 
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 92 17:04:18 EDT
From: wce@hogbbs.scol.pa.us (Bill Eichman)
Subject: miraculous resurrection....
To: +dist+~js9b/Public/camc.dl@andrew.cmu.edu
Message-Id: 
Organization: The Heart of Gold BBS, Lemont PA
Comments: Validated

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Pioneering The 21st Century -- Bill Eichman -- wce@hogbbs.scol.pa.us
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>From: mike@highlite.gotham.com (Mike Wiik)
>Is the CAMC mailing list dead?

Just testing..... ;-}  It was real quiet there for a couple weeks.

>1)      Land Ownership
>I'm not sure this is as important as Bill seems to think. Space
>is important; imho it might be better to try to set up something
>in a developed area (such as leasing a block of townhouses for 10
>years BEFORE they are built: this should allow a slight redesign
>for inner doorways between the houses,etc). I'd like to be a part
>of a high-tech community, I'm not so sure I wanna dig sewer drains
>on farmland somewhere back of beyond.

Using a more urban base for these corporate tribes is something I'm
strongly hoping will happen-- I admit to preferring a rural approach, as
I (a) grew up in the country, and (b) anticipate collapse, civil war,
and a freejack style competition between the classes, and I want to
avoid it, thus I don't really want to live near the sprawl, personally.
I prefer to end up in the greater freedom of the country, even if this
means I'm a bumpkin.

The ideal solution, as I see it, is a network of many different types
of communities/corptribes--- large and small, rural and urban and
suburban, hi tech and lo tech, villages on the land, on and under the
sea, in the cities, and villages seeking to colonize untapped niches
everywhere on the planet. I'd like to see a "time-sharing" system
whereby communities could exchange members on a steady basis, giving
everyone a type of 'vacation', the chance to explore and continue their
education, the chance to travel extensively without giving up the
security of employment contracts.

The ideal starting combination, as I see it, is an urban compound type
of place in a type of sister-relationship with a more rural community.
In effect this creates a micro-model of a traditional city-- a
concentrated, centralized urban site where specialized urban functions
are carried out, in relationship with a decentralized rural support
base, which provides, for example, high quality food and certain types
of manufactured goods to the urban comunity, while gaining the urban
benefits of more intimate access to the marketplace and information
streams.

Have you heard of "co-housing"? There is a book with this name that
discusses this european architecture and housing movement, in which a
group of home-buyers form a co-operative to buy a plot of land, develop
it at rates far cheaper than they would be forced to pay individually,
ending up with a type of townhouse community, with an enclosed park and
gardens, at a much lower cost, and, they claim, with a greater sense of
neighborhood loyalty and unity.

As far as ownership goes--- almost certainly things should start by
beginning to band together in teams, renting space, and beginning to
train and experiment under the restrictions of rental, rather than
ownership.

Just because I think ownership is important doesn't mean that rental, or
other strategies, couldn't be just as effective. I try to distinguish
between my preferences, and the whole gamut of oppurtunities, but i
guess i can't keep my preferences from coloring my ideas.

>2)      Practical People
>Either here or in Alt.cyberpunk.movement, Bill (I think(?)) mentioned
>the need for practical people to start something like this. Imho,
>practical people buy a SFH, raise 2.2 kids, get born, get schooled,
>work, retire, die. The cycle repeats. What I wanna do is escape the
>cycle. So I guess I'm impractical, by my own definition...

I guess what I mean is that we need to look for the most practical and
skilled of dreamers, and try to become practical dreamers ourselves. I
know I'm a dreamer. I know the people I enjoy most are dreamers. But
some dreamers are too flighty, or too emotionally damaged, to handle
responsibility. And we're going to need to handle responsibility....

>I.e., it's gonna be real difficult. Working it out involves getting
>different people to work together not all of whom are going to be
>practical or hardworking or have lots of money. Maybe we could
>examine some really difficult problems and see how they might be
>resolved. I've lived in group houses before: there were lots of
>problems. Back then I made about $150 a week and paid $80 a month
>in rent. In many ways, I was happier then than now. Somewhere

It is going to be extremely difficult-- as hard as the effort to
colonize the new world, I'm guessing, once we get into the deepest
elements of this whole corporate village/microcity idea and it's plans
for eventual colonization of the ocean.

Just as you say, in the beginning even little things like getting real
co-operation, responsibility, trust, etc from the starting members will
be terrifically difficult.

I've spent a lot of time studying group housing, a lot like what you
mention, I imagine, as a sort of miniature model of the types of
interactions and problems we can expect in these communities. I think a
lot of the problems that you find in collegiate group houses, bickering,
job shirking, sexual shenanegins, rent deadbeats, the whole nine yards,
we can expect especially in the earliest, crudest phases of the first
experiments.

I have the opinion that _contracts_ between the people involved are the
minimum essential first step. People who can't live up to the contracts
won't be able to live up to the demands of starting and running their
own business, and certainly won't be able to fulfill the obligations of
membership in a corptribe.

Do you have any suggestions for any "really difficult situations" that
we can try to theortically resolve?

As I see it, one of the benefits of these types of community/tribe
experiments is to provide us a lifestyle that makes up in simple
pleasures and access to high quality equipment what it lacks in emphasis
on comsumption, commuting, sitcoms, and the like. I spent a number of
years as an indebted, salaried married man, living the great american
lifestyle, spending the money for the appropriate consumer goods-- about
six years ago I rejected that life, turned to full time self-employment,
and simplifyed my lifestyle to focus my money, reduce my taxes to a
government I despise, and concentrate my energies on studies and
subjects that I really value.... such as these projects.

Later, Bill


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