But the fog of this battle seems to reveal only a miasma of viewpoints, which is distracting society to the point of utter confusion. In the US, we see this in the conflict between a fake news vernacular, which is desperately trying to shape itself as the people’s story; and the media ‘mother tongue’, which is desperately trying to represent the interests of a corporate elite. Meanwhile, the actual vernacular of the workers’ common tongue has been lost — besmirched and degraded by low wages and the even lower significance accorded to industrial labor and jobs.

This loss of identity becomes very clear in America’s present power struggle between the poor white nationalists and the rich white globalists, in which all people of color are collateral victims. In the Hegelian solution to this problem, commoners are now rediscovering their roots in agroeconomy, as they volunteer to relocalize and thus revitalize their communities. They are also using digital technology to support these efforts. But in reaching back to their pre-industrial roots in ecology, while using the digital technology created and controlled by corporate monopolies, our commoners have not developed a vision or explanation as to why they are still so disjointed from their vernacular. They have not yet recognized nor claimed their identity as digital workers. They have yet to develop a view of themselves as local people who are building the cooperative sustainability of their commons for present and future generations.

When the smoke of battle lifts, and they fully recognize themselves as embodying the vital force of a new, digitally-supported labor movement dedicated to a sustainable society — seeing themselves as workers wresting their lives and livelihoods from the local ecology through new forms production and provisioning, supported by digital cooperatives — the new vernacular of the commons will appear, and people will recognize, deep down, in the very the cells of their bodies, that they knew this all along. ¡Cómo no! They will reconnect with their ancestors’ dreams for the common good, celebrate the joys of collaborating with their neighbors and build a new social contract of cooperative sustainability for their descendants. The irony of the ‘commons’ is that capitalism has made the commons so invisible and unrecognizable that it has become uncommon — uncommon not as in something wonderfully unique, but rather low-caste and useless. Here, I think, is the key to the vernacular epistemology of the commons: to turn what is uncommonly vital — the evolutionary power of labor in the sustenance of life, knowledge and culture — back into what is common.

Photo by Flocke

The post Emergence of a New Story: Redeveloping a Vernacular for Workers as Commoners appeared first on P2P Foundation.

One of the interesting effects of advancing technology is a progressive reduction in economies of scale in many industries and systems. Some of the bottleneck technologies you note do have some interesting, if still speculative, alternatives.

New proposed systems like SkyTran or Hyperloop have significantly lower economies of scale than conventional rail–deliberately so because they find themselves challenged by political conservatives increasingly resistant to ‘big ticket’ infrastructure investments.

There have also been small scale systems overlooked in the conventional urban context,

like cable car systems or, one of my favorites, the ‘banana monorail’ which has been experimentally adapted to passenger use in the developing world context.

These have always looked like a lot of fun to me, and could have potential space applications as the supports for the cableway can be designed to be self-supporting and quick-deployable.

Monorail

The WireRoad (TarBato in Nepali) is a low-cost, pedal-powered monorail transport system for people and goods, modified by EcoSystems/VillageTech Solutions from an original technology called the ‘banana cableway’. Those industrial systems cover many hundred thousand kilometers, and carry ‘trains’ of bananas, pulled by a worker who walks under the wire. EcoSystems modified the cableway to provide an alternative all-weather, self-propelled transport system, with low environmental impact, using human- or electric-power. In agricultural areas, it can pass over the fields, so it does not displace agricultural use of the lands.

Train

In Cambodia there was an aid program to encourage rural development through the supply of a kind of simple general purpose modular motor that could be adapted to many uses. One of the ingenious uses devised by locals was a simple rail car that could be used on the long-abandoned traditional rail system. Called the ‘bamboo train’, these have now become something of a tourist attraction in themselves.

These trains run through the countryside around Battambang in Cambodia. They are an incredibly simple design and as the name suggest are made of a considerable amount of bamboo, which gives great strength for little weight. They run on the old railway lines that were built by the French when Cambodia was still a colony. So who gets right of way? Well the rule is the train with the most passengers gets right of way. However if a train is carrying a motorbike it has right of way over a train carrying more passengers. However everyone seems to take it in their stride and help each other out in taking the trains off the tracks.

Shipping

Shipping now finds competition, at least in some niches, from revived sailing vessels, such as the Fair Trade Cruisers which now travel to the under-served markets of West Africa and South America. With the benefit of new
technology, new kinds of sailing vessels based on technologies like rigid solar wingsails, offer potential to make this increasingly viable.

I think these things represent a long term trend in the Post-Industrial era.

Industrial demassification is driven by the shrinking economies of scale afforded by advancing technology–one of the key factors eroding Industrial Age paradigms from within.

Photo by Bob P. B.

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