Over the course of these essays, I have outlined my idea for a society quite different from the status quo, but one that I believe must be the next step in human social evolution. So, how do we get from point a to point b? How do we handle the transition from capitalism to technosocialism? We talked about the complications of having outside currency flowing through a technosocialist society and the potential for corruption that it would engender. For that reason, it would be very difficult to take a full-scale society and gradually shift it from capitalism to technosocialism.
Instead, we need to try to start with a small technosocialist society, and gradually expand it into a full-size soceity. It could start with as few as a dozen people, choosing to live in an intentional community. At this point the standard utopian radical is supposed to go on about everyone pooling their resources and living communally, aboloshing private property and making things out of hemp. But I would hope that anyone who made it this far in the book knows better than that. (People who skip chapters, you’re just going to have to trust me on that. But you might enjoy reading the essay before this one next, because it has a footnote saying that people who skip chapters get fed to dragons. Then go back to the beginning and read the thing in order. Now go back to the main text, you’re going to miss a good bit.) No, as I have explained, I have a great respect for private property. It becomes all the more important at the beginning of a society, because without people bringing in their private property there will be no property to be had, public or private. At first, this technosocialist community would be simply a residential neighborhood. Some sort of trust would be set up to purchase a reasonably large parcel of land, and residents would then buy or build tiny houses that could be brought to that land. At this stage in the process, every citizen would be an immigrant, as we discussed in the chapter on Material Rights. To join the society, each immigrant would be required to contribute enough money to that trust to buy half an acre of land. That contribution, and a clean background check, would earn the immigrant probationary citizenship, with the rights and restrictions that come with it. Most residents would still earn their living in the outside world, but would also be able to build their Contribution and Consumption ratios by bartering goods and services among each other.
Eventually, the community would reach more than 100 people. By that point, the trust would own fifty or so acres of land, and the community would be large enough that it could start taking its first few steps towards self-suffiency. So long as those who worked in the outside world purchased food and other necessities and offered them in the Market, it might be possible for some to begin earning their living inside the community, producing goods and offering services that others could purchase through the Market and limiting their consumption to that available through the Market. Citizens could begin farming on vacant trust land, and eventually the community would become self-suffiecient for most of its basic foods. Once there is employment available within the society and it is no longer linked to the local job market in the area where it has been founded, immigration is likely to significantly increase.
Eventually this gradual expansion is likely to begin causing conflict with the outside society. Of all of the difficulties involved in the foundation of a technosocialist society, this is the one for which I feel least able to provide a concrete answer. So rather than lay out a step-by-step process, let me lay out some guidelines instead. First and most importantly: violence is never an answer. One of the primary reasons that revolutions started in the name of communism always end with a totalitarian government is that you end up with a bunch of people with guns when the revolution’s over, and for some reason they seem to feel that they should be in charge. There should never be any talk about overthrowing the government or seizing the property of others. The growth of a technosocialist society must always remain peaceful and legal.
Secondly: citizens of a growing technosocialsit society should remain as active as possible in outside politics. Gently over time, they should gain as much political autonomy as possible by running for local office and separating the land of the society from the jurisdiction of the outside government whenever they can. When it becomes necessary, they should run for statewide and national office and push for lessened state and federal jurisdiction over private communities such as a technosocialist society. Eventually an equillibrium will be reached when most of those who wish to join the community will have already done so and growth will slow. The size of the community at that point will the main factor in determining the level of disagreement with the host government, and hopefully the community will have become influential enough to resolve those issues with their votes rather than having it come out into open conflict
Thirdly: the best defense is complete transparency. There needs to be no distrust of outsiders by citizens in the community, or there will also be distrust of the community by outsiders. Public relations, while on the list of things that an ideal technosocialist society would be better without, is nonetheless crucial in the early years of the society’s foundation to prevent the society from being shut down as a cult or a threat to national security. There need to be plenty of tours and other information sources available to outsiders so that they can find out what life in a technosocialist society is really like.
There is no doubt that the founding and growth of a technosocialist society to any significant size would be an incredibly complicated undertaking. There’s a part of me that thinks that it might need to wait until space travel or similar technology makes it possible to reach land that has never before existed, or until the growing instability in our capitalist system causes it to creash entirely. But the more it can be tested on a small scale, the better we can ready ourselves for a societal-scale test. In the mean time, I hope that if you’ve managed to make it all the way to the end of such a strange book, you’ve been intrigued by my ideas. There will be aspects you like and aspects you disagree with, and I hope there’s plenty you would change. Write your own essays. Come to technosocialism.com and contribute them to the community. Let me know what I’ve left out, what I haven’t covered properly. But most of all, think. Think about the way the world works, and how you would change things if you had a magic wand. Imagine how you could make those ideas practical. Don’t get tied down in conventional wisdom and how the world works today. Give humanity something to shoot for. And don’t skip around when you’re reading my book, or we’ll feed you to dragons.