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Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth

Our work focuses on the creation of open source, resilient, post-scarcity communities, which rely on resource-based economies as opposed to debt-based funnymoney systems. This has captured the attention of at least one mainstream author. Here is a short video where Juliet Schor – author and Professor of Sociology at Boston College  –  discusses her new book, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. Factor e Farm is included for about one minute, as an example of the concepts that she is discussing. We are just posting about 3 minutes of her talk, for context regarding her comments about us:

We posted the full video in a former post. We note for our readers that – while Professor Schor states that we are a resilient communitythe more accurate way to describe us is that we are a resilient community in the making. We are far from that goal.

We contacted Juliet Schor by email some time ago regarding collaboration, but so far we’ve had no response. If you have any leads on how to reach her, let us know.

While we are on the topic of our audiences’ perceptions – we frequently receive comments that we are ‘not really resilient/autonomous/sustainable’ because we can’t do things like ‘clean room technology or production of metals.’ Let’s set this point straight: we are very limited in our ‘sufficiency’ all together. We depend wholly on industrial feedstocks, such as metal and hydraulics components, and while we produce some food on the farm, our food still comes from the store. We are off-grid on electricity via solar panels, we harvest our own rainwater, and we can produce biodiesel – but all of these are not truly resilient solutions because the infrastructure used to build these is also largely from the store. Our orchard will be dripping with fruit soon, though it’s still young; and we may have plenty of chicken soon.

What we do here is the open-sourcing of key infrastructure technologies. We have a long way to go before full technological recursion allows us to not only make components, but also the feedstocks. We also emphasize that our commitment to full recursion is a fundamental goal – up to things like smelting metals from clay and semiconductors from sand – not to mention full agricultural resilience up to combines, and energy resilience up to full fuel sufficiency via pelletized-biomass/modern steam engines. These are all proven concepts, which if open-sourced, become economically feasible as the foundation for resilient communities. We don’t really believe that any technological process cannot be done on a small scale – including full-blow semiconductor and microelectronics production utilizing local sand as a feedstock and utilizing our own eenrgy – as the extreme example of what can be done on the scale of a 40 acre farm. RepLab is our main strategy to achieve these goals. Subscribe to support our work.

7 Comments

  1. Marcin

    According to Vinay, The New American Dream (http://www.newdream.org/) also appears to be the work of Juliet Schor.

  2. Marcin

    Vinay’s comment: I think she really has something very nearly the right face to take the concepts into the mainstream and definitely the right face to take them to government and the big charities like Gates.

  3. […] products and infrastructures. This may soon change, with progressive writings such as those of Juliet Schor’s Plenitude. Our license is intended to promote the transition towards an open source civilization, with the […]

  4. […] Things have been spectacular with William so far. We have basically managed to scale our progress twofold. Since he’s been here, we’ve seen full product release of the open source CEB press, The Liberator, and we’ve had significant progress on the open source tractor, LifeTrac Prototype II. We also deployed the first prototype of the heavy duty, open source drill press, which we’re now using as part of our fabrication infrastructure. We just reported on Prototype I of the 150 ton hole puncher . We look forward to using these tools towards optimizing production runs of The Liberator. We also got the first working prototype of Hexahatch, the automated chicken incubator, in operation. Four pips hatched as of now, and we have 70 eggs in there at present. We also deployed Prototype I of a honey extractor. Plus, Sean is on-site for the summer gathering documentary material, and his LifeTrac II update is choice. Also, if you haven’t seen our Economy in a Box presentation, check it out for some of the most recent thoughts. People are beginning to talk about us in mainstream books. […]

  5. […] the world in general is very close to availing the Maker, subsilience lifestyle to everybody. Read Plenitude, read The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, and read The Unplugged. Zombie – wake up and smell […]

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  7. Marcin

    Yes, we got in touch with her, and look forward to meeting at the next favorable opportunity.