[ICTs-and-Society] Red Plenty by Nick Dyer-Witheford

[Bob Hughes]

Thanks for drawing attention to this very helpful article.

1. It touches on a question that's been bothering 
me for some time - where does the modern 
economy's intractably-large number of products 
come from (cited by Alec Nove and others in that 
vein)?

If the number is taken from current, capitalist 
economy, then it's a grossly inflated one because 
of the huge amount of duplication and wasteful 
differentiation. A socialist economy, surely, 
would vastly simplify the variety of products 
that are needed so that people can satisfy their 
needs and wants, and focus on getting those 
right, perhaps in a way similar to that of the 
World Wide Web consortium, for producing robust 
yet flexible standards.

Such an economy would also, automatically, have 
an enormously lower environmental impact.

2. This leads me to think that socialism should 
imply a "grammar of production and consumption", 
analogous to Chomsky's linguistics, in which 
finitely-many products give rise to infinitely 
many ways of living. The situation under 
capitalism is the exact opposite: infinitely many 
products yielding finitely-many (or rather 
finitely-few!) ways of living.

I recognise that this relates to Christopher 
Alexander's idea of 'pattern languages' in 
architecture - which have also been taken up in 
some parts of the software community.

I'd welcome any further information on either of the above points.

Best regards,

Bob Hughes

At 15:56 +0100 8/11/13, Z. Karvalics László wrote:
>Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
>	boundary="----=_NextPart_000_052D_01CEDC9B.1B0C0FE0"
>Content-Language: hu
>
>Dear Jakob,
>do you mean this one?
>Red Plenty Platforms
><http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/download/511/526>http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/download/511/526
>
>Best
>
>Laszlo
>From: Jakob Rigi [mailto:rigij at ceu.hu]
>Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2013 7:57 PM
>To: mathieu.oneil at anu.edu.au; discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
>Subject: [ICTs-and-Society] Red Plenty by Nick Dyer-Witheford
>
>
>Hi All,
>
>Just finished the reading the "Red plenty" by 
>Nick Dyer-Witheford. It incites revolutionary 
>aspirations with the most cogent arguments. It 
>is a kind of poetry of reason. Nick summarizing 
>the debate of cyber communism to date,  imagines 
>his own version of such a communism, which to my 
>mind is also the most realistic and complex 
>version.
>
>
>
>best
>
>Jakob
>
>
>
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