Ladies and gentlemen, the first Seed Eco-Home is now for sale, and we have 8 ways to make it accessible to the global public. This marks a significant step: we believe that sales will bootstrap funding for the full development of the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS).
This achievement paves the way for our broader goal: an open source economy characterized by near-zero marginal cost and efficient productivity. Practically, this means a lower cost of living, increased financial independence, and a shift from economic pressure to pursuing personal passions. We envision a broad transition from scarcity-based business models to abundance mindsets within the next decade or two. This shift should also clarify the productivity paradox – the questionable efficiency gains across the economy despite exponentially more powerful technology – which hinders the creation of a truly efficient and humane world.
Our revenue model is a hybrid of education and production, starting with a four-year school:
Our first cohort of 24 students will begin this year, aiming to swarm-build a complete Seed Eco-Home, from foundation to rooftop PV, in just five days. Having validated each component, we are now launching this school to achieve scale. We aim to redesign and rebuild civilization’s broken infrastructures, with house builds cross-subsidizing the necessary development.
My TED Talk hinted at the GVCS’s potential. We now estimate that completing the GVCS over the next four years requires approximately $50 million, based on our development costs for typical GVCS machines up to full product release. This aligns with the concept of a sustainable village for $15,000 in today’s dollars – the tuition for our transformative OSE Apprenticeship of 2025. This program teaches the integrated skills needed for startup, maintenance, and prosperity in any sustainable village. Without this skillset, progress is blocked. Hence, the school.
We further estimate that open-sourcing all of civilization’s hardware technology would cost around $50 billion, equivalent to ten years of all new product R&D across all sectors (roughly the lifespan of a patent). Details on this estimate are available on our wiki (currently undergoing server migration). While $50 billion covers hardware, it doesn’t include redesigning organizations and institutions. However, we believe that a shift to an open, collaborative economy will naturally lead to the evolution of these structures, thus externalizing that cost in our $50 billion estimate.
While significant, $50 billion is a small fraction of the $100 trillion global economy, suggesting this budget is potentially achievable. Our current work employs a bootstrapping approach towards this goal.
Interestingly, reviewing my 2011 Bioneers conference presentation, presented at around the historical high point for the open hardware movement, reveals an explicit discussion of how large budgets could arise from open source economics work. From tanks rolling down my streets in Poland, to the streets paved with gold in America – it is fascinating to observe how scarcity – both real and artificial – controls peoples’ lives:
The open hardware movement fell. On our side, despite achieving industrial productivity on a small scale and experiencing 12 replications of our heavy machines in a single year after gaining global recognition, the momentum stalled. Over a decade later, having productized the Seed Eco-Home, we now understand the intensive follow-through required for productization – and the necessary cultivation of integrated skills and mindsets for developers – required to get there in the first place.
The largest block to the progress of civilization is the scarcity mindset. Few have attained the cognitive override – over the reptilian brain – that keeps us stuck in fear never to see the light of abundance. Not in a hippie sense – but as a rigorous discipline of productivity and skill that leaves nobody behind.
Our optimism remains, in fact gets stronger. Because there is so much good work to be done. Some of it is low hanging fruit: we simply need to create more opportunity for people to do good work.
While Jeremy Rifkin – social theorist and speaker – popularized the idea of zero marginal cost in a distributed economy, the Seed Eco-Home is giving us a real taste of this possibility. As we progress, our prices will likely decrease as we transform the scarcity-based economics to abundance. This will likely necessitate creating innovative universal basic asset production infrastructures – a far more complex undertaking than open-sourcing a hardware product. We will address this topic in future posts.
Typical companies circumvent the need for integrated skills and high performance through specialization and mass production. This is an unsatisfactory solution for OSE, as many products plain suck. Sturgeon’s Law applies to civilization itself. The OSE Apprenticeship is our response. I believe we can now scale – and transform – through our bootstrapping education-production funding model. However, Sturgeon’s Law undoubtedly applies to us as well. This necessitates rapid, lifelong learning and a growth mindset to overcome this apparent paradox. I’m going back to school, by starting one.
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