The following is a series of short mini-essays on topics that I felt like writing about but couldn’t fit into a larger essay or expand enough to make them worth writing entire essays on by themselves. For the most part they center on aspects and institutions of our current society, and whether or not they would be found in my model of a technosocialist society.
Restraunts – Kept
It’s important for people to be able to eat when they are away from their dwelling, and some people enjoy food that they would not be able to cook for themselves. Plus, it is often more efficient to cook food in fairly large amounts and serve it to a large number of people than it is to cook each serving individually. With that in mind, I think that it is important to find a place for restaurants in a technosocialist society. The tricky part would be determining an appropriate method for calculating Contribution for the staff and Consumption for the customers. After all, food is one of the most basic of Material Rights, but with the setting and extra effort of a restaurant setting, there needs to be some sort of added Consumption charge. To calculate Consumption, I would recommend starting with the Consumption charge that would be associated with the ingredients if they had been ordered through the Food section of the Market. Add to that the demand for chefs skilled in that particular branch of cooking, the labor of the lesser skilled waiters and dishwashers, and for seats at that particular restaurant. By combining all of those factors, it should be relatively simple to calculate a reasonable Consumption charge for food eaten in a restaurant rather than at home. As for Contributon on the part of the staff, that will vary based on the skill level of the position they serve in, but it will be done through the SNA system and will therefore be based on the same supply and demand factors as most other SNA positions.
Schools – Mostly kept.
In the chapter on Education, we went step by step through the process of gaining an education in a particular skill, and I don’t think I mentioned school once in the whole essay. There is a reason for that. I am not fond of schools as a class of institutions, because I believe that they promote the quantization of education into grades and degrees rather than specific areas of knowledge. But there are certainly practical advantages to grouping teachers together into a single location where students can learn different subjects from different people in the course of a single day. To that end, I think that there should be an accepted model for teachers who wish to group together into such cooperative teaching societies to do so, with the understanding that such groupings should not be given any greater power or credibility simply because they have been grouped together, and that there should be no bias in favor of or against students who attend such teaching societies versus those who teach themselves independently.
Cars – Mostly left behind.
I don’t like cars. I have a certain bias in this area because I am not particularly able to drive them safely myself, and in my subsequent role as a pedestrian I have been frequently endangered by drivers who shared my inability to drive safely but not my committment to avoid driving unsafely. There’s just something about several thousand pounds of steel missing you by fifteen inches while going fifty miles an hour that just makes you dislike them. But there are plenty of less personal reasons to discourage the standard car ownership model. The most obvious reason is that they tend to pollute. We’re finally starting to make progress on that with hybrid and electric cars, but those still aren’t pollution free. Secondly, they consume considerable resources. In order to have several thousand pounds of steel to mow down pedestrians with, you need to mine and smelt several thousand pounds of steel that could be going to something more useful. Thirdly, and here we might be getting back into more subjective territory, it fosters impatience. As someone who mostly walks and takes public transportation, I am used to having to amuse myself for twenty minutes at a bus stop, or thinking carefully about whether I really need a new dohicky that I’ll have to walk two miles to get. Being able to just get in a car whenever you want and get from point a to point b without any real effort on your part makes people soft.
Stores – Mostly kept
Sometimes, you need something relatively immediately. If you have just realized that you are out of milk and you have already poured out your cereal into a bowl, you need to be able to go get more milk without having to wait for shipping. With that in mind, there should be in-person stores in heavily populated areas where people can obtain goods instantly for more or less the same Consumption value that they are currently available for on the Market. I haven’t fully developed this idea yet, but I will eventually.
Lawyers – Left behind
I’m including tax accountants in this category as well. The laws of a technosocialist society should be simple enough for everyone to understand, because the population themselves would be voting on them and they should not enact laws that they don’t understand. Similarly, someone whose job it is to try to find loopholes in the law and distort things in favor of one side or the other is clearly violating the spirit of the law by doing so. While there will always be some citizens who study municipal codes and laws to try to find a way to use them to their advantage, they would never be able to earn Contribution credit for doing so, and if they make a habit of it or do it on a large enough scale they are likely to wind up being charged with Corruption.
Nursing Homes – Left Behind
As the caretaker of an elderly relative myself, I find elder care to be extremely important and we should certainly have institutions in place to provide it, but nursing homes are a particularly bad way of doing that. Care for the young, the old, and the disabled should always be rewarded without regard to whether the care is being provided by a “professional” or a family member. Caregivers should work with those who need them on a one-to-one basis or in very small groups, not in large institutions. While it might be possible to scale up medical treatment, janitorial services, and other aspects of providing seniors with care, it is not possible to scale up actual caring about people, and thus nursing homes tend to lack a personal connection between the patients and anyone else in the home, which can lead to faster mental and physical deterioration in the patient.
Political Parties – Left Behind
One of my favorite quotes from Thomas Jefferson is “If I could not go to heaven but with Party, I would not go.” Leaving aside the fact that it was his disagreement with Hamilton that led to the creation of the two party system in the first place, it demonstrates the fact that the founders of the country did not enshrine or even approve of the idea of political parties. As we’ve already discussed, technosocialism is a direct rather than a representative democracy, and the lack of candidates standing for office also negates much of the traditional structure and lone of a political party. But just to be clear, political parties should never exist as official organizations. If people choose to form groups to advocate for or against a particular issue, it is obviously within their free speech rights to do so. But there can never be a “party” as an independent entity with any of its own assets or anything like that. On an official level, it will never be more than a group of individuals.
Religious Organizations – Mostly Left Behind
Let me be entirely clear here: I am not advocating the abolition of religion itself. Freedom of religion is an important sub-branch of freedom of speech. But I am saying that, like political parties and all other associations of people, religious organizations should never have an independent existence. They can exist on an official basis only second hand, as it were. If twenty people enter into an agreement to share the Consumption charge to rent a space in their neighborhood, it is no business of the System’s whether they are doing that to hold a weekly poker tournament or to hold a religious service. The religious organization as such does not exist, it is simply an agreement between individuals and their reasons for entering into it do not matter on an official level.
Other Non-Profit Organizations – Mostly Left Behind
I’ve already covered most of it in the last two mini essays, but very few organizations of people have any official existance outside of the agreements that the members of the organization choose to enter into jointly. If a group of psychologists want to enter into an agreement to rent an office together and keep it staffed 24/7 for anyone who might need emergency counceling, the system has no knowledge of that beyond the fact that they are making themselves jointly responsible for the rent of that office. Their Contribution is still earned independently unless they choose to pool that as well.
Fitness Clubs – Mostly Kept
Exercise is important, and it should be as easy as possible for people who may not have the ratio buffer or the space in their living quarters to purchase their own exercise equipment to still have access to a gym. Fitness clubs would be treated similarly to collectives of craftsmen in terms of equipment aquisition and rent, and they would be available for anyone to join.
Pets – Kept
Pets can greatly enrich one’s life, and provision should certainly be made for them under technosocialism. however, the question of the Material Rights of animals is a tricky one. We need to take into account that bringing an animal into the world, just as with a person, creates a burden on society to care for it. To this end, people who adopt animals from a shelter should be entitled to food for those animals under Material Rights provisions, but anyone who breeds their animal, whether intentionally or by not having it properly spayed or neutered, should be responsible for a part of the cost of supporting that animal the same way they would be for a human child.