When it comes to making a Resource-Based-Economy happen in real life, it's best to start small. Really small. Like your city. I propose a "food first" policy when it comes to automation, where we automate the production of the basic needs of life first, then work our way up to producing more complex goods. For our purposes, this means food be the top priority, then housing. This new approach isn't about building shiny new cities or breathtaking vistas: It's about producing real, tangible results for all the time that's been invested, and allowing members to work less. Everything mentioned here works together to give members a better quality of life at a lower cost.
Automated Agriculture
Steady, free food should be a right for all people. Everyone could grow food at home, but most don't because it's too much work. "Food First" means that we would use technology such as farmbot to take care of TVP members' gardens for them- and eventually produce an overabundance of food to freely give away. Some local ordinances will need to be changed to allow home gardening, which will require getting into politics. Alternately, we could seek farmland donations from people interested in assisting the project. While the current version of farmbot runs on a system of rails, an outdoor version would probably use wheels and raised beds. Each raised bed would contain an RFID chip that had information about it's position relative to the other raised beds, and farmbot would know what types of plants were inside. An interesting effect of knowing exactly where plants are is that you can plant "polycrops"- ecosystems of plants that work together in the way nature intended. With automation, Permaculture just got a whole lot easier. Every few days, a truck with several farmbots would pass by your house and take care of your gardens for you. Even the harvest could be done automatically. While in the beginning people would need to volunteer to drive the truck, self-driving vehicles could later make their daily rounds unattended.
When it comes to meat and dairy needs, automatic farming can shine too. Any farmer in the rural areas of town who wanted to join the project would be welcome to donate their time and resources. As technology improves, even this would become unnecessary. Chicken production is already largely automated, and automated dairy farms have already been tested out. In keeping with the "waste nothing" ethos of a RBE, even the lawn clippings from grass would be used to feed cows and goats. Of course, the lawnmowers would be electric so the grass wouldn't become tainted with gasoline. Localized food production will allow members to save money on groceries.
All Hail The Sharing Economy!
One of the core tenets of a RBE has always been "Access Abundance"- the idea that everyone really doesn't need one of everything. We see sharing services such as Taskrabbit and Lyft exploding in popularity. Tool lending libraries are starting to pop up in cities all over the globe. But what's been missing is a free and open source alternative that allows communities to easily set up trust networks. Like many of the things we need, it already exists.
Meat Joatu.
Short for "Jack of All Trades Universe", Joatu is an open-source community marketplace you can use to exchange nearly anything you can think of. With Joatu, you can keep track of your trades and build a reputation- all without using money. It's purpose is to build "vibrant communities", and with a little on-the-ground promotion, I think it can work.
Localized Manufacturing and Closed-Loop Recycling
This is the big one. Obviously, the goal of a RBE is "zero waste"- getting the most out of every product from cradle to grave. The Venus Society in each city would live by this principle: "Waste Nothing, Want Nothing". In practice, this means that everything would be "kept in the system", recycled, and used to make new products. You can call it "Trash to Treasure" if you want.
Every member's home would have a special trash can with several holes in it. In reality, this is a recycling bin. One hole is for paper waste, another is for metals, yet another is for plastic and the last is for "Organic" Waste. I don't see glass being used that often, but if it is it could have it's own hole too.
When the "trashman" comes, the entire trashcan is taken and a new, clean one provided. At the processing facility, waste is seperated for reuse:
Paper, Wood and organic waste is used for biofuel.
Plastic is melted and formed into filaments for 3-D printing new products
Metals are separated and go into induction furnaces for reprocessing. Open Source Ecology already has most of this stuff covered, including the machine tools you'd need to build functioning products.
When you look at everything cities throw away, it becomes clear that if all that waste was constantly reused, cities would always have enough resources to support themselves.
In the beginning, you won't be able to make everything. Advanced components like computer chips and other technology is still too expensive to produce locally- if done the old fashioned way. However, using direct-write electron beam lithography, it's possible to create computer chips in your average university research lab. In advanced stages of RBE development, it'd make sense to crowdfund the purchase of an electron microscope and use it for semiconductor production.
Even with the limited variety of products you can make, there's still plenty you can do. You can manufacture clothing, chairs, cups, bears- just take a look at Thingverse and let your imagination run wild!
And as always, an equal share of goods will be distributed freely to all members at no charge. Read below for more info.
How will you distribute goods?
That's a very good question. In a resource based economy, everyone will be entitled to an equal share in the world's production. This is a birthright, and it isn't transferrable or up for sale. But what does that mean? You can't just give everyone a chair if you produce 7 billion chairs monthly- some people won't want a chair, they might want something else entirely, or nothing at all.
It's here that the ideas of "RBE" and "UBI" collide. An equal share in the world's production could more appropriately be called an equal share in the value of the world's production. How would we allocate this? You guessed it: "money". But in sociocapitalism, money has a vastly different purpose than it has today. For one, these credits can only be used to buy goods- and once the goods are bought, they are destroyed. (The market for services uses social capital.) There would be a finite amount of credits too- exactly enough to buy all the goods on the store shelves. No more inflation, period.
What's more interesting than the credits themselves is the price system. How, exactly do we determine how much a particular good should cost? While it would be easy to do this at the local level, it definitely would be harder at the global level. Some people argue that a "free market" is the only way to do this, but I disagree. The free market as it is today leaves out many of the bigger costs, like the incredible damage to the environment and public health. Higher crime, corruption and even terrorism isn't accounted for either. The most important thing of all, the cost in human lives is also given no value. Externalizing all of these costs can only harm society at large.
When we think of "cost", we usually think of money and the price system. Price is an important way to allocate scarce goods, no doubt- but deciding who lives and who dies based on who has the most pieces of paper with funny pictures on them isn't just stupid, it's inhumane. So can we separate "price" from "money"? Of course we can.
Let's start with the basics: A resource-based economy is an economy based on resources. Simple enough, right? So we want to always keep a running total of how many resources are available, and compare those amounts. We'll call this "Scarcity", and the higher the scarcity of something, the higher the price. Scarcity can be measured based on available supply of an item vs the demand.
Next, we need to calculate the "Labour" that goes into producing a product, and since labour is just Time x Energy, both of these values are directly measurable in seconds and joules, respectively. So for a computer, we will measure how much time it takes for us to gather the necessary raw materials, manufacture the final product, and most importantly, ship it to your destination. We'll also measure how much energy it took to extract the raw materials, run the machines and transport them to the store.* This gives a great incentives** towards designing methods of production that use less time and energy. There's no doubt that this final number will be large, maybe in the millions- so we'll want to divide it by 1000, or any number that makes the final price human-readable.
Price = Scarcity x Time x Energy
*An important note about energy: For "natural" products that grow on trees or inside animals, the energy only includes what it took to prepare and transport the finished product for sale. Direct solar energy is always free.
It would be a ridiculous idea to get rid of prices and money altogether, and by reworking them we can design a stable system with little to no inflation or externalized costs.
**Most of this really falls under "Economics", but the question of how you motivate people to innovate and improve society when everything is free is a good one. Although it's been proven that money is a bad motivator, saying that people will work just for the joy of it isn't satisfactory to most people. They have a good reason to be skeptical- communism failed because people were paid the same for doing terrible work.
In this case, things are very different. While everyone receives the same amount of good credits monthly, nothing is stopping them from earning social capital by doing things for other people. In this sense, social capital is a lot like today's money. If you invent a new industrial process that saves time and energy, you will receive all the saved good credits for a year.
So why this, and why now?
By growing food and manufacturing products locally, you are bringing a small-scale version of an RBE to life. You won't be able to produce everything you need at first, and that's okay. It's about taking real steps towards sustainability. There is absolutely no need to go out and buy large tracts of land to produce communes- besides being remote, most new "intentional communities" don't survive because taking care of them is too much work, or they lack a steady income stream. It would only be wise to establish new cities once we have the proper technology to care for them. This is why getting people who can help develop the technology is so important, and why we will eventually need to find investors.
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