[P2P-F] Automenta vs "The World Game" + Networks of Open Reciprocal Production

Sun Sep 11 14:29:42 CEST 2011

Dear Eric,

I'm excerpting your fascinating discussion here below on our blog on the
20th, but it is not clear to me what netention is and a google search
delivers a few competing, or at least not completely similar, pointers,

would be nice if I could point to what you guys mean when using netention,

Open Reciprocal Production, Resource-based economics and the World
Game<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=19390>
Tags: [empty]
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
Michel Bauwens
20th September 2011

*Eric Hunting* dives into the history of resource-based economics, in an
online email to Dante Monson:

*“The idea of netention systems, and especially the extension of that into
that Global Survival System, seems a very promising and ambitious attempt to
reduce to software the principles of Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and
Jacque Fresco’s Cybernation. *

*This notion has emerged a lot in contemporary Singular/Post-Singularity
science fiction. The root concept is the elimination of financial paradigms
in economic systems in favor of a demand-driven resource-based economics
that is rooted in productivity and functional need and desire rather than a
simplistic model of cost vrs. price. In the case of The World Game, Fuller
was proposing a kind of mutualist gaming model; a game of poker where
everybody wins. He developed this originally as an educational platform for
global systems management and once proposed a university based on it. His
Biosphere geodesic sphere built as the American Pavilion exhibit in Montreal
for the ’67 World’s Fair was actually intended to be a World Game arena
where the principles of The World Game would be explained and demonstrated
in a live televised exposition. But no one in American government could even
remotely grasp such an alien concept as resource based economics, and so The
World Game was dropped from the expo proposal.*

*Fresco re-imagined The World Game in the context of a kind of expert system
software of massive scale. Fuller -in his 1950-60s context, imagined the
role of computers in The World Game as data loggers, gathering a series of
digital counters of world statistics. Early in the history of the Web there
was an attempt to put The World Game on-line and the start of the project
was a set of live digital counters for statistics about the world that were
intended to be become ‘widgets’ people could ad to their own web sites. The
project self-destructed because, shortly after Fuller’s death, idiots at the
Buckminster Fuller Institute sold rights to all software based versions of
The World Game to a fledging company seeking to make a touring show of it
for schools. Fresco, aware of the early work in artificial intelligence,
imagined a more autonomous system where a vast network of data gathering
would feed global information to a massive expert system running on a
central supercomputer whose adaptive rulebase would crafted by committees of
scientists and constantly self-optimized in application on real world info
and people’s needs. *

*Dubbed Cybernation, this system would treat human demand for goods as the
‘currency’ in a resource distribution management that learns to anticipate
and balance human and environmental needs and generates a plan for
production and resource communication. Eventually it would be capable of
managing and manufacturing by itself as production and transportation became
increasingly networked and automated. Still, this is a somewhat
anachronistic notion based on the 60′s era idea of centralized data
processing on massive supercomputers tended to by a systems management
priesthood trusted to employ scientific reason to the rulebase. Fresco may
be right in considering science more rational than politics but he is too
trusting of the intentions of scientists as a community. It’s by no means
monolithic and exclusively rational. *

*Curiously, the concept of Cybernation is the core of Fresco’s vision of a
Post-Industrial economy but probably fewer than 10% of the members of The
Venus Project or the recent Zeitgeist fandom have any notion of what this is
exactly or how it would work or be created.*

*In recent years a variety of science fiction writers have adopted the
notion of cashless future cultures where social networking evolves into a
replacement for financial and market systems. The basic idea is that a
social credit system develops where one’s situation in the society –
basically a dynamic metric of social worth based on accumulating reputation-
determines one’s access to goods and resources above a dynamic common
baseline defining the common reasonable standard of living. This is intended
not to enable access to luxuries but as some sort of prize but rather to
justify the access to goods and resources for individual and group projects
and activities deemed of some value to the larger society. Like Fresco’s
Cybernation, the suggestion here is of total automation and total resource
awareness in an increasingly intelligent software platform. But instead of a
system hosted on some old fashioned central computer, this takes the form of
a network of distributed systems which, through social networks, permeate
the fabric of people’s lives as well as the fabric of resource communication
and planetary environmental sensing. So the result isn’t so much a single
computer program as it is an Internet of Things with a very sophisticated
but passive artificial intelligence. A neural network for the civilization.*

*In my writings on this subject, particularly with
P2P<http://p2pfoundation.net/ContactCon?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=0&search=%22Eric+Hunting%22&fulltext=Search&ns0=1>and
in The Millennial Project 2.0, I
talk about the establishment of networks of Open Reciprocal Production
originating at a community level, running in parallel to old market systems
at first, and merging into a progressively larger and eventually global
network. The idea is of the technologies of independent manufacturing
enabling and leveraging proclivity-inspired production and productivity on a
model akin to publicly accessed web servers and Open Software projects which
employ the Internet as a medium of demand-currency communication. This
derives from P.M.’s notion of open production within the discrete community
context. Because planned communities are hard to pull-off in a world
dominated by the existing market hegemonies (tending to be marginalized and
hampered in standard of living by being ostracized from urban/suburban areas
and pushed to the edge of wilderness -particularly in the US), I’ve taken
this to a kind of ‘insurgent virtual community’ where an Internet of Things
can be established as a location-independent participatory infrastructure
for individual life support that can supplement and whittle-away at market
systems. *

*Instead of an illegal Black Market, an insurgent Anti-Market or
Alter-Market. One of the functions of the CIC concept in TMP2 is as a
corporate ‘firewall’ between the outside market and the alternative economy
within the collective communities of TMP which leverages the power of
automated industrial scale exploitation of renewables -solar energy through
OTEC and food through polyspecies mariculture- as a means to support its
subsistence in its nascent stages of development. Basically, you’re creating
-in the TMP context- this massive multinational corporation that looks to
the outside world like any other giant corporation producing energy, food,
and many other things but, within its communities and among its
resident-shareholders, is cultivating an alter-economy as a social
convenience.*

*I find this Netention concept very interesting because this looks like a
very deliberate attempt to create the kind of networked passive AI that
would be the basis of this neural network of a civilization independent of
any established production infrastructure. At some point that must be
implemented, but here we’re seeing an attempt at a Semantic Web of Living
developing in the social networking context that could become a foundation
for a production/resource oriented Internet of Things, which in turn becomes
the foundation of an Open Reciprocal Production network. And hence we would
get that passive intelligent wholesale management of resources and
production linked to the awareness of human beings as individuals. It’s sort
of like having a globe-spanning Jeeves -a genius butler- integrated
into/distributed throughout the built habitat that would obsolesce the
contrivances of economics by its total passive awareness of needs, wants,
and sustainable limitations and self-optimizing predictive abilities. It’s a
breathtaking possibility.”*

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 4:33 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson <
dante.monson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Following Thomas , then now Eric ( see mail below, which I briefly comment
> ), mentioning it,
>
> I feel like sharing references to Buckminster Fuller's concept of
> "The World Game"<http://www.google.be/search?sourceid=chrome&client=ubuntu&channel=cs&ie=UTF-8&q=buckminster+fuller+world+game>
> :
>
> Role Play - Simulation Game
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njoyT2EB9ow
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8up1F_fpZ9g
>
> *Note* : I would like to include "Alternative Complementary Currencies"
> into this game - or alternative hybrid transaction contracts which
> themselves enable the visibility and further choice within various
> relational dynamics emerging out of the various economic networks of
> transaction contracts, hence enabling choices regarding resource allocation
> and relational dynamics one wishes to support along directions in which to
> orient interdependent economic networks :
>
> http://sharewiki.org/en/Transaction_Graphs
>
> http://p2pfoundation.net/Relational_Model_Typology_-_Fiske
>
> *
>
> These models are" :
>
>    - Communal Sharing
>
>
>    - Authority Ranking
>
>
>    - Equality Matching
>
>
>    - Market Pricing
>
> *
>
>
> ///
>
> I feel like bringing up some elements of Eric's interesting reply ( see
> below ),
> reply with which I feel my current approaches and intentional
> strategies resonate with.
>
> including ( when applied to housing )
> http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Utilihab_Project
>
> More below, via Eric
>
> ps : longer video with Fuller :
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYtQ_-rpAUo )
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 6:13 AM
> Subject: Re: Hi Eric - Ongoing Micro Housing Experimentation Projects ?
> To: dante.monson at gmail.com
>
>
> Please, feel free to share that info with anyone you think might find it of
> interest.
>
> The idea of netention systems, and especially the extension of that into
> that Global Survival System, seems a very promising and ambitious attempt to
> reduce to software the principles of Buckminster Fuller's World Game and
> Jacque Fresco's Cybernation. This notion has emerged a lot in contemporary
> Singular/Post-Singularity science fiction. The root concept is the
> elimination of financial paradigms in economic systems in favor of a
> demand-driven resource-based economics that is rooted in productivity and
> functional need and desire rather than a simplistic model of cost vrs.
> price. In the case of The World Game, Fuller was proposing a kind of
> mutualist gaming model; a game of poker where everybody wins. He developed
> this originally as an educational platform for global systems management and
> once proposed a university based on it. His Biosphere geodesic sphere built
> as the American Pavilion exhibit in Montreal for the '67 World's Fair was
> actually intended to be a World Game arena where the principles of The World
> Game would be explained and demonstrated in a live televised exposition. But
> no one in American government could even remotely grasp such an alien
> concept as resource based economics, and so The World Game was dropped from
> the expo proposal.
>
> Fresco re-imagined The World Game in the context of a kind of expert system
> software of massive scale. Fuller -in his 1950-60s context, imagined the
> role of computers in The World Game as data loggers, gathering a series of
> digital counters of world statistics. Early in the history of the Web there
> was an attempt to put The World Game on-line and the start of the project
> was a set of live digital counters for statistics about the world that were
> intended to be become 'widgets' people could ad to their own web sites. The
> project self-destructed because, shortly after Fuller's death, idiots at the
> Buckminster Fuller Institute sold rights to all software based versions of
> The World Game to a fledging company seeking to make a touring show of it
> for schools. Fresco, aware of the early work in artificial intelligence,
> imagined a more autonomous system where a vast network of data gathering
> would feed global information to a massive expert system running on a
> central supercomputer whose adaptive rulebase would crafted by committees of
> scientists and constantly self-optomized in application on real world info
> and people's needs. Dubbed Cybernation, this system would treat human demand
> for goods as the 'currency' in a resource distribution management that
> learns to anticipate and balance human and environmental needs and generates
> a plan for production and resource communication. Eventually it would be
> capable of managing and manufacturing by itself as production and
> transportation became increasingly networked and automated. Still, this is a
> somewhat anachronistic notion based on the 60's era idea of centralized data
> processing on massive supercomputers tended to by a systems management
> priesthood trusted to employ scientific reason to the rulebase. Fresco may
> be right in considering science more rational than politics but he is too
> trusting of the intentions of scientists as a community. It's by no means
> monolithic and exclusively rational. Curiously, the concept of Cybernation
> is the core of Fresco's vision of a Post-Industrial economy but probably
> fewer than 10% of the members of The Venus Project or the recent Zeitgeist
> fandom have any notion of what this is exactly or how it would work or be
> created.
>
> In recent years a variety of science fiction writers have adopted the
> notion of cashless future cultures where social networking evolves into a
> replacement for financial and market systems. The basic idea is that a
> social credit system develops where one's situation in the society
> -basically a dynamic metric of social worth based on accumulating
> reputation- determines one's access to goods and resources above a dynamic
> common baseline defining the common reasonable standard of living. This is
> intended not to enable access to luxuries but as some sort of prize but
> rather to justify the access to goods and resources for individual and group
> projects and activities deemed of some value to the larger society. Like
> Fresco's Cybernation, the suggestion here is of total automation and total
> resource awareness in an increasingly intelligent software platform. But
> instead of a system hosted on some old fashioned central computer, this
> takes the form of a network of distributed systems which, through social
> networks, permeate the fabric of people's lives as well as the fabric of
> resource communication and planetary environmental sensing. So the result
> isn't so much a single computer program as it is an Internet of Things with
> a very sophisticated but passive artificial intelligence. A neural network
> for the civilization.
>
> In my writings on this subject, particularly with P2P and in The Millennial
> Project 2.0, I talk about the establishment of networks of Open Reciprocal
> Production originating at a community level, running in parallel to old
> market systems at first, and merging into a progressively larger and
> eventually global network. The idea is of the technologies of independent
> manufacturing enabling and leveraging proclivity-inspired production and
> productivity on a model akin to publicly accessed web servers and Open
> Software projects which employ the Internet as a medium of demand-currency
> communication. This derives from P.M.'s notion of open production within the
> discrete community context. Because planned communities are hard to pull-off
> in a world dominated by the existing market hegemonies (tending to be
> marginalized and hampered in standard of living by being ostracized from
> urban/suburban areas and pushed to the edge of wilderness -particularly in
> the US), I've taken this to a kind of 'insurgent virtual community' where an
> Internet of Things can be established as a location-independent
> participatory infrastructure for individual life support that can supplement
> and whittle-away at market systems. Instead of an illegal Black Market, an
> insurgent Anti-Market or Alter-Market. One of the functions of the CIC
> concept in TMP2 is as a corporate 'firewall' between the outside market and
> the alternative economy within the collective communities of TMP which
> leverages the power of automated industrial scale exploitation of renewables
> -solar energy through OTEC and food through polyspecies mariculture- as a
> means to support its subsistence in its nascent stages of development.
> Basically, you're creating -in the TMP context- this massive multinational
> corporation that looks to the outside world like any other giant corporation
> producing energy, food, and many other things but, within its communities
> and among its resident-shareholdera, is cultivating an alter-economy as a
> social convenience.
>
> I find this Netention concept very interesting because this looks like a
> very deliberate attempt to create the kind of networked passive AI that
> would be the basis of this neural network of a civilization independent of
> any established production infrastructure. At some point that must be
> implemented, but here we're seeing an attempt at a Semantic Web of Living
> developing in the social networking context that could become a foundation
> for a production/resource oriented Internet of Things, which in turn becomes
> the foundation of an Open Reciprocal Production network. And hence we would
> get that passive intelligent wholesale management of resources and
> production linked to the awareness of human beings as individuals. It's sort
> of like having a globe-spanning Jeeves -a genius butler- integrated
> into/distributed throughout the built habitat that would obsolesce the
> contrivances of economics by its total passive awareness of needs, wants,
> and sustainable limitations and self-optimizing predictive abilities. It's a
> breathtaking possibility.
>
> By the way, another idea about microhousing has been floating around in my
> head lately. Recently I responded to a Herman Miller newsletter article
> about the concrete tube hotels (http://www.tubohotel.com/welcome/
> http://www.dasparkhotel.net/) with the suggestion of a purpose-built
> recycled plastic form that built upon the N55 concept of the Snail Shell
> System (http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/SNAIL_SHELL_SYSTEM/SSS.html) with a
> structure offering better accessibility and ventilation with similar
> mobility. I thought it very well suited to relief applications and, in some
> other profile shapes -like the traditional house profile, but made as a
> tube- for backyard sheds and shelters. But, of course, to make these you
> need a very large roto-molding system.
>
> Well, the other day I was looking at one of these web sites of odd pictures
> with a collection of photos of Asian people sleeping. It's something of an
> Internet meme that pokes gentle fun at how people in Asia have the uncanny
> ability to take a nap in the most unlikely of places. And I found this cute
> picture;
>
>
>
>
> This seemed like an awesome little space to make a bed in and it got me
> thinking. What if you created a structure like the tube hotel cabin from
> bamboo basket weaving? You could basically use the basket as a geodetic
> support structure like the traditional yurt, covering the outside with a
> weatherproof membrane and the  inside with a quilted covering. You would
> make bamboo hoops for 'wheels' like the tread attached to the Snail Shell
> exterior, allowing you to create a towing rig that lets you pull the shelter
> around like the cylindrical water barrels that have been developed for rural
> villages. This would give you a way to make the same sort of tube shelter
> but with very low-tech materials and manufacturing suited to local
> production in a developing world setting. Though much lighter than an HDPE
> tube, it would still be bulkier than a tent, of course, but much more
> weather resistant, secure, comfortable, and private, given that bamboo has
> such high strength. You could lock these up in various ways and the rigidity
> of the tube makes it possible to link them end-to-end, stack them and tie
> them together in close packed groups or radial cluster. And instead of just
> hauling them around empty, you can pack a survival kit and supplies into
> them using them as an alternative to the ISO container that is light enough
> to be hauled by light pick-up trucks. It would also have multiple uses for
> bulk storage, water storage with a membrane tank insert, kiosks, and so on.
> Seems an interesting idea, and the structures would certainly be fun to
> experiment with.
>
> Eric Hunting
> erichunting at gmail.com
>
>
>
> On Aug 20, 2011, at 1:30 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson wrote:
>
> > Thanks Eric,
> > Waw, what a great reply.
> >
> > Can I share it with people around me, and also on some mailinglists ?
> >
> > + I am interested, what concerns ( emergent ) agreements, to support the
> development of some software which could enable something like this :
> >
> > http://sharewiki.org/en/Transaction_Graphs  ( draft )
> >
> > potentially with netention ( developed by a friend )
> >
> > http://www.automenta.com/netention
> >
> > This same friend / developer,
> > also works on
> >
> > http://www.automenta.com/global-survival-system
> >
> > more links :
> >
> >
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sAgANJmMDIvA9C5eFeZM-Aqobsw2Fd4DVVSMOxNcaq8/edit?hl=en_US#heading=h.5s7wzxfw880l
> >
> > And I'd like to also have some "paper" version, in case of some peakoil
> kind of collapse,
> > as to have an idea of where to go , based on data from past wars,
> > adapted to current infrastructure and technology which might still work
> in case of collapse,
> >
> > as to enable food production, and regional economics in times of global
> logistics collapse...
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>

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