Open-sourcing: New social networking idea which allows us to see beyond our present market economics model.

NEXT EVOLUTIONARY STAGE: BEYOND THE MARKET ECONOMY

Many of the recommended innovations for updating our monetary system are mere extensions of a system which has been used to control us for generations. I am reminded of a phase I read long ago: "buying and selling, we waste our precious lives." Perhaps 20 years ago, I read in a business magazine a very provocative article about how nanotechnology could become the means by which we might escape the manipulations of the market economy to which we had become enslaved. The idea was that if each of us had access to such a technology in our basement, then anything we needed, we might be able to provide and we'd be freed from the economic system which controlled our lives and limited our choices to only those which the market deemed as possible.

My imagination was sparked by such a concept. I, as a student of history, had become impassioned about "finding an economic system which served us, vs. us genuflecting to it." I had observed patterns of cyclical economic booms and long, contractive busts which had plagued humanity like clockwork over-and-over throughout history. As I have had an inclination for understanding the root causes of things, I have been voraciously reading economics and history since college searching for answers to my inquiry.

I had not been alone in my wish to understand our economic realities. " R. Buckminster Fuller in Grunch of Giants, published 1983 was well aware of our challenges in transforming our world. Fuller was a forward thinker, who having analyzed the machinations of the economic system as it evolved though history formulated many far reaching conclusions. He saw quite clearly our current realities. I've excerpted some of his most relevant thoughts related to our most pressing economic and societal concerns:

“I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive.” (I found this quite relevant in my own work and research.)

“Nature has various categories or unique gestation lags between conception of something and its birth.” (The market has been focused on short-term profits and thus short term solutions--many of which create long-term detrimental, social and ecological consequences)

“Since human thought can calculate in minutes what it takes light to travel in one year. It may be that thought itself expands outwardly in all directions at a speed even faster than

light—maybe in no time at all—to inter-network the people of our eight-thousand mile diameter spherical space home.”

“As the networking accelerates humanity into a spherical embracing, spontaneous union, yesterday’s locally autonomous, self-preoccupied governments are left in the exclusive control of yesterday’s most selfishly successful and entrenched minorities…”

“…Because networking is apolitical and amorphous, it has no “cells” to be attacked, as did the communism of former decades [and terrorism of our own.] The fearful sovereign nation politicos will find that trying to arrest networking is like trying to arrest the tides of the

ocean.”

“…Because of ancient arms-accomplished seizure of land by the most physically powerful and the subsequent arms induced blessing of the seizures of power-ordained “ministers of God,” royal deeds to land were written as assumedly God-approved and –guaranteed covenants.”

“Landlordism, first woven into the fabric of everyday by royal fiat and thousands of years of legal process precedent, has become an accepted cosmic phenomenon as seemingly inevitable as the weather. Humans have learned to play many of its games. (Our current economic model is an extension of this "game.")

“Land “ownership” and its omni-dependent comprehensive thing-ownership involvements and their legal-doc**ents-perpetuations constitute the largest socioeconomic custom error presently being maintained by a large world affairs-affecting segment of humanity.”

“Nothing new about that. But what is new is that humanity has gone as far as it can go with this significant error and is in final examination as to whether it can free itself from its

misconditioned reflex straightjacket in time to pull out of it greatest-in-all-history, error-occasioned tail spinning into eternity.”

“We have both the knowledge and the technical means to do so if we do it quickly enough.”

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Once we begin to understand the matrix to which we have all been entrapped and which has limited our thinking we can become open to much more efficient and sustainable solutions. One which quite excites me, is that of developing an open-source economic model. Lest you think such is impossible, it is already developing over the internet and is proving to be quite efficient. Wikipedia and Linus are two such examples. For a deeper understanding of the potential of this model to revolutionize our world hear Yochai Benkler on TED.com on the new open-source economics.