Let me start this essay out with an admission: like so many Americans, I have never really travelled. I’ve been to Canada once or twice, and I once spent a whole week in Antigua, but I’ve never even been to California, let alone Europe or Asia. Unfortunately under our current system, travel is both difficult and expensive to undertake. In addition to the actual costs of going from point a to point b, there is the time off from work required, the cost of finding lodging at one’s destination, and a dozen other costs that add up to a significant obstacle. Travel and the accompanying learning about other cultures is a valuable experience that can often help someone grow as a citizen of the world. In addition to the cultural and intellectual value of tourism, the freer the population is to travel and to migrate, the better market forces will steer populations into stable and efficient configurations.
With this goal in mind, how can we make provisions for both casual travel and migration in a technosocialist society? Let’s start with a little definition of just what a municipality is. One of my favorite holdovers from history is the size of the modern county. When county lines were first being drawn, it was thought that everyone in the county should be able to get to the courthouse with no more than a day’s ride on horseback. And while people rarely need to ride a horse to the courthouse anymore, it is still reasonable to use travel time and population density as guidelines when we draw these sorts of boundaries.
The most basic unit of land is the plot, determined by however much land the person living there wanted to claim. But the most basic unit of land with a fixed area is the acre. Each individual acre of land is marked either as unpopulated, rural, semi-urban, and urban depending on its population density. An acre with no people living on it would obviously be classified as unpopulated. A acre with less than one person living on it (for example, if one person had claimed four acres of land, each acre could be said to have .25 of a person living there) counts as a rural acre. Between one and twenty people living on an acre would make it semi-urban, and more than twenty people would make it urban. Different population densities are then afforded different levels of municipal services. A rural acre would be entitled to mail delivery, but if it did not abutte a semi-urban or urban acre it would not be entitled to municipal water or electricity delivery, and would need to produce its own through wells and solar cells. A semi-urban acre would be eligible for bus service, but not automatically to light rail service, and so on.
Up one level from acres are districts. Since the basic unit of transportation is not the vehicle, be it horse or car, but the pedestrian, it seems logical to base our municipal land units on that. In my experience, the furthest you can expect most non-hikers to walk in a day is about five miles. After that you run into many people’s physical limitations, and they simply can’t go farther than that without considerable physical discomfort. With that in mind, I think it’s reasonable to limit the size of an individual district to no more than 3.5 miles on a side so that no point within the district is more than 5 miles away from any other point. Districts are also registered as unpopulated, rural, urban, or semi-urban, based on the classification of the majority of acres within them. Any urban district should have at least one light rail access, one medical center, two or three Depots, and a variety of other public resources. Semi-urban districts should have similar resources, minus the light rail and anything else similarly resource-intensive that would not be as necessary in lower-density areas. Rural districts should still have a medical center and at least one Depot, but are not automatically eligible for other municipal services.
The next level in scale is the city. The city has no defined size, but instead is made up all contiguous urban and semi-urban districts contiguous to the city center. As the city expands, more and more urban districts around its edge. On occasion, two cities may end up merging when their sphere of suburban districts begin to overlap. In this case, it is up to the residents of the two cities whether they would rather unite into a single city or continue as two separate boroughs of a larger city unit. In either case, the change is purely symbolic, as there is no city government and the city designation is purely one of civic identity. The only importance of a city designation is that every city of more than three urban districts is entitled to a connection to the national train network.
So that was a bit of a tangent, but let’s get back to looking at travel. Every individual is entitled to a single place of residence, but they are entitled to that anywhere within the technosocialist society in question. If we take the United States as an example of a landmass that might encompass a technosocialist society (no, don’t get annoyed libertarians, I’m not trying to take over your country, I’m just too busy to make up fake places with any consistency to them) the fact that someone was born in Massachusetts doesn’t mean that they aren’t just as entitled to live in Ohio as they are in Massachusetts. They are still entitled to their Material Rights in whatever city they choose to live.
Now, there’s an obvious problem with this formulation. Namely, the problem of how you fit the 300 million-strong population of the United States onto the island of Hawaii. There needs to be some sort of provision to stop everyone in the society from moving to the temperate, naturally beautiful parts of the country. The trick here is to add a certain national element into the equivalent for Material Rights when it comes to housing. If demand for housing on Oahu is significantly higher than demand for housing in Tulsa, there may end up being no housing in Oahu that counts entirely under one’s Material Rights, and there may be some quite lavish housing in Tulsa that would qualify. Hopefully this would serve to equalize the population levels somewhat and compensate those willing to endure the hardships of the starker areas of the country for their lack of natural beauty.
But if we aren’t talking about migration, but simply travel for the sake of enjoyment, we need to figure out how Consumption charges for that would work. There is the actual travel itself, which could easily be calculated by placing seats on trains, planes, etc. on the Market with initial prices determined by the cost of fuel, but there is also the matter of lodging at one’s destination. Now, we’ve already covered the fact that each citizen is entitled to a single place of lodging under their material rights. If someone is simply visiting a location as a tourist for a week or so, they probably will not want to move out of their home and give up claim to it for that week, even though they aren’t there. So for the term of their vacation, they will be taking up two residences, and we largely have three ways of dealing with the Consumption charge involved with that.
The first is home-swapping. When someone wishes to go on vacation, they put their home into the pool for a week, and in return they are able to stay in someone else’s home with no Consumption charge. The trick here is creating tiers of housing based on the normal Consumption value of the home, so that people who are putting a week in a 6′x8′ Material Rights apartment into the pool are not entitled to a week in a five bedroom mansion. If someone wishes to vacation in a house that is in a different tier than theirs, they are either charged Consumption value or awarded Contribution value for the difference in tiers.
The second is a traditional hotel model. Building devoted particularly to housing people who are there on vacation. Rooms could be distributed through the Market with prices set by supply and demand. The problem here is that it requires a separate structure built solely for the housing of visitors, and in “off-season” times it may go largely empty, which is an unfortunate waste of resources and land.
Finally, there could be a “temporarily renting two apartments” model, in which visitors simply entered the housing market like everyone else, but only for a short time and without the benefit of any discount provided by their Material Rights. The disadvantage here is that they would not have any furniture, so there would also need to be some sort of furniture rental service. While the whole idea would be completely impractical in our current system, the lack of any paperwork would make it surprisingly easy under technosocialism.
Because of the separation technosocialism creates between “work” and “job”, it is much easier for people who are travelling to continue to earn Contribution credit. In the case of the traditional young adult backpacking across Europe, for example, a young person who worked as they traveled and consumed little could actually end up considerably bettering their ratio over the course of the trip. Indeed, someone could live a fairly nomadic lifestyle for much of their lives and still build up quite a solid ratio. While such nomads in modern culture are often associated with criminal activity that they are never fully punished for because of the many jurisdictions they commit it in, under a technosocialist society a person’s Profile is attached to them wherever they go, and they would not be able to avoid the consequences of their actions simply by moving. By removing the incentive for criminals to become nomads, we leave a space for the creation of a wholesome and productive nomad culture among those who simply like to see new places and avoid long term committments.
The last topic we need to cover is the issue of travelers from the outside who wish to visit a technosocialist society. They would be visiting without ratios or Contribution scores, and cannot simply be allowed to consume without repercussions. They need to have some way of paying the society for their stay. Probably the easiest way to do this is to allow them access to the Market, and allow them to earn Contribution value by bringing in manufactured goods from the outside and listing them in the Market. This means that all visitors would need to set up Profiles before their visit, but this process would probably be less onerous than that of obtaining a visa, etc. before traveling even between two different capitalist countries. And once they visited once, they would be able to return as much as they liked without any further paperwork.