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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

I think money isn't the issue here. Freedom is the issue.

If you're a regular person:

- You have no free time because you have to work non stop just to pay the bills (especially rent)

- You have no free speech because if you say the wrong thing at work, you might get fired. Workplaces tend to severely limit individuals' ability to express themselves freely (because people have their livelihoods at stake). It's usually a very tense environment.

- For a lot of whitecollar jobs, you don't even have freedom of thought. You can't do your work while thinking about other stuff; your mind has to be focused 100% on the work (and in a lot of industries, the work is increasingly mechanical and repetitive).

The problem is not lack of money itself, it's lack of freedom. The only way to get freedom is through having a lot of money.

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You work no more now than ever before.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USAAHWEP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/image.php?g=d5P

Very few people work non-stop and those folks tend to earn a lot of money (e.g. bankers), which kind of goes against your narrative.

I'm not sure what you mean by free speech, can you clarify? Are you referring to various government restrictions on commercial speech?

A lot of people work non-stop and don't get paid much - Especially outside of the US.

A lot of software developers learn new tools outside of work to keep their skills up to date or they have side projects. Many developers (myself included) work 80 hours per week. The pay is typically good but not that good if you count it on an hourly basis.

You can lower the importance of money by having great public services that will be paid collectively.

What would it take for a community to "break off" the grid and not need money? Land for agriculture, solar panels, 3d-printers for parts, water filtration, AI and robots for automation (maybe the robots can build more robots, as well). What a single person can't do, maybe a hundred or a thousand can. Some technologies are converging towards independence, there might be a way to escape the system as it is now. Maybe we get to see various lifestyle experiments popping up, as long as the communities can take care of themselves, and seek independence.

I think independence research should compliment UBI as a strategy for the automation age. Give people the necessary means of production to provide for themselves absent wages.

You may want to look more into communes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commune) to see what does and does not work about this arrangement. Unfortunately, most of these examples are going to be skewed because of the selection factor (what causes a group of people to recuse themselves from wider society? Radical politics, religion, or often just cults), but there's still something to be learned there.

While technology makes a self-sustaining community require less human labor for food, water, shelter, etc, there's still the issue of technical maintenance. 3d printer filament, machines parts and repair labor aren't free.

For another perspective, you could also look into the Seasteading movement. I can't say I'm too well versed in this field beyond a passing interest, but I think there should be quite a bit of information on the logistics of it. The governance (or lack thereof) would be the interesting part.

You can escape the system, but you don't want to. It would mean giving up far more than you thought.

There are people that have done something like this, such as the various community buyouts in Scotland of which Eigg is the most prominent and successful. And they're "broken off" in a very literal sense - an island.

But they've not forsworn money, because you still need to buy things from off the island like electronics and oil products. And they still have to pay tax.

And... then what? You get a small community where some people will establish themselves as leaders and be in control. It would be worse.

You could be right, a small community might be limiting and controlling, but my basic intuition was to divide the power and protect people from large companies. Up until the age of automation it was not possible to divide concentrated power, because things were too interdependent on each other. If there are ways to live without depending on others, communities of like minded people will surely form to build their "utopias".

Good point, but the rich don't want to lower the importance of money, they want to increase it.

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