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From Why Can't Money Grow On Trees?
This is the wiki version of "Why Can't Money Grow On Trees?" (a book in progress).
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The latest version of the proposal is available in PDF format and as a single page. The proposal includes a cover letter, an overview of the book, and other marketing-related information.
Why Can't Money Grow On Trees? is a non-fiction book about the technology of globalization and how a rising counter-cultural movement known as open source may provide a means to make globalization work better. It is unlike any previous work of its kind. By turning the proposal into a wiki, the author has opened up the process of writing the book, putting its ideas into practice. You can contribute or edit the book(-in-progress) as you watch it being written.
Contents |
Pitch
Why Can't Money Grow On Trees? has three major points:
- In the age of globalization, the remaining barriers to perfect competition are no longer technical, but political;
- The price of oil and the global warming crisis have begun a worldwide rethinking of the generation, distribution, value and use of energy;
- We can use these opportunities to create a fair, sustainable global "open marketplace" with readily-available technology. Instead of fearing the perfection of competition in terms of its threat to profits, we should embrace it wholeheartedly.
Recent upheavals in the international financial system are causing people to rethink the basic assumptions which underpin the global economy. This book offers a way out, a plan for rebuilding the world's markets from the bottom up in a sustainable fashion. The book advocates that instead of running away from the trends challenging businesses, we ought to embrace the changes technology is bringing to the marketplace and how to harness the power of these sea changes to create a fair and sustainable economy.
Summary
All around the world, traditional top-down control structures are being challenged. Governments, corporations, trade unions, and social movements are all undergoing crises of confidence about how they will cope not only with the changes brought on by the modern world, but with the ever-increasing pace of change. This chaos marks the end of an era, and it has given birth to a new series of individualist (yet globally conscious) movements which threaten both the state and the corporation. Chief among the horsemen of this systemic apocalypse is the Internet, itself a former secret government network which escaped its creators and ran roughshod over all previous means of communications. By providing a practically infinite source of information flow, the Internet broke down information control in a way none of our institutions quite knows how to handle.
At the same time, it is clear that our ever-increasing consumption and modern lifestyle are no longer economically or ecologically sustainable. With the end of cheap fossil fuels and the energy they provide, large scale changes to the infrastructure and lifestyle of the most industrialized countries are coming. A globalizing world's burgeoning demand for energy, food, clean water and raw materials will only mean more conflict unless we figure out how to balance out undersupply with overdemand. Though we depend on tomorrow's technology to save us from the problems created by yesterday's, we tend to overlook what we can actually build with today's tools.
Fortunately, humanity is now technically capable of building bottom-up institutions in order to create a global "open marketplace" which is sustainable and fair. The confluence of 'green' renewable energy based on distributed power generation, and the development method known as open source, could be the basis for a new fair trade economic policy that doesn't require getting your corrupt representative in government to pass a new spending bill.
This book is an instruction set for building a sustainable future, based on the rising global counterculture known as the open source movement. Open source, the programming philosophy which now powers the majority of the Internet and an increasing array of devices, spread from 1980's computer science to an ever increasing range of industries: manufacturing, law enforcement, medical research, even religion.
Instead of advocating direct political change, this book calls for direct technological change to create a voluntary, global "open market" where perfect competition is a precondition and a new infrastructure is built for a sustainable future on Earth. Combining elements of science, history, philosophy. economics, politics, game theory, computer programming and liberal doses of humor, it explores the evolution of globalization and how the global system can serve the planet's needs better. Each chapter is filled with real-world case studies to show how the future is being built today and how ordinary people working together might be able create a sustainable economy.
The book examines the technical criteria for what economists call perfect competition and asks whether today's technology might be up for the task. If so, we could build new market institutions which use the technical capacity of perfect competition as a guarantee for all transactions.
How could it work? Keep reading.
Background
In the 1920's and 30's, a movement arose in North America which had dubbed itself the Technocratic movement. it was a collection of scientists, engineers, utopians, intellectuals and so forth, who had coalesced around the idea that machines were better suited to producing things than humans.
Technocracy was a movement which fizzled because it suffered two relatively minor flaws. It was years ahead of its time, which wouldn't have been an issue had it not been for the second problem, which was that technocracy advocated a strategy of waiting until robots were developed to take any kind of action.
Today, the technocratic movement has morphed into the Singularitarian movement centered in Silicon Valley, California, a dangerous band of scientists, inventors and venture capitalists who believe they will save humanity with biotechnology (among other things). This book argues that in order to fulfill any such promises of a better world through technology, we need to reunite the ideas of Technocracy with the demand for social justice. Technology must be for the people and by the people, from the bottom up instead of the top down.
Why Can't Money Grow On Trees? also examines how the worst fears of Luddites like the Unabomer have already come to pass, the contradictions of depending on technology to solve the problems it creates, why we cannot depend on governments or corporations to build a sustainable future, and most importantly, how to outsmart nature and retire early.
Comparable books
Why Can't Money Grow On Trees? represents a confluence of three major subjects: science, economics and politics. The works of Jared Diamond—Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse have a similarly tripartite focus (and his works are a great influence on this book). While Diamond's work sticks to analysis, Why Can't Money Grow On Trees also seeks to describe the tools we can use to address global crises head-on.
Most non-fiction books about the global economy either rehash the rhetoric of liberalism and modestly propose various methods of redistribution or laissez-faire deregulation. The institutions I refer to as 'the Washington consensus' have corralled our thinking about globalization down a few narrow avenues, making for rather dry (and wonky) reading. At the same time, a growing number of futurists have developed an industry around a permanent optimism often devolving into science-fiction fantasy. Meanwhile, the public knows something is wrong with our economic system, but doesn't know how to fix it—leading to a third category, the Luddite jeremiad.
This book has concrete proposals based on research and analysis of existing systems.
Comparable ideas have been expressed by people like R. U. Sirius; for example, here is a podcast about Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog.
Marshall Brain, who is now a TV host on the Science channel, posted an online science fiction novel about technocracy and open source called Manna, which can be read here.
How to Read This Book
You can read the whole book-in-progress as
