Dear Eric,<br><br>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,<br>
<br>would be nice if I could point to what you guys mean when using netention,<br><br><br><p class="postTitle"><a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=19390" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Open Reciprocal Production,
Resource-based economics and the World Game">Open Reciprocal Production,
Resource-based economics and the World Game</a></p>
<div id="tags-box">Tags: <span class="fee-field" title="Tags">[empty]</span></div>
<img src="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/avatars/Michel%20Bauwens.jpg" alt="photo of Michel Bauwens" align="left"><div id="postauthorname">Michel
Bauwens</div>
<div id="postdate">20th September 2011</div>
<br>
<p><strong>Eric Hunting</strong> dives into the history of
resource-based economics, in an online email to Dante Monson:</p>
<p><em>“The idea of <strong>netention</strong> 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. </em></p>
<p><em>This notion has emerged a lot in contemporary
Singular/Post-Singularity science fiction. <strong>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.</strong> 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.</em></p>
<p><em>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. </em></p>
<p><em>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. </em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>In my writings on this subject, <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/ContactCon?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=0&search=%22Eric+Hunting%22&fulltext=Search&ns0=1">particularly
with P2P</a> and in The Millennial Project 2.0, <strong>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</strong>. 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. </em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.”</em></p><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 4:33 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dante.monson@gmail.com">dante.monson@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">Following Thomas , then now Eric ( see mail below, which I briefly comment ), mentioning it,<div>
<br></div><div>I feel like sharing references to Buckminster Fuller's concept of<div><a href="http://www.google.be/search?sourceid=chrome&client=ubuntu&channel=cs&ie=UTF-8&q=buckminster+fuller+world+game" target="_blank">"The World Game"</a> :</div>
<div><br></div><div>Role Play - Simulation Game </div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njoyT2EB9ow" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njoyT2EB9ow</a></div>
<div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8up1F_fpZ9g" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8up1F_fpZ9g</a></div><div><br></div><div><b>Note</b> : 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 :</div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://sharewiki.org/en/Transaction_Graphs" target="_blank">http://sharewiki.org/en/Transaction_Graphs</a></div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Relational_Model_Typology_-_Fiske" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net/Relational_Model_Typology_-_Fiske</a></div>
<div><br></div><div><span style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><i><p style="margin: 0.4em 0px 0.5em; line-height: 1.5em;">
These models are" :</p><ul style="line-height: 1.5em; list-style-type: square; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Communal Sharing</li></ul><ul style="line-height: 1.5em; list-style-type: square; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Authority Ranking</li></ul><ul style="line-height: 1.5em; list-style-type: square; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Equality Matching</li></ul><ul style="line-height: 1.5em; list-style-type: square; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Market Pricing</li></ul></i></span></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>///</div><div><br></div><div>I feel like bringing up some elements of Eric's interesting reply ( see below ),</div>
<div>reply with which I feel my current approaches and intentional strategies resonate with.</div><div><br></div><div>including ( when applied to housing )</div><div><a href="http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Utilihab_Project" target="_blank">http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Utilihab_Project</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>More below, via Eric</div><div><br></div><div>ps : longer video with Fuller : </div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><br>
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYtQ_-rpAUo" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYtQ_-rpAUo</a> )</span><div><br></div><div>---------- Forwarded message ----------</div><div><div class="gmail_quote">From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Eric Hunting</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:erichunting@gmail.com" target="_blank">erichunting@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 6:13 AM<br>Subject: Re: Hi Eric - Ongoing Micro Housing Experimentation Projects ?<br>To: <a href="mailto:dante.monson@gmail.com" target="_blank">dante.monson@gmail.com</a><br><br><br>Please, feel free to share that info with anyone you think might find it of interest.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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 (<a href="http://www.tubohotel.com/welcome/" target="_blank">http://www.tubohotel.com/welcome/</a> <a href="http://www.dasparkhotel.net/" target="_blank">http://www.dasparkhotel.net/</a>) with the suggestion of a purpose-built recycled plastic form that built upon the N55 concept of the Snail Shell System (<a href="http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/SNAIL_SHELL_SYSTEM/SSS.html" target="_blank">http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/SNAIL_SHELL_SYSTEM/SSS.html</a>) 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.<br>
<br>
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;<br>
<br>
<br><br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Eric Hunting<br>
<a href="mailto:erichunting@gmail.com" target="_blank">erichunting@gmail.com</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On Aug 20, 2011, at 1:30 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson wrote:<br>
<br>
> Thanks Eric,<br>
> Waw, what a great reply.<br>
><br>
> Can I share it with people around me, and also on some mailinglists ?<br>
><br>
> + I am interested, what concerns ( emergent ) agreements, to support the development of some software which could enable something like this :<br>
><br>
> <a href="http://sharewiki.org/en/Transaction_Graphs" target="_blank">http://sharewiki.org/en/Transaction_Graphs</a> ( draft )<br>
><br>
> potentially with netention ( developed by a friend )<br>
><br>
> <a href="http://www.automenta.com/netention" target="_blank">http://www.automenta.com/netention</a><br>
><br>
> This same friend / developer,<br>
> also works on<br>
><br>
> <a href="http://www.automenta.com/global-survival-system" target="_blank">http://www.automenta.com/global-survival-system</a><br>
><br>
> more links :<br>
><br>
> <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sAgANJmMDIvA9C5eFeZM-Aqobsw2Fd4DVVSMOxNcaq8/edit?hl=en_US#heading=h.5s7wzxfw880l" target="_blank">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sAgANJmMDIvA9C5eFeZM-Aqobsw2Fd4DVVSMOxNcaq8/edit?hl=en_US#heading=h.5s7wzxfw880l</a><br>
><br>
> And I'd like to also have some "paper" version, in case of some peakoil kind of collapse,<br>
> as to have an idea of where to go , based on data from past wars,<br>
> adapted to current infrastructure and technology which might still work in case of collapse,<br>
><br>
> as to enable food production, and regional economics in times of global logistics collapse...<br>
><br>
><br>
><br>
<br>
<br></div><br></div></div></div>
</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br>
<br>Connect: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.ning.com" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.ning.com</a>; Discuss: <a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank">http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation</a><div>
<br>Updates: <a href="http://del.icio.us/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://del.icio.us/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br>
</div><br>