Our very high tech, capitalist society has some obvious flaws, but one thing that’s always been interesting to me is the two main ways that knowledge is stored: either distributed or silo’d. There’s very few foundational collections of instructions on how to build the stuff we have already, from scratch.
There are, of course, many distributed or hidden versions of that. Through manuals, tutorials, internal documentation, or institutionalised knowledge. I like the idea of focussing on being able to rebuild and document “from the ground up”: for any foundational component of modern day society, document out how to construct its materials.
Benefits
As a society, maintaining this view of our foundations comes with a strong set of benefits:
- Survivability: a pretty sci-fi concept that in case of societal collapse, we might rebuild.
- Security: being able to build up our technologies from scratch could protect from all sorts of highly advanced (supply chain) attacks.
- Independence: allowing “microsocieties” to bootstrap themselves provides independence from government and the larger society.
And probably more!
What is foundational?
Deciding what’s foundational will obviously be personal. I think the imaginary goal of rebuilding society from the ground up gives some criteria and methods of defining and limiting the set. Any “foundational” component of society must be:
- Equitable
- Sustainable
- Minimally viable
- Libre
- Constructible from components that match these requirements
Foundational components
Here’s my (sort of random) way of organising our society’s foundations, including some existing projects that break from lock-in culture:
- Culture
- Organisations
- Co-ops, and specifically meta-foundations that support setting up and managing co-ops in specific fields
- Herenboeren supports groups of people setting cooperatively owned farms
- Removing shareholder incentive from corporations
- Patagonia, voting stock owned by a trust, non-voting stock owned by a 501(c)(4)
- Triodos Bank, shares owned by a foundation
- Co-ops, and specifically meta-foundations that support setting up and managing co-ops in specific fields
- Government
- Art
- Organisations
- Personal
- Manufacturing
- Housing
- Technology
- Hardware
- Communication
- Productivity
- Software
- Hardware
- Communal
- Public spaces
- Transportation
- Power
- Currency (banking, payments, etc.)
Other resources
See also, similar projects, relevant organisations, etc.: