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Trying this again

17 Sep

A few months ago, my webhost decided to cancel my account and delete all my data. That was fun. So I’m working on getting everything set up and running again, but if this post remains the only one on here for a couple of months, it’s because having to start over from scratch made me grumpy.

Update: Yay for me! I’ve sucessfully gotten most of the archives back up.  Apologies to anyone who got their RSS reader spammed, but there’s really no way to avoid that. I have a number of new posts that will hopefully be showing up over the next week or so, but I’m so tired of copying and pasting right now that I could spit.

 
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How do we get there from here?

01 Dec

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.

 
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Health Care, TechSoc Style

27 Nov

I’ve talked in a number of these essays about the Material Rights that every citizen is entitled to. Food and Housing have each gotten at least an essay a piece. Housing and Technology have been at least briefly addressed. But there is one important piece of the Material Rights puzzle that I have left almost entirely unaddressed: Medical Care. In fact, as I planned out the course of this first volume of essays, I subconsciously left it to be the penultimate essay, just before the one that almost had to finish out the book. Medical care is incredibly complicated. Not only is the science far beyond my personal understanding, but the bioethics are nearly as impenitrable. But medicine is just as important as food and shelter when it comes to a citizen’s right to survival, and so it needs to be addressed here at some point.

Anyone who reads this book should be at the top of the list if dragons turn out to be real and we need to feed them people to appease them.

Yes, that was a non-sequitor. But I’m guessing that although it primarily probably made you puzzled, it also probably made you at least a little bit angry. And there’s an important point to be made there when it comes to the intersection of logic and bioethics. When I define you, the reader, as someone who should be fed to dragons if they exist, I am not actually threatening you in any way. Dragons don’t exist, and apart from young children and fantasy fans with not enough to occupy their minds, no one would take the idea that they ever would remotely seriously. And yet, by telling you that there are circumstances in which I think that you should be fed to a dragon simply because you are a member of a group, i.e. readers of this book, I have made you feel singled out and unappreciated.

In the context of this essay, that doesn’t mean all that much. If you’ve made it this far through the book, you probably have some small appreciation for my ideas (if you’re simply skimming through chapters out of order, shame on you. They’re in the order I wrote them in and if you skip around there will be concepts that haven’t been explained in that particular chapter because I’ve gone over them earlier. I’ve changed my mind, it’s people who read things out of order that ought to be fed to dragons. Now stop dawdling in the footnotes and get back to the main text) but I’m guessing that you aren’t taking my condemnation of you very seriously. On the other hand, if we were to say, for example, that the elderly should be less eligible for medical care because they aren’t going to live as long anyway, that is a much more serious proposal, and that feeling of marginalization that was strong enough in the dragon example suddenly becomes a serious wound. Not only those who are both elderly and in need of medical care would object, but also those who are elderly and not in need of medical care, but who feel devalued just the same. Those who are still young but can anticipate a day in which they might be elderly and would not want to be told that they are not worthy of saving. It creates a massive feeling of uncertainty that does far more harm to the psyche of society than it can possibly make up in seemingly logical distribution of medical resources.

On the other hand, it is a fact that society does not have unlimited medical resources, and there must be decisions made about how those resources are spent. If we accept our three basic premises, that medical resources must be distributed, that all citizens are entitled to medical care, and that creating categories of people who are not entitled to the same level of care as others is unacceptable, how can we walk the line between these three factors to develop a system that works?

The trick here is our definition of medical necessity. Rather than defining who is and is not entitled to care, we choose what care can and cannot be an entitlement. Elective medical treatment, such as cosmetic surgery and treatment for erectile dysfunction, should not only be subject to Consumption charges, those charges should include the fact that they are taking up resources that could be put to medically necessary use. If a patient is getting a laser skin abrasion to remove wrinkles from a dermatologist who could be spending his time checking patients for skin cancer, the Consumption charge for the de-wrinkling should reflect that.

Basically, I imagine a three tiered medical system. At the core, we have genuine medical necessity. This includes all of the treatments we classically think of when we think of medical care. Any care that comes from genuine medical necessity, as reviewed by a panel of three qualified doctors, should not subject the patient to any Consumption charge whatsoever. The next ring out consists of care which is necessary because of voluntary action on the part of the patient: i.e. treating lung cancer caused by smoking. Generally, these sorts of costs are incurred by a small percentage of a larger population. A large portion of the population drinks highly sugary soda, but only a fraction of that group will develop diabetes. For that reason, although the patient did contribute to his own situation, it would be unfair to lay the entire cost of his care on himself. Instead, the cost of his care should be spread among the entire population of those who took the risk. In this case, there would be a Consumption surcharge added to the cost of sugary foods and sodas to cover the cost to society of caring for those who will go on to develop Type II diabetes through their consumption of such foods. Lastly, we have the outer ring of genuinely elective treatment. This includes all non-reconstructive cosmetic surgery, as well as any treatment that has not been demonstrated to be effective. Those who choose to have such treatment will have the full cost of such proceedures added to their Consumption account.

Let’s take a moment to review what exactly we are talking about when we refer to the “cost”. Adam Smith has a great section on this in The Wealth of Nations when he talks about the wages of apothecaries. The reason that medicines prepared by an apothecary are so expensive, he argues, is that they must not only pay for the ingredients, but for the labor involved in making them. And that labor in turn must take into account not only the time that the apothecary spent actually preparing them, but for the time he spent training to be an apothecary. And not only the time he himself trained, but also the time of all those who began training but found themselves not capable of completing it sucessfully. What might seem like a very inflated price for a few powdered leaves (we have to remember that Smith was writing before modern medical science) was actually made up of a large number of very reasonable costs.

Similarly, when we look at the costs of medical treatment in society, there are a number of different components to consider. They can basically be split into three components: medication, which has a high research cost but once discovered is generally fairly simple to produce, doctors, who have a limited amount of time every day and must be very thoroughly trained, and equipment, which is generally expensive both in its research and its production. There are going to be a number of people along the way in an individuals treatment who must be awarded Contribution credit for their efforts, and at some point we must come up with a number for the Consumption charge incurred, whether or not it is ever charged to the patient in question.

Bill has fallen into a hole and broken his arm. (The other characters were tired of him always being brought in to demonstrate consumption and financial sucess and petitioned the author once they found out someone needed to be an example in the medical essay.) He needs to get to a medical center, have the damage to his arm evaluated, and be treated for his injury. First, getting to the medical center. Ambulences are important, and they certainly exist in Imaginary City, but in this case Bill does not necessarily need one. His arm hurts like hell and he needs urgent medical attention, but not at quite a level of urgency that would require paramedics. So instead, he requests Urgent Transportation. This is basically a cross between an ambulence and a taxi cab, in that a vehicle is dispatched to Bill’s location as fast as possible to bring him to the hospital but the driver has no particular medical training. Urgent Transportation is free from Consumption charge and is also available for non-medical emergencies, but once the situation has been calmed the user must be able to justify the emergency nature of his situation to a three citizen panel to avoid a Consumption charge for the trip.

So that gets Bill to the hospital. There he is first seen by a nurse who has been trained in both general nursing and triage. The nurse confirms that his arm does appear to be broken, and sends him for an x-ray. Once his arm has been x-rayed, a doctor who has been trained in orthopedics as well as general medicine will review his x-rays, discuss treatment options with him, and apply a cast. The doctor will then write him a prescription for something to help with the pain, draw up an extended treatment plan including future checkups, removal of the cast, and physical therapy. Depending on the scale of the medical center, Bill may be able to pick up his medication at that time, or it may be sent to him later through the postal system. A nurse will then help him arrange transportation home, and he will go home to get some rest and wonder just how such a narratively convenient hole would up in his backyard without him noticing it.

That’s the process, but what about Contribution and Consumption? Bill’s arm has required the attention of two nurses, one doctor, and one x-ray technician, as well as taking up time on the x-ray machine. The key to establishing a system for rewarding medical staff and estimating the cost of an illness or injury is thinking in shifts. We mentioned in the essay on land use that every district should have a local medical center, and that there should be at least one comprehensive medical center for every four urban districts. The shifts available at each such medical center will vary depending on the local population and its medical needs, but in general a local medical center should be staffed sufficiently at all times to deal with the primary care needs of the citizens in its district, and a Comprehensive medical center should be able to deal with the specialty and emergency medical needs of the city it is in and the surrounding area. Exactly how many doctors in each specialty need to be on duty at any given time for that need to be met is something that the community of physicians will need to decide for themselves through trial and error.

So rather than earning Contribution credit based on the number of patients they treat, or the number of tests they perform, doctors and nurses recieve their Contribution credit based on the shifts that they sign up for. Let’s say that a local medical center generally requires 8 primary care physicians and 15 nurses on duty between 8am and 6pm, and two primary care physicians and three nurses on duty overnight. The SNA system will automatically create those shifts and list them as available, and doctors and nurses will be able to sign up for them. As with all other SNA positions, the longer they sit unclaimed the higher the Contribution credit for them will go, and the more people who try to sign up for the same timeslot, the lower the Contribution credit for them will go. Once they are signed up for a shift, doctors and nurses have the responsibility to ensure that all patients who come to the medical center during their shift recieve adequate medical care. The Consumption cost of a visit is based on the Contribution credit the doctor or nurse recieved for their shift and the percentage of that shift taken up by the visit in question.

Now let’s look at equipment, for example the x-ray machine used to evaluate Bill’s arm. Equipment also acts in shifts, but unlike human labor an x-ray machine can work 24/7. Nearly all local medical centers would need an x-ray machine, and Comprehensive centers would likely need two or three. This means that a number of such equipment “shifts” would be available, and if suffient equipment was not available to fill those shifts they could become quite valuable. An x-ray machine obviously cannot earn Contribution credit, but its designer can, and the calculation is necessary to determine it’s contribution to the total cost of Bill’s injury.

Once all of these factors have been totaled up and the cost of Bill’s injury is known, the next step is determining who is required to pay that cost. If Bill fell into the hole because Greg in his continuing role as the villian of the piece set a trap for him, that Consumption cost would be charged to Greg. If Bill deliberately broke his own arm because casts were trendy that season, the Consumption charge would be made to Bill. If he fell into the hole because he was drunk, it would be added to the pool of expenses caused by alcohol, as discussed in the chapter on social vices. But if it was simply an accident and there is no one to blame, as is often the case, there would be no Consumption charge to anyone, and Bill would be able to go on his merry way.

 
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Farming and Food Production

27 Nov

Let me start this essay off with two givens: the production of food is very important, and the production of food is very complicated. The production of food is also something that I know very little about. Oh, I can hold my own when it comes to baking bread or churning butter, but when it comes to actually growing the wheat or milking the cows, I’m in completely over my head. For that reason, I am not going to try to lay out my plan for a technosocialist method of agriculture. What I am going to try to do in this chapter is outline a way that the basic resources of agriculture (land, labor, seeds, equipment) can be provided within a technosocialist framework.

Let’s start with labor, and with the two different types of labor that it takes to grow and harvest crops. The most obvious type is farm laborers, people who can pick the crops, plant the seeds, etc. This sort of labor is fairly easily matched through the SNA system, and is a good way for young people who want to get out of the urban areas for a few months to do that while continuing to earn COntribution credit. The trickier type of labor to find is that of the knowledgable farmer. It is the farmer’s job to not only help plant the seeds and harvest the crop, but to know when to do this. A true farmer needs to know how much to water crops and in what conditions, what sorts of crops would grow best in what type of land, and the rest of the subtle arts of dealing with plants. To that end, farming is one of the few professions to require a fairly quantized educational program. Before an aspirant can take up a post as a farmer, they must have passed a large array of educational units on plant husbandry, seed germination, etc. including a meta-unit that makes sure they still remember all of their previous training and can put it to practical use.

Next, the farmer needs somewhere to farm. There are two different models for this, and farmers should be able to choose between them. He can simply reserve some land through the SNA system, rent or purchase his own equipment, hire labor directly and have it charged to his own Consumption score, and then recieve 100% of the Contribution credit from putting his crop on the Market. Alternatively, he can sign up through the SNA system to be the farmer of an established farm. In this case he will live on the farm for at least the growing season, and he will organize all planting, watering, harvesting, etc. for that season. Established farms generally already have their fields layed out and their equipment on the farm, and a crop history and soil analysis will be available to help the farmer decide what crops would be most appropriate.

We’ve already mostly covered the equipment issue, but just to reiterate: independent farmers are responsible for purchasing their own equipment through the Market. Farmers on established farms will have access to the equipment on that farm, and they can order new equipment for the farm without personal Consumption cost as long as the request is reviewed and granted by a panel of randomly selected citizens who are now or have been farmers.

Finally, seeds. At the historical point that I’m writing this, seeds can cause considerably more controversy than one might think. The questions of genetic modification is a tricky one, and I’m not going to come down wholeheartedly on one side or the other, but I will say this: if a scientist creates a genetically modified form of wheat, for example, that produces a better crop, he may be eligble to recieve Contribution value for the increase in crop yield. But if it later turns out that his modification had adverse health effects, he is also liable for the damage that it causes.

Now, the farmers in the system that I’ve described have quite a bit of independent power. And the decisions that they make have serious ramifications for the security of the food supply for the entire society. It is at least as important for there to be a quality control system for the food supply as for manufacturing. Let’s say that a farmer overseeing a 300 acre farm decides to plant corn even though the soil has been used for corn several years in a row and the soil is depleted. An automated survey of the land estimated that by planting soybeans, soil in this condition could be enriched considerably while producing fifty thousand nutritional units of soybeans. (usual disclaimer: I am completely making these numbers up. I have no idea how many servings of soybeans you might normally get in an acre.) But because the farmer plants corn in soil that is no longer suitable for corn growing, he is forced to use a great deal of fertilizer and he only ends up with twenty thousand nutritional units of corn, he should be called to explain his choice to a panel of his fellow farmers. If they find that he has misused the public resources entrusted to him and thus harmed the society’s food supply, the compensation he recieves for the year’s harvest should be cut in half.

Every effort must be made to aviod the monoculture situation currently in play in the midwestern United States. A combination of government policies and the influence of big agribusiness has rendered our food supply skewed in favor of an unhealthy diet and in danger of collapse if a serious disease affecting corn were to spring up. Farmers should be trained heavily in crop rotation and its use rather than simply fertilizing the soil to continue planting the same crop. Alongside that, consumers must be made aware of the true cost of the food they eat so that they are able to choose a more diverse diet without having to pay significant Consumption penalties simply because they are not eating the particular crop favored by the farm lobby.

And on that note of paying attention to the true cost of ones food, we get to animal farming. If there are controversies to be found about genetically modified plant crops, there are wars being waged right now over animal farming practices. And here we get into another area where it is difficult for me to be entirely objective. You see, I don’t like meat. I’m not a vegetarian as such, because I have no major objection to meat and I do eat the occasional chicken nugget when it’s been prepared the way I like it, but in general I could go the rest of my life without eating a bite of animal meat and be perfectly happy. So when I see the health and economic arguments against meat consumption, it is hard for me to defend meat eating as a public institution.

For every serving of meat consumed, there have been seven nutriciously equivalent servings of plant-based food consumed by the animal in question. That’s six servings of food wasted every time someone eats a serving of meat. The average American eats half a pound of meat a day. Speaking as someone who eats almost no meat and whose family eats very little meat, I am downright disturbed at the quantities of meat the regular carnivores must be consuming to bring the average that high. The human body simply did not evolve to eat that much meat. Our digestive systems evolved for millions of years on a diet consisting mainly of plants with occasional meat as it became available. In many cultures around the world, meat is still an occasional flavoring and almost never the main body of the meal. I’m mentioning all of this because I am about to suggest a set of standards for animal farming in a technosocialist society, and the initial reactions of most readers will probably be “But you’d never be able to produce enough meat that way.” I am not trying to come up with a system that will produce as much meat as Americans currently consume. I am simply trying to come up with a system where citizens will have access to meat as an occasional addition to a primarily plant based diet.

On to the actual plan. Basically, my twin goals for this plan are humane treatment of animals, and minimization of the use of societal resources. In a number of ways, these two can go hand in hand. It all boils down to a simple question: if all the humans disappeared tomorrow, would the animals survive? This is the question with which I draw a line between factory farming, which tends to treat animals very badly, and free range farming in which the animals are allowed to behave more or less naturally in an environment they are comfortable with. In the average factory farm, animals are penned up in extremely cramped conditions and recieve all of their food, water, and other resources through human intervention. Without the aid of humans, animals in those conditions would quickly starve. Contrast that with traditional ranching practices where cows wandered more or less as they chose across the plains of the West with human attendants there mainly to fend off predators and cattle theives. If those humans disappeared, a number of the cows would probably get eaten by wolves, but on the whole they would be unlikely to starve.

With that principal in mind, animal farmers should be trained in the natural behaviors of animals and in the ways that different species of animals can be sucessfully raised with minimal human interference in those behaviors. Most species raised for meat can be largely allowed to run wild, guarded from preditors but not otherwise restrained by humans. When they are old enough to be slaughtered for their meat, they can then be brought into a processing center and slaughtered as humanely as possible without as much risk of disease and contamination as modern farming techniques often create.

It is a bit different for species of animals raised primarily for their milk. Dairy species need to be milked fairly regularly, and this cannot generally be done in a fully free range setting. To this end, there will need to be organized and fenced dairy farms for cows and goats. But because dairy animals are a fairly renewable resource to meat cattle’s fossil fuel, it does not take nearly as great a quantity of cows to meet a society’s milk requirement as it does when each citizen is also eating half a pound of meat a day. By combining dairy farms with the established plant crop farms in a traditional three field system, the cows can help to enrich the soil of the farmers while grazing naturally on pasture rather than requiring resource-intensive grain feed.

I don’t want to make it seem like farming is something that can only happen out in the country. The housing system that allows individuals to claim exactly as much land as they want without being confined to predefined lots is likely to create odd pockets of unclaimed land perfect for community gardens. As long as crops and animals are looked after responsibly, there is no reason why they could not be kept in such vacant lots to provide local produce and a connection to the land to city-dwellers. Those who grow fruit, vegetables, or meat on their own land are of course entitled to their own produce without Consumption charge, or welcome to list it through the Market to earn Contribution. Anything that strengthens the connection between the food supply and food consumers is a good thing for a society.

Food production is one of the most important aspects of any large society. Surplus agriculture was one of the most important developments in the foundation of civilization as we know it today, and there have been few social theorists who failed to recognize how vital proper agriculture is to the stability of society. Unfortunately, they tended to go to one of two extremes: the entirely laizzes faire approach, leading to large agribusiness feeding cows to other cows and unleashing previously unthinkable forms of food contamination, or in the other direction towards Soviet collective farms, with beurocrats making farming decisions who had never seen a plow and whole peoples starving as a result. As in so many things, we need to try to chart a middle path. We need to make sure that our farmers are educated, and that they do not make choices that hurt society in the long run, but then we need to give them free reign to do as they see fit, and contribute food to society in the best way that they can.

 
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Things kept, things left behind

27 Nov

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.

 
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Disability and the Social Safety Net

27 Nov

One question that comes up a lot when I try to explain the idea of citizens being required to contribute more than they consume has to do with the question of those who, because of physical or mental disability, are unable to work. This is a subject close to my heart, and I want to make sure that its properly addressed. To start with, very few citizens are likely to fall into this category. Unlike our current system, where being able to work also requires being able to obtain and hold down a job consistantly, the technosocialist SNA system allows people to earn Contribution credit whenever they can and without having to overcome discrimination from those with hiring authority.

Those with physical disabilities would still have a variety of ways to earn Contribution credit through intellectual and artistic work. Remember that it is always possible to earn Contribution credit by gaining an education and by educating others. Between education, music, writing, computer programming, and all of the other occupations that do not require physical exhersion, it should be possible for most of those with physical disabilities to continue to earn a normal living. For those disabled later in life, they may need to retrain themselves if their previous occupation was largely physical in nature, but even that retraining would earn Contribution credit for them under a technosocialist system.

Mental disabilities are more difficult to generalize about, but again the flexibility of the SNA system should allow nearly anyone to earn a normal living. For those with intellectual disabilities who might have difficulties navigating through the SNA system, group homes and caretakers need to be available to provide assistance. Those with panic or mood disorders can simply design their worklife around their limitations with the help of the SNA. Because technosocialism dequantizes labor as much as possibile, someone who suffers from migranes does not need to be able to show up for work every day for years at a time to build a career, they simply need to work when they feel well wnough. Those on the autism spectrum should be just dandy, since this entire system is being designed by one of their own and is in some ways tailored to their requirements.

There will of course be those with a combination of physical and mental disabilities who find themselves entirely unable to earn Contribution credit. The main provision for them is the fact that they are still due their Material Rights, and are thus entitled to housing, food, medical care, etc. without any increase in their Consumption score. People in this condition are likely to be under the full-time care of the medical establishment, and thus we can further close the gap by saying that those who are hospitalized or otherwise under full-time care are entitled to some extra leeway in choosing their food, clothing, etc. under their Material Rights.

This might seem an unfairly spartan existance for those with severe disabilities, but it is actually considerably better than the one they are entitled to under our current system. While the United States does have a rudimentary safety net for those with disabilities, it is made up of far more holes than net. It is extremely difficult to qualify as disabled, and generally requires the disabled person to hire a lawyer. Once one’s disability is finally recognized by the government, the income provided is frequently too paltry to pay for independent housing and food, let alone anything else. And the earning of any income outside of one’s disability payments can lead to permanent disqualification. The technosocialist model makes it as easy as possible for people to earn Contribution credit, and then says that even those who cannot earn anything at all are still entitled to more than modern disability payments generally afford them.

Proper care for the disabled affects more than simply those citizens who require such care. It also affects the society as a whole. What most citizens want above all else is security, and the security of knowing that whatever happens, they will not have to worry about ending up without a home or without food is an incredible feeling. This is the main role of the concept of Material Rights. It says to each citizen “you do not need to worry. Whatever happens to you, you will not starve. Your children will not starve. You will still have a way to contribute to society, and in return society will take care of you.” Once citizens are freed from that fear of poverty and homelessness, they can better enjoy their lives. The sword of Damacles that is illness or injury is removed, and the parts of their minds that had been taken up with worry and fear are freed to do greater and more productive things.

 
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Protecting against Identity Theft

27 Nov

With so much of technosocialist society depending on one’s online identity, what is the best way to ensure that it’s not possible for criminals to steal the identities of upstanding citizens and make purchases through the market or do other things that would hurt their standing in the community? There are a number of ways, some more high tech than others. The option that most people will probably think of first is some form of biometric scanning. Through the use of fingerprint or retinal scanners, it would be possible to confirm someone’s identity. But, while quite difficult, fooling biometric systems is possible. And with the importance that would attach to biometric scanning if it became a more routine part of society, criminal gangs would rapidly improve the techniques until biometric scanning became more or less useless.

Then there’s another popular idea, implanted RFID tags. A citizen could simply have a tiny chip implanted in their skin that would enable a computer to verify identity by reading a code broadcast by the chip. Again, seems quite handy, but it still runs the risk of counterfiting by crime rings. All it would take to discover that code would be to set up your own RFID scanner somewhere those tags would be likely to pass close, and you could easily get the code of anyone who walked by.

The example that I like to look at here is the Blizzard Authenticator. It’s a small plastic device that does one thing: when you press the button, it displays six digits. It was developed for the popular computer game, World of Warcraft. When a player wishes to log into their account, they simply enter their account name, their password, and that six digit code from the Authenticator. The code changes based on the date and time, but the algorythm on every authenticator is slightly different, and no one except the Blizzard Authentication Server knows what that algorythm is. But that server can check the code you’ve entered against the code that your particular authenticator ought to have generated at that date and time, and only lets you log in if the two match. The key fact about the Blizzard Authenticator is that there has never been a confirmed case of an account with an attached Authenticator being hacked. And while it may come as a surprise to non-gamers, Warcraft accounts are targeting by exactly the sort of organized criminal hacking rings that we are discussing here. They have withstood considerably more attempts at hacking than most biometric systems are subject to in their lives, and they’ve come out of it with a perfect record.

Something as simple as the current Blizzard Authenticator would probably do a very good job at protecting the security of citizens’ Profiles in a technosocialist society. But they can be lost, broken, or stolen, and so if I had a magic wand, I would actually create a device that combined all three ideas into a single security technology that would be extremely difficult to hack. Basically, it would be an implantable RFID chip whose broadcast code was determined by an algorythm that took into account both the date and time and the DNA of the person into whom it was implanted to come up with one-time-use codes. I am not a biotech researcher, and I have no idea how difficult to achieve this would be, but it would be incredibly cool.

Once we’re able to have a guarantee of an identity that cannot be stolen, there are all sorts of interesting technological features we can include in the society. Imagine door handles with built-in RFID readers that would only let people authorized to enter that room open the door. Not only would this eliminate the problem of people losing their keys, it would significantly help even the playing field for law enforcement in a society with no actual law enforcement organizations. If someone was granted a restraining order that required them to stay 500 yards away from someone else, the door system could automatically prevent the offender from going through doors less than 500 yards away from the victim. Computers could automatically sense the RFID chip of the person using them and pull all of their data and settings from the cloud so that they could use any computer as if it was their home computer.

 
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Travel and Tourism

26 Nov

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.

 
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Imports and Exports in a Post-Currency World

24 Nov

One of the primary challenges in starting a technosocialist society is the difficulty in trade between technosocialist and non-technosocialist societies. While trade between a society based on the dollar and a society based on the yen only requires a currency exchange to enable trade, it is far more difficult when one side uses currency and the other does not. I’m not sure that I have a perfect answer for this, but there are a couple of possibilities that might work.

The challange is not so much how goods could move from one society to the other, since bartering would likely work, but how Contribution and Consumption could be determined when an item is being sold beyond the Market to the outside world. And much as I hate to admit it, I think this might be the one case in a technosocialist society in which merchants, those who buy and sell for a profit, would be needed. In the essay on profit, I mentioned the example of merchants in historical times bringing products from the far east to Europe, and even if they weren’t producing anything temselves, that function of a bridge between two otherwise unconnected markets was a useful one. To that end, people who wish to act as merchants should have the ability to purchase things through the Market, barter or sell them in the outside economy, purchase outside goods, and offer them up in the Market for Contribution credit. In the case of a small technosocialist society nested within a larger Capitalist one, this would enable the technosocialist society to obtain goods that it could not produce for itself, and in the case of a larger technosocialist nation, it would enable the society to obtain natural resources it might lack in its own territory.

One restriction that would be very important in this sort of arrangement is that while the importation of outside goods should be allowed, and at times even encouraged, the importation of any outside currency must be strictly prohibited. We’ve talked before about the importance of stifling the formation of a black market, and an important part of that is the lack of a currency for a black market to trade in. The key to establishing a currency that people trust is having its value guarenteed somehow. Either by gold, or wheat, or another commodity, or by a government. On their own, black marketeers would have little hope of establishing a currency system that people could put their faith in. For one thing, they would need to organize a mint, and a mint being run by criminals just isn’t fated to work very well. But if there is a currency coming in from the outside, backed by an outside government and an outside economy that gives that currency buying power, all of a sudden the black market has somewhere it can go with ill-gotten gains, and that significantly increases the incentive for crime in the technosocialist society. Current trends in Capitalist societies are largely moving away from physical currency in favor of various types of cash and charge cards, so this may not be a problem in the future, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind.

Another import restriction that would be important to consider would be the labor and environmental conditions involved in the production of imported goods. It is important for a society to be able to set its own moral standards for the treatment of workers and the environmental impact of its consumption, and any environmental restrictions that apply to goods produced inside the society should also be applied to imports coming in. Merchants should be required to verify that the goods they’re bringing in have been produced in a safe and environmentally clean manner. The exact process of this verification should be left to the society itself, as should the nature of the standards. But the equality in standards between imported and domesticly produced goods is important to avoid an influx of toxic goods from the outside from flooding the market and driving individual producers within society out of business.

Similarly, outside products must be held to the same standards for durability, safety, and general quality as domestic products. Because the actual manufactorers of the goods are not members of the technosocialist society, the responsibility for their safety and quality falls on the merchant who imported them. As with domestic goods, all mass-produced items must be tested for and labeled with an expected use life, and if they fail within that time period they must be replaced at the merchant’s cost.

When it comes to trade between two technosocialist societies, the answer is simple: there can be no such thing as two technosocialist societies. There can be different cities, different regions, but for the sake of efficiency of scale and accuracy of the Market, all technosocialist communities across the world must be connected. Other than the logistics of shipping between regions, there is no reason that it should not be as simple for Fred to send one of his hats to a customer across the country as it is to send it to a customer across the street. The centralization of the Market should, as the internet is beginning to, equalize prices and availablility of goods across the country and even the world.

These measuers might sound at first like protectionism, but they really aren’t. They are simply ensuring a level playing field for all products. If there were exceptions to our modern American labor laws for companies with an ‘e’ in their name, there would be public outcry. Exempting foreign imports from those same laws is not fundimentally different, and still must be avoided. Ideally a technosocialist society would be self-sufficient, so that this sort of trade would not be necessary, but there are unavoidable advantages to global scale that simply can’t be reproduced in a developing community. Trade between technosocialist and capitalist societies must be possible to fill the lacunae in resources manufacturing capabilites of both societies, and the only way it can be done efficiently and democratically is to allow it on an individual level.

 
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Big Brother, sans Brother?

24 Nov

I was talking to someone the other day about my ideas, and while we didn’t go into any depth (the conversation lasted a total of about three minutes) her immediate concern was that “You’d need people checking up on everyone, and that’s Big Brother.” And the idea of a centralized computer system that keeps quite close track of the material details of people’s lives is essential to the idea of technosocialism. But there is a key difference between the technosocialist model and an Orwellian surveillance state: under technosocialism, there is no centralized government. There is no government at all, beyond the organized decision making of the population. Can it be possible, therefore, to have a “Big Brother” society in which there is no Big Brother? Is a “Myriad Small Cousins” society really one to fear?

Let’s start with an examination of surveillance and verification under technosocialism, beginning with Fred, the individual craftsman of several essays ago. You’ll remember that he sent out several sets of juggling balls through the post. He would want to make a record of himself packaging the balls and putting them in the postal system, so that he has evidence of his own contribution. The system then tracks the package as it makes its way through the system to the recipient. The recipient opens the package and either accepts it, in which case his Consumption score and Fred’s Contribution score are both increased appropriately, or he rejects it, in which case he will want a record of himself sending the package back to Fred. Should either of their actions be disputed, it’s within each of their best interests to have a record of their actions. So as far as actual camera-based surveillance goes, it comes not from an ominous centralized system but from individuals recording their own actions.

But there is such a thing as non-camera surveillance, and the system would be tracking all of an individual’s possessions and frequently their location as well. Why shouldn’t this make citizens nervous? Because no one is watching. There is no government to use the information in malevolent ways. Depending on the situation, some of the information may be open to the citizenry as a whole, but generally it is used solely by an automated computer system to track Consumption and Contribution or to efficiently route the mail and public transit.

The other important reassurance for those concerned about a “Big Brother” state is that under technosocialism, free speech is an absolute. The classic movie plot involves a lone protagonist who stands against the ruling government/large corporation/etc and who is tracked down by military satellites and his cell phone by the powers that be who want to stop him from spreading his message. But in a technosocialist system, this would not be a concern. The free interaction of ideas is the very core of technosocialism. Short of blatant calls for violence, there is no speech that could ever be deemed a crime. Not to mention the lack of the sort of centralized police force that would be required for that sort of scenario to take place.

And in most cases where political repression could be even a theoretical danger, annonymity is always an option. There will be those who find the idea of the system tracking their reading habits  repugnant, and there are two solutions for those individuals: if the author is of a similar mindset, they have the option of turning off all tracking for their book. It means that they will not recieve any Contribution credit when people read the book, but it allows authors and readers alike to remain annonymous. The second solution is a bit more complicated, but provides a solution for situations in which the author does not wish to forego Contribution credit but the reader does not want it tracked that he is reading the book. It relies on print-on-demand technology. Using only currently available technology, it is possible to create a printing unit that can print, bind, and dispense a book on a while-you-wait basis. Using this technique, such units could be set up for citizens to have books printed from the collection of all books available electronically. They would be subject to a Consumption charge based on the paper, etc required for the printing, and the author would recieve Contribution credit based on the average time that it took someone to read the book. But importantly, those Consumption and Contribution amounts would only be calculated once a month, and the unit would track only who had books printed and whose books were printed, but not times or dates. That way, if Ed, Ted, Ned, and Jed printed books by Rob, Bob, Cob, and Yob (hey, you try coming up with two different sets of rhyming one syllable names. It’s harder than you think) the system would be able to distribute Consumption and Contribution value accordingly, but there would be no way of tracing who purchased which book.

In general, it is important to allow people to opt out of tracking whenever that is possible for society without creatinga  haven for corruption. For example, there are real benefits to having all items tagged with RFID tags. It would make it much easier for citizens to find things in a messy apartment, and it would make it extremely difficult for theives to get very far once the item was flagged as stolen. However, there will be those who don’t want their belongings tracked at that level, and therefore the rightful owner of an object should be able to turn off RFID tracking on that object. And even in cases where tracking cannot be turned off without causing the danger of corruption, such as with the inventory of what every citizen has purchased and should still have in their possession, they should have complete control over the privacy of that information. Anything that someone wishes to keep private should remain private unless a jury in an ongoing criminal investigation votes at least 10-2 that they need to see it.

If we accept that free speech is an absolute, that there is no government and no police force as such, and that all laws are created directly by the people of the society through democratic methods, it becomes harder and harder to imagine a totalitarian “big brother” society.

 
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