As you’ll probably have worked out by now, many of my ideas and opinions are based on collective community action and increased citizen responsibility for many of the things that the government, local government especially, is supposed to take care of on our behalf.
My ideas on the future of sanitation, bodily waste processed by the householder into soil by the householder for either use in his own garden or sale to farming areas would effectively put local government sanitation out of business, leaving local government with the role of system regulator rather than provider.
My ideas on the future of power generation, created by the householder by constructing building that generate a lot of their electricity, due to their construction focussing on energy sufficiency, would effectively put national power utilities out of business, delegating to them the task of providing power to electricity intensive industry, such as aluminium smelters and the like and/or provider of last resort to communities.
My ideas on the future of food production would effectively put supermarket chains out of business. The creation of farmer markets, whether that means walking around stalls talking to farmers or having food delivered directly to your home as you send your shopping list to the farmer down the street over the internet, would cut out the middle man meaning that customers get cheaper food and farmers get higher returns for their work. Walmart cut out warehouses from their system, so that delivery is straight to the store from the supplier. What is standing in the way of delivery direct from the supplier to the customer and missing out Walmart altogether?
I have a hard time thinking through all the implications of what I am thinking. It’s infrastructure light but process heavy, if you take my meaning. When everything you do is sourced in your own backyard a lot of the roads, pipes, step down stations, electricity pylons, malls etc, indeed all the stuff you need to move things around and store/present it, whether it’s energy, sanitation services, food and goods, disappears. I think that would be a good thing. It moves the money from outside providers to inside providers, from shareholders (the people who own it) to stakeholders (the people who use it). I think that would be a great thing. That would be water, energy, staple foods, sanitation etc
In a future where infrastructure is eliminated (because it’s un-necessary) a lot of the transportation would be by rail or air, and it would be point to point. I’ll talk about my ideas on that a little later, but consider what our world would look like with nothing larger than 2 lane roads in a world where trains, LTA heavy lift vehicles and personal urban transport systems make travelling by car something you only do to explore the back of beyond.
In such a system you would need a rail company (preferably public) and a system of airspace management to regulate people flying around to the tops of buildings to go to work.
But I have doubts too about the wisdom of this community utopia combined with Fritz Langs’s Metropolis.
Some might say that citizens can’t provide all their own services, either by themselves or through a community co-op, they won’t be able to supply everything. I think that’s true. People will still want glassware from Italy, Wine from Australia and fashion from Paris. Some things you cannot localise, so we’ll still need container ships and the like, but I imagine it would be much reduced to the benefit of the environment and society as a whole.
But what are the other implications?
There’s probably political implications, since when your community organization is providing for most of its services what happens to local government, what happens to taxation? I think there’s lots of room for abuse here. One of my big problems with it is that the world we live in today is so complex that a lot of how it works is not understood by the average man in the street. Having decisions made by the ignorant on the basis of which opinion is the more populist is a nightmare scenario.
There’s also the problem of justifying the enforcement of universal rights. What I’m thinking here is the famous Monty Python “Life of Brian” sketch turned on its head. What have the Romans ever done for us? In the sketch the answer went something like built roads, schools, aqueducts, provided security, ensured grain shipments etc etc etc. However when you have communities which could be to all intents and purposes self sufficient in many areas you could get something like Waco Texas, (where contrary to popular belief the authorities did use tanks and flamethrowers).
I spend a lot of time just thinking about things like this. It’s not the sort of thing I can think of effectively by myself though so maybe you could shout out your ideas on this issue?
