Excerpts from Stefan Heidenreich‘s new book on the post-currency future, republished from Transmediale.

Stefan Heidenreich’s book recently published by Merve Verlag is titled Money (2017). What it presents is not exactly a polemic against money, but rather a convincing speculation that soon we may not need money at all. While the notion that currency might soon become obsolete sounds like science fiction to many, Heidenreich argues that we are likely already within the first phase of a media transition leading to that point. Given the complex information infrastructures that have already been developed for documenting transactions, tying consumer habits to identities, and accurately predicting future exchanges, the substructure of a new kind of economy is now in place. In the following excerpts from his book (translated from the German), Heidenreich explores the potential ways this system might function, based partially on sophisticated “matching” formulas, leading to an age that could be more fair and equitable, but that might also produce monopolization and co-option in entirely new ways.

Introduction

One purpose of money is to distribute goods and labor. In the future, we will be able to solve these tasks differently, without money, instead relying on the help of networks, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

Why do without money? The medium of money combines three functions: payment, value, and storage. In every money economy, the function of storage tends to overshadow the other functions. This tendency is unavoidable because it is inherent to money. The command “More!” is inscribed in it from the very start. The command drives toward a state in which all economic activity is forced to pay tribute. Each valuation of goods and professions shifts in favor of assets and their accumulation. Increasingly, income and property are distributed unequally. This should come as no surprise, since the measures taken by central banks after the crisis in 2008 were limited to the continuous salvaging of assets.

Designing a non-money economy would pose a fundamental utopia in opposition to the money economy. This economy would do without money, abolish the storage of value and assets, and replace the functions of value and payment with the algorithmically supported distribution of things and activities. Technically speaking, this is possible because all transactions are already digitally recorded and enough data can be calculated to enhance and replace the market’s information function. In this sense, the concept of the non-money economy represents a radical leftist utopia: an economy that strives toward equal economic distribution by changing the current system in a fundamental way, because it pertains to money’s nature as a medium.

(…)

1. Distribution

The task of the economy is to distribute money and labor. But money is not necessary for this task. Historically speaking, the medium of money came to be used to bundle necessary economic information and to communicate it. Today, almost the entire economy runs under a money regime. But neither the end of history nor an optimal solution for distribution has been achieved with this scenario. Since data and computers are now large and fast enough, we can envision alternative, moneyless, and probably better techniques of distribution. We need to begin with questions of distribution and allocation and not with markets and their monetary orientation.

The task of distributing many different things among many different participants represents a typical problem for networks, which is how to deal with a variety of connections. The core element of these connections is to form a social relation, be it through a gift or help or communication. Whenever something is distributed, a link is activated.

(…)

With the increasing amount and density of information, the relationship between prices changes radically. Prices only retroactively express what we already know about the behavior of consumers in the market. Whenever we book a flight, we can see how prices are set using algorithms. This data head-start applies not just to final consumers, but also to large sites of trading. Sporadic flash crashes show what happens when algorithms speculate on stocks and other securities.

When our profiles, our likes, and our consumer histories are used to calculate who will buy what and where, the entire market becomes condensed to a singular moment for each transaction—that is, if a profiling algorithm can determine the price one is willing to pay for a specific product at a given time and place, there exists exactly one marketplace for that sale. In that case the price of the item conveys no additional information outside of this single market. Formally speaking, distribution is still depicted in prices and calculated in terms of money, but data currents today already represent the technological foundation of a non-money economy.

(…)

2. Transactions

Transactions form the foundation of every economy. The simplest of all transactions is a gift. One person (A) gives something (x) to another person (B)—noted as a tuple (A, B, x). 1 The term “person” here refers to any kind of active agent, not just human beings, but also robots, programs, machines, or other living beings.

A gift is anything at all that can be given, not just commodities, but also information, events, access, actions, assistance, and the like. Giving, rather than labor, should be considered the foundation of economic relations, for the simple reason that one can indeed work without being part of the economy—that is, entirely for one’s own good and without any effect on others. In contrast, a transaction always represents a social relationship of some kind. This means that, with the division of labor, the foundational act is that of division, not labor. We need to take a closer look at what economic activity means. Labor is part of the money economy and relies on the concept of paid, productive activities. In a non-money field, the economic value of an activity would be decided by whether and how it is shared.

All formats and structures of giving and exchange, like payments, prices, values, purchasers, consumption, supply, demand, and markets, can be traced back to simple transactions. The entirety of all economic relationships can be understood through the elementary transaction of giving. The act of purchasing, today seen as something quite ordinary, emerged rather late in the long history of economic relationships and the advent of money. Previously, simple transactions were the rule: gifts, even forced ones, in the form of taxes, for example. Measuring and noting gifts in numeric form began not with money, but with systems of inscription that were usually linked to temples. All the stories of money that suggest the economy began with exchange are not just historically incorrect; they also refuse to recognize that an economy before money existed, and thus are not suited to conceive of an economy without money today.

(…)

3. Media and Networks 

Reaching the point when data can take over the tasks of money depends on the relationship of computing capacities to transactions. As soon as computer networks are large and fast enough to process all acts of payment, technically speaking it is possible to algorithmically emulate the function of money. We have now reached this very threshold, and are likely to cross it in the course of a few years.

As mentioned, economic forms without money are not entirely new. Before the rise of money, larger economic units were administered by systems of inscription. Their remains are not only found in the ruins of temples, but also in the myths of guilt or debt (Schuld) in many religions. In one of the most famous of all prayers, Christians demand, day in and day out, millions of times over, an end to all debt: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” But they have forgotten the economic core of these lines. With the shift from a centralized system of inscription to a decentralized one—i.e., using money—forgiving debts went out of fashion. This was no coincidence, for the many creditors who had taken the place of a central power were then more interested in collecting debts than in forgiving them. Christianity reacted by replacing debt with sin and replacing the forgiveness of debt with individual confession—that is, through a form of control.

Historically speaking, economic relationships did not begin with exchange and certainly not with payment. What came first was giving, helping, and lending. Property was unknown. In small village communities, memory was sufficient to keep track, more or less, of who gave what to whom.

It was only with the introduction of writing that larger economic units began to be organized over a longer term. Recordings of gifts and debts can be found at many excavation sites of ancient civilizations. Ultimately, the invention of writing can be traced back to such archives of gifts and tributes. Together with the first general medium and system of inscription, new economic units grew. The dominance of these economies of inscription, usually around temples and in cities, could expand as far as their power to collect tributes extended.

Money only came later. In a strictly technical sense, money is not a medium but a technique that uses all sorts of media to make notes transportable—and the process is read-only. For the economy, this meant that money was a fundamental innovation, for it converted the simple transaction of the gift into a symmetrical exchange. If somebody paid to acquire something, there was nothing left over. Nothing needed to be noted. Money saves data.

The expansion of money ran in parallel to war and expansive state forms that, with money’s help, established a cycle of taxes for paying and feeding soldiers.

By way of the circulation of goods and labor, a complex structure evolved of money-like forms of notation for payments and promises of payment, from the coin to the promissory note, from paper money to digital currencies.

In the end, we have returned to a system of inscription that not only notes all payments, but also constructs the wildest derivatives and wagers on promises of payment. But the fact that money condenses data is no longer of interest, since we are able to process enough data.

Peer-to-peer currencies and crypto-currencies are nothing fundamentally new to this system. Bitcoins are still a form of money, even if separated from a central institution. On the path towards the abolition of money, they merely represent a detour. The principle of payment itself is maintained by digital and peer-to-peer payment systems. They simply reproduce old money on the new-media foundation of a distributed network. This corresponds to the first step of a media transformation.

In media theory since Marshall McLuhan, it has been a commonplace to state that newly developed media are first used to reproduce old content. Media transformations often take place in two phases. First, there is a reproduction of the old in the new: in the case at hand, Bitcoin is the internet’s replication of money. Only in the second phase will it become clear what kind of new life the new medium can develop. This step is still to come for money. It will lie in the takeover of economic functions of money by way of intelligent networks.

The most important thing about peer-to-peer currencies is the architecture in the background, the so-called blockchain. This represents the foundation for a decentralized technique of administration by which transactions can be communicated anonymously and examined by anyone. The technique works for money just as well as for other moneyless and decentralized systems of notation. Therefore, the blockchain represents a possible building block for an economy after money.

The second phase of a media transformation applies to the question of how a moneyless economy can emerge and how it could replace money. But technological development leaves many possibilities open here. At issue is not a fixed, defined path that follows deterministically set media guidelines. Technological progress opens possibilities for future activities, in terms of the ecology of information affordances. As a rule, these are achieved by way of a chaotic process full of contradictions. What drives transformation are not plans or impact assessments but rather the misuse of possibilities, the counterculture, hacking, and taking advantage of mistakes and gaps. This applies to the non-money economy as well. We will not be able to plan it. It will emerge in the niches and obscure corners of various networks and spread from there.

(…)

4. Matching

Matching is an important operation in a money-less economy. It takes on functions that are otherwise controlled by prices and by the market. “To match” means to classify, assign, or link.

(…)

The process of matching serves to integrate all participants and their desires, needs, possibilities, and abilities. It offers to mediate between transactions, to advise participants in their decisions, to accompany negotiations, and to note the results.

Theories of algorithms and networks use the term matching to refer to every cross-classification of elements from two different sets. For our purposes, these elements can be things or people or events or points in time or locations or objects of any kind. Elements of the same set may be matched with one another—such as in the case of two people connected by a dating agency, a team of programmers brought together for the development of a project, or trucks or containers coordinated for shipping purposes.

Formally, in a network-based environment, matching performs a gift based on conditional constraints. The result of a match can be described as the difference between before and after, whereby each matched transaction has effects beyond all immediate participants, no matter how small. The environment encompasses all links and information that go into the matching, that are processed along the way, and that are noted in the final conclusion. In the process, all decisions made along the way are accounted for, both on the giving side and the taking side, on the side of the good itself that is given, and on the side of the affected third party. The factors that go into making a match include comparable transactions, the history of transactions in the participants’ profiles, and the participants’ desires, needs, and capacities.

Matching processes all of these parameters to suggest one or several possible solutions. The function is not that of an auctioneer, but of a mediator. This means that it is not the goal to calculate the best solution for an ideal price and to leave things at that, but to communicate among a series of interests. Matching is scaled depending on need. Not all options have to be taken. When it comes to daily use, matching would become a formality and take less time than paying does today. If matching were to be applied to a more extensive political process, it would affect all the committees, authorities, and interested parties involved, and would thus unfold similarly.

(…)

Matching procedures would make suggestions on the path towards a decision, show opportunities, and accompany the process of negotiation. It might well be the case that the algorithm becomes active before we even think of wanting something particular. Some suggestive apps already do this, by evaluating our desires and predicting them. Whether we want this influence or not is perhaps a hypothetical question. The more advantages people see in algorithms, the more they will take recourse to them. In this way, socially recognized patterns of behavior arise all on their own. The future, present, and past of media transformations are never foundationally subject to social intention, but driven by a technological dynamics all their own.

(…)

Seen from the users’ perspective, every process of matching begins with a desire or a need. The algorithm then suggests various solutions. If one of them fits, the other participants—producers, suppliers, inventors, machines, or algorithms—are contacted. If an agreement is reached, the transaction is carried out and noted. The impulse to make a match can emerge from each of the four participating sides: from those interested, from those offering, from the product itself, or from the algorithm. Most steps in a match are basically familiar to us already. We carry them out all the time, looking for something online or offering and selling something of our own.

The matching process encompasses an entire bundle of functions around a transaction. Whether these functions are encounters in a unified framework or are divided among a variety of apps is of no relevance in terms of a currency-less economy. The decisive feature is that matching does not operate with money, but organizes distribution directly. This also means that transactions are noted and stored, but not valued with fixed prices and calculated as such.

Matching is also omnipresent within an economy like the current one that operates with money. When we buy things or somebody pays us for our labor, matching is also taking place. But this usually follows different rules than it would in a moneyless world. Without money, the selection criterion of simple and one-dimensional value would fall by the wayside. Instead, an entire series of various decision-making factors become available.

Consider for a moment how matching works under conditions of money. Let’s say we go into a store and purchase something. The product already has a history behind it. Somebody designed it, others made it, and the store has it in its assortment because it could count on customers like us. Our purchase is thus preceded by several decisions that are all linked to the exchange of information. But before we take the product and pay for it, we undergo a more or less intense process of deliberation: weighing the costs, our budget, our desires, and our needs. This internalized matching can take place in very different ways depending on the person and the situation. Some have to consider every single cent they spend, whereas others are largely free of this concern. In a moneyless economy, there is no guarantee that all will be freed of such concerns.

There will continue to be unfulfilled—and unfulfillable—wishes. Even in an economy without money, we won’t be able to possess all that is denied us under a regime of money. Only the conditions and procedures will change, fundamentally, and for the better.

Whether with or without money, our personal decisions are integrated into a broader cycle of information. In today’s economy, a purchase sends the information that more of the same product is needed. It combines with similar information at the point of sale and reaches the producer from there. Parallel to the flow of money and payment, there is always a second current of information that controls how paths of production are organized and goods are distributed. Matching without money would dock directly onto this secondary flow of information.

1. In mathematics a tuple is a finite ordered list.

Translated from the German by Brian Currid.

This excerpt is part of the transmediale journal – face value edition. You can buy a print copy here.

Photo by Dyroc

The post For a Non-Money Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sol Trumbo & Nick Buxton: In an age of Trump and trolls, it may be strange to talk about utopia. Not only has a divisive reactionary right-wing privileged minority surged to the fore, but social inequality, militarism and the climate crisis have worsened too. There does seem, however, to be one arena for hope for progressive solutions and that is in the city. Worldwide, mayors are increasingly a progressive and fearless voice advancing bold agendas on climate change, welcoming refugees and trialling new forms of democratic participation.

The question remains: can these cities offer solutions that address multiple systemic crises instead of pursuing, as Greg Sharzer suggests, a “way to avoid, rather than confront capitalism” by focusing on “piecemeal reforms around the edges”? Can a group of cities really offer any fundamental solutions to a crisis created by the immense power of corporate capital?

To try and answer this question, the Transnational Institute in 2017 launched Transformative Cities, asking communities to share their stories of radical transformation, in particular in the areas of water, energy and housing. Our research, particularly in the areas of water and energy had revealed a significant global counter-trend to privatisation, showing that 1,600 municipalities in 45 countries had brought their public services under public control since 2000.

We wanted to explore this more deeply to see whether and how cities could be part of building systemic solutions. American sociologist Erik Olin Wright, in his assessment of strategies for confronting capitalism, says that we need to escape from delusions that we can either overthrow capitalism or tame capitalism – arguing that the answer is to erode capitalism. He argues for the building of “real utopias” which are constructs that have “the potential to contribute to eroding the dominance of capitalism when they expand the economic space within which anti-capitalist emancipatory ideals can operate”. As we argued in a previous piece, cities offer many advantages for pushing forward these kinds of radical emancipatory ideals, that in the language of this initiative we call ‘transformative’.

At the same time, it is clear that what ‘transformative’ looks like will vary radically according to the context, the culture, and the process. Cities may make transformative changes in one area and still be regressive in others. As the Zapatistas have cogently argued and shown in practice, the revolution depends on stepping out and asking questions as we move forwards (Caminando preguntamos). We have a clear analysis that the key crises we face are due to a capitalist system of production that has concentrated economic and political power in the hands of transnational corporations and a small elite while bringing our ecological systems to a dangerous point of collapse. However, we have an open mind regarding what the truly transformative city and politics looks like.

 The Atlas of Utopias. Credit: TNI 2018.

As a result of the call, TNI is today presenting its Atlas of Utopias, telling the stories of 32 communities from 19 countries, ranging from small peri-urban indigenous communities in Bolivia to major urban metropolises such as Paris. Their contexts are starkly different, and their initiatives vary widely in terms of time, scale and impacts. Thirty-two cases are also just a tiny snapshot of the range of exciting transformative initiatives taking place around the world.

Nevertheless, the stories showcased in this Atlas of Utopias are deeply inspiring. Despite the diversity, there are also common threads to radical transformative practice. We would like to share four of them here:

1. Organising locally can take on corporate power and national governments. It would seem that the balance of power between local governments and the national government and multinational corporations would make victories difficult but, in many cases, determined campaigners have defeated both. They have done this by taking advantage of people’s loyalty to their city, their greater control over local policy and by naming and shaming corporations and their failures to run city services effectively. In Berlin, for example, residents took on the federal government as well as the multinationals RWE and Veolia that did everything they could politically and legally to block remunicipalisation of the city’s water. Eventually political pressure – including a referendum in which 98% demanded that the government publish secretive contracts – led to water remunicipalisation in 2014.
2. Organising around access to basic rights such as water, energy, housing can engage many people and be part of a bigger transformation including tackling climate change. The advantage of organising around tangible issues such as energy or housing is that these are essential to everyone’s daily life, which is why these struggles have been so emblematic to the rise of municipalist movements everywhere. They also can be an opening to building a bigger progressive radical agenda. In Richmond, California, initial protests against air pollution by the Chevron refinery has led to a surge of support for the Richmond Progressive Alliance, their election to the council and a sea of change in local policy. This oil company town has subsequently raised its local minimum wage, brought in rent control measures that protect 40% of Richmond tenants, and rolled out successful community policing led by a visionary gay police chief. In Nicaragua, an association of rural development workers not only organised to build a community hydro to provide electricity to a rural population for the first time, it used the income from its surplus electricity to create an additional US $300,000 of revenue for investment in further development projects for the region.
3. Worker engagement is usually critical to transformation. As Hilary Wainwright has argued, workers are not just important for their bargaining power against capital, they are also uniquely positioned because of their knowledge and experience in running services and their pivotal role within community relations. Remunicipalisation and transformative practices work best when they can draw on this knowledge and creativity. In Jamundi, Colombia, the local trade union has not only stopped the privatisation of water, but has also become a fierce defender of the human right to water, developing four community water systems.  In Mumbai, India, former mill workers have succeeded in staying mobilised even after the mills closed and have won the construction of 26,000 homes for workers. They have successfully challenged and defeated real estate developers who sought to build malls and luxury housing.
4. Changes in one city can inspire many others. Many cities report that their actions have led to interest by many others and therefore sparked changes way beyond the community. Grenoble’s bold water remunicipalisation in 2001 – that included high levels of citizen accountability, social tariffs and ecological measures – inspired Paris to do the same. In Mexico, a special school has been set up to encourage lawyers, engineers, accountants, geographers and teachers in 16 states to defend public water for all, helping ensure that good practice becomes viral. The victory of the citizen-movement platform Barcelona en Comú has similarly sparked a new wave of municipalist movements worldwide. This perhaps answers one of Olin Wright’s challenges for establishing real utopias – the need for these networks to expand so that they can be in a position to challenge ‘the dominance of capitalism’.

In the next month, we plan to explore nine cases in more depth, sharing their process of change. Then in mid-April, the public will be invited to vote on their favourites. In addition, we have been working with a number of evaluators to draw out the learning which will be turned into publications in a variety of media formats to inspire and assist other communities involved in the same struggles.

There is a lot to learn about both the individual cases, their durability in terms of transformation, and whether they contain the elements for eventually “challenging the dominance of capitalism”. The latter still seems very far off, and it remains an open question and debate over whether an ever-expanding municipalist movement will ever reach the position of challenging the hegemony of transnational corporations and client neoliberal states.

What is clear already is that the first step for transformation begins when a group of people in a community decide to say no to the corporate takeover of public resources, and when they start to imagine an alternative.

Throughout the atlas, we witness individuals and organisations who have dared to dream and who have trusted that people can make decisions more justly than corporations driven by profit. In the process, they are building the social relationships that can take on corporate capital and most of all creating the imaginary that another world is not only possible but is on the way.

Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance. – Eduardo Galeano

Featured image: Affordable housing for women workers in Solapur, India. Credit: Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).

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Introduction: MaaS vs MaaC

Mobility has become a basic need for people. The quality of life for people is closely related to access to mobility. The question arises whether mobility should not be treated as such, as a public good, as commons. Partly this is already the case, roads and public transport systems are financed largely with public money. However, the voice of citizens and hence users is rarely heard when it comes to the development of our mobility, we depend on the decisions made by politicians and executive boards. These choices are often poorly justified and some propositions made are demonstrably unwise and futile and solely proposed for political gain. Mobility is at present a political and public issue and we, the people, are not part of the decision making process.
I would like to propose to use a different strategy and manage our mobility and space requirements as commons. It concernes a radically new way of decision making on the vehicles and especially the necessary infrastructure to be created and how we maintain and operate these vehicles and infrastructure. Mobility as a Commons, instead of Mobility as a Service.
The transition takes places on the axes:

• the shift from ownership to access
• automation

Both developments are very promising and we already have most of the technical details figured out to start implementing new concepts. In this article I want to explain what that means in a utopian future vision and what initiatives we can take today to allow MaaC on a small scale and thus set this transition in motion.

Utopia

The Natural City is a laboratory for utopian thinking. For the transport transition I’m working on a transition based on a utopia. A destination that we never reach because Utopia is by definition unattainable. Utopia’s unattainability is also its strength. Since the utopia is not the goal, we can not fail, and it can serve as inspiration. Since the utopia is based on concepts that are technically and socially possible, we can continue to adapt this vision of utopia with new insights and shape the transition. Utopia and the transition are therefore flexible designs that are infinitively in development.

The transition

The transition is the indefinite time span between today and utopia. This period will also need to be designed, especially when talking about complex issues such as urban mobility. Designing starts at the end, so from utopia back to today.

Mobility

As stated above, developments in mobility are set on two axes, the shift from ownership to access and automation. On both issues a completely new paradigm will not be created overnight. The transition should be designed. Technological developments provide opportunities and social developments are slowly pushing for a change in behaviour. Both need to be developed with a utopian vision in mind.

Imagination

If we do not collectively imagine what we want, others, mostly commercial parties, will shape the future of our mobility. A self-fulfilling prophecy, not based on vision, but based on predictions and commercial interests. Take a close look at Uber and you might get an idea of where we will be headed if we do not take control.

Utopia: MaaC

A city where no fossil fuels are required for the mobility needs of its residents and visitors. In this city, every place is connected through a network of high-quality vehicles. This network consists of vacuum tubes with a diameter of 1.5 meters. The capsules moving through these tubes are accelerated with the aid of magnetic levitation and superconductivity. The size of the vehicles is based on a large car and optimised to ensure that virtually all goods shipped around the globe fit therein. For people, the capsules have an optimised design for travel comfort.

The system is fully automated and the network is as dense as our current road network. Each part of the network has its own speed. 60km/h within cities, 300km/h on a regional scale, 1500km/h at a national scale and up to to 3000km/h for continental transport. With a maximum speed of 6500 km/h for intercontinental transport no place on earth is out of reach. The costs for the construction and maintenance of this system are so low that every inhabitant of the earth can have unlimited mobility for a low monthly fee. The entire system is controlled by a global cooperative with local departments. Decisions on the development of the system are made by means of a collaborative platform that connects all stakeholders. These networks ensure that the questions are answered by the appropriate members. The more a specific decision influences the life of a member, the more weight is applied to his opinion. Every inhabitant of the earth has access to unlimited mobility for a low monthly fee. Whether you go from Amsterdam to Haarlem, or from Paris to Beijing, the cost is almost equal thanks to the extremely low energy consumption. Only acceleration and braking require energy, the rest of the trip is nearly energy neutral.

ET3 is a type of Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) which is ready for production today and is the inspiration for this new network.

The same network can also serve as an energy storage. Because of the nearly energy-neutral character of the system, renewable energy can be stored as kinetic energy by speeding up the capsules.

ECN presented this principle of energy storage in 2015 in the form of an energy-train.

This network is the new main infrastructure. In addition, people will be free to move on bikes, e-bikes and electric vehicles using the open and above-ground infrastructure. The amount of roads will be drastically reduced given that fact that all transported goods and most of the necessary displacements of people will be handled in the new network. What remains is a city where there is no more need for parking and with very little infrastructure. A city where public space is used for high-quality life. A city where the predominant sounds and smells of traffic finally belong to the past. A city where children can play almost everywhere without danger.

This vision is based on a fully automated network of vehicles in a world where these vehicles are no longer personal possessions but belong to the global commons.

The transition

The rollout of the ETT system

Before city residents are willing to get into a vehicle, this system needs to be tested extensively. In addition, it is difficult to imagine that we can immediately start with construction in the city. The first step in the transition to a new transport system can consist of providing an alternative for the flow of goods and waste at a regional level. Before the network is rolled out, overburdened connections can be relieved at a regional scale. For instance, we can consider the port of Rotterdam and a connection between Schiphol and Aalsmeer. Given the dimensions of the system it is relatively simple to build an addition next to motorways.

When the technical and economic feasibility has been proven, work can start on the construction in urban areas to slowly connect each address.

Autonomous vehicles

As a precursor to a fully automated transport system in a closed and controlled environment, the transition to autonomous vehicles can take place on our existing infrastructure. Specific lanes on our highways can quite simply accommodate autonomous trucks and cars. The development of new, smaller autonomous vehicles can increase the capacity of our existing infrastructure tremendously. When we consider how much empty space is being transported in our current vehicles there is an enormous potential for improvement. We can also imagine small couplable vehicles that can take any size that is needed. Prototypes are currently being developed.

 animation: NEXT Future Transportation

What is the result of the above developments? What can a city like Amsterdam look like when we use autonomous vehicles and e-bikes on a large scale? This is the question we asked with THNK School for Creative Leadership in 2016 for un Urban Mobility Lab commissioned by the municipality of Amsterdam based on the results of a workshop during which we have defined an ideal situation with the participants. The starting point was a new network of e-bike highways and specific corridors for autonomous vehicles.

These autonomous vehicles can also be manually controlled which could lead to new forms of public transport. For each trip from someones front door to the autonomous lanes drivers can be used. The driver can then get off at the autonomous hub and the trip is continued autonomously in the vehicle until it needs to be driven again by a human being. The next driver gets in and brings the passenger to where he or she needs to go. In short, a door-to-door solution of public transport for the city. Car ownership has become useless in cities hence rendering all parking spots unnecessary. Besides autonomous vehicles some intensively used and efficient metro and tram lines in the city will remain operational. Based on the above assumptions, we have redesigned three nodes in Amsterdam. The principles and designs have been created with the help of a traffic consultant.

On this site you can see “before” and “after” images of the nodes:

Ownership to access

Before the above features are fully available, we will have to rely on our current transport systems. Currently we have an enormous fleet for our car mobility. Most people have their own car, often even several cars. Studies show that to respond to our car mobility needs we can use far fewer cars. Cars sit idle most of the time. Even at the peak moments during the day we only use a small part of our fleet. As Jeremy Rifkin writes in “Zero Marginal Cost Society,” “Incredibly, Burns (the corporate vice president of research, development, and planning at General Motors until 2009 and Currently professor of engineering at the University of Michigan) Admits that” about 80% Fewer shared, coordinated vehicles would be needed than Personally owned vehicles providence to the same level of mobility, with less investment “. The first step on the road to utopia is therefore to implement on a much larger scale the concept of car sharing. This requires new forms of cooperation that we are currently developing in The Hague. To promote the use of “commoning” to manage our streets, we created an animation to show the potential of car sharing in a street in The Hague.

To show the effect of behavioural change in one or more blocks, a partnership is needed with the municipality and some other local commonors. We are working on a process in which people are encouraged to park their cars elsewhere (temporarily) and start sharing car. The group of shared cars is composed by the residents themselves. The amount and different type of cars dependent on the usage profiles of the participants. Initially, this takes the form of a pilot. During this pilot participants will save money (the car will be parked elsewhere allowing them to save money on insurance and taxes) and can experience what it is like to use a group of shared cars. In addition, the vacant parking spaces will be used for other functions. The design for the public space liberated with the disappearance of a large amount of cars will be made in a collaborative way by the residents and the city, based on some sort of menu provided by the urban designers of the city. This to ensure that the proposals made by the residents are realistic and thus realisable. If this experiment pleases the participants, they can choose to make this situation permanent.

The cars are owned by the Mobility Cooperative. The cooperative has local teams that manage their own fleet of cars. The cooperative platform ensures that you can use mobility solutions owned by the cooperative throughout the whole city. The mobility fleet can consist of e-bikes, transport bikes, cars, vans, and so on. You can also image a large amount of services that can be added to the platform like ride-sharing, pick-up and drop-off services, grocery pick-up and so on. All these services can be “payed” in mobility minutes meaning that every time you help someone out with his or her mobility needs, you get the opportunity to consume mobility when you need to.

This is the predecessor of the global cooperation we want to use to connect the entire world. Due to the cooperative nature of this solution it offers the highest quality for the lowest price.

Conclusion

The transition to MaaC requires vision and design skills. I have tried to put a project out there and hope other thinkers and designers get inspired to work further on this and, by all means, criticise the above proposition. In 2017 we will develop a cooperative platform that will be the start of the transition. This platform will start in The Hague but needs affiliates in other cities. To have the impact we need to have it is imperative that mobility experts unite and start collaborating with the inhabitants of the cities instead of with the politically motivated organisations they tend to work with today. Get on board and let’s start working on Mobility as a Commons.

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“In the line of your discussions during the Deep Dive on value, I thought this might be of interest. In Germany something fascinating has started: while different very small movements who organize themselves according to “unconditional sharing” or “living (more) money free” already exist for some years now, many of us decided to come together to prepare for a big meeting this summer (21.-25. June) north of Berlin.

Please see the English manifest below, and also on www.move-utopia.de (scroll a bit down for other languages than German), including an email-address for English-speakers (or Spanish or Portuguese – to be continued).

We want to spread that we exist, that we grow, and last but not least that we are convinced it is time to make us visible as an alternative to both fascism and a socialdemocratic policy of trying (if at all) to tame capitalism.”

It’s time to get together!

MOVE! Summer meeting 2017 in Germany

Designing the future together, with openness, trust, and emancipation…

The economic system that dominates our world has passed far beyond its tipping point. More and more people have come to understand this, and they fear for the future. Answers from left parties fail to go beyond a “let’s make it a bit less worse” mentality and leave the field clear for right-wing endeavours.

We see an absolute necessity to counter such agitations with a movement that includes everyone. We want to live with and not against each other.

Instead of being dazzled by nationalistic ideologies, we refuse to think of people within the constraints of pigeonholes and wish to encounter each other’s particularity with respect and care. Being open and self- critical towards our own mechanisms, and shedding light on make-believe taboo subjects such as power and hierarchy, are integral parts of this movement.

… de-growing growth

Taking care of our planet and living together peacefully are not compatible with an economic system based on the exploitation of people and our connatural world; a system that can only be kept alive through a constant growth mindset, excluding more and more people who cannot be turned into ‘value’. The climate is not only becoming more volatile in the atmosphere, but also on earth. Conflicts and wars are being fuelled while arms-expenditure soars. For as long as we can remember, thousands and thousands are dying within this system, and almost one billion people go hungry while a third of our food production lands in the bin.

We prefer to change the system and not the climate, refusing to be part of a society that understands nature as a mere resource and animals as meat; a society that does not leave time for care activities and judges people based on their cost and efficiency.

We are walking a new path.

… living utopia

We share the common vision that we can overcome existing conditions of human separation and work towards new forms of conviviality. New kinds of relationships can come into being by openly sharing and communicating needs and talents. Ones that recognise individuality as a basis for our interactions and consider our differences as an enrichment of our experiences.

The challenges of our times cannot be treated individually, neither can they be solved by individuals or parties. We want to develop new forms of living together to make a good life, for all, possible.

Conscious of our dependence on this earth and also on each other, we are deeply convinced that we can live together according to our needs and abilities. Many of us call it moneyfree(er)-living, others Ecommony, Commonism, or the gift economy, while others talk about unconditional sharing. But, instead of tripping over terminology, let’s start to re-create the world: we celebrate the experiment of living utopia to confront the global issues of our time, beyond nations.

We will meet in summer 2017! Do these words sound appealing to you? Then get involved in developing this further! Get informed here: www.move-utopia.de

Let’s MOVE!

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The culture in which we were brought up is the product of millenia of scarcity. That is why it’s easier for us imagine a society of abundance as the negation of a good part of what we know and take for granted than as the affirmation of a project whose elements are within arm’s reach. However, the unprecedented development of productivity during the last two hundred years, the emergence of distributed networks, and the first social experiences of abundance on the Internet have begun to clearly show outlines of the possible world in the present. Today, to imagine the society of abundance is, in more and more fields, to take the present–a present that is radically different from that of the origins of industrialism–to its limits.

The division of labor

An especially interesting example is the division of labor. In classical economics, starting with Adam Smith and his famous example of the production of pins, specialization is understood as part of the social effort for the improvement of productivity. That is, it was part of the road towards abundance. Dividing work into precise tasks and substitute people with machines, to the extent technological development made it possible, was the heart of the Industrial Revolution that transformed the world between the 18th and 20th centuries.

From the manufacturing to the robotic factory, the specialization of tasks not only revolutionized productivity, but also encouraged the specialization of knowledge, and just as it had never been possible to produce so much, neither had so much knowledge been developed ever before.

But with the development of services and the massive incorporation of information technology, knowledge becomes a direct tool of production on a new scale. Production processes are confused with marketing and communication. Businesses begin to demand people with more than one specialty. What had, until then, been reserved for engineers and a few technicians, was multiplied by all of the knowledge that the new industries understand link their more and more sophisticated tools and products. Initially, this tendency, which Juan Urrutia called multipecialization, appears above all in the new technology sector that becomes consolidated in the ’70s.

But the innovation industry linked to personal computing first and the Internet later, is a very particular industry: in the US, its pioneers are openly influenced by hippy understandings of abundance, and in Europe, by a new work ethic centered on knowledge that soon will be expressed in free software. As far back as 1984, the writer Bruce Sterling describes in his novel Islands in the Net the following dialogue full of reminiscences of the classic tales of the society of abundance:

“… a sort of hotel manager?”

“In Rhizome we don’t have jobs, doctor Razak. Only things to do and people who do them.”

“My esteemed colleagues of the Party of Innovation Popular might call this inefficient.”

“Well, our idea of efficiency has more to do with personal realization that with, um, material possessions.”

“I understand that a broad number of employees of Rhizome do not work at all.”

“Well, we keep ourselves busy doing our own thing. Of course, much of this activity is outside the money economy. An invisible economy that is not quantifiable in dollars.”

“In ecus, you mean.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. It’s like housework: you don’t pay anyone money to do it, but that’s how the family survives, isn’t it? Just because it’s not a bank doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. As an aside, we’re not employees, but members.

“In other words, your baseline is playful joy before benefit. You have replaced work, the humiliating spectrum of forced production, with a series of varied hobbies like games. And replaced the motivation of greed with a network of social ties, reinforced by an elected structure of power.”

“Yes, I think so…, if I understand their definitions.”

“How long until you entirely eliminate work?”

What makes this scene especially interesting is that the character being interrogated is member of a transnational egalitarian community. Sterling’s intuition connects technologies that had hardly even been sketched out then–in fact, in the novel, the Internet is not used, but a sort of hybrid of fax and e-mail–with the cooperative inheritance and community values held by hippies in the US.

Twenty-first century trends

The prophecy will begin to come true scarcely a decade later with the nascent reality of the first industry linked to abundance: free software. Connected to it is the appearance of the first businesses that break with the obsessive hierarchies of the industrial enterprise. As Pekka Himanen argued in 2000 in his famous essay about the hacker ethic, in knowledge industries, work in self-managed teams is simply more productive. Also, by that time, the Internet was already restructuring the forms of relationship. Hackers, used to equality in conversation and to working in networks like equals, practiced “flat” forms of organization based on conversation between “multi-specialized” individuals. Also, networks of relationships between peers that occur in a conversational space will tend to be transnational, limited perhaps by linguistic borders.

This incipient movement will not stay in the world of software: consulting, digital publishing, graphic design, and generally all the services that were first commercialized directly via the Internet are the natural point of departure for these first experiments of transnational communities of multispecialists, but not their destination. The development of productivity and new forms will reach the industrial world in their most radical way as the “direct economy“: small groups of friends design products, finance them with pre-sales and crowdsourcing within communities of affinity, send them to be built by the old industry (now converted to 3D printers), and distribute them through the network.

As a result, traces of abundance appear in more and more places in our lives. The tendency can be summed up today as: multispecialization, transnationality, and non-heirarchical organization of business.

If we take them to their limits, we can glimpse the main features of work in a society of abundance: obsessive specialization disappears, and with it, professional identities as we know them. Thus, the ideal of knowledge as a whole is recovered. In correspondence, group projects, formed and motivated by the pleasure of creating and discovering, not by the need to earn a salary, small, non-hierarchical, identarian communities form, which don’t respect borders other than the ones of the affinity for objectives and media.

A society of abundance is a society in which productivity is not separate from research, conversation and knowledge, as if they were different worlds, and knowledge itself is not divided into professional and mercantile knowledge. It is a society where community is directly productive, without divisions.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

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