I wonder what life is like for the people of this world who can’t afford to live in the narrator’s “property-as-a-subscription-service” world, or how such an individual would react to learning there was something wrong about the assumptions baked into their delivered foods, or a sudden new need the system couldn’t fulfill. I also wonder how such a person or community of persons would hold together after an earthquake/tsunami/hurricane/grid-collapse/revolution.
It’s an interesting thought experiment, and it seems like it’s within the realm of possibility. I’d specifically be interested in better understanding ways in which it would reduce present per capita energy and resource usage and mankind’s footprint on the planet, understanding better the economics and balance struck with life on this finite planet. It seems very focused on the individual and their home life, but what of the wider world?
It’s a bit like the people who romanticize living in an English country manor in the Victorian/Edwardian era. If you were the estate owner it might be pretty neat. Not so neat if you were one of the anonymous servants that had to do the work to allow the lifestyle.
I’m curious about the conundrum of both scarcity and total availability. The character opined over their rental of fabulous rare vintage shirts (which somehow don’t work out in spite of being constantly available for rent). Surely this rarity must cost extra somehow, yet the character implies that it is not the cost that is different but rather his special knowledge of a good store. I don’t find this Utopia credible.
Well, clothing’s a bad example (it’s on the intimate end of the rental spectrum) but it’s just sitting at its natural place on the supply/demand curve. Rental is a strong factor in things like heavy machinery and expensive power tools, and the growth of makerspaces is a strong indicator that there are a number of products that people want access to but don’t necessarily feel the need to own (or don’t find it financially viable to do so)
Given how generally wasteful we are there’s nothing wrong with a closed group going heavy on reducing unnecessary disposal by improving distribution networks and resource transfer methods.
Utopias generally aren’t, but we can acknowledge that we can be wasteful, reckless idiots and design for that rather than just shrugging our shoulders when the ‘invisible hand’ turns out to be batshit crazy.
There’s a lot of growth potential and IMHO we’re sitting on the lamer side of the analog scale of possible presents and futures.
Don’t use nations as a model, they’re a stupid idea for a civilized society anyway. Civilization has to be something you join and can leave, not something you’re born into where most people don’t have any other options.
And it just so happens that don’t need somebody with ‘all the power’ to do this. You just need one VC to sign up in exchange for lots of money.
Yes, and they put all the power into the legal construct of the corporation. Why go off in some little commune and give them all the tools?
Going back to the example I was hitting on above…so instead you min/max. Use hiring as a method to collect ‘citizens’. Think of it is making a cheat for Civ, a sort of spiderwebbed nation state that can gobble up everyone else’s happy citizens for the productivity bonus, but can’t be militarily targeted and can spread over as many countries as it wants (using their legal constructs in turn)
That’s assuming you can’t figure out how to use Citizen’s United and the recent wave of pro-business rulings to collectively take over the entire primary process (Stewart/Colbert for president and VP? Nobody else would vote for them of course ) …not that they couldn’t also take advantage of the lobbying process and issue ads.
And they get to do it while having a hiring profile that’s basically ‘the people who don’t care much about money but wouldn’t mind being appreciated every so often (or perhaps a bit spoiled) and want to help in as rewarding or amazing (or both) manner as is possible.’ … So nurses, teachers, doctors, caretakers, inventors, content creators, hackers, dreamers, code monkeys, MAKErs, public servants…and skewed heavily towards the sort of energetic overproductive person who’s more than willing to help out in a pinch and always there to save the day.
And as a bonus they get to literally have somebody creating a bunch of ready-made mini-societies where they don’t have to be terrified all the time for them and theirs?
Yeah, I think somebody could turn that into a positive and reap some benefits at the same time. There’s way more solutions than problems here.
Seriously, unless we have a major economic paradigm shift, what Kelly is describing is what the life of the extracting managerial class will be like. The rest of us will supposedly serve this system for a pittance or drop out (off). I can’t see that being politically viable for another 30 years, soooo… I think Mr. Kelly’s crystal ball is a bit myopic.
Nor will you ever with these fantasists. This isn’t futurism, it is Utopian daydreaming. This thinking is only possible because of a complete ignorance of both current and historic politics. There are already so many unaddressed stresses in the political/economic system we have that self-assured commentaries like Kelly’s are akin to the alleged scholastic argument about angels fitting upon a pinhead. It’s nonsense, as it doesn’t address any of the real-life costs (like slave wages and underemployment) needed to implement such a “disruptive” system.
We will definitely have continuing technological advancement, but without a complete rethink of the distribution systems, any assumptions about the future, like Kelly 's, are farts in the wind.
Look, I have standing here: This is the kind of crap you can expect from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts…and it’s not exactly a Marxist Utopia.
You know what else Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts is known for? It has been referred to as “little Chicago” because it has been so plagued by corruption. Know what else? Every pizza place in Chicopee Falls only serves slimy, greasy, Greek versions of New York Style pizza and it’s all awful. And Chicopee Falls itself? It’s a shitty waterfall over a 100 year old dam that for most of my life stunk so bad of feces that getting stuck in traffic crossing the Chicopee Falls bridge was equivalent to the Catholic penance for mass murder!
Yeah, and it’s been deindustrialized too.
And there’s still a bunch of Irish bums hanging around! I know!
Having given the article a re-eyeball, are you sure that she wasn’t describing a small group working collectively, like few dozen working families glued together distributing resources internally?
I can kind of see your interpretation, I’m just 100% sure she just said he was talking about ‘one extreme’ and fairly sure she wasn’t specifying it’d apply to everyone. It seemed to be more about the theoretical viability of the option but not without everything else in play.
There will definitely be no “owners” in this bright new future of renting everything. No one will control who gets what and how much and they will certainly distribute the world’s finite resources with rationality. The costs will be stable and cheap and no one will live like serfs to be able to rent the most basic necessities to live in this utopia. Like all of society has become a Blockbuster Video store.That rock solid Blockbuster.
But if people owned nothing, it would mean the end of art as we know it. Famous art may be available to all but small unknown works will cease to exist.
Quite apart from that, it seems to me that people today own more stuff than at any time in the past, so why are they all going to suddenly change?
NAIL ON THE HEAD, sir. For me, this trumps everything, always.
Governments everywhere need to fix that, so everyone can enjoy equal comfort in life and die with equal dignity (insofar as scientifically possible).
It’s really not so much a science fiction story as it is a fantasy story and instead of invoking magic many science fiction authors use their own brand of magic and just call it technology.
Well, even magical nanotech isn’t strictly necessary. Amazon is able to automate its warehouses today without it. And there are already machines that wash dishes and clothes. All they really need are other machines to shove stuff into those machines.
Amazon still uses armies of overworked pickers to do their fulfillment. What seems like a fully automated process actually isn’t. There’s certainly a lot of impressive technology but behind it is a layer of invisible people proping it up, working under difficult circumstances for little pay.
) …not that they couldn’t also take advantage of the lobbying process and issue ads.