Yeah that makes a lot of sense, personally I think a big part of the solution will have to be some form of community focused solution to end the culture of conspicuous consumerism and economic based social value - i don’t think it’s wrong to want good things or beautiful things but valuing something more because it’s got a certain logo is absurd, even more so when you’re valuing people simply based on which logo’s they can afford. I fear when worker run cooperatives compete it’ll still create that imperative to advertise and gain market edge which has caused so much of our twenty-first century woes.

My solution would have to involve a strong attack on not just copyright, patents and monopolies but on the very structure of our industrial economy. We need school and universities to be actively participating in community science and design projects to create verified and tested open source designs which can be fabricated locally anywhere in the world - it’s a pretty radical idea really because it involves changing pretty how we do and think about pretty much everything but it’s got a lot of positives.

Firstly it’s basically how the PhD system was intended, you put all that effort into doing a bit of science and when you’ve done it they check it’s ok and say ‘yep, you’re a real scientist now’ and that science gets added to the public storehouse of knowledge for the benefit of all - we could extend that so the education system teaches and guides participation in community benefiting projects like citizen science and collaborative design – for kids things like data gathering, group experiments, etc while university students are doing design work, materials testing, creating documentation, user guides, or other related media depending on specialisation. Projects will be worked on by community members in various ways, either as part of official efforts, community projects or individual work - basically the same model as social media, sometimes a random person goes viral for making something cool and sometimes a big company uses their budget to make good content.

The thing i always think about is washing machines because they’re so painfully simple and yet when you look at the choices available in stores there’s a crazy amount of totally meaningless choice - we ended up having to pick between one with ‘sport’ mode and one with ‘sanitary’ mode - presumably actually essentially the same thing but my why do they have these weird settings? because then they can have one with limited choices as the cheap one, then the next level up one that can do most the things you’ll probably want and expensive ones that can do it all and have an app… it’s all just software settings, it doesn’t cost them anything to have a mode that spins the drum for X seconds and runs the heater for X seconds - we could have a really simple design for a washing machine that’s easy to fabricate and repair, an easy to flash microprocessor connected to controls so you can easily choose the modes you’re likely to want and change your mind if the situation changes (for example you take up sports and require a longer soak and wash cycle or a new cleaning agent is developed which works better when used differently)

school kids could do supervised and documented tests to determine ideal washing conditions, it’d be a fun way to learn about science and how it relates to real-life plus they’d have more of a connection to the world they’re part of, the washing machine wouldn’t be a weird alien device from on high it’d be something they actually helped create - a wonderful feeling.

design students could participate in various design related challenges and projects such as creating custom displays and dial configurations, art students on making various options for making them look cool and beautiful - all passing work (i.e. work that meets the required criteria) is added to the general database of designs and options which people anywhere around the world can access when ordering an open source washing machine fabricated from their local small industrial firm, community run fablab, or to create with their own tools.

Again not saying this is the final or ideal solution but everyone should be used to having access to the very best, most efficient, and well designed things - if someone wants to show off then they should show off their good taste not their ability to outspend people without generational wealth. A community working together to design and create is always going to be better than a community battling itself.

I think about this a lot it’s an interesting one, the current system of money is kinda crazy but the principle of having a token that can be used in trades is great.

Like @keepthepace said I can see it’s significance diminish but not entirely vanish, if I want you to come and do the colour scheme for my living room then it’s taking time from your life which i’d like to repay you but you might not need anything i know how to do -however personC might want something i can do and be able to do something you need - rather than having to work out every trade and find the people to agree we just use a token, that token is money.

The problem comes when you need that token to live and they’re all in the hands of a greedy group of crazy people obsessed with having the most tokens - maybe we actually need more types of money not less, like maybe we should get land tokens that allow us to trade land but everyone gets a set amount and you can’t just buy a thousand acres because your great-grandfather sold opium… Maybe even two types of money to buy food, a basic ration that affords for a complete and healthy diet of your choice plus a surplus coin which is earned by supplying the economy with foods or materials required (e.g. if you grow apples and supply them to the community pool you get 1 surplus token per kg but strawberries you get 1.3 st per kg due to local demand) these tokens can then only be spent on luxuries, rare items, and non-essential services.

I’m certainly not saying that’s the system i propose or support simply that there’s a lot more options and possibilities than we normally consider - maybe one land token gets you a small beach-front property or a huge bit of old farmland to restore, that gives everyone personal choice and helps manage demand with all sorts of interesting challenges - if you move onto a ruined plot of land and make it beautiful then you deserve more tokens than it cost you to get there but that opens of the possibility of someone purposely getting a rough bit of land, paying others to work on it using their excess surplus tokens then claiming the extra land tokens for themselves… and is that a bad thing or a good thing?

Thinking about things in obscure ways can really help to crystallise the interesting and important parts of something we’re so used to thinking of in everyday terms, like what really is money and what is money supposed to be.

yeah, i really hope we see better systems emerge for using energy at peek times or sharing power locally so that we can start moving away from the grid.

would be a great place to cook, and to relax while other people cook. love the kitchen garden in the kitchen.

oh nice that sounds really cool, i’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

use of different types of solar where appropriate, we always see PV but solar thermal and bio-solar have some great uses - tanks of algae can be really good for various uses; nutrition for people and animals food and medicine ingredients such as carrageenan and agar, building materials from cellulose, biofules, bioplastic, wastewater treatment, fertilizer as well as potential future uses like being used in biodegradable electronics, as sensor materials (https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/50395) and for more advanced chemistry such as genetically engineered algae making cleaning solutions (great for cleaning solar panels), fuel for cutting tools, and of course alcohol and drug molecules (both medicinal and recreational)

Cody’s Lab has some fascinating videos about his diy algae project, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64cEmjtwRgw might be useful as a visual reference, but basically they’re tubes or tanks that sit in the sun or partial shade and grow algae.

people having a cookout on something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker or using a larger one to do things like fire ceramics (to maintain and regulate temperature over the duration you’d probably want something like molten salt feeding into a refractory chamber, by controlling the flow rate and mirror focus you could get very good temperature balance) there was a great video with a guy i think in the Nevada desert who had an array which he was using to melt metal and sand casting, this would be a great way to recycle heavy infrastructure from todays society - maybe a scrapyard with mirror arrays used to recycle old cars into useful new tools, the mirrors don’t need to be perfectly reflective so could simply be sheets of metal made from the scrap and polished with a windmill powered grinding plate – the only difficult thing is getting them all to line up, this could be complex tracking gears, digital sensor and motor based systems or a slightly cleverer solution using passive solar tracking where a windowed section of the mirror surface is linked to hydrolytic containers and thermal expansion causes it to realign when one side goes dark - i’ve seen diy people make them that work pretty well but they’re still far from perfect even the expensive industrial ones