Category: Uncategorized
how much does running a car cost?
I’m returning to education, and because of the rural area in which I live, I shall need a car to get to schools to do supply on a daily basis. So, I shall have to ‘buy’ a car. Which brings into question how much a car costs to run, the issue of ownership, petrol costs, taxes, and so on. Also, a brief look at current ‘alternative’ solutions like Zipcar and a local car-trader down the road who is trying to compete with a low-tech solution, and then we’ll look at how an ecosquared car use may be financed. And if cars don’t rock your boat, we’ll look at other applications of the same math such as with health, revealing a fundamental core to economics: the relationship between capital (a static fund) and regular payments.
everyday running costs of ownership
These costs are ‘reasonable’ for running an average car; with new cars devalue, replace the ‘maintenance’ costs with devaluation. ‘Upgrade’ is the amount of money that is put aside to pay for a new car; eg sell a car at a loss of £500 over the year will mean that the new one will be bought to re-coupe that loss; that is, it will cost £50/month to just stay ‘level’.
Still, if you have a car, these costs are reasonable. That’s £3000 to £5000 a year! Cars burn money…
running costs of rental
Roughly £400, which is £250/£100 more than ownership. No head-aches of ownership. New car. Surely there should be a non-new rental deal out there? There was, but more of that later. Let’s look an a new ‘alternative’ to rent/buy.
‘alternatives’ like zipcar
Based on a trip daily to work and back, clearly Zipcar isn’t the right solution. Another one is Uber, but that’s beyond the horizon at the moment; it’s touted to do to logistics what Amazon did to book-selling, and everything else-selling, kinda. It’s what ecosquared will be competing with a few years down the line, if we’re not clever.
a guy down the road called Darren…
I spoke with a guy last night, Darren Sharpe, an interesting guy. He was ahead of the curve and came up with ‘rent-a-banger‘, basically renting out non-new cars. He ran this for 15 years, but the insurance was a real head-ache, and people abused the system; as we know people take care of things they own, and tend to trash or neglect rented cars, flats, tools — a mentality shift which is critical for longer term sharing solutions.
Now, Darren sells five-year old cars for £2k, and guarantees buy-back at £50/week. So, if you want to return the car say 10 weeks down the road, he will buy it back for £1,500. Thus, cost of use is £200/month PLUS £100/£200 ownership costs. That is, using Darren’s system you need £2k capital, and it costs £150/month more than ownership.
summary of current offerings out there at the time of writing
Looks like ownership is still the cheapest way to run a car, with all the head-aches that ownership entails. Basically there is a financial separation between the players: the owner of the car, those who build the roads and the insurers, the car-mechanics who maintain it, and the company employees who supply the petrol. They are all working together, using the same economic system, with the belief that competition provides us with the best service at the lowest cost.
ecosquared?
Well, it depends on what scale the ecology is at. Let’s say it we have levels of social saturation, which I’ve used before, but in reverse order this time, from the ‘fantastic’ to the realistic, me now looking for a car:
- Yellow Saturation with massive game-changing coverage
- Blue Network where a wide sector of people are sharing within ecosquared protocols
- Green Team of a few people connected and using the protocols
- Red Solo just starting with only you using the protocols
Yellow Saturation
A world where there are enough people in the network to own Esso; where the users and employees of the petrol stations are the shareholders, have %-equity. Nobody is making a profit from the petrol you get at the station. You drive up, fill up the tank, resource use is tabulated, you drive away. No money transaction. Of course, your petrol use may be higher or lower than others, and this is related to how often you use the car. Remember, none of it is yours: its an economy of use, not possession.
(By the way, Esso is evaluated at $300b. 100million people putting in £3000 each (the cost of petrol for a year for some folk) could buy Esso outright. That’s something to think about. An FTP open moneystream of $300b; that’s everyone on the planet contributed $40 each. Will we ever reach this ‘fantastic’ situation? Well, we have the protocols. We have the intention and love and trust between us as friends and family… we just lack the trust in their operation. We are trapped by our traditional mechanics.)
And the cost of petrol is much lower in certain countries, those which have decentralised their government. Just like Esso is %-equity crowd-shared, so is ‘government’. A double win for the folk who manage that first!
Blue Network
A car-pool where insurance is brought within the fold. That is, a crowd-owned insurance company. Again, no-one is making money out of us. When an accident occurs, it is covered by FTP. Of course, it comes down to trusting people to drive cars around. Do you give a super-dooper car to a young man? Only if he proves he can drive well. Insurance companies have the math worked out in terms of rates of injury etc. We should be using this math to simply reduce costs of premium, or in our case FTP contribution towards this BitCar project. Money is not put into the organisation competing with other organisations, a massive marketing and advertising game, both externally and internally.
This is from Direct Line’s 2012 Annual Report (p98).Operating costs 25% of revenue, over a £1billion. That’s a lot of ‘financial’ machinery being paid for.
In terms of ecosquared, we don’t want an insurance company; in fact, we don’t want any company for that matter. We simply use the assurance we have between us: MTTP for p2p, and FTP for one to many. If some network of people give a flash car to one of their group, and they don’t have the resources locally to cover it if things go wrong, then they will require other networks to subsidise them. This is the typical fission-fusion and 1:5 grouping that all kids are familiar with by the age of 11. Not complicated. Fractally complex, but essentially — mathematically and psycho-socially — simple.
Green Team
For this to work, the team has to be concentrated. That is, people who live close by, who share the same garage for example. Each participant ‘owns’ their car in the sense of paying for Road Tax and Insurance (£50-£100/month). Instead of paying for when the car breaks down, a contribution is made to keep the car running smoothly. How much? Depends on how many cars are in the network and the size of the garage, but let’s say around £50/month. They may need to take more people on during periods of stress, or pass cars on to other garages if the demand is too high, as occurs nowadays. And when things are slow, cars are invited in to upgrade them. The objective is to keep cars healthy, so that they do not ‘lose’ their value. Courses are put on to invite owners to be involved in the maintenance of their cars.
Instead of saving funds in private banks, or accessing credit, participants GIFT(£50/month) for the use of the car, FTP{Bitcar}. This accumulated FTP (within a year, 10 car-owners accumulate £6000) not only attracts other car-owners to the network, but can operate like insurance, and to buy in new car, perhaps when a member of the community gets to driving age.
Red Solo
Difficult. Two things possible: hack ownership, and share %-equity in the income enabled by car-use.
hacking ownership
Let’s say I manage to generate the funds to ‘own’ a car at £2k. Let’s say I give-it(car)-forwards-to the ‘BitCar’ project. I also give-it(£50)-forwards-to FTP. Which means I have 100%-equity in all three ecosquare value vectors, Vp Vk Vi, namely the Aggregate (ie the car), FTP or Moneystream (which will be £300 by summer), and SEA.
Who knows how I can leverage this in the future? Perhaps attracting others to the Bitcar project? Perhaps someone may wish to GIFT(car)(£50). Perhaps, I will be able to give my car to someone (rather than selling it), and produce the dynamics described in the Green Team? Either because I leave the country and don’t need the car, or I buy a new car. Perhaps I can use the FTP to buy a new car, and thus include the car within the BitCar network?
So, running costs are identical to ‘ownership’, only difference is, the money that normally goes into the ‘bank’ (for whatever nefarious purposes they put it to) when saving up is replaced with FTP, an open-money-stream:
invest in people, not things — we are the ones ‘making’ the money anyway
Secondly, an alternative way of thinking about this, is to think what the car enables. I will be able to teach, making around £80/day after tax. The car enables this. Without the car, I can’t get to school. So, in a way, the person who gives me the car, is enabling me — they deserve some %-equity in my income. If I make £1600/month, what %-equity would they want? Same goes for the garage mechanic — how much %-equity do they deserve?
Whoever has contributed the car (£2k), the mechanics at the garage (£50/month), I still have to pay for insurance and road tax (£50/month). Based on a plan which is half-way between rent and ownership, at around £250/month, those who supply the car should get around £200/month, which is 12.5%-equity of my income stream.
After one year, the ‘owner’ has recouped their investment, and the garage has made £323.99, regardless of the repairs. Total, £2400 to use the car.
Now, with this kind of relationship, if I kept using the car by the end of the second year, the car-gifter will have made £1722.78 ‘profit’, and the garage another £750 from the second year to cover the costs of maintenance. Total, £4800 to use the car over two years.
A few questions may come to mind, about what the gifter of the car may do — perhaps offer a better one, and if so, what is the rate now? And does the garage-mechanic keep getting more and more until they are taking all of the 12.5% equity reserved for car use? Well, funnily enough, no. It tends to a number. After 10 years, for example, the car-gift owner will be getting £50/month and the garage-mechanic £150/month. Perhaps the car will require that amount of maintenance, but probably not.
the core of economics: numbers and time
Whatever your interest is in cars, the math pattern deserves attention. Why? Because it shows the relationship between capital and regular investment. Think about this in a completely different field — health. Do you pay for health treatment when something goes wrong (capital), or should you be paying a regular investment for health (regular)?
This relationship is at the heart of all our finances: the difference between a static lump sum and regular payment.
FTP, the accumulation of money as an index of trust within a network, combines both: regular payments to a static ‘standing wave’ of money. Where is this money? Well, it is like a bank, but unlike a bank, accumulated FTP does not get used. Like MTTP guarantee, it remains in escrow between the parties. So, FTP acts more like a guarantee, to be released if not enough revenue is generated from what is co-created; to ‘buy out’ those who do not wish to have %-equity in the co-created product.
The thing to get your head around is that %-equity is at the base of new economics, ecosquared or otherwise. Moneyflow is secondary.
And there is a race going on: as capitalism gets finer and finer in resolution, turning everyone and his dog into a capitalist, versus the sharing economy, where we are all part of a greater whole, a collaborative commons, where we share everything. Capitalism has massive momentum, institutionally, mechanically (financially), and psychologically. The internet has cracked open a massive opportunity in the form of open-source and it rejuvenated the commons and after a decade a massive sharing meme. But are the proponents of the sharing economy fooled by their relative luxury, royalty within the citadel playing games because they live in a world of material abundance?
It’s a tough call, and we each have to make it. We do so in our daily actions. We do so with every single financial transaction. I for one, am not convinced, as I turn to ‘buying’ a car, filling it with petrol regularly, and fueling the current system which is so destructive to our environment, and our collective soul.
GIFT(x) FTP Invitation
So, FTP has been rolling around my head since the beginning of the year. I haven’t finished the math, or the website invitation, but after speaking with Patrick Anderson, I pulled together this provisional video. From even the briefest perusal of Patrick’s G+ About page, it’s clear he is insightful and working towards bettering the world.
In terms of the system, I already have a Stripe submission in play, though will be looking at alternatives for moneyflow for content, eg for this site, which constitute ‘Surplus’ which is divided in the ratio of SEA. That is, the system is minimally operational!
the triggering dialogue
Interesting. I found you on linked-in… searched for your future product foundation thing on the internet, didn’t find you, but eventually came round to your g+ page — and you are already in my circles! How are things going with you?
1:57 PM
Hi David. I’m doing well. How are you?
Hi. Yeah, pretty good. Too many convergent thoughts since the new year. Way too many. Hence my rather rare attempt to outreach, eg with you. Perhaps a few other players who are on the fringes, who are exceptional, may share the… burden of exploration 🙂
2:32 PM
I don’t know where it comes from, but once you see in a new way, you are compelled to show others. I see your G+ response to my old, repetitive post. In not really sure what you mean by math or model, but I am willing to work with you to develop those interpretations
2:38 PM
Ah, nice. You talked about fractional ownership, I think. I was asking if you have any math for this? To track fractional ownership. If this is what you were working on, coding, etc? With your product future foundation?
2:39 PM
Ah. Hmm… It seems so elementary that I don’t see how math would help
2:41 PM
hehehahahahah ok, cool heheha I have the opposite problem. When I engage my peers who are trying to develop algorithms that track value, they don’t see the simplicity of our solution. So, good.
2:43 PM
I may be wrong, and an willing to try, but let’s look at a small example and then scale up to see where we lose track
2:43 PM
Well, that’s it exactly. Ok, you free for a quick chat? Or perhaps a major engagement? How serious are you about this? By major engagement, I mean, say, an hour, where we delve as deeply as we can. So that we establish the parameters of our engagement.
2:44 PM
I am extremely serious about this. I can prove it is the optimal organizational form
2:45 PM
Can you prove it financially? Are you loaded? Are you living in comfort? A life of luxury?
2:45 PM
I want to chat right now, but I have to go to work in about half hour Just because I’m not living and luxury now doesn’t prove this approach invalid
2:46 PM
Same here. However, if you can prove something mathematically, that’s a big bonus. Something useful to leverage with.
2:47 PM
I haven’t actually implemented anything yet because nobody understands me yet
2:47 PM
I’ll put £5 forward to engage you over the next 20-30 mins or so. Will you.
2:47 PM
I appreciate your offer but I am so anxious to explain this solution that I would be willing to pay you:-D
2:49 PM
Exactly, will you put money forward? I will take you at your word. Which means, if after we engage, you don’t think it has been useful, then don’t honour your word. From the little I have engaged, I believe we are worth £5
You want me to pay you?
2:50 PM
Not really, it just goes forward. Part of the discussion… I’d like to have a video up explaining it, but, that’s still in the pipeline. The actual math hasn’t been finalised yet. Hence this engagement. You might be part of the solution. Doesn’t prevent us from experimenting, though. So, I am willing to put £5 forwards. Are you? Actually, with this time now, let’s reduce it to £1 since we don’t have much time left…
2:52 PM
The system I am trying to describe “cancels out” most of the need for money
2:54 PM
Yeah, I know, I know. I need something to sustain my exploration. I’ve done enough over two years and have to go back to work because of ‘problems’ in communication. Let’s talk another time when you have the time and the £ interest. You definitely are saying the right things. It will be good.
2:55 PM
We will need some money to start, but I’m sure a kickstarter campaign will work once we can explain it to others
2:56 PM
Good luck! Get back to me when you are ready to engage logarithmically.
2:57 PM
I am in severe debt right now going through a divorce and was out of work until just the beginning of this week
2:57 PM
Tell me about it… That’s why our engagement will be valueable. Don’t waste it through this little text chat. You are highly valuable, so am I, and our engagement will be valuable. Don’t worry. If I had the money, I’d invite you personally, but I don’t. So, be assured, get back to me when you have time.
2:58 PM
Okay, it would help me understand your needs if you would send me example of algorithmic engagement
2:58 PM
ehehe — which comes first, understanding or experimentation? I have enough info from your posts that I want to experiment with you. Based on that experiment, I will have more understanding, and so it builds… It’s fine, don’t worry. This engagement has already been useful. Believe me. I will record something, post it, and invite you to review it.
3:01 PM
Ok, set you later. *see
3:02 PM
Cool. Have a good day, really 🙂
3:02 PM
readability of this post — the turning point of understanding and information
Editing a Google Hangout Chat has been a real pain. I hope it is readable. How well you penetrate this, how deep your reading, will determine the depth of our engagement, and the speed by which this protocol takes shape in 2014. Your temporal co-ordinates as you read (early January? Spring 2014, Summer? Perhaps 2015), compared to the current saturation of this (FTP) protocol in the current marketplace, will determine your importance in this process. You know, early adopters and all that.
So it comes down to understanding. I have explained complex math to kids. I am a professional communicator. And yet, with ecosquared, the resounding response from the beginning has been lack of understanding — and get this — a demand for more explanation. Just look at this site — it is two years worth of explanation! I have risked my wellbeing, my family’s wellbeing, on ecosquared. I believe ecosquared holds the kernal of a global solution, and this FTP may be the actual turning point — it enables a means of moneyflow that helps us learn how to operate a completely alternative economics, an ecological and ethical one, one based on giving.
Is there enough information, through the video, this post, the other posts on this video — is there enough INFORMATION, that it warrants engagement? It is through the process of engagement that understanding will emerge. That is, is there enough INFORMATION that you are willing to conduct an EXPERIMENT? Not just theorise, discuss, chat, etc, but actually conduct a financial experiment?
But where does the money go?
Yes, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Where indeed…
You’d like to know where it goes, but as we know from our current situation, the money end up in the pockets of those who have it. Capital. Money attract money.
Ecosquared protocols perform two hacks on money, namely MTTP and SEA. FTP performs the equivalent function of ‘capital’, though it operates more like ‘insurance’.
For now, suffice to say, you will get a say in where the money goes if it ever has to leave the network. That is, FTP is merely the decision to give money forward to a future date where you and others decide what to do with it. What power you will have in where it goes, depends on the quality of engagement you have, the value you co-create, and so on. The money doesn’t really ‘go’ anywhere. It is like a standing wave of collective intention; the accumulated FTP indicates the health of the network, the level of trust we have in one another.
Perhaps faith. Once our engagement occurs, our initial faith in one another will be honoured by trust. With small amount of money, small periods of engagement, and small projects, and over time this grows — based on results. Just like any enterprise or company or government or any social organisation in recorded history. It’s results driven. But to have results, one needs experimentation.
It’s up to you. Right now.
So, are you willing to gift £x forward to an engagement? You don’t have to pay that up after the engagement if you didn’t think it valuable. Of course not. But if you do think it is valuable, you will be happy to, and indeed, perhaps give more money forwards as your confidence in what we are doing is proven. Yes, in what we are doing. FTP is the financial protocol for collective co-creation. It is the process by which teams form in a network. And it operates from the get go.
Perhaps you will need some more information, so read on. Perhaps you need someone social validation, an article in some trusted source gets written at some point, or someone you know invites you to FTP later in the year, and after a few invitations, your trust of your friend or colleague overcomes the need for ‘understanding’ and you give it a go. And then, you will have experiential evidence of the experiment: how money-trust-time operate in ecosquared. Then it is for you to decide what to do next. Lovely.
This is a win-win-win solution. It’s just a matter of time. It’s a matter of who reads this: those who already resonates with it, and those who are willing to risk their word-action to test it. And of those who participate, those who can iterate a better version of engagement than this first, rather crude, iteration of video and blog post.
I look forward to meeting with you!
mttp first principles #1 slideshow
Get in contact if it catches your mind, to follow up with the next in the series.
considering the ecosquared equivalent to Return-on-Investment
Someone asked, in the context of doing things you love, how do we get remunerated:
“What additional work is required to maximize the RoI of time and energy?”
There is no need to maximise the time you spent to produce what you love — it was its own gift, and it is over now.
Think about it across different people: say a farmer digs out the carrots, his work is done; the distributor accepts the carrots and takes them somewhere, and his job is done. By having a system that imbalances the equality of this, ‘maximising roi’ or ‘marketing’ or ‘advertising’ or ‘selling’ is simply eating into the efforts of the distributor. Or another way of thinking about it, the farmer is happy to pass on the carrots and the distributor is thankful for the carrots so they can distribute them, and the people who eat the carrots are thankful to the distributors; the number of thanks increases. Or a third way that comes to mind, the farmer doesn’t need to worry about RoI because the distributors are taking care of that — their act of distribution is the RoI. And this is clearer when the distributor gives the carrot to the thankful person at the end, both parties know exactly what their RoI will be — the eating of the carrot.
(I don’t know if that makes sense, or whether the meaning comes across. It is a bit terse, but I think valid.)
A more important question:
“What is the most efficient way to translate your work of love into income?”
My answer is, pay the person before they do what they love, so they are free from the burden of ‘getting a result’. And this is scalable in time, so they end up doing more that they love, especially as it changes over time.
centerless politic and old people!
I think I’ve worked out the social form that creates a dynamic, centerless politic! It’s come out of the experience of the ha-ha’s, and involves compression and expansion of the phase space of £-people-time. Circulation of money in equity cycles, what I originally understood as horizontal and vertical but is now sequential in time, makes money ‘well-behaved’ while giving rise to a subjective enumeration network which tracks our own individual personal value. Lovely.
A centreless politic is something I have had my eye out for over a decade. How to create a social dynamic that is centerless, and yet stable? Our current politics and economics suffers from emphasis on the centre, on the pinnacle of the pyramid, on ego, on selfishness and ownership. We area culture dominated by ‘leaders’, and worse, institutional forms that places control centrally regardless of the capacity of the people who occupy central positions. A centerless politics provides us with a completely different social dynamic.
Because of the initial conditions of giving money before deciding where the money is going to be directed, the ha-ha’s create a centerless structure. However, it was only half of the dynamic of the torus — the compressive aspect. That is, when a bunch of people agree to give-it-forward to a smaller number of individuals, represented as the movement from outside the torus to the inside. The other half was not obvious, and is the reason why the ha-ha’s failed — the expansive aspect. What is the social force equivalent to more people being involved? Yup, the Invitational-Protocol. During the co-design period in August, I put it to everyone for the second meeting that we needed to come up with the IP that would work given the limited technology. We don’t have a means of tracking our Invitations, so we settled on using an off-the-shelf ‘crowd-funding’ template.
Anyway, if we sort out the IP, being careful how money-people-time expands, so we have the two parts to making this centerless politic exist!
how many people will we need to make it work?
Because we are dealing with fluids, it is not a straight forward ‘number of bodies’. Just like one’s pulse can be measured not just by number of heart-beats per minute or the blood pressure, the Chinese have several more subtle indicators.
We need to consider density — the number of people within a period of time. We might have several ha-ha’s running simultaneously, each with their own settings. Most of the feedback during the ha-ha’s involved suggestions to improve the tech, making it easier for people to be represented, dreaming up new bespoke tools — check these rather interesting social toys, by the way, specifically Points of Unity.
We wanted to get 100 people in the last ha-ha, to create the conditions that is beyond a small group. We simply don’t have any direct experiential feedback at this level, apart from when we work in companies and governments, or when we are audiences, or take part in self-organising systems like driving on the roads. We didn’t create the conditions, we didn’t meet the right density.
We may also want to consider density in terms of the Invitational-Protocol, how many people we invite, over what period, and with what quality, and range of gleick-group we are tapping into — it is wiser to invite only a few from each social group we may have, rather than all from a social group of like-minded people, which is our traditional way of organising ourselves.
and where to the old folks come in?
Because it works scalably, I have no idea of the threshold numbers from this end, from initial start-up situations; less than a hundred, perhaps only 40, but over a few ha-ha’s. From the back-end of global unity, using the old back-casting thought-experiment we should be familiar with by now, I know the peer group that can make it happen — old people! When we are talking about change over a couple of decades, over a generation, there is only one generation that can almost guarantee that they will not be about, thus deriving our centerless politic. Ie, if it is started with old people, rather than young and wilful, they may be able to kick-start the conditions that in a decade bring fruition for us all globally. It requires this level of vision, something we tend not to think old people have. However, with their age, this kind of period is well within their grasp to understand and to operate by. Think about old folks and their grandchildren, and the legacy they are leaving them globally.
I tried this idea out with a housemate, and the idea got immediately dumped. He only saw the problems that may arise from children worries about their parents being fleeced. Yes, there are problems, and problems which we may not be able to overcome. Still, global unity isn’t going to come about without challenges. This is a challenge that they may need to take on. It is not up to us.
So, I believe this is a rather beautiful invitation for old people to regain some of their lost respect, and bring into existence a sustainable world. I doubt if anyone will get this in this day and age, and also because very few (less than a handful) have any insight of the potential of the protocols, but my, it is beautiful. And the invitation goes to those who are terminally ill, or those who are suicidal — a possible way for them to contribute towards creating a centerless politic. And those mature souls who are playing a less-ego-bounded game; for though they may live to see it happen, they are centrelessness enough in their daily practice, that they have some chance of avoiding the power that comes with social attention.
inaugural happening-hangout
$10 for a piece of future-history!
Inaugural Happening-Hangout tomorrow http://isithappening.org/
Learn experientially — shift from discussion and community building to direct social impact.
There’s a free option, but it is recommended to put in $10 to get a full experience. Although only a handful of people may turn up (this is only one day’s notice), the social insights the first players get will be essential to the success of the experiment.
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
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.
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.
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.
collective objective ‘light-touch’
Co-designing the ha-ha’s is a good experience, there are plenty of lessons to be learned. Even in the ‘negative’ spaces of what is missed, what is omitted, what doesn’t happen.
I saw this post on a FB group, Campathos, run by Cynthia La Grou.
My comment was this:
I am finding in our current co-design, people look to one another for perspective. That is, they are focussing on each other rather than the objective. I’d rather look at one another for value, which is inspiring, and keep my attention on the objective, which will enable us to achieve it collectively. Tricky to enable. The basis of human ‘flocking’ I think.
Does this make sense?
hard co-design versus soft co-creation
Co-designing is slightly different than softer, more open-ended creative collaboration. Co-design brings a certain specificity. It’s more like engineering. There are specific settings, parameters, that are demanding. We must obey the laws of physics when building our bridge. We must play with the tools we have. This goes for engineering a bridge, or coding, and — I propose — certain psycho-social dynamics.
The ha-ha’s are not a ‘get together’, a soft social gathering, a ‘feel-good’ event. The objective of the ha-ha is to create consensus with upto 1,000 or more — in an hour! That’s… like… crazy! Impossible, or at least very very demanding if we want to control, force, coerce, argue, etc. However, if we use Trust and we self-organise, I believe we can do it relatively easily — if we get the ‘social tech’ right. It has to be right from the get-go. Hence the emphasis on the Invitational-Protocol, an implementation of the ecosquared financial protocols, the methodology. We are reversing the current economic system. We are practicing aikido, we need to touch just the right pressure points for it to work. ‘Light-touch’ collaboration on a collective objective.
Are we going to co-design this social tech by being soft, looking at one another for instructions, or building community within our own group? I never pretended that we are ‘building community’ between us as co-designers. We see the lay of the land, we have an objective, and we make moves. We do what we can. We allow ourselves to think the impossible. We take courage in that our fellow co-designers are making moves. We see what they are missing and we fill in the gaps. We may support one another as we attempt the impossible! We are self-learning, co-dependent, incredible mutual beings. We are amazing!
the social feedback loop of ha-ha’s
Think about how the ha-ha’s will work, whether we get it right this iteration or not. In one hour, 1000 are not going to ‘befriend’ anyone. There is no time for ‘discussion’. It is not ‘community building’ as we know it. It is not reaching consensus by listening to each member. It is not about aggregating a network with 1,00o like-minded members. So what is the point of it?
Social impact.
That is, if something actually happens in the following week — this is why we come back together. We managed to do something socially miraculous. We trusted one another enough with our £10 and our 1 hour to enable something amazing to happen in the world.
That’s enough for me. I will die happy if ha-ha’s are working in the world. I will look forward to doing ha-ha’s. I will start to recognise names, I will note quality contributions, I will pursue off-shoots, I will get to know other participants, I will take part more actively in the decided social action and work in more intense teams. All because there is social impact. It is social impact that defines my engagement with others. I exist relative to the social impact. Everyone who is playing ha-ha’s, and learning to humanly flock, is relative to our collective flocking.
Intelligent flocking. Self-herding cats. Heart-connected future-orientated collaboration. Courage and love! Courage to go forward not-knowing, and love as the bond between us.
second critical week of co-design of ha-ha’s
We had our second meeting on Monday, framing what needs to be done this week, namely working out the ‘Invitational-Protocol’, how we invite people to the ha-ha’s and what the tech required to enable a smooth player experience.
I’ve timestamped the first hour so far. There are a few framing bits to start with, framing piece, and then two conversational bits of about 10-15 mins between Doug, Mani and me which are very interesting.
I get the impression when reviewing this, the complexity of the space we are creating within. Amazing to hear Doug’s and Mani’s perspectives. Very revealing, of themselves and their trajectories, but more importantly the space. Doug has a remarkable understanding of the current corporate ecology, Mani is focussing on designing the player experience, and I am attempting to introduce ecosquared financial protocols. If I wasn’t locked into the objective of 1000 people by end of september, this is the kind of conversation we ‘should’ have had in phase 1. I believe our objective would have been different.
benefits of light-touch co-design of a specific instance
I still think we can pursue multiple strategies, which is the benefit of working as lightly as we are. By creating a prototype, by fulfilling our commitment:
- we have something to show eg reddit or quora which is along Doug’s lines
- we’ll be able to tighten up an experiential tube to fulfil Mani’s method
- we have experienced a way of working which is light, and yet fulfils our objective
That is, we have something concrete to take forwards, as well as the experience of trying to integrate our thinking in a specific instance. A second iteration may emerge as a consequential result, either directly through the ha-ha’s if they turn out to be successful, or as a separate trajectory if not.
this week’s co-design focus
So, let’s apply ourselves to the co-design for this week: creating the ‘Invitational-Protocol’. The default is running much like a crowd-funding site. Can we include a loop that binds people through trust? Can we include a financial movement when we invite friends? If we manage it, this increases the chance that the ha-ha’s will work. By binding value, trust, and moneyflow at the dyadic relationship, in the ‘Invitational-Protocol’, we create an ecological economics equivalent to ‘marketing’ and ‘sales’. Check out the MTTP animation, since the IP is a version of MTTP.
Remember, though, it is not sales or marketing, since what we are inviting people to is ‘not-known’. It is a genuine invitation to co-create. Amazing potential — let’s see if we can apply ourselves this week and crack it!
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