Yeah. Out of the billions of people alive it amazes me that there are so few. Surely there are at least thousands of rational altruists that think it’s important to ‘change the world’, so why are so few coming to the same conclusion as me (I.E wouldn’t we be SO MUCH MORE productive if we lived together)?
No. You could also go for a walk outside. Ideally the community would be 20+ people and have enough rooms/areas so you wouldn’t feel trapped in a small space with someone.
From what I can see, the best stuff usually comes from teams working together IRL. Two examples I like are: 1. Xerox PARC 2. the development of the Amiga computer. People that have been involved in projects like that often say that it wouldn’t have been possible without the community and the synergy of being around people that care about the same stuff all the time.
I think almost everyone that has worked with people IRL on projects that they all care about will say that there is a kind of energy and excitement there that is much greater than with any online collaboration.
Because they understand how the mind works and cognitive bias and emotions. And because their rational goal is for the greater good it’s easier to avoid being selfish.
the nicest solutions i can think of, always tend to more possibilities than less. although i am confined to one “home” my whole life (…i mean: never more than one at the same time), i always dreamt of more locations in the world where i could go when i have had enough of the same place every day.
so the optimal solution for me would be to have a network of branch offices where i can meet like-minded people to work together on projects for a limited time. but i also need a retreat with no human contact at all. it is so delightful for the soul, for thinking and creativity, to have the certainty, that no human being will disturb you, that you will even hear no human voice or no human induced noise unless you freely leave your hermitage. i hope future generations will realize that our concepts of “home” are outdated. i hope they will consider the world as their home and the soulmates they find, no matter if those soulmates live far away on another continent.
you are right with all the pros of living and working together but i think radivis is right as well and you underestimate the cons. if you decide to settle down somewhere and put energy and work into it, the options to leave, whenever you want, tend to zero. and if you feel coerced to get along with the people you live with, no rationality and altruism and idealism could prevent tension and hostility. even in this thread is tension, although everybody is free to decide not to read or write here.
have you read the book “the beach” by alex garland? (the movie is not sufficient)
what do you think of my idea to have more than one home and one workstation?
if you imagine that you have to drive an hour to reach the next “transhuman -base” with a park of soundproof apartment- cubes and common areas for work and recreation would it be sufficient for what you have in mind?
I’m not fussy. I think with the right people it would work anywhere. It would be nice to be able to grow food and look towards self-sufficiency, so warm climate and water source. It’s probably a good idea not to be somewhere with an evil government, so avoid USA and Russia. Personally I’d like to be near or in a big city, but that’s not essential.
Sure, that would be nice. But I’m thinking we don’t even have one such place, so let’s do that first, then we can say to people ‘look, it works, it’s easy to do, you can do it too’
in a way it is a different story. even if you watch the long version of the movie and all the important deleted scenes, you will not have a clue about daffy and richard. for the movie they add scenes, that in the worst case could twist the meaning and exclude persons and all the important events and thoughts and dreams concerning richard and daffy. it is a real mindfuck, when you finally understand the meaning of both protagonists.
heh. I dunno. It probably wont matter to us. But seeing how the US treats radical people that want to change the world (e.g. Aaron Swarts, Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, etc), It’s probably sensible to locate to somewhere with a reputation for being more forward thinking. Iceland?
With all due respect, growing food there could be slightly problematic
But in any case living together is unexpectedly difficult when you are no longer a student. After that, when you have family and “duties” and roots, even moving to another place is not easy, and living in a community, especially trying to be self-sufficient, which may include getting up early to plough… There is a reason it is not popular. Having enough resources (or, simply speaking, money) to live like lords in some secluded castle, yes, that would help. But we don’t have money, do we. And even then someone would have to wash the dishes. Maybe robots? But we don’t have them either, and even if we started a community to build them, when would we have time, when there is all that ploughing to do? I mean, we’re here to invent the future. Building self-sufficient community will be conterproductive, unless what you want is having just that, self-sufficient community. You will spend too much time doing mundane chores instead of thinking about the future.
And governments… aren’t all of them evil? You’d need one that does not penalize (with taxes) barter or selling food you grew on a small, local scale. Etc. For starters. And be sure that it won’t change with introduction of TTIP, or whatever the current acronym for that is.
I’d say what you need is a motivated virtual community to begin with, motivated, dedicated and working towards better future and solving problems of living together before it is actually attempted. I mean, you’d really need to think it through.
Yes, that’s how we can start realistically. If we cannot even create a viable flourishing virtual community, then it seems rather unlikely that just placing all of us in one location suddenly will fix all of our problems (rather than amplifying them).
Our most important resources are time, information, money, and energy (motivation). Getting people together may create more energy and bundle information together more effectively, but unless there is a plan to optimize time and money constraints, things won’t work out nicely.
Ya. I mention Iceland just as an example of a less evil government.
Yeah, ideally it should be somewhere with lots of space, so we can expand and it would be possible for families to move there.
Being totally self-sufficient is not super important to me, especially to begin with. I think it’s more realistic for the community to make money by working together in some kind of tech/media company. If/when we grow any food, I imagine we would use hydroponics, so high levels of automation and no ploughing.
This is an introduction I wrote:
Reality Adventuring Party. Altruistic Quests. Killing monsters and sharing the loot.
Let’s get some cool people together and live in a tribe / family / team / intentional community. Experiment with better ways to live, and make the world a cooler place. We’ll work together to survive and look after each other. This could include: farming, making software, making art … Any way we can harness our creativity / brainpower / muscle power / willpower in order to build the world we want. (We could do anything (as long as it’s ethical)). I’m confident that a team of smart, passionate people, using the synergy created by living and working in the same space, can come up with lots of ways to survive and have fun at the same time.
Compare this idea with live-in hack/art spaces where individuals come and go, paying a small sum of money per day to cover costs. This system can create cool communities, but it puts pressures on members to have ‘day jobs’ (which are often a boring waste of time). We want to avoid this.
Think more along the lines of an RPG adventuring party. killing monsters, healing each other, sharing the loot. Each member has different skills that help the team. They succeed or fail as a group. Nobody is left behind.
No practical details have been fixed yet. Options we’re considering: Renting/buying a house/warehouse, squatting, tent/yurt village, nomadic tribe, private island. The location will depend on the option we pick, and the consensus of the group. We’re prepared to move anywhere in the world.
Why?
I’ve always felt more productive and more powerful when working in a group. I want my life to be optimal - so that means having the people who are working on the same projects around me all the time. Some of this can be achieved by online collaboration, but the effect is even greater when the people are in the same physical space. It allows a much better interface between the people. E.g. writing on white boards, group chats, looking over someone’s shoulder at what they’re working on, discussing projects during meals. Similar effects are possible online, but so much better in real life. I like to think of people as the neurons of a hive mind. Working together they are greater than the sum of their parts.
Most modern mainstream lifestyles encourage isolation, people living in small family units and selling their time to a boss (see also: Problems with Profit Motive). I’m sure people can be much happier and more productive when living and working in larger communities.
I look at the world and it saddens me that there is so much injustice, oppression, suffering, greed, stupidity and violence. I’d like to see humans doing a better job of things/society/politics. One of the projects I want to work on with others is improving this situation. So as above, I think the most efficient way for me to work on this problem is in a real-life community.
Starting a community and getting our own space is also probably a good step towards fixing some of these problems. It gives us the control to experiment with new types of society/economy/politics. It gives us our own little world/space where we can try the things we want with minimal interference from pre-existing powers. If we can build something there that we think is an improvement, others will look at us and see that our ways are better, then they can try the same things.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller
Join us
At the moment we’re just a small online community. The next step is to get more people involved. I think more people will give us a better chance of making the project work. More knowledge, more ideas, more hands, more options. More synergy!
How many people will be involved? I’d like at least 12. There is no upper limit. Supposing 99 people are really keen on the idea, and can agree upon a location and are ready to move; could 99 people that only know each other from an online community, arrive at a location and manage to make something like this work smoothly? I don’t know! On the one hand it’s exciting: ‘imagine what 99 people can do together!’, on the other hand organising that many people into an efficient group could present a lot of problems. Obviously a lot depends on the people, let’s see how it goes.
Everyone has something to offer. Everyone is welcome. You don’t need any money or any particular skill set. We think a broad mix of people types is important to make this work optimally. I’d say our group is more aligned with hippie / anarchist / squatter mentality (but find out for yourself).
If you’re interested, come and talk to us. Say ‘hi’ on our email list. Share your thoughts/ideas. Ask any questions you might have. Tell us about other groups on the same wavelength. Or if you prefer, feel free to contact one of us individually (You can find our contact details from the profiles on this wiki and say ‘hullo’ to someone). We also like to have discussions by voice. We use mumble for this.
If you’re interested in this type of thing, but for some reason you don’t feel like this particular manifestation is right for you, you’re still welcome to talk to us. We’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions (please speak freely, even if you only have criticisms!). Feel free to post about other projects. We’d be happy if this list became a hub for people thinking along the same lines, and maybe independent groups will form from it.
We think it’s important that everyone involved gets to know each other online a bit first, and make sure everyone is on the same page. (Hopefully we’ll all be friends, but this isn’t essential!)
Nothing is set in stone at the moment. Everything is up for discussion. A lot depends on the people that will be living in the community. How many will join us? How many will be 100% committed and ready to move? Where do people want to live? What skills and resources will we have available to us? As the group grows, we’ll get a better idea of what people want, and start to add more details to the plan.
“make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone”.
― Richard Buckminster Fuller
One of the main points is to be more time efficient together than we are separately. How many of ‘us’ currently need ‘day-jobs’, and how much time is that taking up?
heh. How we should do politics is a big question that we’d need to answer, but actually I don’t think we need to answer it in detail before starting a community.
Yeah, that’s one way to get things started, but it won’t end up with what I want if non of those people are prepared to move from their current location. There is also the issue that text based virtual communities are only attractive to a certain kind of person. A lot of people that would be good for a real life community are uninterested in virtual forums because all they see is talking, and they want to be in the ‘real’ world doing/building stuff they can see/touch. So virtual forums should definitely not be the only source of people for this project.
I see that you are passionate about this idea and you do make this feel exciting and very worthwhile. In principle, I would be willing to join such an effort, if
There was a really good plan
The people were into character development and had excellent social skills (which excludes the majority of people I know)
People mainly joined for the common vision, not out of desperation about their own problems or the problems of the world
The participants would be willing to work hard and to compromise in order to establish common projects that actually do something, instead of focusing on their own private passions (which is something that is quite challenging for me)
The community has something which creates cohesion, for example shared values
I suppose it’s difficult to find enough people who satisfy all, or even most of these criteria to a sufficient degree.
The difficulty of turning such concepts into a reality, is why people still join boring companies just to get a day job that allows then to have a moderately convenient life. A company binds people together through the common necessity of having to make money. This is not a pleasant force binding people together, but it works to some degree, and makes things get done, even under adverse circumstances. Therefore, it is quite understandable that people want to avoid such situations and desire a way of life that is less determined by economic constraints. For example, by spontaneously becoming rich, which explains the attractiveness of lotteries.
Anyway, I don’t see how a bunch of not-really-rich people could avoid the necessity to have day-jobs (without the deus ex machine of a sufficient unconditional basic income). What may be achieved under the right circumstances, is a minimization of the time people have to deal with unpleasant work. That can be done by reducing the time people work overall, or it can be achieved by managing work in optimal ways, so that it becomes pleasant almost all the time.
However, even that is not what I would find most appealing right now. What I have in mind is making as much of a positive impact on the world as I am able to – even if that means doing a lot of unpleasant things. I just want to become more effective and efficient. If I could dedicate my full time to the areas in which my impact is maximal, this would be awesome, although it would also be very demanding and challenging.
I think the most positive future lies not in doing less work, but in doing more work that is more meaningful and fulfilling!
What needs to be reduced is the time we do work for the purpose of getting money. Science has proven that money is a quite problematic motivator. Nevertheless, we still require money in order to be able to do high quality work. This means, we should find ways that enable us to get the most money with the lest time and energy invested into thinking about how to make money from our work. If getting money was a pure side effect of work, that would be pretty ideal!
My reputation economy framework Quantified Prestige is supposed to make that much more feasible. Money would be created by people appreciating works born out of passion, not by selling goods and services out of uninspiring economic necessity. So, a reasonable approach would be to create some kind of community that works on establishing a reputation economy together, to bootstrap towards a situation that enables everyone to focus on their strengths and passions, which would maximize their effectiveness, impact, and fulfilment.
This is precisely what should be established, defined and set in stone before advertising existence (or even idea) of community. Otherwise there will be a lot of very surprised people coming to you for drugs and sex
I wish I could say there is hope, but the longer I live the longer it seems “it won’t end up with what you want” anyway. 99.99% guaranteed.
Also… the advantage of a company is that you get to go home after work. Even if the “work” is what you love, you will get at some point bored and want to get away.
And yet another thing that crossed my mind, I find the idea of “nests” (Stranger in a Strange Land) much more appealing. You don’t need to live there (unless you want to), but you know there is a place that you belong to. Many places. Distributed community
And last but not least,
Definitely, and virtual community should use all available comms, text being an option, but mainly video conferences… that’s level up from convenient text-based anonimity. Say, if there was a weekly video chat just to see if it makes sense… Evening, like 8PM GMT, middle of the week, like thursday? Technology to be determined, google hangaout I used in the past and it worked. Or join.me, or… something?
The reason I think we don’t have to plan all the politics in detail before starting is:
I think we can get away with only a few general abstract ideas/‘rules’ to start with. As long as everyone is on roughly the same ‘wavelength’. People can quickly get a decent idea about the type of community just by reading a bit about it and/or chatting to a member. Small groups like this can easily function efficiently with anarchy/do-ocracy.
Deciding everything in detail will take a lot of time/energy, so if it doesn’t need to be done yet, we should use the time on other things.
I imagine the need for more detailed rules/political systems will only start to arise when the community starts to grow larger (at least greater than 10?). I also suspect that it may be a bad idea to make too many decisions about politics before they are really needed. I think we should be flexible about things and work things out by trial and error. I’d be against setting anything in stone (well, probably setting ‘Be excellent to each other’ in stone would be OK (and maybe ‘One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated.’)
Just because you live around the people you ‘work’ with doesn’t mean you can’t take breaks from work. Go for a walk alone. Go out and socialise with other groups. Have a boardgame/movie night. Sit in your box alone. etc. Even in the ‘normal’ world, where the home box is usually separated from the work box by a few miles air gap, many people still have trouble separating and escaping ‘work’ stuff.
Yeah. I was gonna suggest that for the fractals (can I call them/you/us the fractals? heh). If people don’t feel the desire to do it on a regular basis we should at least do a one off. (In my experience Google hangouts is the best tech for this)
I like that. Calling us “fractals” does sound stylish and cute at the same time!
And yes, let’s do Google Hangouts, unless someone comes up with a good alternative. Best time for me would be Saturday, but other days are acceptable, too. What are your preferences?
I don’t really think community living is a matter of productivity or creativity but that of love, understanding, conflict, exposure to different cultures and personalities and personal growth. I can’t imagine a future where this kind of living isn’t more common.
That seems to be an interesting trend. It reminds me of the Hypercube @ SOHOland project, see
To me personally, productivity and creativity are quite important. Your other points
sound more like a crazy adventure. Sure, crazy adventures are awesome, but I’m not sure I’d want them every day. Perhaps I’m still too cautiious about such things, because I still suffer from complicated health issues. Being able to live in my own reality, and eat my own food are kinda important to me. I see the need to become more outgoing and adventurous, but I still live with the fear that this will end in a total catastrophe. It’s easier to survive a constant moderate catastrophe than a single total catastrophe.
But that’s what we are, one way of looking at us. So no problem