 In Part One of this series, I promised I would:
...explore some non-violent ways we
can incapacitate the power elite, using this 4-step process,
- Identify the vulnerabilities: Fragility, overconcentration,
ignorance, arrogance, lack of diversity, centralization, lack of
redundancy, popular disgust, anxiety, dissatisfaction or apprehension,
ill-preparedness, lack of agility, overcomplexity (left hand doesn't
know what the right is doing), lack of imagination and creativity, etc.
- Acquire resources stealthily: Put together what you need
without letting your target know you're doing so, or even what you are
capable of doing with them.
- Develop solutions that exploit the vulnerabilities.
- Rigorously assess the likelihood of those solutions working
effectively (incapacitating the incumbent power), and deploy only the
high-probability solutions, quickly, before the incumbents have time to
react and defend themselves.
and
introduce 'innovations' that make our world a better place to live. The
focus will be on new technology, new infrastructure, new models and new
processes that replace the vulnerable ones that are the causes of so
many of today's global problems -- and ensuring that these replacements
are Open Source, and stay in the hands of all the world's people.
In a brilliant and famous Wired interview
with Freeman Dyson by Stewart Brand, Dyson identifies "a return to
village culture" as the most important opportunity of the 21st century,
driven by three technologies: global access to free information, local
energy self-sufficiency, and biotech, which together could "gentrify"
(bring affluence, population stability and ecological awareness to) the
villages. Dyson predicts the "collapse of the market economy" will
bring about this opportunity, in 'rising from the ashes' style. He's a
great believer in technology, and impatient with and pessimistic about
our political and economic systems, but he has faith in human
ingenuity, and the power of multiple, coordinated small-scale
experiments.
| But suppose if, instead of waiting for the collapse of the market economy and the crumbling of the power elite, we brought about that collapse, guerrilla-style,
by making information free, by making local communities energy
self-sufficient, and by taking the lead in biotech away from government
and corporatists (the power elite) by working collaboratively, using
the Power of Many, Open Source, unconstrained by corporate allegiance,
patents and 'shareholder expectations'? |
Let's picture what that would look like: Imagine Canada, for example,
with its 30 million people living in 200,000 communities with an
average of 150 people each. Thirty people in each community work as
partners in Natural Enterprises in the information sector -- teaching,
training, and managing the technology, information and learning
resources of the community. Twenty people in each community work as
partners in Natural Enterprises in the energy sector -- operating and
maintaining the community wind turbines, solar collectors, geothermal
pipes and other renewable energy infrastructure that sustains the
community. Thirty people in each community work as partners in Natural
Enterprises in the biotech sector -- growing and reforming proteins to
produce foods, fibers, medicines and materials to feed and clothe the
residents of the community, maintain its physical infrastructure and
keep its citizens healthy. Everyone in the community plays a role in
looking after each other's well-being, raising the children, cooking,
cleaning, and entertaining. Each community is completely
self-sufficient for all of its essential needs. Its information, any
surplus energy and biological products, and its artistic creations and
productions are shared freely with other communities. Young people are
the connectors and meme-spreaders in the community -- part of their
education is traveling and staying in other communities to find the
people they want to live with and to learn hands-on how to make a
living by trying out roles in each sector of the local economy. No one
commutes and there is no need for private transportation other than
bicycles -- solar-powered vehicles are borrowed as needed for visits to
other communities.
The first part of this guerrilla undermining of the
corporatist-controlled 'market' economy -- the 'making free' of
information -- is already underway. The war for free information
between corporatists and people is occurring on multiple fronts: The
attempt by large corporations to patent everything so it cannot be used
by the people without paying an exorbitant and prohibitive fee; the
attempt by large corporations to ban file-sharing without first paying
extortion to the intellectual property 'owner' (little of which
actually goes to the artist); the attempt to make more of the
information on the Internet 'pay for itself'. But the people are
winning this guerrilla war.
I spent all day Saturday watching the first skirmishes in the second
part of this guerrilla war, at a jam-packed information session on Wind
Power, sponsored by the Canadian government, principally as an
initiative to help enrich struggling family farms. Three hundred and
fifty people packed a conference centre in a little town northwest of
Toronto, and two hundred more were turned away, hoping to learn how to
generate their own electricity, or to set up local energy co-ops in
their communities. They were unfazed by the challenges -- a five year
process to locate the ideal site for wind turbines and to navigate the
bureaucracy. The message repeated by the presenters over and over again
during the day: Do this bottom-up, including your neighbours so this becomes a community project.
If the community supports the project, the bureaucracy can be worked
through more quickly, and the effort needed to succeed can be split up
among more community members. The technology already exists, and is
being improved at an astonishing rate. The economics of community-based
all-renewable-resource energy production are already here. A
representative of a local credit union, who has studied the European
model by which local community energy co-ops are funded, was on hand
with his chequebook and encouragement -- money to pay for the
infrastructure is available, no strings attached. The only obstacles
are time, and paperwork, and...
One extremely agitated gentleman kept trying to sabotage the day's
events. Having all these local, piecemeal energy producers was 'grossly
inefficient', he said, and for that reason (and because they are
'eyesores') they should be banned, in favour of large mega-farms of energy owned by private industry. Private industry would pick more 'efficient' sites, get economies of scale, and they 'knew the business' and would be motivated by profits
to run these farms in a more businesslike way. This guy was utterly
outnumbered on Saturday, but watch out -- as word gets out that we can
all be energy self-sufficient, and own our own 'utility', getting
energy at cost (which is plummeting), the energy companies will join
the war on the other side. They have billions to lose, and will not
stand idly by as the peasants take back the means of their own
production. In Canada, as in most of Europe, we have a liberal
tradition in government, and governments here have ordered the owners
of 'the grid' to allow local energy co-ops and even individual
producers to feed their energy into it, and to compensate them at full
retail price for what they contribute to the grid, on a 'net-zero'
basis (if over time they actually put more into the grid than they take
out, they only get a lower 'producer price' for the excess, but if they
put in as much as they take out, they pay zero, not even a 'rent' for
the use of the grid lines). It is doubtful that in the US and other
conservative anti-government countries, the government will be as
cooperative, and the struggle faced by local energy co-ops will be
long, expensive and litigious.
We are not nearly so far along in the third part of Dyson's vision for
a community-based post-capitalist, post-'market' economy -- biotech.
This will be a more difficult and complicated process. The key players
-- farmers and scientists -- currently don't work together directly.
The middle-man is the giant biotech firms whose answer is patented
genetically manufactured foods providing monstrous revenues for the
corporations and equally monstrous dangers to the natural world. These
companies are working hand-in-glove with the equally giant
agri-business conglomerates who want to make agriculture into a factory
business where farmers are merely dependent employees who do what they
are told, where automation is used to minimize the number of jobs that
need to be created, where horrific animal cruelty is just 'a cost of
doing business', and where all the profits accrue to the large
corporate owners -- a replay of the feudal system.
I have argued in past articles that scientists will play a pivotal role
in either averting or causing the collapse of civilization culture,
because they 'own' the assets -- scientific knowledge -- that could
either allow us to create a sustainable economy (if they're in our
hands), or contribute directly to the escalation of the current
unsustainable economy past the point of no return (if they're in the
hands of greedy corporatists and their politician handmaidens).
Developments to date are discouraging -- most scientists are in the
employ of corporatists, or tied up in academia where their knowledge
produces almost no social value. And scientists in past have often been
politically naive or at best neutral, and ignorant about economics. But
there are signs this is changing -- organizations like the Union of
Concerned Scientists are agitating for drastic economic changes to make
our world sustainable, and credible scientists no longer work for the
Bush Administration, Davos and other corporatist-controlled political
entities who try to make them mouthpieces and apologists for
corporatist excess. And as conservative as farmers have been in recent
years, they were critical supporters of the union and co-op movements
that led to the New Deal and almost all modern legislation for social
responsibility.
It's time for us to get farmers and scientists working together to
undermine the corporatist Ag-Bio stranglehold by creating an
innovative, entrepreneurial, people-controlled, socially and
environmentally responsible and sustainable Ag-Bio coalition, to bring
the third part of Dyson's dream to fruition. We're winning the battle
for free information, and we've turned the corner towards freeing
ourselves from the Big Energy-controlled grid. But we need to do a lot
of work on this third front, where we start now from a position of
weakness. If we can succeed in this, we will have dealt a fatal
incapacitating blow to the existing power elite, and created the
foundations for a truly sustainable and democratic economy to supplant
the one that now threatens us all.
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2:30:48 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
