May 27, 2017 at 03:37PM

Reddit scan:Hello, and welcome. This is an essay which describes a model of network building which I believe can fundamentally change the nature of human organization in our world.I'm sorry that it is a little longform for the reddit medium, but it takes a while for me to get at the breadth of what the model is capable of.This model seeks not only to decentralize, but to "grease" the wheel of human innovation and also to help us mitigate and adapt to climate change and all the complex issues of the 21st century.Please read through and give me some feedback on what you think!For the past several months I've been thinking deeply about creating an alternative way of doing things within our system that is actually viable and which can help us solve our problems in the world.I know many here are delving deep into decentralized web systems thinking like blockchain and its many uses. However I've been focused on a slightly different angle of things. I want to explore how to decentralize our system in the physical world. And I want to explore how to do this optimally in the face of climate change, resource hardening, and all the other social and environmental systemic threats we're gonna be dealing with in the near and not so near future.Part of the reason I make this post is to petition for help. I want collaborators to join me. A network theory is only good if it leaves the head of one individual and instead occupies many.In order to do that, I want to lay out for you the synthesis of where my thought is leading me and why I believe it is not only something that marks a fundamental shift in human organization, but that its actually very viable and practical (which is by far the most important thing here).I'm going to introduce you to networks that are already very established and exist with a lot of resources and success, and how we can leverage that to really bring about something good.But first I have to get you thinking in a slightly different way. So to do that, let me just share a model I made which lays out a theory for the foundations of decentralized sustainable resilience. I made this image (read it from the bottom up!) to show a model which is more comprehensive of a look at what constitutes human livelihood in a sustainability context. It is a "layercake" model. Each layer is built upon the previous one, and each represents an area of human activity or a wider ecological context. In this way we can integrate hydrology, soil science, ecology, agriculture, technological systems, social systems, trade networks, and atmospheric effects into one analytic model.This is helpful, because I seek to bridge the gap between those individuals quite helpfully focused on areas of study such as permaculture and water systems, and those individuals quite helpfully focused on new decentralizing technology and other technical things, and situate this within the context of human ecology and economy.I'm seeking a comprehensivity here. Which is also helpful. But enough of the background story... now let me try to relate the specifics of the network theory.There are several prominent organizations modeling a fundamentally new way of human organization. Read the basic theory on the homepage of the P2P Foundation. This organization has developed several intriguing wikis to do with decentralizing and opening up knowledge commons and equitable economics. P2P Lab is a research branch which has put out some pretty serious academic papers on 'commons based peer production', including some intriguing case studies, general theory, and more.Now, I cannot believe this one is not more well known than it is. But it is Fab Labs: http://ift.tt/1ctVzod, https://www.fablabs.io/. Fab Labs grew out of MIT's center for Bits and Atoms. You can watch a short lecture by the professor who created it here and hear some history and theory. Fab Labs are "fabrication labs" which house a variety of desktop manufacturing machines, and tout the ability for people to "create (almost) anything".Each lab must meet the basis of having the basic set of machines. 3D printers, CNC milling machines, laser cutting and engraving, and a lot more. The amount of cool stuff these labs are able to create is pretty astonishing. Furniture, housing, electronics, appliances, drones, sensors, circuit boards, shoes, scientific equipment, infrastructure in 3rd world villages, and more.Fab Labs are a growing global phenomenon. They are represented throughout Africa, southern Asia, the middle East, South America, as well as all the developed nations.The Labs work with a distributed education model, (2) which includes a pretty serious and rigorous education, as well as its own accreditation system.The underlying theory of how the network of Labs operates is based on the ethos to design global, manufacture local. In effect, the system is based on a Knowledge Commons. A knowledge commons is distinct from a physical resource commons, in that it actually improves with use and more users, rather than degrades.These Labs also have interesting emergent properties too. They tend to create culture. They bring people together, knock down barriers between cultures, and are amazing in an educational sense. I'd dare to say that they are a often superior model for education than much of what we have today. The Fab Lab in Israel is full of testaments to the power of this model to bring together people of opposing backgrounds and ideologies. (can't find it, there was a good video on this).Not only do they create a common place to hang out and create culture in the locality they exist in, the model builds bridges between cultures. When a Fab Lab in Africa opens up, they are connected into the network of collaborators. We can travel there, meet them, hang out with them, share designs. They can pull designs made from anywhere in the world and modify them to meet local conditions. And the education received in this whole process is superb. This one is a documentary about a guy who travels to different global Fab Labs and shows a bit of what I'm talking about: http://ift.tt/2rq9LO8 model that Fab Labs have constructed forms much of the basis of my own network theory. It represents a new form of human organization, a fundamental break with what existed prior to this. We have in effect democratized knowledge and created a network of nerve nexuses distributed throughout the globe.In the Open Source Everything Manifesto, Robert David Steele writes the following:The circumstances underlying this manifesto are stark and compelling: We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making. Power was centralized in the hands of increasingly specialized “elites” and “experts” who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted.Our society and decision making processes are currently driven by two classes of monoliths. Nation state governments, and large corporate enterprises. Neither have shown the will or capability to meet our complex challenges in the 21st century. If anything our era is marked by disintegration and divisiveness, inequality, disenfranchisement, and over-enfranchisement of a few. With little to no commons that is not commodified, community structure degrades. Education is dauntingly expensive, and most people make their livelihood as a type of "precariat", meaning the work situation is taxing, precarious, and unstable, and serves mostly the need of a few people to concentrate wealth instead of being a place where creativity and proactive design thinking is engaged in.Meanwhile, we are faced with the need to literally rework human society in the 21st century. Climate change is impending. Ecological destruction is continuing. We need to change our energy systems completely, and it is a harder task than is often presented by the optimists.Let me take us on a detour through a few subject areas to get at what I mean here.WaterClimate mitigation is about carbon, while climate adaptation is about water. According to Anthropologist Brian Fagan:“Fagan says the myth of the medieval warm period is that it was warm. There were all kinds of weather extremes. In 1315 it started to rain for seven years. The newly cleared and naked hills eroded, dams burst, disease spread, and prolonged drought followed. And not just in Europe. Mesoamerica was jolted by long droughts. The Mayan pyramids at Tikal were engineered to act as water collection reservoirs. The collapse of their empire, and others in South America such as the Inca in Peru, are correlated to prolonged droughts.”“Even mild climate warming produces prolonged droughts, and we should expect more of them. There’s already been a 25% increase in droughts globally since 1990. In the next 100 years, we can expect the number of people to be affected by droughts to rise from 3% of the world’s population to 30%.”Excess water destroys agricultural production, allows both plant and animal diseases a vector to spread, causes widespread damage that needs to be repaired, and makes conditions difficult for humans, animals, and plants alike.Lack of water causes drought. Which cripples agricultural productivity, puts stress on human societies, and in worse case scenarios leads to widespread societal and ecological disruption, conflict, even collapse. We think water crises underlied the conflict in Syria for example. And evidence further correlates African conflicts in the sub-Saharan region to periods of drought.So water management in both lack and excess is key to resilient adaptation for human society over the next century. I hope my analytic model from above is beginning to make more sense now. How do we wisely adapt to the coming storm, both figuratively and literally?One of the very most important ways has to do with soil. Soil is what you get when rock meets biological systems. Rock + organic matter (decayed life) + soil organisms = soil.When soil is "healthy", when it has a good mix of rock/organic-matter/soil-life, then it develops good drainage and good water retention. This TED talk is by a permaculturist who gives some amazing insight into these dynamics and showed how he implemented good design at scale in a city in Arizona, which experiences seasonal monsoonal flooding and seasonal drought. If you're reading, you really should watch this video in its entirety to grasp what I mean here.When plant communities assemble in a dry region and feed into good soil life it can create a positive feedback loop which reverses the process of desertification, creates habitat, creates cool microclimates, and even can create surplus biological wealth for humans (food, wood) in some occasions.These communities also buffer the area against flooding, against soil erosion, create better soil drainage, and then when the excess water event is over, they retain moisture in the soil for surprisingly long periods of time.Permaculture can reverse desertification: 1, 2. Plant communities create their own climates, alter water dynamics, and form the basis of the preservation of biodiversity.Trees and other plants can even be understood as a sophisticated water harvesting technology that humans can exploit at very low cost when in need: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTsH8qgIb80I'll say it one more time in a different way. Water dysfunction can easily kill advanced human societies. From disease, rot, and destruction in excess. To scarcity, conflict, and collapse in lack of it. The way to manage water scarcity or excess is to assemble biological communities in a wise way.Through geospatial analysis we can identify areas of risk. Here is a map of desertification vulnerability. The southwestern US, the Middle East, and much of Africa are regions of immense concern. We know that desertification and water lack are linked to increased violence and social instability in Africa and the Middle East. In the southwest, we have many troubles as well, including the recent finding that the Colorado river is declining not only due to drought, but even significantly just from higher temperatures and evaporation alone.Now, having identified this, we can actually bring both the technological design process seen in Fab Labs as well as the permacultural knowledge to bear in solving these problems. On one hand we can design water catchment and harvesting systems. The better design, the more storage, the cheaper economic model, the better it is all around. At the same time, we have to also defer to the natural processes that form the base of our layer cake analytical model, in soil and biological communities.I hope you can see how the network theory plays into this as well. Solutions can be worked at in a bottom up manner at the point of impact, carried out by people on the ground, with access to a global repository of knowledge and design models, as well as assistance and help from a pool of international collaborators.Maybe there is a severe problem going on in Nigeria, for example. And we are connected with labs in Nigeria. Both with technical partners and permacultural partners. We can bring an entire globe of experts in (not physically, but people can show up physically too) to collaborate for local solutions, or alternatively the Nigerian lab can explore the totality of design solutions that have been created in the past for similar challenges.EnergyWe can now also begin to look at energy system design. I said earlier, climate mitigation is about carbon, and climate adaptation is about water. We'd be fools not to work intensively on mitigation. This is a scathingly complex problem though. I linked earlier this video under the hyperlink harder task, than the optimists often think.To figure out the spatial component of an entire alternative energy system to fossil fuels is huge challenge. This is another area that geospatial analysis comes into play. We also must figure out the utilitarian needs of how the energy system will interact with the grid and use patterns too.We need energy system engineers. And to transition our entire societies energy systems we need to somehow unlock a lot of capital. There are people working on these problems. I have been recently lucky enough to discuss with an energy system engineer who is working on a model which can successfully meet the needs of a neighborhood sized system entirely with renewables from within the system. I've seen the data analysis tools he used to visualize the energy inputs vs. use, and I think more people can be trained to apply this type of analysis to more case studies. Practical solutions are needed badly. As for capital needs, there are some solutions floating around. I'm a fan of this one, Global 4C, which is a proposal for an alternate currency funded through international quantitative easing and put specifically towards wide scale energy infrastructure transition. Check out the model, if you like.I don't have the best solution here. I know that Fab Labs and peer production have been able to produce energy generation systems. P2P Labs have published a model of a windmill design. Fab Labs have done other types of windmills. Novel/innovative solar apparatus designs claim to achieve a 40-50% efficiency increase. Increased permacultural and urban farm production could lead to increased capacity for decentralized biomass generation. And there are tons of solutions to be found in the world of greater energy efficiency design, whole city scale proposals, microgrid networks, etc.But my point here is that, for such a network as I am proposing, we'd have to become intimately engaged with evolving our energy systems too. Achieving rapid transition should be the goal. Mutual education, attracting in experts, collaboration, and sharing case studies across a global network of nodes can help us accomplish this.FoodIn this domain I'd just like to share one simple concept.With apps, such as on your smartphone, we can help organize counter-economies. For example, if you only wanted to buy food from local producers or even just friendly operations from anywhere in the region, you could create a "local food app", which connects consumers to local food production.I don't think we should completely localize food production, but to enable an economy of local food production is beneficial in a myriad of ways. First, it empowers local permaculturists and urban farmers to practice their trade and build up knowledge and local culture (much the same as Fab Labs do).It creates nodes within a society which are biologically productive, which are good habitat for biodiversity, which conserve water, which sequester carbon, and finally, local producers can cultivate and even begin to breed cultivars which do well in local climates and are very productive, increasing genetic diversity and actively adapting plants to changing climatological conditions so as to ensure food security for our species into the future.Simply changing our diet to include more beans than meat can make a huge impact on carbon emission and land use. http://ift.tt/2rZo0Xn networks, enabled by new ways of connecting, we can build entire counter cultures around food and goods. We can develop a system where it is easy to opt out of one economic system entirely and opt into a different economy.Also, building local food cultures and culinary traditions is like glue for cohesive and inclusive societies. Much of human culture is built directly atop culinary traditions. To eat with another culture is to feel accepted by them. To eat with friends and community members is to feel accepted by them.There is an outsized importance of this simple thing. Growing food and cooking food is fundamental to human psychological wellbeing in some strange way.I'd also like to make note of one model for education in food growing. A group of collaborators make use of existing space, such as a suburban house, or rural house, or doing a CSA, sourced in some way or other. They make it a permaculture education commons, much in the way that a FabLab works. The practitioners could potentially even take up residence at the place, packed as densely as they desire to do so (this is not necessary but may be more economically feasible). Then transform the place into a productive permacultural farm. The process will be a group education, and the house will operate as an open commons for anyone interested in farming to come by and learn and network with like minds. Food can be sold to learn how to do a business with small scale farming, and the income can cover the costs of the house/location, making it a cheap residential educational facility for a group of peer collaborators. If the number of collaborators grows too high, then attempt to source a second nearby location and do two, and so on.Not all would look like that, but its an idea that could potentially be utilized. We need to educate growers and create markets for a different way of eating.Now, this is quite complex on the number of things it touches on.As well as the emerging capacity of being able to collaboratively design and produce technology, as seen with Fab Labs, its also arguing to take into account the entire geophysical picture.Some might say, "this is too complicated, you've got too many areas of focus going on at once". However I disagree. Let us boil this back down once again to its very basics.We hope to create a network of nodes which can have a transformative impact on our society. In doing so we hope to draw in as many collaborators as possible. We hope to draw in well educated experts, we hope to create common areas where high quality education can take place, and we hope to come to a comprehensive model for changing our systems.I may spend my life focusing on technical apsects of new technologies, and you may spend your life working with plants and animals and soil, and a third person may spend her life working with energy systems. But these domains are interconnected. And once you become educated, they are inter-navigable. You may be an expert in software and machining, but you can also be quite familiar with the work of the commons permacultural educational facility down the street. And vice versa.As you delve into the proposal, it begins to appear that what is developing is the potential for a new form of education which is fit for the 21st century. One which operates like a globally connected knowledge commons, which brings together diverse fields, but also which can bring a person to deep specialization in a given field.All that is needed to participate in this is to join one of the common locations where this type of work is being done, and then to learn about it, and join the discussion.We can, in my estimation, evolve the system of our society and avert catastrophe. All it takes is a little understanding of the theory, and then a lot of collaboration with the people getting involved and making it happen."So what can I do?"If you want to discuss my ideas and the theory, or even collaborate with me and pitch your own ideas here, join /r/solutionspace, just a temp subreddit I made to discuss this kind of thing. Or post here as well, this is a good sub for that kind of thing.Look into makerspaces and FabLabs around you. Consider starting one. FabLabs take time and money to get going. But they have done a lot of work in creating resources to get them established in as many cities as possible as fast as possible. You can likely rely almost entirely on grants, or at least I think so anyway. Personally, this is what I'm going to attempt to do in the near term.Research an area and really dedicate yourself to becoming something of an expert or at least well versed in it. Society cannot evolve without us educating ourselves and problem solving directly. Go to college for something that's relevant and gives you technical skills, or hack an education in the many ways that is possible nowadays.If you like, an interesting model to organize people into micronetworks which can learn and achieve a lot is Freedom Cells. These guys are Agorists, but you don't need any specific political philosophy to do this.Transition network organizes and teaches how to start or join groups that are dedicated to transitioning society out of the fossil fuel era and onto new modes of doing things: http://ift.tt/2rq9VVN an agricultural project, either on your own (grow vegetables, mushrooms, microgreens, etc.), or maybe even organize some people to use my permacultural education model from above.Organize people on the web. Bring together thinkers from disconnected places. Create hubs of thought. Promote design thinking and new models of education and organization.Learn CAD (computer aided design), GIS (geographic information systems), programming in any popular language, etc. All useful!Share knowledge about this kind of network theory and its potential to change the way the world works. Culture drives education and action. The philosophy of one time period is the common sense of the next.And discuss with me! Like I said, I would like to find people to collaborate with, if anyone is as interested in these ideas as I am! http://ift.tt/2r9TI6n by Towson Makerspace