style

How would I go about building a house if I wanted to do so using ecosquared protocols? I will look at three conditions of social saturation:

  • Red just starting with only you using the protocols
  • Green with teams of people connected in a network using the protocols
  • and Blue where a wide sector of people are sharing within ecosquared protocols

There are many factors to building a house and different ways to categorise its construction, let the following payments are estimates for building a three-bedroom house using traditional economics suffice:

  • land cost, buying land, £100k
  • labour, 40k
  • materials, £120k
  • selling of house £260k +/- whatever the ‘market’ price of such a thing is in the current market

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red solo

Because you are the only person using the protocols, their use is rather limited. Land will be bought, as normal, though you may want to consider the land to be ‘commons’. The materials will also be bought. However, it may be possible to phrase the contracts with suppliers as an MTTP contract. Certain resources may be accessed again in the future, and rather than thinking the money is for the materials, it is more for the relationship to the materials supplier. They just happen to be giving you the bricks, cement, cables, etc.

Labour is conducted as MTTP, whether people understand it or not, it does not matter. It may be possible to open up the potential for a ‘crowd-funded’ house. That is, when the house if finished, the distribution of it worth (if it was sold) would be shared by the value attributed to people’s contribution.

When the house is built, it is ‘open-source’. It is nominally, legally owned by you, but in your mind it is simply the place where you happen to live. Neither the house or the land on which it is built is owned.

Building a house during Red Conditions, means this is more a mental exercise, a thought-experiment, than anything else. It does open up the necessary mentality for future growth however, both in terms of the people engaged to build it, as well as engaging others who have self-built.

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green team

A team gathering to build a house is a little like a ‘barn-building’ community, or a ‘building society’. People are aligning to create a house together, and if they can build one, they may help others as a team so that everyone who contributes ends up living in their own home.

The land is ‘owned’ but is shared in a collective sense. Again, not much meaning here unless the team actually build on mutual, shared ground.

The labour can be paid for via MTTP, and if within the team, it is volunteered. Subjective enumeration is the basic means of tracking people’s contributions. This should map in some way to the current market costs, for laying foundation, brickwork, panelling, flooring, electrical system etc. It should be possible to estimate the ‘return’ to each contributor via SEA should the house be sold.

Resources are bought off market. Again, this is a standard ‘trade’ exchange, money for resources, however it may also be clothed as an MTTP contract, to invite suppliers into the ecosquared supply chain.

The finished house is owned collectively, but is occupied by whoever is living there. The current inhabitants are stewards of the building. This should enable greater flexibility in terms of movement should people want to relocate to other parts of the city, country or the world, by swapping households.

The ‘market-value’ of the house is in terms of traditional economics. In terms of ecosquared, the building has no financial value whatsoever. We may attribute subjective enumeration, presumably by the inhabitants, but this relies on allowing SEA to apply to things. The principle, the practice, is that once the house is built, it is ‘free’. It is a resource to be tracked, to be used, but not to be tabulated with a monetary value.

old fashion barn raising

blue network

Let’s assume that the ecosquared network has end-to-end chains of supply. This means that the build team are simply sharing their resources, as do the suppliers. There is no payment for anything. Materials are given. There may be MTTP contracts, and of course subjective enumeration, depending on the scale of the network.

If this is integrated with an end-to-end supply chain of food too, so that material suppliers and build teams are given food, then the system gets close to becoming fully self-sufficient. Of course, this is still within the current market place, with externalities like oil perhaps, or electricity from a central power grid, and so on, which need to be ‘paid for’. This is balanced by ‘income’ by the entire network as normal jobs. Some participants may take an income as ‘joiners’, ‘bricklayers’, ‘construction workers’, ‘farmers’, ‘teachers’ and so on. Such individuals sell to the current market, and this money is distributed via SEA to all participants within the network.

Because most of the daily resources are internally sourced, whether it happens to be the bricks for the newest buildings or the lettuce in the salad, there is no need for money, personally. Luxuries may be bought by individuals, but this kind of behaviour is frowned upon since the community is still paying for certain collectively required resources, such as electricity, petrol, etc. Once these collective requirements are covered, which is a calculation based on resource allocation and nothing more, the moneyflow which ends up with individuals is spent as each individual sees fit. Because of the way the system works, those who accrue the most money are those who produce the greatest value within the community. This may be related to jobs that people do not want to do, such as working in the sewars, or who happen to provide more invisible skills and services, self-development, social integration, educating kids, etc.

The point is, with the accumulation of material products, as houses, schools, farms, factories, enter into the ‘commons’, so there is no need to pay for these. These resources are shared. Their use is what is tracked using SEA as well as resource allocation economics. There are no owners, so no burgeoning externalities. People are being useful to one another, giving of their produce, whether it is planting a seed and then giving the resulting carrots to others, tutoring kids at math, or constructing bricks. Everything is given freely, and tracked with SEA. Money loses its internal necessity at the rate of which things are being produced within the ecosquared entity; money is no longer needed to ‘buy in’ resources.

 

challenging observation

You decide when these periods of time occur, when we shift from Red to Green to Blue conditions. The rate of social adoption depends on each one of us, individually and collectively, personally and globally.

At some stage, entire communities can become self-sufficient, where money is no longer needed to ‘buy-in’ resources, since they are all generated within ecosquared, food, materials, energy sources. This constitutes the Yellow Condition. Once these conditions apply to all communities globally, then we will have shifted from our current economic system to an economics based on giving, and GIFT will have been completed.

Could something like the Ha-ha’s be used to build a house? Current estimates are about 6 months to build a house. Would 1000 participants be willing to put in £100 to get a house built, using ecological designs, minimal electricity usage, etc — and that house be ‘owned’ by the collective? The current system for enabling ha-ha’s is not strong enough to support this kind of initiative because we can’t track SEA. However, one day the system will be more rigorous, and if participants put £100 per month into these initiatives rather than a mortgage, the world may look rather different in a decade or so.

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