I've advocated for this since I was a youngster fully engulfed in John Cage, Alan Watts and Buckminster Fuller. Nice to see it so elegantly written here.
Well said Cecil, this resonates. William Morris spoke in a similar manner in News From Nowhere. There exist of course vested interests who would resist this with every inch of their fibre because they would regard this as a manifesto against them. The question is how we get from here to there. But again well said, what you have written is true.
how we get from here to there... well it won't be pleasant I don't think. Much suffering. But it seems humans must suffer much to develop the gumption to insist on such a complete change in expectation.
Thanks for that reference Andrew. I found it on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXTb191xIoE I will give it a listen. I have a fictional novel in mind that I am starting to work out that will play out the idea of how the world might be between now and the year 4020 I am think about the title as Wayfarers of the Capricorn Moon. I have my basic concept worked out.
OK I have listened to Morris's News From Nowhere. Fascinating the projections forward from 1890 considering how the future was imagined to unfold from there. Everyone still riding around by horse and buggy.
But it does cover some ongoing ideas that I have taken up namely the difference between labor and work. Certainly the excessive capitalistic machine of creating endless market dynamics and the drive toward cheap products.
It also anticipates the later 'less is more' shift in attempting to account for a better 'everyman' life that emerged after world war one with the universalized low cost design construction methods and product design and the ever growing sense of human rights and dignity. But I like how it kept the idea of craftsmanship and handwork. That probably is still part of the future. Interesting the depopulation of London and the removal of slums and the shift toward slowing down and a stronger sense of ecology.
One interesting unanticipated change has been not only cars and oil markets but also computers, internet, the digitization of a lot of things like records, music, books, gaming, etc. once we got to the storage problem of physical documents and endless storage facilities (for over acquisition of goods no longer needed but too good to throw away) and advent of the simulated society and the social media and the internet and the smart phone universe we are currently in and the rising and obvious problem of corporate capitalistic markets and the imbalance in the wealth gap caused by systems of distribution. The poverty of time and imagination at the top of the food chain so to speak, to be unable to recirculate wealth and just constant accumulation and wealth concentration because of capitalistic privatization. It's a problem sucking all of the oxygen out of the economy.
I liked the idea of people just making stuff because they aesthetically enjoy making it. There are a lot of questions not asked but that we, these years later, need to be thinking about for the future based on how things have unfolded and the need of a new way to start to shift our thinking. Old thinking once systematized, built upon and institutionalized is hard to uproot and especially hard to reimagine without going though the direct work of being put into practice. Though some are experimenting.
But it is going to take a global change in thinking and conforming to some new principles. Top among them would be achieving ecological sustainability on a global scale. A whole new attitude and orientation. Unfortunately this usually only happens at the moment of complete collapse I am sorry to say. Something so catastrophic that it forces the world population to stop what they are doing and wake up to the fact that we can't keep going. That of course is when authoritarian 'strong men' show up and claim to have the answer, which they never do. And there are always enough dumbasses to go along with it as we see all around us.
All I can think of is the creative community globally needs to be seeding the human mind world with coherent long term new imaginative practical proposals (not utopias or dystopias) for a future that could work with enough effort and cooperation. It's a tall order.
Thanks Neural, this article was in response to your 'UBI or We're All Screwed' that I developed from comments I made in that post. https://neuralfoundry.substack.com/p/ubi-or-were-all-screwed. I conjecture that it is going to have to be global UBI. That's the only way it makes sense to me when I think about it. This is a planetary issue. It is hard to calculate the long term consequences and all the possible shit that could go wrong but the trail we are on now is definitely not going to work.
I've advocated for this since I was a youngster fully engulfed in John Cage, Alan Watts and Buckminster Fuller. Nice to see it so elegantly written here.
Thanks Rod!
Well said Cecil, this resonates. William Morris spoke in a similar manner in News From Nowhere. There exist of course vested interests who would resist this with every inch of their fibre because they would regard this as a manifesto against them. The question is how we get from here to there. But again well said, what you have written is true.
how we get from here to there... well it won't be pleasant I don't think. Much suffering. But it seems humans must suffer much to develop the gumption to insist on such a complete change in expectation.
Thanks for that reference Andrew. I found it on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXTb191xIoE I will give it a listen. I have a fictional novel in mind that I am starting to work out that will play out the idea of how the world might be between now and the year 4020 I am think about the title as Wayfarers of the Capricorn Moon. I have my basic concept worked out.
OK I have listened to Morris's News From Nowhere. Fascinating the projections forward from 1890 considering how the future was imagined to unfold from there. Everyone still riding around by horse and buggy.
But it does cover some ongoing ideas that I have taken up namely the difference between labor and work. Certainly the excessive capitalistic machine of creating endless market dynamics and the drive toward cheap products.
It also anticipates the later 'less is more' shift in attempting to account for a better 'everyman' life that emerged after world war one with the universalized low cost design construction methods and product design and the ever growing sense of human rights and dignity. But I like how it kept the idea of craftsmanship and handwork. That probably is still part of the future. Interesting the depopulation of London and the removal of slums and the shift toward slowing down and a stronger sense of ecology.
One interesting unanticipated change has been not only cars and oil markets but also computers, internet, the digitization of a lot of things like records, music, books, gaming, etc. once we got to the storage problem of physical documents and endless storage facilities (for over acquisition of goods no longer needed but too good to throw away) and advent of the simulated society and the social media and the internet and the smart phone universe we are currently in and the rising and obvious problem of corporate capitalistic markets and the imbalance in the wealth gap caused by systems of distribution. The poverty of time and imagination at the top of the food chain so to speak, to be unable to recirculate wealth and just constant accumulation and wealth concentration because of capitalistic privatization. It's a problem sucking all of the oxygen out of the economy.
I liked the idea of people just making stuff because they aesthetically enjoy making it. There are a lot of questions not asked but that we, these years later, need to be thinking about for the future based on how things have unfolded and the need of a new way to start to shift our thinking. Old thinking once systematized, built upon and institutionalized is hard to uproot and especially hard to reimagine without going though the direct work of being put into practice. Though some are experimenting.
But it is going to take a global change in thinking and conforming to some new principles. Top among them would be achieving ecological sustainability on a global scale. A whole new attitude and orientation. Unfortunately this usually only happens at the moment of complete collapse I am sorry to say. Something so catastrophic that it forces the world population to stop what they are doing and wake up to the fact that we can't keep going. That of course is when authoritarian 'strong men' show up and claim to have the answer, which they never do. And there are always enough dumbasses to go along with it as we see all around us.
All I can think of is the creative community globally needs to be seeding the human mind world with coherent long term new imaginative practical proposals (not utopias or dystopias) for a future that could work with enough effort and cooperation. It's a tall order.
So beautifully stated.
Thanks Neural, this article was in response to your 'UBI or We're All Screwed' that I developed from comments I made in that post. https://neuralfoundry.substack.com/p/ubi-or-were-all-screwed. I conjecture that it is going to have to be global UBI. That's the only way it makes sense to me when I think about it. This is a planetary issue. It is hard to calculate the long term consequences and all the possible shit that could go wrong but the trail we are on now is definitely not going to work.