Resilient communities

Killing as many birds with as few stones as possible, I’m introducing the concept of resilient communities by posting a couple of recent posts from John Robb’s excellent blog, www.GlobalGuerrillas.typepad.com. Robb is the author of Brave New War, a look at the evolution of warfare into “open-source” conflicts.

His subtitle is “Networked tribes, systems disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures.” Fair enough.

Resilient communities, loosely defined, are the sorts of self-contained, locally oriented towns and regions that existed all over this country before about WWII, and have collapsed, disappeared and fragmented since, for a variety of reasons. Like many other areas around the country, northeastern New Mexico had a larger population 100 years ago than it does now.

Peak oil, more than anything [but certainly not exclusively], is rapidly moving life back the other way, away from WalMart and the 3,000-mile salad: accelerating relocalization in a computerized world. It’s fascinating, at least, and Robb is one of the thinkers worth paying attention to.

From www.GlobalGuerrillas.typepad.com:

RC JOURNAL: Accelerating the Development of Resilient Communities

One of the major attributes of resilient communities is that can locally produce most of what they need (food, energy, and products).  Needless to say, the transition to local production won't happen overnight.  Let's explore this.

Most of the efforts to increase local production, to date, have been either:

The result of community action.  Efforts like the transition towns movement.  

Development driven.  Communities that have built from the ground up with resilience in mind, i.e. agricultural urbanism.

Unfortunately, these early efforts have been sporadic and the results haven't reached what's needed to become fully resilient.  Why?  The reason is that these efforts are being attempted early in the cycle, before the trends that make transition inevitable have fully matured.  

These trends include:

• Expensive energy.  Energy costs are climbing (with occasionally spike), but they haven't reached a level that makes local production much more attractive than global production, yet.  They will.
• Technology.  The costs of producing goods locally are rapidly decreasing due to new technologies.  For example, with desktop fabrication, we are right at the cusp of a rapid increase in efficiency/capability -- the equivalent of 1980 in the personal computer industry. 
• Disruptions.  Shortages, panics, and cascading failures.  We had a taste of a big one in 2008 in the financial industry and lots of small ones.  More to come since the global system is only becoming more interconnected and unstable as time progresses.
• Economic failure/D2 (the second global depression).  There's a strong argument that we are already in the midst of a second global depression. As economic failure intensifies on the global stage (debt, default, income stratification, fraud, etc.), the need for local economic activity will intensify.
• Global guerrilla insurgencies. Low grade, crime fueled insurgencies that spread like the plague.  Think Mexico.  Shootings, kidnappings, hijackings, etc.

There's many more (political chaos, the inevitable global pandemic, sovereign default, the disappearing middle class, etc.), but these are some of the top ones.

Fortunately, there may be another way to get resilient communities off the ground faster than waiting for the trends driving their development to become inexorable (and in the process lose many, many people to the encroaching failure).  The fastest way I can think of is to use the Internet to build a system that fosters their development (what other method can go from scratch to 500 million participants in three years).  

The system I propose is a fully functional economy built as an Internet service.  I believe that almost all of the elements need to build this, launch it, and gain widespread adoption are already available today.  Further, there are people ready to build it.  The only limitation is the funding needed to exploit the opportunity.

Tuesday, 16 November 2010

EaaS (economy as a service) JOURNAL: Behavior Blocs

Here's a simple way to regularize demand and rationalize patterns of consumption (for rivalrous goods): behavior blocs.  

A behavior bloc:

• Is an opt-in service.
• Is a set of behaviors (things you do and buy) that are connected to a specific goal/objective that you aspire to.  i.e. Local food/production.  Efficient energy use.  
• Uses MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) dynamics, social meta-currencies, and social networks to manage, measure, and reward activity that aligns with the goal.  Far, far beyond simple local currency and loyalty schemes.

The benefits of a behavior bloc within a commercial context include:

• Regularization of demand (frequency, scale, duration, etc.).  Stable targets that can be planned against.
• Can rapidly shift demand to specific goods/services that don't yet exist.
• Can disrupt existing patterns of commerce.

An economy as a service (EaaS) provides the tools that make designing, launching, and growing a behavior bloc easy.

          We'll be exploring these concepts, both in principle as it applies to strategies for coping with Peak Oil and economic [let's call 'em] hard times; and in specific as it applies on the ground, here in Taylor Springs, NM, and, I hope, in your home community.

Thanks for reading.