Foreward!

Human history is a mix of excellence and terror - but the good news is that humanity appears to be moving forward. This book is about my personal experiment of making a better world - a lifelong experiment much like Ghandi talked about in his autobiography - or like Buckminster Fuller described in his Critical Path. Both were guinea pigs in a paradigm of change, and so am I - so that my logos, pathos, and ethos is consistent. I started a group called Open Source Ecology - and our tangible project is the Global Village Construction Set. We design and build open source industrial machines and publish the plans on the internet for free. The goal is lowering barriers to progress - progress being defined as transcending artificial scarcity. Humans have abundant resources - from first principles the sun shines 10k more times power to the surface of the earth than we currently use. With abundant energy, there should be abundant material prosperity. With material prosperity, there should in principle be the chance for all people to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives. It is not controversial that as a civilization - we should be able to do better than we are doing now.

This book is nothing new. Our goal is to synthesize human knowledge to explore what has worked historically to make a better world - and build on this knowledge to make a brighter future. Our unique value proposition is that this is not only a thought experiment - but an experiment in practice. In this book we propose a certain set of values and principles - and we aim to build communities based on these principles. The tangible outcome is the global villages of tomorrow - productive engines and building blocks of civilization. We are a civilization reboot experiment

Many attempts in this direction have been taken. From the soviet kolkhoz to the modern university campus - from the secular religion of technology as the new savior - to Disney's failed attempt of a futuristic city that ended up in the form of Epcot Center - to Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow - to successful economic free zones such as Hong Kong - or Gaviotas - the Village to Reinvent the World, and many others. The quest for a practical utopia exists.

Instead of utopias - we think of a practical transition and evolution of humanity. We believe that the key element that is missing today in the secular religions is sharing - the distribution of wealth to more people than today. This sharing thing is something we learn in kindergarten, and forget once we enter the workforce where dog eats dog. Humans have mastered production, in some way - but the missing link is distributio - wealth distributed far and wide like Jefferson talked about. Our way to that distribution is entrepreneurship - for distributed production and distributed economies. With advanced technology of today, there should be enough for everyone, and the pie can grow bigger.

We think that the most critical missing link in today's economy is that bit of love, caring, and sharing - and that love can be expressed in the open source economy. By the open source economy - we mean a paradigm where