We start and fund a non-profit organization designed to produce basic living essentials and sell it at the cost to manufacture, regardless of market pressures. Then we all collectively buy from this non-profit and have a functional means of production legally owned and controlled by the people.
Set up strict rules to ban anyone who has ever worked in any upper management position in any for-profit basic essentials producing company from ever holding any position of power in the non-profit. No one from the corporate world at all. No one from any position in state or federal government. No lobbyists or consultants or members of their think tanks or any of their goons.
Use open source designs for the factories and everyone in the community works together to automate them as much as is possible.
You’ll have to make the way the non profit organisation is run or organised, also impossible to gather autocracy in.
Not just hard, impossible. No one should be able to mess with any aspects of the nonprofit, incorruptible, people-owned, affordable (NIPA) organisation.
And even if it is hard and not impossible, it should be made such that it is easier to get back to that situation, than to remove any of the NIPA aspects.
Yes this is what I’ve wanted to do for a long time, I think it’s basically inevitable that it’ll happen eventually but an actual effort to make it happen faster would be such a positive thing in the world.
The reason I say it’s inevitable is because design tools are getting consistently better, hardware is cheaper than ever, and ever more useful stuff is being added to the commons. With ai assisted CAD and ai assisted manufacture we’re going to see so many amazing new open source designs getting built.
People are going to start moving away from for-profit designed homegoods like washing machines and printers because they’ll be able to get a community designed and tested product modified to their specific needs and tastes then have that fabricated at whatever local firm or tinkerer you want to give your business to.
So I propose a solution:
We start and fund a non-profit organization designed to produce basic living essentials and sell it at the cost to manufacture, regardless of market pressures. Then we all collectively buy from this non-profit and have a functional means of production legally owned and controlled by the people.
Set up strict rules to ban anyone who has ever worked in any upper management position in any for-profit basic essentials producing company from ever holding any position of power in the non-profit. No one from the corporate world at all. No one from any position in state or federal government. No lobbyists or consultants or members of their think tanks or any of their goons.
Use open source designs for the factories and everyone in the community works together to automate them as much as is possible.
You’ll have to make the way the non profit organisation is run or organised, also impossible to gather autocracy in.
Not just hard, impossible. No one should be able to mess with any aspects of the nonprofit, incorruptible, people-owned, affordable (NIPA) organisation.
And even if it is hard and not impossible, it should be made such that it is easier to get back to that situation, than to remove any of the NIPA aspects.
Yes this is what I’ve wanted to do for a long time, I think it’s basically inevitable that it’ll happen eventually but an actual effort to make it happen faster would be such a positive thing in the world.
The reason I say it’s inevitable is because design tools are getting consistently better, hardware is cheaper than ever, and ever more useful stuff is being added to the commons. With ai assisted CAD and ai assisted manufacture we’re going to see so many amazing new open source designs getting built.
People are going to start moving away from for-profit designed homegoods like washing machines and printers because they’ll be able to get a community designed and tested product modified to their specific needs and tastes then have that fabricated at whatever local firm or tinkerer you want to give your business to.