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Intellectual Property

23 Nov

When it comes to intellectual property, I have two conflicted biases. On the one hand, I am an author and a content producer. From that perspective, I think that artists should be paid for their work. On the other hand, I am a content producer who probably never will be, but enjoys reading books and listening to music, and from that perspective I think that requiring consumers of media to pay for it restricts access to the relatively wealthy and stifles the societal conversation. While many modern copyright organizations place these two sets of interests in direct competition, and perhaps they must be in a capitalist society, they do not need to be in all cases. In the following essay, I will attempt to outline a technosocialist approach to ensuring that content producers are rewarded for their work without restricting free access to such work by all people.

The first point that I want to make is that I am not talking about any type of physical goods here. If a citizen wants a physical paper book or music disc, it is only fitting that there be a Consumption charge appropriate to the resources used to make it. But as we become an increasingly digital culture, the need for such physical goods becomes smaller and smaller. Software, books, journalism, music, and even visual art can all now be created and distributed without any physical objects changing hands. If the Contribution for the production of physical goods is based on supply and demand, how can you determine a Contribution value for something with, essentially, an infinate supply?

By refocusing on something that does come in a limited supply: the attention of citizens. Every citizen in a society can have no more than 24 hours in a day, and only a portion of that can be spent consuming media. If citizens are free to focus their attention wherever they choose, they will automatically “vote” for their favorite media by giving it the most of their free time.

To my mind, there are two primary types of media: those which aspire to be informative and those which aspire to be entertaining. There are of course those which accomplish neither, but it is still a useful boundary to draw. Under my model, content producers would have to choose one label or the other, and they would then “compete” only against the other media in that same category. The informative media such as journalism and non-fiction writing would therefore be put in a smaller pool, but they would also be subject to an expectation of factuality. Content producers found to have included untrue or misleading information in a piece claiming to be informative are subject to a three strikes policy, after which they would only be able to post content as entertainment. Not only would this mean that journalists and non-fiction authors would be compensated for their efforts without having to compete against the flashier entertainment programming for the attention of the crowds, it would create a bright line between entertainment and information that would help citizens judge the reliability of the information they were recieving, without limiting the rights of opinion-based media, which are entirely free to publish however they see fit but which must be labeled as and compete with entertainment programming if they do not wish to be held to journalistic standards of integrity and truthfulness.

So, how does this competition actually work? It’s fairly simple. When a citizen reads a book or watches a television show electronically, it is easy for the system to track the length of time spent engaged in that activity. Let’s say that in a given month, George listens to 8 hours of music, spends 5 hours reading the news, watches 12 hours of entertainment television, and reads one one book, which takes him 10 hours. That’s a total of 30 Entertainment hours and 5 Information hours. In each category, each citizen is worth a set amount of Contribution credit. For the sake of this example, we’ll set that at 20Ctv, but it would probably take a certain amount of trial and error for society to find a good value for it. Now, in the 8 hours of music that George listened to, he played one of Steve’s songs twice, for a total of 7 minutes. That translates to .3888% of George’s total entertainment attention for the month, and Steve would therefore recieve .0777Ctv added to his Contribution score. Not much in this case, but it adds up quickly as a musician gains fans. Meanwhile, George also read a news article that Sam wrote about the theft of Steve’s guitar several essays back. He spent 7 minutes doing that as well. But Sam’s piece was an Informational one rather than an Entertainment one, so he is only competing against the other news articles that George read. His 7 minutes translates into 2.3333% of George’s Informational attention, and he therefore recieces .4666Ctv added to his contribution score. Again, not that much, but if only a thousand citizens of Imaginary City with similar news consumption habits read it, he would get more than 450Ctv.

Our modern economic system attempts to judge a product’s value by how much money a consumer is willing to spend on it. I prefer to look at a person’s spending habits as they relate to time rather than money for a simple reason: everyone has time, and everyone has a limited amount of time. The same is not true of money. As someone who has extreme difficulty finding a conventional job, I need to be extremely careful in how I spend money. Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors of all time. I’ve read all of his books dozens of times, but always through the public library. My friend Dave is a cardiologist and has family money as well. He liked the one Terry Pratchett book he read, and so he bought the rest of them so that he’ll have them available if he ever gets some free time and feels like reading them. In monetary terms, he likes Terry Pratchett better than I do. After all, he was willing to spend more than $100 on books, and while I did once knit Terry Pratchett a scarf, I’ve never actually purchased a single book. But in terms of how we spend our time, I spend at least eight or ten hours a week reading them, and Dave has only spent about ten hours reading Terry Pratchett in his life. If we want our culture to be shaped by the democratic interest of the population, it should be at least as rewarding to enrich the lives of the poor as it is to incur mild interest from the rich.

Let me put forward another example. One of my favorite comic strips is “Unshelved”, a comic about a public library. There are few libarians I know who do not love Unshelved, and because librarians are particularly good about passing book recommendations to each other, this means that Unshelved has quite a large fanbase, and book sales ought to be fairly high. There’s just one problem: that fanbase is made up primarily of librarians. Which means that while there are few public library systems that do not have at least one copy, the thirty librarians in a given library system all borrow the one copy the library bought rather than buying their own. Librarians tend to have strong views on the rights of authors, and so the creaters of the comic make enough off of sales of tshirts, coffee mugs, and other items less easily shared to earn a fairly comfortable living, but does it make sense on a cultural level for books written for librarians to be less profitable than books written for CEOs? By making all digitally-reproducable media free to consume and rewarding content creators by the time that their consumers are willing to spend on their product rather than their money, we can more accurately create an information marketplace based on the true value of the media to consumers.

I think I’ve labored this point enough, so let me declare the subject of copyright over and done with, and move on to a related field: patents. That is, the right for someone who develops a technology to require those who utilize it to pay a liscence fee. This is another field in which I have somewhat conflicting biases. On the one hand, I think that the greater the financial rewards for technological sucess, the faster it will happen. On the other hand, I’m sick and tired of not being able to sync my iPhone with any of my Linux computers just because Apple holds a patent the iPhone syncing software and they won’t release a Linux version. It’s annoying as hell.

To stay in the realm of software development, let’s look at the two competing software universes current existing side by side in our modern culture. First, we have commercial software. In the commericial universe, software is written by salaried programmers working in more or less traditional corporate organizations, and the resulting code is patented and controlled solely by that corporation. Second, we have Free Open Source Software (FOSS). In the FOSS universe, software is written by everyone who feels like it. Both the programs and the code are available for free over the internet, and patenting any of it would probably get you into some serious legal trouble.

Saying for sure which of these systems produced “better” software would be difficult. Linux is far and away a better operating system than Windows, but lack of Linux compatibility aside, iTunes is similarly much better than anything the FOSS community has produced in the realm of music organization. As with so many cases, technosocialism’s post-currency nature gives it an advantage over capitalism in dealing with these sorts of situations. Rather than having to choose between financial incentive for the programmers and openness of the results, technosocialism can combine the two. In much the same way as we dealt with academic texts, journalism, and music, we can also find a way of incentivising technological progress without simultaneously stifling it.

Let’s start with how Contribution credit is earned when someone uses a program. Programs, like other forms of media, are going to come in two basic categories: entertainment, and productivity. A computer game, like World of Warcraft, would be considered entertainment and would be grouped with television and novels as an entertainment pasttime. The Contribution earned would be dependent on how long people played it versus reading a book or listening to music. But for productivity-oriented software, such as OpenOffice.org or GIMP, Contribution would be determined by the use to which the program was put. Let’s say that thanks to the universe ignoring a certain amount of paradox, I was writing this essay in a technosocialist society. (This example needs to have rather a lot of references to computer programs and I’m too lazy to make up imaginary ones.) I’m writing on a netbook running the Linux operating system, and specifically I’m using a text editor designed for writers called TextRoom. And to keep it simple, let’s say that I wrote the entire book in TextEdit. (I’ve also used gEdit, OpenOffice, and a paper notebook, but I don’t feel like doing the extra math right now.)

Now let’s say that my book was wildly sucessful, what with Bill, George, Steve, and Fred getting to read all about their own lives and everyone else in Imaginary City finally finding out why their society was structured the way it was. Thanks to the process described earlier in this essay, this earns me quite a lot of Contribution credit. In one month, my Contribution from the book is 1800Ctv. The creaters of TextRoom would therefore get a 10% ‘royalty’ for being the tool that I used to create the book, or 180Ctv. I don’t happen to know how many people are involved in the development of TextRoom, but I think that it’s a solo project and so for the sake of this example, let’s assume that it is. The author of TextRoom get’s 180Ctv. Now, I could only write my book with TextRoom because I had Linux to run the program with. So in addition to the 10% royalty that goes to TextRoom, there’s a 1% royalty to the creators of Ubuntu Linux, the operating system of my computer. Distributing this 18Ctv is far more difficult, because Ubuntu is most definitely not written by a single person. It is made up of hundreds of components written by hundreds of different people.

To distribute the Contribution properly so that everyone gets their due, we have to somehow quantify the work that each individual has put into building Linux. After putting a lot of thought into it, I’m not sure that I see a better way than to count lines of code. On the one hand, this risks incentivizing sloppy code over more efficient code that uses fewer lines. On the other hand, if one person in the coding community comes up with a ten line function that replaces a fifty line function, it is in the interest of everyone working on that programming to replace the inefficient code, because it will increase the value of their own contributions. In self-defense, coders will need to submit the most efficient code they can write to avoid having their code replaced entirely. But to get back to our example, let’s say that a particular programmer wrote 1% of the code that makes up Ubuntu Linux. That would then entitle him to 1% of that 18Ctv, or .18Ctv. Quite small in this particular case, but when you think of everything that people use Linux to accomplish every day, even 1% of 1% adds up to a significant amount.

This same model can apply to other forms of technology as well, and that is really what I’m getting to about a replacement for the current patent model. If you design a particular circuit, you will get 10% of the Contribution value recieved by any designer who incorporates your circuit into a product. What you cannot do, and this is the primary difference from our current patent system, is stop any other designer from incorporating your circuit into their product. That ability to block further innovations based on patented technology is what turns our modern patent system from a system that incentivizes progress into one that stifles it. To go back to my initial complaint, Apple developed iTunes and they should be entitled to financial rewards for that. But if they are not going to develop a Linux version themselves, they should not be able to stop someone else from doing so. If someone else wanted to port iTunes over to a Linux platform, it is Apple’s right to be rewarded for it, but it is not their right to deny Linux users their program.

I could go on for pages about current abuses in Intellectual Property law. The recording industry once sued a college student for seven trillion dollars. A few years ago someone recieved a patent for a stick. But I think I’ve gone on long enough about why we need reform. And while reform under our current system would be extremely difficult (and rather unlikely, given the political power of the big content producers), Intellectual Property is one of the few fields which are actually easier to work out in a technosocialist context than in a capitalist one. Because of the breakup of the individual-to-individual exchange, content producers can be “paid” without there needing to be a specific charge for that content. This allows not only equality of access for all citizens, it brings equality of value to all audiences. Books aimed at a poor niche market can be just as sucessful as books aimed at a rich niche market of the same size. And this, in turn, greatly strengthens and deepens the social conversation and encourages greater participation.

 
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Alternative Models for Academia

22 Nov

In the modern academic world, there is basically one way to earn one’s living: teaching at a University. If one is in the medical or scientific field, it may be possible to gain a purely research-oriented position, and if one is also a skilled writer one may be able to suppliment one’s income by writing books on the topic one studies, but on the whole it is difficult to earn a living without teaching college students.

One of the main aims of technosocialism is to break down links between duties, so that someone who is good at task A doesn’t also need to be good at task B in order to be rewarded for doing task A. This is very relevant here. Teaching is a challenging task, and not everyone is tempermentally suited to it. Certainly not all of those who are suited to scholarship would do as well in a classroom. With that in mind, we need to develop a new model of rewarding pure scholarship, but first we need to take a closer look at just what scholarship is.

Let me start by drawing a line between scholarship and research. They are closely related, but they are distinguishable from each other. In a sentance, research is the discovery of wholy new knowledge, and scholarship is the the digestion of knowledge already gained. Without research, scholarship quickly grows stagnant, but without scholarship, society can never gain the full benefits of research. But while the benefits of research are often fairly easy to determine, the contributions of scholars are often more difficult to quantify. Once we take away the assumption that scholars will earn their living through teaching, how can we quantify their work and assign Contribution appropriately?

Once teaching and research have been defined as separate activities, there is one quintissentially scholastic activity left: the publishing of books and papers. We’ve already touched briefly on the Contribution credit assigned to the authors of books in non-academic contexts, but there is a fundimental difference between books written for entertainment and books written to convey information, and that must be dealt with when we’re talking specifically about non-fiction work.

The example I’d like to call your attention to in this context is Google. Specifically, Google’s PageRank system. To determine the order of search results, Google looks both at how frequently the search keywords turn up on a particular page, and at how many other pages link to the page in question. The more pages link to that page, the higher its PageRank becomes.

This is relevent to our discussion because in many ways academic writing works the same way. The significance of a given book or paper lies partly in how many people read it, and partly in how many other scholars cite it in their own work. The more citacions are made to a given work, the more likely it is to have been significant in its field.

There are two primary ways that the author of a book recieves Contribution credit: when someone reads their book simply for enjoyment, they are given COntribution credit in proportion to the amount of that person’s reading time that was devoted to reading that book, the same way a musician would be, and when someone uses their book as a learning aid to pass a test in the SNA system. We’ve already gone over both of those in some detail and I don’t want to rehash them here. But I do want to add one more feature, one which can trace its lineage back both to Google and to pyramid-marketing schemes. Every time a book earns Contribution  credit for its author, a secondary pool is created, equal to half of the primary amount, which is divided up among the authors of the works cited in that book according to the number of times they are cited. Each of those credit assignments then generate their own secondary pools, which are similarly distributed, and so on until the amount of the credit generated falls under a predefined threshold. I realize that that last sentence may have been a bit difficult to follow, so let’s try an example.

Ed writes a book. He cites Jed and three other authors. Ned writes a book, and cites Ed’s book, and three other authors. Ted writes a book, and cites Ned’s book, and three other authors. Because they are obidient little imaginary academics who like making the math easy, they each cite all of their authors an equal number of times. Now, several people read Ted’s book and use it to pass an exam on English Literature. Ted earns 512Ctv. He thinks no more about it. The system, meanwhile, begins calculating the secondary Contribution pool. Half of Ted’s reward would be 256Ctv, which is then divided among four authors. Ned recieves credit for 64Ctv. This then creates a secondary pool for Ned’s book of 32Ctv, and Ed gets a credit of 8Ctv. You know the drill by now, Jed gets a credit of 1Ctv. At this point it stops because the system does not calculate secondary pools on rewards of 1Ctv or less. Which is handy, because I was running out of ‘ed’ names.

In real life, the world of scholarly writing is less like a linear progression and more like an interconnected net. What this means from the standpoint of academia in a technosocialist society is that these these secondary reward pools would enable even fairly obscure scholars to gain Contribution credit if their work led, even several steps down the road, to an important book or breakthrough. The more influencial a work is, the more it will be cited by others, and the more avenues for gaining Contribution the author will have.

 
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Quality Control

20 Nov

When I decided that I needed a distraction-free writing studio, I built one in my basement. I brought together a set of shelves that I had and configured them into a square. By hanging fabric around the inside of the square and putting a comfortable chair, a footstool, and an upside down wastebasket to rest my tea mug on inside the square, I made myself quite a comfortable 4′x4′ studio with no visual or auditory distractions. One side effect of this setup is as that as I’m writing this, I’m surrounded by a large percentage of my personal belongings. From the inside I just see fabric, but I still know that I am surrounded by craft materials, old papers, and reasonably useless appliances.

It’s about the appliances that I want to talk now. Just off the top of my head, I know that there’s an ice shaver, a couple of crock-pots, a toaster, and a space heater. None of them work. The crock-pots, toaster, and space heater have all stopped working, and the ice shaver never worked in the first place. I can’t bring myself to throw them away, because they all seem like they might have useful parts in them, so in the mean time they just hang out on shelves in my basement. I’ve only been living here for three years, and I’m a fairly frugal person, and yet I’ve already managed to build up a collection of five dead appliances.

I think this says something important, and a bit disturbing, about our modern culture. Upstairs in the kitchen, my mother has a blender that she bought shortly after I was born. It still works, and I use it to make milkshakes for myself and my grandfather several times a week. In the two years that I lived in Chicago, I went through three blenders just making milkshakes for myself.

It’s a cliche, but they don’t make anything like they used to. I don’t think I paid more than $20 for any of those blenders in Chicago. But in total, at 3x$20 every 2 years, I was paying $30 a year in blender purchases. Meanwhile, my mother payed $50 in 1987 for a blender we still use. It hasn’t come near to reaching the end of its lifespan, but even if it died tomorrow she would have paid $2.27 per year for her blender privileges. And if I wanted to go out right now and spend $50 on a blender, I might be able to find one that would last me an entire year, maybe even 18 months. But I would be extremely hard pressed to find a blender that would last for 22 years.

There are advantages to the recent emphasis on keeping costs low. As a freshman in college, I could afford most of a kitchen’s worth of small appliances. But if I add up all of the small appliances I’ve bought since then, it comes to three toasters, eight crockpots/rice cookers/etc., five blenders, three hotplates, and one electric fondue pot. Nineteen appliances in seven years. One of the rice cookers was admittedly my fault, because I used it for making candles and the wax got into the electrical workings, and the fondue pot didn’t so much break as sit on my shelf unused until I eventually gave it away, but the other seventeen all stopped working. That’s nineteen appliances’ worth of labor wasted, and nineteen appliances’ worth of materials sitting in landfills. I would gladly have traded all nineteen for a single reliable blender and hotplate.

The strange thing is that while it’s a trend nearly everyone’s noticed, no one quite knows how it happened. Over time as products began to be mass produced primarily in other countries, goods became cheaper and cheaper in both price and quality. It’s interesting to think how things might have evolved differently if the manufacturers had just come out one day and pitched this new approach to appliances. “Gather around, ladies and gentlemen, and see the amazing semi-disposable blender! It costs $20 instead of $50, but you’ll need to buy another one in about eight months!” Something tells me that it might not have been quite as popular with the public.

What is the solution to this problem? How, as we’re building a new economic system from the ground up anyway, can we ensure that good craftsmanship is rewarded and customers are not sucked into a wasteful cycle of cheap but shoddy products? It’s actually simpler than you might think, and it’s based on a model that already exists in our current economy: lightbulb manufacturors. When lightbulbs are labeled for sale, they include an expected bulb lifetime in hours. While most bulbs last beyond that lifetime, and a few defenctive ones might burn out much more quickly, it is an estimate of how much use the consumer might be expected to get out of that lightbulb.

What if we applied similar standards to all of our other consumer products? When a new factory was set up to manufacture blenders, for example, part of the process in setting up the factory would be to include an estimated use lifetime for the product. This would not apply to Bill’s ear swab factory, because that is clearly a disposable product, but for non-disposable factory made products, the first few products should be tested for longevity and that information should be included in the Market listings for all future products made with that process. That way customers can make an informed choice between a cheaper product with a shorter expected lifespan and a better-made but more expensive one. And lest manufacturing designers be tempted to cheat and somehow get a better rating than their product deserves, the expected use time also serves as the warranty period. If a product fails before the expected use life expires, it must be replaced at the personal cost of the manufacturer’s Consumption score.

That deserves to be covered in a bit more detail. When the quality of a given product is found to be wanting, just how is fault for that determined? Personal responsibility is important, but so is making sure that the right person is being held responsible. To that end, we must once more interact with our good friend, the jury system. Let’s take the example of one of my many dead blenders. If I was living in a technosocialist society and a blender that was rated to last for 10 years failed after six months, how do we find the cause? A combination of statistical analysis and human investigation is likely to be required.

To start with, we can look at what percentage of units have failed prematurely. The early failure of a single unit out of thousands in use would point towards a failure on the part of the factory worker who made that individual unit. The failure of 10% of the units would point fairly clearly to a design flaw. With that in mind, the fault is initially assumed to lie with the worker in question for products with a failure rate of less than 1%, and with the designer if the failure rate is greater than 1%. This can be adjusted if the worker or designer has unusually high failure rates in other products they have been involved in, or if there are other statistical anomolies. In addition, the party who recieves initial fault can appeal that if they feel they were not at fault, in which case their claims will be reviewed by a six-member panel. Who should compose that panel is a little difficult to determine, because it’s important to have as much expertise as possible without introducing bias one way or the other. My inclination is to recommend one factory worker, one manufacturing designer, one statistician, one engineer, and two members of the general population. A two-thirds majority vote would be required to assign fault in any particular direction, and hopefully the mix of backgrounds would enable the members of the jury to between them make an informed decision. If two consecutive juries fail to reach a verdict, the cost would be evenly divided among all parties involved.

While we’re on the topic, let’s take a second to discuss general allocation of reward and penealty as it applies to manufacturing design. Although the myth of the lone inventor is a beguiling one, it is frequently not all that accurate. Most inventions are made by teams and even groups of teams of people. How can we ensure that they are all compensated appropriately? Basically, this decision must be made within the teams themselves. If half a dozen people collaborate to write a software program, for example, it is up to the six of them to apportion credit appropriately. If two of them wrote the bulk of the code, three of them wrote a few subclasses each, and one of them wrote a single function, it is up to them to decide how to divide the pie. If they cannot decide on their own, a three-person panel drawn randomly from the pool of all people in their field can be brought in to apportion credit. Either way, if someone has done 25% of the work involved in designing a product, they should recieve 25% of the Contribution credit due to the designer of that product, as well as 25% of the liability for any design flaws that might exist in that product.

What of the case of severe design flaws that go beyond simple device failure and cause physical damage or even injury? These would be treated as crimes and dealt with according to the proceedures outlined in the essay on law enforcement, with the sentance applying to those whom the jury found to have been involved in the relevant part of the design process. To go back to the blender example, if the motor of a particular model of blender was found to catch fire sometimes, the person who designed the button assembly on the front would have nothing to fear unless the button assembly somehow contributed to the failure. But the designer of the flawed motor would be responsible not only for the cost of recalling all of the faulty blenders, but for any damage or injury that they blenders-a-flambe caused before the recall.

One of the biggest problems with our current marketplace is that short of a class-action lawsuit, once a customer has bought a product the link between product and manufacturor is severed. The manufacturer does not need the customer to like the product, only to buy it. While most companies would prefer that their customers like their products for the sake of word-of-mouth advertising, one only needs to look at the history of Microsoft Windows to see what a clever and well-funded marketing department can do to ensure a reputation for reliability and ease of use where none exists. By making product quality over time more transparent and making the designers and producers of products directly responsibility for product reliability, the technosocialist model attempts to increase overall product quality while maintaining efficiency of production. As always, the more information available to customers and manufacturors alike, the better their unrestricted choices can help society reach those goals.

 
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Real Estate

20 Nov

Different cultures have always approached land use and ownership in different ways. There have been nomadic cultures, feudal cultures, and capitalist cultures all over the world. From the three field system of the middle ages to the rise of the urban metropolis in the age of refrigeration, land use and its accompanying standards for a citizens living requirements has shifted dramatically over time. From the many Native American tribes who had no cultural recognition of land ownership to our modern model that recognizes someone as the owner of a home even if they have no actual equity in that home, there have been a wide variety of systems to learn and choose from.

So what is the technosocialist approach to real estate and land use? Let’s start at the level of Material Rights: we’ve already covered in a previous essay the fact that every citizen deserves the right to somewhere they are allowed to exist. And it is important for citizens to have the security of knowing that they will not be forced to move arbitrarily, because moving one’s place of residence is an extremely disruptive process. At the same time, private ownership of land can create enormous social complications. For one thing, as a fixed resource it tends to quickly become very expensive. In the past few years in the United States we have seen the consequences of inflated housing prices upon the economy as a whole and individuals in particular. Consumers have been forced deeply into debt in order to afford a place to live, and the instability of an economy based on that debt has caused a massive crash in the larger economy.

Long term debt is something that technosocialism does its best to avoid. Flexibility of citizens to make, reevaluate, and remake their own choices is key to the operation of a free market, and just as it should be as easy as possible for people to change jobs, it should be as easy as possible for people to change their place of residence. Having a large part of their net worth tied up in real estate makes that very difficult. With that in mind, I have something extremely strange to propose: private ownership of houses, but not of land.

Your first reaction is probably one of complete confusion. After all, until the invention of hoverhouses, you can’t have houses without land, and houses are generally quite tied to the land they are built on in a very literal sense. But there are some significant differences between houses and land as concepts. A house is an object. They are built by humans, and more can be made as needed. Land, on the other hand, is not an object. It is space. It can be altered by humans, but it cannot be created or destroyed. Sea can be turned into dry land through the use of landfill, but that is simply a type of alteration. Barring the discovery of methods of manipulating the fabric of space itself, there is no way that anyone could actually create more space. As a fixed resource therefore, it is considerably more reasonable to treat land as something which is publicly owned.

Now, as to the link between houses and land. Our western culture ceased to be nomadic more than a millenium ago, and as such we tend to think of living space as something that remains stationary. In American suburban culture, we have gone as far as to accustom ourselves to large single family homes even when we only need a fraction of the space the house contains. But there is a growing movement against that trend that advocates the use of so-called “tiny houses” instead. A tiny house is generally between 60 and 300 square feet, and they are often built on top of trailers. Unlike motor homes, these tiny houses are intended for traditional single-location use, but the choice to build them on a trailer makes it possible for the owners to relocate them when they need to, which is extremely difficult to do with larger houses.

Our current society looks at two basic housing paradigms: renting and ownership. My concept leaves renting more or less intact, because there should always be public housing available to citizens that they can occupy without long term commitments, and for this they would have a variable charge added to their Consumption score depending on the demand for their particular housing unit relative to the housing units in least demand. (see essay on Material Rights for more details.) The big change comes in the concept of home ownership.

Humans have a very strong terretorial instinct, and people tend to feel far more secure when they know that they own their home and have rights over their own personal “dominion”. Similarly, people tend to keep up their property better when it is their own rather than one they are simply leasing. I would not dream of doing away with the institution of home ownership altogether. But I do think that it could use significant tweaking.

The biggest tweak is that I would separate ownership of the house itself from the land that it sits on. A citizen can absolutely own a house, but they cannot own the land that it stands on. In other words, they can pay a one-time Consumption charge for a house and then live in it without any further charges for the house, but they will be subject to a periodic charge for use of the attached land based on the demand for land in that area.

There are several key differences in how this would affect citizens looking for semi-permanent living situations. Under our current system, the house and the land must be purchased simultaneously. This tends to be extremely expensive. Building a house generally only costs between $5000 (for a tiny house like those described earlier) and $100,000 (for a large suburban house) in terms of actual building materials and elementary labor. What makes the same house that was built for $100,000 “worth” $450,000 is the location of the land that it sits on. Whether it’s in a good school district, whether it has a nice view, etc. By separating the two, we can make the house itself much cheaper to purchase.

Before I go over the rest of the way that home ownership works under technosocialism, let me take a moment to go over some details about rent. Whether a citizen is renting a dwelling or renting land that accompanies a house that they own, all citizens who are not living in strictly Material Rights housing are going to be paying rent of one sort or another. In our current culture, we tend to associate rent with wasted money, and with insecurity. After all, you might love your apartment but if the landlord doubles the rent when you need to renew your lease, you will probably have to move.

Technosocialism attempts to prevent that. Because all citizens will be in situations where their rent is likely to shift over time as demand for housing in their area rises or falls, it is important for them not to feel insecurity about possible rising rents. To this end, there needs to be a restriction added to the rent determination algorythm that prevents a citizens rent from rising more than 2% in a given year. Whether it be on an apartment or simply a plot of land under their house, people need to feel secure in their ability to stay in their home. On the other hand, if demand dramatically lowers in their area and rents would be due to fall, they should do so immediately and without restriction. This deliberate imbalance in making it easier for rents to fall than for them to rise should hopefully counteract the tendency for rents to rise constantly as the population increases and becomes increasingly urbanized.

Now, back to home ownership. Let’s take a look at George, who has gotten tired of only showing up in examples when something needs to have plans drawn up, and has decided to purchase a house. Being a fairly simple guy, he is buying a medium-sized tiny house on a trailer. There are a number of such houses available, so he is able to purchase it at the base Market price of 10,000Csv. It is a significant hit to his ratio, but thanks to the residual Contribution from his various engineering projects, it is one that he can easily afford. Once taking ownership he has painted it, moved in all of his stuff, and done all of the other little things that people do to make a house their own. Now he simply needs to decide where to put it. He has a variety of options.

Those who have portable houses have the option of taking their housing Material Rights in the form of low-demand land that they will not be charged rent for. In this case, they will generally have to choose from the least popular locations in the area, and they will not be allocated much more than the land directly beneath their house. But, just as citizens have the right to somewhere to exist, so do houses, and it should always be an available option. From there, those with movable houses can upgrade in several ways, by expanding the amount of land they hold in addition to that directly below their house, by moving their house to a more desireable location, or a combination of both.

In George’s case, he has always wanted to have an outdoor patio, so he simply asks the system to recommend an 18′x12′ plot where he can put his 10′x10′ house, and the system shows him locations with at least that much space available, along with the current Market rent value for those properties. He finds one on the outskirts of town that looks promising, and after going to visit it in person a few times, he signs up for it on the Market. Because it is a very small plot and it is not in a high-demand area, he will only be charged 25Csv in rent for that property.

There are two key things that I would like to point out from George’s story. The first is that he was able to purchase his house first and find a location for it second. This is obviously something that can only be done with moveable houses, but it adds a fantastic element of flexibility to the market for citizens who do not want to have to compromise their standards in building quality or design simply to get the view that they want or vice versa. Secondly, George was able to specify exactly how much land he wanted to use. He was not bound by existing plot lines, or any sort of government regulation. If he decided later that he wanted to expand his patio and wanted another 100 square feet of land, he could use the Land section of the Market to expand his property borders into any adjoining vacant space he wanted to, and his rent would be adusted accordingly. If there was no nearby vacant space, he could put in a bid whenever a lot opened up near him, or he could choose a different location entirely.

Now, let’s take a look at Bill and his Real Estate situation. He’s a man who’s not afraid to raise his Consumption score to get what he wants, and his various business ventures give him the flexibility to do that. Bill has a fairly large stationary house close to town where he lives with his family. He likes his kids to have enough space to run around and play catch, and so he has rented the two acres surrounding his house to act as a yard. He had the entire cost of his house charged to his Consumption when he bought it, so the only ongoing cost he has is for the land. The trick here is that he is not the only one living there. His spouse and two young children live there as well. How is appropriate Consumption charge established?

The household consists of four people, two of them children. Each of those four people would be entitled to a 6′x8′ boarding room or a 10′x10′ plot of land according to their Material Rights. As we covered in the essay on children, children are not able to have anything significant charged to their Consumption scores until they gain economic adulthood, but they are entitled to their Material Rights. Therefore the total cost of the land would be calculated based on demand in the area, and then the cost of four 10′x10′ plots would be subtracted from that. The net Consumption charge is then divided evenly between the two adults, although if one of them has a higher Contribution score and therefore would like to take on a higher percentage of the cost, they can set that up when the reserve the land.

But let’s say that Bill and his family grew wanted to move. How is that handled if he owns the house but not the land? One common problem today is that those who have ended up with unmanageable mortgage payments cannot move to somewhere cheaper without selling the house to someone else for at least the same price. This adds a rediculous restriction of movement to citizens lives. It is true that because Bill chose a stationary house he cannot simply bring it with him to a different piece of land. But as soon as he puts the house on the Market and establishes his residency somewhere else, the rent charges for the land around the house stop. The land surrounding the house becomes available for anyone else to claim, and the land directly under the house is made available to the new owners of the house. He will not get any Contribution credit for the house until someone else purchases it through the Market, but neither will he be subject to any ongoing charges for it.

On to Steve. Steve lives in an 8×8′ movable house on a 10′x10′ lot in a fairly run-down part of town, which he claims on the basis of Material Rights and thus pays no rent for. He built the house himself mostly out of scraps and recycled material, and thus managed to get himself a fairly nice dwelling for around 500Csv, which he had charged to his Consumption score when he bought it. But now that he’s been working regularly for the last few years and he’s built up a comfortable buffer in his ratio, he wants to take some time off to get some serious songwriting done. He’s tired of the distractions of the city and wants to try country life for a while. Luckily, he’s in a moveable house so that part won’t be a problem. All he has to do is rent a truck to tow it. But what are his options for finding property out in the country? He has several.

To start with, he could attach himself to a rural work settlement. There are a number of things that society needs to do that are best done in a rural setting. He could bring his house out to an established living space near a farm, lumber camp, or other outpost. Depending on the supply and demand at the post for both labor and living space, he would probably be able to pay any rent that accrued through working at the post. The main advantage of this method would be the connection that would exist between the outpost and the rest of the society, enabling him to still enjoy many of the conveniences of society (mail, internet access, etc) while living rurally. On the other hand, if he is looking for the opportunity to get away from the pressures of other people, he may find that to be too crowded a solution.

Another option would be to find a purely vacation-oriented site. It seems likely that society would have chosen at some point to set up camping sites in nearby scenic areas, which would be accessible by truck and might have water and electricity hookups for moveable houses. The rent for this type of site would vary considerably based on demand, but it would be a nice way to get out of the city for a week or two without significant cost.

Or, as a more permanent solution, he could try a homesteading site. These would be quite isolated from society, and he would be responsible for either bringing or finding his own food, water, heat, etc. without being able to rely on any of society’s resources. Depending on Steve’s personality, this could be a positive or a negative factor in his decision, but one nice thing is that this independence from the rest of society would lead to practically non-existent Consumption, which would probably outweigh any rent that he needed to pay for the land.

Then there’s Fred. As we’ve seen before, Fred is quite dedicated to the goal of keeping his Consumption score as low as possible. To that end, Fred moved into a 6′x8′ boarding room in a somewhat dilapidated neighborhood in the city many years ago and he has stayed there ever since. He has never had any Consumption charges for lodging. Fred moved in at about the same time a number of other artists did, and since then the neighborhood has experienced considerable gentrification. The small artist boarding rooms such as the one Fred occupies are now in considerable demand from yuppies who like to pretend that they are more creative than they actually are. The last time a room in Fred’s building went on the Market, it went for several hundred Csv a month. So how much will Fred be charged for staying in his suddenly-more-valuable room? Nothing. As we discussed before, rent for land or for apartment space can only go up 2% a year. So when Fred moved into a room that at that point qualified as part of his Material Rights, the base price locked in was 0. And no matter how many years 0 increases by 2%, it will always remain 0.

The one disadvantage that Fred has to deal with in his tiny room is the fact that as an artist, he sometimes needs a workspace bigger than his room. While he has a small sewing area in his room, he does not generally have enough space to lay out and cut fabric for projects. To do this, he saves up space-intensive projects and then rents out a workroom in his building. This is where it comes in handy that he’s in a building with a lot of artists. Rather than every individual person having a large workspace in their apartment which is likely to go unused much of the time and tends to get filled up with clutter (yes, I’m speaking from experience as an artist here,) Fred can live in a very small space and then simply get the use of a room for a day or two when he needs it. These communal workrooms would include large tables, sinks, etc.. Different workrooms might cater to different specialties, so that there could be woodshops with collections of tools, fabric shops with large cutting mats, and painting shops with easels and good windows in addition to general-use large rooms that could also be used for meetings and parties. These rooms would be available for rent in the same basic way as land, although for much shorter durations. The Consumption charge would be based on demand for rooms of that type in the area, and those wishing to reserve a such a workroom would be able to do it in increments as short as 30 minutes.

That about covers the basics of how housing and real estate are used by the public, but how about how they are built in the first place? Real Estate development is a major industry in our current United States, and finding a way to replace the current corporatized system is an important step in making Technosocialism viable. Once we have eliminated the ability to buy up and subdivide land, we have significantly shaken the usual development process, so what do we put in its place? Apartment buildings are constructed largely through the Civic Proposal system. When demand for housing reaches a certain level, plans can be proposed for new apartment buildings that would then be approved and carried out much like the bridge or the ear swab factory mentioned eariler. As for the building of houses, moveable houses can be manufactured and sold through the market just like any other product. Stationary houses, with their relatively permanent committment to use of that land as a residential property, should be built only when a particular citizen wishes to do so. That citizen is then responsible for either building it himself, in which case he is only charged Consumption for the raw materials, or for hiring laborers through the SNA system, in which case both materials and labor will be charged to his Consumption score.

The quality of all such houses is very important. One probem with the current way the Real Estate market works is that the incentive is for developers to take empty land and fill it with houses. There is very little incentive for those houses to be well-built because none of the other houses in the area are well-built and soundness in building is something that many modern suburb dwellers have been trained out of looking for. As we mentioned in the Manufacturing essay, the manufacturing process has two basic stages: process design and actual production. Thus when maintenence needs to be done on a house, part of that maintenance process is determining whether it is simply standard maintenance or whether it was due to a flaw in construction. If it is found to be a construction flaw, the cost of the maintenance is charged not to the Consumption score of the owner of the house, but to whoever was responsible for the flaw. For example, in the development where I am currently living, nearly all of our neighbors have had to have their windows replaced because the initial window installation was so shoddy. Replacing a broken window would be standard maintenance, but replacing a badly installed window is fixing a construction flaw, and under the system I’m proposing, the cost of that replacement would have been billed either to the installer who made the error, if it was the fault of a single laborer, or to the designer who specified the installation process, if it was a systemic problem.

The key is to make sure that whenever there is gain to be had in doing something properly, that does not incentivize people to do it badly but in great quantity. One of my aims for societal change in technosocialism is a shift to valuing quality over quantity, and that can only be done by penalizing for bad quality. I’ll go over this in more detail later, but it seemed apropro to mention it here.

Before I close the essay, I want to mention one more thing. Readers may have noticed that I have talked about urban and rural living situations, but not described any suburbs of Imaginary City. This is quite intentional. Part of it is a strong personal dislike for suburbs. But part of it is also due to the significant social disadvantages that come from suburban settings. Suburbs are very inefficient use of land, with everyone having a quarter acre of land and needing to go several miles to find a contiguous piece of open space big enough for a pickup baseball game. They lack both the convenience of the city and the charm of the country. They more or less necessitate the use of a motor vehicle for everything from commuting to work to buying a gallon of milk. The personal car is something I have tried to make as unusual as possible in my technosocialist model, and part of reducing our reliance on cars is reducing our reliance on the suburb. My hope is that by giving citizens more control over how much land they reserve with their dwelling rather than confining them to predefined lots, we can make people more aware of the social costs involved in our current ticky-tack-house-on-a-quarter-acre standard and incentivize them towards more efficient living.

 
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Profit

17 Nov

When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, he was careful to stay objective when speaking of the economics of different industries and different ways of making a living. But one strong stand that he did take was against those who live off the rent of inherited land, and take wealth out of the system without providing anything in return. I am going to take a similar stand, albeit one that Adam Smith would probably disagree with, and say the same thing about those who buy and sell goods for a profit.

In Smith’s time, merchants generally were providing a real service. They bought goods in one place, brought them to another, and sold them at a higher price. While this might not be the same type of productivity as actually producing goods, enabling the flow of goods around the economy is nonetheless something that should be rewarded. Now, however, most who buy and sell things are providing no such service. One of the largest sectors in our economy, the financial industry, is fundimentally based on transactions where traders buy something in the stock or commodities market, wait anywhere from a few minutes to a few years for the price to go up, and then sell it in the very same market where they bought it. There are arguments to be made that the stock market provides capital to emerging companies that allows them to grow when they might not otherwise be able to, and this is occasionally the case. But on the whole, this type of buying and selling does nothing for the availability of goods, and it adds an incredible volitility to our economy, which those who participate in it often make very handsome livings by pulling money out of the economy when it could be going to far more productive use.

With the introduction of the Market in a technosocialist economy, the availability of goods ceases to be a problem. Merchants are no longer needed to discover new products in India and bring them across seas to the court of France. Any product produced in a technosocialist society is immediately available to all potential buyers on an equal footing with all other products. Therefore, it no longer makes sense for people to earn their living through the buying and selling of goods without improvement of them. Similarly, because having a single Market makes the standard “buy a bunch of something in one place and sell them individually somewhere else” model more or less impossible, such profits would have to come by buying goods and holding them for extended periods of time until the price went up, taking them out of useful circulation for the duration. This is certainly not something we want to encourage.

At the same time, however, we do not want to limit the right of someone who has purchased something from the Market to resell it once he no longer requires it for himself. If we restrict secondary sales we risk people simply throwing away things they no longer need, leading to increased waste and a lessened availability of goods. What compromise can be made? It’s actually fairly simple. There is no restriction on a citizen’s right to resell something he has purchased, he simply will not be able to recieve a greater amount in Contribution credit than was initially charged to his Consumption score when he bought it if he has not owned it for at least ten years. While this might seem radical, there is actually precedent for it in our current system.

Housing is both a basic necessity of life and a potentially rewarding investment opportunity in our modern economy. Most state and local governments want to encourage people to own their own homes without subsidizing those who are simply buying and selling property to make money without relying on it for shelter. To encourage people to build equity in their homes and to give residents an interest in the condition of their neighborhoods, income from the sale of a home is frequently taxed at a lower rate than some other types of income. But to make sure that this benefit does not encourage speculation in the real estate market, this lower tax rate generally does not apply to properties sold less than two years after they were purchased.

What I am suggesting certianly goes much farther than that, but it is still broadly in the same category of policies. It gives those who purchase goods with a genuine intention of using them the opportunity to recoup their investment if they keep them in good condition, without creating the opportunity for speculators to abuse the market and reap profit without productivity.

One thing that I need to make very clear is the difference between profit and added value. This is something Smith goes into in great detail and that is frequently misunderstood by the modern public. What Smith explained so elegantly was the difference between rent, wage, and profit. A farmer who plants $100 worth of corn seed and harvests $3500 worth of corn might at first glance be thought to be making an enormous profit, but this is not really the case. That $3500 sale price is made up not only of the cost of the seed corn but also includes the use of the land for the growing season, and the labor of the farmer in planting his crops. Even if he owns his own land and provides all of his own labor rather than paying someone else for either of those components, they are still a part of what makes up the price of the corn.

To bring it into a more familiar context, let’s go back to our friend Fred the craftsman. Fred has just bought several yards of fabric from the Market, for which 15Csv have been charged to his Consumption score. If Fred simply resells the fabric, he will not be able to earn more than 15Ctv towards his Contribution score. But he can use that fabric to make a messenger bag and three hats, and when he puts those goods on the Market he can earn as much for them as purchasers through the Market are willing to pay. He will probably earn considerably more than 15Ctv, but that difference will not be profit, it will be wages for the labor and creativity involved in turning the fabric into usable goods. As long as the goods are being improved in some way, there is no reason that the person improving them should not earn wages for that improvement.

While it’s not entirely related, the other topic that I would like to cover in this essay is credit and the advancement of capital to those who cannot afford to have the materials for a project charged to their Consumption score until the project is complete and they recieve their Contribution credit for it. This is one of the primary justifications for the financial sector and one of the more frustrating perpetuators of economic inequality. If we prevent people from earning money by lending money to others, and thus prevent the widening of the gulf between those who can make money simply by having it and those who must now pay even more for something to cover the costs both of the item and of the financing for it, we also prevent the foundation of new businesses by those who are not already wealthy.

Luckily, in technosocialism we are dealing with a post-currency economy, and this is not a problem. We do not need individuals or institutions to lend money, the capital can be lent directly by society itself. But we still need to come up with a way to prevent abuse of the system and make sure that those taking out “loans” do not gamble unwisely with their society’s resources.

We’ve already more or less covered the process for building factories, civic projects, and other large capital-intensive projects, but how is the process handled when an individual is looking for a small quantity of materials to produce goods on an individual level? Let’s say that Fred wants to upgrade to a new sewing machine. In general, Fred keeps his ratio high enough that this sort of occasional significant purchase should not be a problem for him, but for whatever reason in this case he would rather spread this particular purchase out over several months. There are a couple of ways that this could be accomplished.

Firstly, if he needs the new machine for a specific project, he could pre-sell the work that he intends to do with the new machine. If he has regular customers who he knows are interested in hats with a particular embroidery pattern on the brim and he needs the new machine to accomplish that, they can commit ahead of time to their purchase, and the cost of the new machine is split up and charged to their Consumption scores rather than Fred’s. They would then recieve a hat without any Consumption charge once Fred has the machine and has made the hats. Fred meanwhile would have no Consumption charge for the machine, but would also recieve no Contribution credit for the hats.

Another option would be for him to set up a payment plan. Citizens can choose, when buying something through the market, to have the Consumption value charged to their account immediately or to spread it out over as much as three months. They can do this without needing any outside approval, and the only restriction is that the total Consumption charge must not be enough to push their ratios below 1.0 if it were to be put on their account at the time of purchase. The goal with this type of “consumer credit” is to enable customers to make large purchases without taking a large immediate hit to their Consumption score while not allowing consumer debt to get out of hand. As we have mentioned before, life for those with a ratio below 1.0 can be quite difficult and we do not want anyone to find themselves in that position because they were extended too much credit.

A third option, if he needs to spread the charge over more than three months, would be to seek assistance from a business credit committee. Somewhat similar to a jury or a building approval committee, it a panel made up of randomly selected citizens, this time from the pool of citizens who have sucessfully completed long term payment plans. This panel then reviews Fred’s request, his business plan, and his Consumption/Contribution history and approves or rejects his requested payment plan extending up to 48 months. Longer-term loans than that are not allowed, because it is too difficult for citizens to know ahead of time that they will be able to maintain their ratios appropriately. Because the flexibility of citizens and their freedom to make and alter choices is one of the core principles of technosocialism, it is important not to create institutions that encourage long term financial committments that could later prevent them from making the choices they wish to make. A purchase so expensive that a consumer would need to spread it out over more than four years is most likely a purchase that is too expensive for that customer to make. (For more detail on how this might work in relation to housing, one of the primary reasons modern consumers take on long term debt, see the chapter on Real Estate.)

My point in this essay is not to gang up on the financial industry. It is a popular target for both the left and the right, particularly in recent years as the danger it poses to our economy has become clearer. But under our current system, it is necessary. Without profit and interest-bearing loans, our current economy would grind to a halt. But rather than blindly rail against the banks like the stoned leftist some readers probably take me for, or blindly supporting them like those who realize their necessity in our current system, I am attempting to design a new system in which they are no longer nessessary. The closer we can get to rewarding only genuine productivity in our society, the more productive and efficient that society will become.

 
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Private Property

10 Nov

One of the assumptions frequently made about socialism and socialists is that we are somehow enemies of private property. That we are trying to tax everyone into oblivion and distribute their belongings to the masses. And while that has sometimes happened in the name of socialism, it is a feature of populism, not inherently of socialism. I believe strongly in private property, freedom of economic choice, and the incentive created by working for private gain. Without the ability to earn a higher standard of living through one’s labor, it is impossible for a society to motivate its members to work. But now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, there are a few nuances in the way private property works that I would like to take a look at.

My own personality is a rather confusing mix when it comes to personal possessions. On the one hand, I am able to live quite comfortably out of a 65-liter backpacking pack, and have a genuine appreciation for minimalism in my life. On the other, I have managed to fill most of the basement of my mother’s house with craft supplies, and if I had the money to wear a different humorous tshirt every day of the year there’s a decent chance I might go for it. What I’m getting at here is the difference between my short term and long term material needs. On a day-to-day basis, my needs are very minimal: a computer, a pair of pants and a shirt, a toothbrush, a bedroll, and shelter of some sort. And on that day-to-day basis, the less there is apart from that the better. But in the long term, I sometimes need access to a sewing machine so that I can make myself a new messenger bag. And I know that those plastic shopping bags will come in handy if I get back into working with fused plastic. And that yarn was too good a deal to pass up, and is bound to come in handy if I ever have time to make that afghan I’ve been planning. I accumulate possessions not because I need them now, but because I know that I may need them in the future and if I don’t keep them around me, I can’t guarentee that I will have access to them in the future. But in the meantime, they clutter up the basement and go largely to waste.

When I moved from Pittsburgh to Denver in the summer of 2005, I had to pack up a one-bedroom apartment into an 8′x10′ moving container. It was a one-bedroom apartment that contained the craft supplies and other belongings of nearly twenty years accumulation. And I had an interesting revelation: nearly all of it was replaceable. Rather than try to fit everything into a small moving container, I could simply sell most of my stuff in Pittsburgh and buy new stuff when I needed it in Denver. I sold nearly everything I owned that wasn’t one-of-a-kind, made about two thousand dollars, and had a very easy move.

Unfortunately, that sort of philosophy is much easier to discover and practice during a single move than it is to stick to once one has a large basement to put things in. We live in a society where borrowing or renting things you only need occasionally is fairly difficult, and where the average individual can buy things far more easily than he can sell them. The other day a button fell off my coat, and being away from home I did not have a needle with me. What I needed was five minutes use of a single needle, but what I had to buy was a pack of fifty needles in various shapes and sizes. I bought them, because the pack wasn’t expensive, and I sewed the button back on. But now there is a pack of 50 needles sitting in my room to no purpose. I already have legal ownership of several hundred needles and have no need of more, what I was lacking at that moment was easy access to anything I could use to reattach my button.

I could list similar examples for page after page. Everyone I know who lives in a single-family house has a washing machine and dryer, but most of them are unused for at least 90% of the time. And I would challenge anyone to count all of the different objects that they owned and determine the percentage of them that they used in any given week. In general, the majority of the things we own we choose to acquire for the same reason that my basement is full of craft supplies: we want to guarentee access to them when we do want them. And so while I have absolute support for the right to private ownership if that is what people prefer to do, I also think that there needs to be a similar right to shared ownership. If people have the right to own things, people should also have the right not to do so. As a society, we have largely lost the ability to share, and it is likely a significant cause of the growing alienation many feel from the people around them. Most people read a book once and then have no more need of it, and so as a society we have agreed that we should have lending libraries rather than spending the resources required to have separate copies for every individual. Similarly, why not have libraries for other durable goods? Just as with books, there will still be those who wish to guarentee unlimited access to particular resources, and they should be completely free to purchase them. But we should make it at least as easy to borrow temporarily as it is to purchase permanently.

I’ve drifted a bit from my original point, which actually had more to do with the ease of buying and selling. There has long been a saying about cars that a new car loses half its value the second you drive it off the lot. This is even more dramatically true of things like the package of needles earlier in the essay, because there is a far larger secondary market for cars than there is for sewing needles. This has very little to do with any lessening of actual value or usefulness, and far more to do with the difficulties involved in any one individual selling something in the modern marketplace. Most packs of needles are bought the same way that I bought mine: an impulse purchase in a moment of need. When trying to sell a pack of needles, the corner store has an infinate advantage over me as an individual. Customers will automatically check to see if the corner store sells needles, whereas I have no way of finding them or vice versa. This is why the development of a single Market is so important. Even if a needle lending library proved too dificult to organize, a single marketplace that provided a level p\laying field for everyone would have enabled me to buy a needle, sew on my button, and put that needle right back into the Market where someone else could use it. The resources and labor saved by not requiring everyone in society to own a 50-pack of needles on the off-chance that a button might fall off could then be put to more productive use, which as I’ve said before is what technosocialism is all about.

 
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Family and Children in a Technosocialist Society

10 Nov

So far today I’ve written essay in which I condoned prostitution and condemned alcohol, another which described marketing as a form of corruption, and yet another which suggested that people should have a natural right to an internet connection. So I figured while I’m having a controversial day already, I might as well write the essay that’s been floating around in my head about children and family structure in a technosocialist society. This essay comes firmly with the disclaimer you probably have memorized by this point: do not judge this project as a whole by your opinion on this particular essay. None of the ideas presented here are “core” ideas and even if you think they’re junk, that shouldn’t impact your opinion of technosocialism as a whole.

In the essay on a citizen’s Material Rights, there was considerable discussion about the fact that no one chooses to be born. But a choice is made by someone nonetheless: by the parents of the child being created. My own personal views on the morality of having children aside, there is no question about the fact that when someone chooses to have a child, they are also choosing to place a certain level of burden on society to care for that child. In their desire to become parents, they have created a human being who must be clothed, fed, educated, and kept safe. Our current system makes them largely responsible for that by making the parent purchase the food, clothing, etc., but much of the time this creates a situation in which children of financially-disadvantaged parents are put at a further disadvantage because their parents cannot afford nutricious food or a house in a good school district. The child suffers for something that they have no control over.

Technosocialism attempts to remedy these sorts of inequalities, and therefore a way must be found to make parents responsible for the burdens they have placed on society without limiting the opportunities available to children from poor families. Ideally, this needs to be done without creating an incentive for couples to have children they might not otherwise have had for the sake of any increase in Material Rights that they might be afforded. The key here is to ensure that all citizens of any age are entitled to their Material Rights in their own right and not through any other parties. Under our current system, attempts to help poor families with children must largely be done through money, and money is far more difficult to control. Money intended to be spent for diapers can be too easily diverted to other purposes. In recent years, programs like WIC have attempted to prevent these types of abuses in the American welfare system, but they have brought their own challenges and abuses.

To ensure that parents are aware of and responsible for the consequences of having children, on the birth of their child both parents immediately become subject to an additional charge to their Consumption scores equal to 25% of the current market value of the Material Rights claimed by the average child that age. The use of the average consumption rather than the consumption of that child in particular is to ensure that children are not denied things they might need by their parents because of problems with their parents financial status.

To avoid financial exploitation of children by their parents, the Material Rights of an infant would include only things that an infant would need: baby clothes, baby food, etc.. The infant’s Market account can purchase only those necessities while the parents are still acting on behalf of the child. Non-necessitities can only be charged to a child’s account once that child has proven themselves capable of making purchases on their own.

Here’s where we get into the reasonably non-controversial areas of this essay: coming of age standards. In most cultures, levels of responsibility and adulthood expected of and given to children are determined by age. In most of the United States, for exampe, adolescents are considered ready to drive at 16, to vote at 18, and to drink at 21. The problem with this system is that across-the-board age standards are generally based on an average that fits very few people. Some young people who are interested in politics may be far more politically active at 15 than most adults of 30 would be. And some 30 year olds will be less responsible in their behavior towards alcohol than the average 18 year old. Therefore, instead of using age as the measure, technosocialism takes the same approach towards readiness for responsibility as it does towards education: proof of knowledge and capability. Each major puzzle piece of adulthood can be arrived at separately when the child is ready for it. The following list will explore what those pieces are, how they might be achieved, and what restrictions they will lift.

*Market Participation*

We covered in the chapter on education the fact that technosocialism does not view education as something that one should have to pay for, but rather something for which one should be paid for achieving. This creates an important difference from our modern society, in that instead of having to rely on their parents for an allowance and spending money, children in a technosocialist society begin earning Contribution credit quite early in their lives as they gain a basic education. This means that children who are not yet experienced enough to understand how to exercise self-control might run up considerable Consumption scores before they are old enough to realize the long term impact of their actions. To prevent this, and also to prevent parents from financially exploiting their young children, children are not able to make purchases through the Market until they have demonstrated an understanding of its use and underlying principles.

This process is largely similar to the process that we have today. Starting around Kindergarten age, when modern children would be learning how to add up dollars and cents, children in a technosocialist society would be introduced to the ideas of Contribution and Consumption and taught how a ratio works. Later on, around the stage that modern elementary school students might start recieving an allowance from their parents, students who have demonstrated a reasonable understanding of Contribution and Consumption are given the ability to make small purchases independently. These purchases will limited to avoid significant ratio changes over a short period of time (the same way allowance money is usually distributed in small amounts each week) and those limitations will gradually be loosened as students show understanding of the long-term nature of their ratio and restraint in their purchases. Eventually older students who can pass a comprehensive test on the nature of a technosocialist economy and its interactions with its citizens will be able to lift all of those restrictions and enter the economy as an independant financial adult.

*Employment*

Our current economic system has a history of horrible exploitation of child labor, and in the hopes of preventing that from happening again, there are many restrictions on the hours children can work at various ages. But as we’ve discussed before in previous chapters, exploitation of others is difficult if not impossible in a technosocialist society. There can be no advantage to others in forcing children to work, because only the children could gain by it. Therefore, I see no reason to stop children who wish to work and have demonstrated proficiency with the SNA system from doing so. And I believe that a single restriction would be enough to safeguard the children involved from the kinds of abuse we saw during the Industrial Revolution: children must be treated no differently from adults. If an eight-year-old wants to do plumbing work, they must go through the same training and certification process as an adult plumber. If he wants to work with dangerous equipment, he must demonstrate his ability to use it safely just as an adult would. In practical terms, this will work to keep children largely out of the work force until they get older and have finished their schooling, while allowing the occasional prodigy to profit from their skill without undue restrictions.

*Voting*

Participation in the democratic process is an important part of citizenship in a technosocialist society. Rather than expecting citizens to simply vote for representatives every few years and then leave the governing up to them for the rest of the time, a technosocialist system depends on constant participation by all citizens. But before this duty can be undertaken, it is important that it be properly understood. Civics, rather than being a once-a-week class that some students take in eighth grade, must be a major component of any education. And as students learn more about the workings of a technosocialist society and demonstrate that knowledge, they can earn the right to participate in parts of the democratic discourse. Rather than having a single monolithic course that must be passed, civics is split into individual units on different aspects of society. Once students have demonstrated a basic knowledge of land use and city planning, for example, they can participate in discussions and votes about what we would today call zoning issues. Once they have shown that they understand the justice system and basic investigative technique, they can serve on a jury. And once all of these individual units have been passed, they can be considered full voting citizens regardless of age.

*Adulthood and citizenship*

If you told most modern citizens that they were required to pass a test before they could serve on a jury, they would be quite happy, and would make sure that they never came within ten yards of that test. Even in our current system, which requires very little of citizens in terms of voting, American elections are considered to have high turnouts if more than half the eligible citizens vote. It is important not to overestimate the importance to people of the duties and rights of citizenship. Therefore, we need to ensure a cultural tie between the reaching of these milestones and adulthood. Tell someone that leaving his education unfinished means that he cannot vote, and he’s likely not to care. Tell him that it means he is still considered a child, and he is likely to find that harder to accept. There need to be a certain number of rights which a citizen only earns after he has completed all of the steps to become a full voting and economic citizen. But how can we set that up so that it provides significant encouragement without creating a permanent rights-less underclass? What is one right that society already attaches to adulthood and which is desirable enough to push those who might not care about voting or civic participation to gain full citizenship anyway? The right to have a family of one’s own.

See? I lulled you into a false sense of security with the middle section about education and citizenship rights, but I told you this was going to be a controversial one. And here is the most controversial part of all: people should not have the right to reproduce simply because they come with the equipment. Note that I am not talking here about eugenics. The right to reproduce should not be limited to the genetic elite, because humans will probably never be able to truly understand who those are. Neither should it be limited to the economic elite who can “provide best for the children” because as we have already covered, children are entitled to their own Material Rights and will be provided for anyway. Instead, it should be limited to those who have shown the ability to be responsible parents. This is not for the sake of society or the species, although society will almost certainly benefit, but rather for the sake of the child. We talked a couple of essays back about how the imposition of existance onto people without their choice should entitle them to certain rights from society, and one of the most fundimental is to be born into a family that wants them there and will care for them well. With that end in mind, the following steps should be required before people are allowed to reproduce:

1. Both parents must have completed all the steps in becoming a full adult citizen.

2. The parents must have been engaged in a stable committed relationship for at least several years, and must be willing to agree that they will not separate until all children have grown to adulthood.

3. Both parents must pass tests on parenting techniques, child psychology, and other skills that they will need to raise a child.

Just how this restriction should be enforced is a tricky matter. My personal inclination is to require vascectomies of all males by the time they reach the age of 14. Once these conditions have been met, they can get the vascectomy reversed. Given the disproportionate burden on women in most of the reproductive process, it seems only fair that men get the short end of the stick for once.

I fully recognize that the odds of any society enacting the limitations I have outlined here is extremely slim, and I can only hope that this essay is not used in the future to discredit the idea of technosocialism in general. But I hope that even those readers who most strongly disagree with my argument can agree on a fundimental premise: that of all the rights due to a human being, one of the most important should be the right to be wanted. One of the great social arguments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been the balance of an individual’s right to control over their own body and the rights of an unborn fetus. My views are somewhat difficult to place along the pro-life pro-choice spectrum, but in many ways it’s the same debate. The control of an individual over their own body should be important to any society, but can that outweigh the right of a child not to be born to abusive or neglectful parents? I have always viewed the right to life as something that can only be possessed by a being capable of anticipating and fearing death, and I would like to substitute the right to not be given life carelessly.

 
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Learning from Today: Ebay

04 Nov

eBay has evolved considerably over its twelve years of existance so far, but at its core it has always been a sort of national garage sale. People buy and sell collectables and other goods across the country and sometimes the world. And the standard proceedure is for buyers to pay before the item is shipped. Why do buyers trust sellers they’ve never met enough to send them money? The answer is eBay’s feedback system. After each purchase, the buyer is invited to rate the seller in terms of shipping speed, item quality, etc.. This means that future buyers can rely on the feedback left by past buyers in their judgement of a seller’s trustworthiness. And it gives incentive to the seller to behave honorably because otherwise it will have a negative impact on his feedback rating.

Now, nearly everyone who’s ever shopped on eBay wants to point out that I am painting a far-too-utopian picture of the credibility of its sellers. And eBay certainly has its share of fraudsters, just as any flea market does. But I would argue that these gaps in the effectiveness of the feedback system are largely due to the ability to maintain more than one eBay account. When a less than scrupulous seller has driven his feedback rating too low, he simply has to open another account to start back at a clean record with no feedback, positive or negative. But most sellers are only willing to do this if they have relatively low feedback ratings. A seller might be willing to walk away from a +10 rating in order to scam you, but they are far less likely to similarly walk away from a +150 rating. And professional sellers are often part of eBay’s Power Sellers program, which gives buyers extra confidence by holding sellers to very high feedback standards. A seller who is part of such a system is highly unlikely to jeapardize his position by behaving dishonestly.

So why am I going on about feedback? Because technosocialism is all about empowering people to make choices in a decentralized and genuinely free market. If Bill needs the oil changed in his car, the system ought to be able to direct him to the closest mechanic capable of that. But Bill wants to be able to make his own decision and to choose a mechanic with a reputation for reliability. So instead of doing a simple location search, Bill can instead ask the system for a list of mechanics within, say, a five mile radius who have a feedback rating of 95% or higher and make his decision that way. And after he has had his oil changed, he rates the mechanic himself, making it easier for the next citizen coming along to make his choice.

The goal is to have a rating occur every time a Consumption/Contribution transaction takes place. The great mass of information thereby created allows citizens to make informed choices about their consumption, and attempts to prevent unscrupulous pseudo-Contributors from flooding the market with inferior products. As with the relatively benign culture of Facebook, the key is linking someone’s behavior immediately to their identity and thus to their reputation. Not only does this help prevent fraud and allow consumers to gauge the quality of a product before selecting it from the Market, it also helps producers. By recieving critiques from their entire customer base rather than simply the part of it particularly impressed or enraged, they can learn how they need to improve their product to appeal to a larger customer base.

 
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Corruption in a Technosocialist Society

03 Nov

I don’t know what it says about human nature, but systems and corruption have gone hand in hand for the vast majority of human history. There will always be people out to get an unfair advantage over others, trying to gain things that they haven’t earned. I don’t expect this to magically change just because a society switches to Technosocialism. The more rules are set down, the more likely it becomes that there will be those who make their entire living from finding ways to skirt them. For this reason, I don’t think that there should be defined rules about what is and is not corruption. It is the spirit of the law that needs to be enforced, and setting out the letter of that law only adds loopholes that can be exploited. However, the spirit of the basic categories of corruption do need to be identified before they can be enforced. With that in mind, I present the following list of types of corruption that need to be discouraged in a technosocialist society:

1. Marketing. I might as well start with the one most likely to get people mad at me. Marketing is not considered a form of corruption in our current society, and is in fact one of the few major industries still left in our economy. But what is marketing? It is an attempt to influence the purchasing decisions of consumers. To buy something which they otherwise might not have bought, or might have bought from a different company. In other words, to skew the market in favor of a product which is unable to suceed on its own. Even if it might not initially seem so, this is a form of corruption. It is taking a system that is supposed to be based on quality and price, namely the market, and altering the way it works through the use of money and power, namely the marketing budget of a large corporation. For a free market to operate properly, it needs to be based on quality and price, and be free of these sorts of influences. To that end, any attempt to artificially increase demand for a product through marketing and similar methods for personal gain should be considered corruption and therefore a crime.

2. Unregistered Trading. As discussed in the essay on Competition, for the Market to work properly as an efficient exchange, all of the goods of the society need to flow through it. Not only does trade outside of the Market make it more difficult for the Market to guage supply and demand, transactions outside of the Market may be used for more traditional corruption. People are of course welcome to exchange gifts, but these should still be registered through the item tracking system to prevent the formation of a black market, to discourage money laundering, and to prevent “gifts” being used to corrupt individuals involved in decisionmaking processes.

3. Distortion of decisionmaking processes through gifts or influence. This applies to any attempt to influence people selected for a particular decisionmaking body such as a jury or approval board through the use of gifts, promises, or threats. This would be difficult to pull off in any case, as such decisionmakers would be kept annonymous throughout the process, but it is a clear case of “old school” corruption that would clearly be illegal.

4. Distortion of the democratic process through gifts or influence. This includes cases where a decision is left to the general public and gifts or other influences are used to gain supporters to a cause or to convince others to rally supporters. As with number three, this is a type of corruption that fits more comfortably into our current definition of the term.

5. Deliberate spreading of falsehoods to influence a decision. This is perhaps the trickiest category, because it comes right up to the line protecting free speech. I want to be clear that this does not include any type of opinion, or any statement whose truth is debatable. This is only for very clear cases of lying to advance a political agenda. For an example of what I mean, let me describe an ad that ran in a recent political election in Washington state. It was in support of a measure to ban same-sex marriage in the state, and it quoted a number of statistics about the country of Scandinavia. Apparently Scandinavia legalized same-sex marriage in 2004, and since then suicide rates have doubled and drug use has increased by nineteen times. This was all stated as fact. The problem is that there is no such country as Scandinavia. Scandinavia is a region. And none of the countries in Scandinavia legalized same-sex marriage in 2004, let alone experienced any of the drastic consequences the ad claimed. This was not a case of a controversial opinion that should be protected by free speech principles. This was deliberate lying to confuse the public into accepting their point of view. While accusations of corruption by falsehood should be very few and far between, it needs to be there in cases such as these.

As for the actual trying of corruption cases, there must be two separate juries. The job of the first would be to determine whether the alleged actions would constitute corruption, and the second would determine whether the defendent actually took the actions in question. The decisions of both of these juries can be appealed as described in the chapter on law enforcement.

 
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In Detail: Material Rights

03 Nov

We are all born because of someone else’s decision. We find ourselves in the world through no fault of our own. And in our current system, we find ourselves almost immediately taxed for that existance. Most of us grow up in families that provide food, shelter, and clothing, but the provision of these necessities is connected immediately to that family, and those who have the misfortune to be born into abusive or disfunctional families must choose between staying with them and facing a world where they must fend entirely for themselves. Children born into poor familes are put at considerable disadvantage compared to those born into richer ones, and all people, once they reach adulthood, must continually pay for things necessary to their continued existance. Indeed, as many of our nation’s homeless know, it is becoming increasingly difficult to even find somewhere you are allowed to stand without somehow paying for the priviledge.

Technosocialism approaches this differently. It is society that says that new people must come into the world, and chance that causes people to be born into one society and not another. People need food, clothing, and shelter, but they are not the ones who created their own need for these things: that lies at the feet of the society who created the individual. Therefore, society should be responsible for the basic costs of keeping that individual alive and well.

What does this mean in real terms? Basically, it means that every citizen is entitled to certain Material Rights for which they are not charged any Consumption value. These include the food required for a basic balanced diet, a place to sleep and keep belongings safely, adequate clothing for the season and climate, and medical care as needed. It also, though some will find it counterintuitive, includes a computer with internet access. Now, it is quite clear that internet access is not as necessary for survival as food or shelter, but it is necessary if one is going to act as a citizen in a technosocialist society. The free flow of ideas is as important to a society as the flow of goods is to an economy, and it is important that no one be excluded from that.

But the fact that food, shelter, and internet access are all essentially free in a technosocialist society does not mean that most people would be freed from the responsibility for working, it simply gives them more freedom in their choice of work. Citizens may have the right to free housing, but it doesn’t have to be extravagant housing. Someone living only on their Material Rights without earning any Contribution credit would have little or no choice in the things they recieved. A base-level housing unit would not need to be much bigger than 6′x8′ to hold a bed and some shelving for belongings. They would be entitled to a computer with internet access, but it would not need to have more than text capabilities. They would be entitled to food, but only to something that met their nutritional requirements, not necessarily something they liked. In short, if someone wanted to live without working at all, they would be able to do so, but they would not be able to afford anything else to do either.

The technosocialist view is that while people should not have to earn the right simply to survive, the right to choose more than the bare bones is one that they do need to earn. It should be possible for an author or musician to trade a spartan existance for the time to complete a masterpiece, but it does not need to be particularly comfortable. History has shown us that when comfort and idleness can be simultaneously achieved there is a significant segment of the population that will attempt to do so. Comfort should always be linked to productivity.

So if people who wish to count expeditures as part of their Material Rights have limited choices about what they recieve, how is what they recieve actually determined? Critics are likely to assume that there would be some sort of “government standard” that restricted what people could get, but it’s actually much simpler than that: it’s whatever is currently in the least demand.  If Steve needs a new pair of pants for the winter, he can submit a Need request for a pair of pants, and he can specify his size and the fact that they need to be warm enough for winter, but from there the Market is going to choose the pants that others seem least interested in: the pants that have stayed unclaimed in the Market for the longest. They might be plaid, they might be pleated, they might be clown pants. If he wants to be more specific, he will need to accept a charge to his Consumption score for the difference. (see essay on pickiness). As for what exactly constitutes a person’s basic Material Rights, that must be decided on by society as a whole. It is likely to change somewhat over time, but might include a living space of at least 6′x8′, a week’s worth of clothing, food that meets currently understood nutritional requirements, and a computer capable of running a basic text web browser.

One question raised by this approach is that of immigrants. Most issues of interaction between a technosocialist society and any outside society that still operates on a currency basis is a tricky one, and this one is no different. If everyone in a technosocialist society is guaranteed food, housing, and clothing, that is likely to attract immigrants from outside who see it as an opportunity to live without having to earn a living. The key here is that immigrants must go through the same process as the technosocialist society’s children before gaining full citizenship. Until that time they are given a certain amount of leeway in terms of maintaining their ratio, but their Consumption scores are still charged for things that would count as Material Rights for a citizen. This might seem like a double standard, but it isn’t. In the case of people born into the society, they were not the ones who made the choice about joining the society, their parents chose to create them. In the case of immigrants, while they are obviously still the creation of their parents, their entry into the technosocialist society was entirely voluntary, and until they become full citizens it is reasonable to expect them to earn their own way. (There will be another essay soon on the process of gaining citizenship for children and for immigrants, but I don’t want to take up too much space in this one.)

This brings us to the issue of ratios. Just as there are people in currency societies who go into debt, there will be those in a technosocialist society who bring their ratio below 1.0. Once a person’s ratio goes below 1, be it through overconsumption or criminal activity, they are restricted from purchases through the Market except for their Material Rights. This might seem harsh at first, but compared to the fate of the penniless in our modern society it is actually quite generous. They are still entitled to the necessities of life, but they cannot drive themself deeper into debt. Technosocialism makes it very easy for those who need and want to earn Contribution credit to do so, and most of the reasons that drive people in our current society into debt crises (medical bills, real estate market crashes, layoffs, unscrupulous interest rates) do not exist in a technosocialist context. There should be no reason for anyone who has not been convicted of a crime to be subject to ratio-related restrictions for any length of time. There will be further discussion of the impact of these restrictions in the essays on Real Estate and Private Property later on.

This idea that all citizens are entitled to certain Material Rights is one of the primary reasons that I have named this system of political economy Technosocialism. To those who have grown up with Capitalism setting societal norms, it seems like an alien idea, but it is quite logical when you think about it. It should not cost people anything to continue existing, when it is society that requires that continued existance of them. The freedom from uncertainty provided by that guarentee would carry innumerable benefits. How many visionaries throughout history has society been denied because they were too busy trying to make ends meet? Under technosocialism, anyone from any social or financial class can have the freedom to make the breakthroughs of a Henry Cavendish or the other gentleman-Philosophers. And even those without any ambitions of greatness can rest more easily in their beds knowing that no change in the market or suddenly layoff will leave them hungry in the streets. The ideals of Technosocialism owe quite a bit to the “Four Freedoms” speech of Franklin Roosevelt, and the idea of a citizen’s Material Rights are there to try to provide the last two: Freedom from want and Freedom from fear. Once those two are covered, the citizenry is freed up to look after the rest.

 
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