#1
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i look around, i look around, and i see a lot of new faces...
that means a lot of you are living in societies in evident decay & degeneracy.

i expect we'll see alternative solutions sprouting all around us in 2012, so investigating their characteristics & connections may prove fruitful.


time banking is as good a place to start as any.




a time bank is a platform for matching needs with abilities, and a catalyst for forming interconnections in a community.

it seems to exist in the ambiguous space between market exchange and gift economy.

the video touches on an interesting question - how can timebanks go beyond personal matchups to to take on more complex projects (eg building a house or managing a community farm)?

timebank as incubation space for worker-owner coops resonates today (JOBS), but offshoots that jump out to me are tool libraries (segueing nicely into a productive ecosystem) and autoreduction.


these are fertile grounds for discussion; imo the (soft) focus should be on how these various solutions knit & weave together into a ( )hole.


if you need some ideas to start with, these guys have lots
#2
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heres the guy who promulgated the current time banking model talking about it



i'm a little bit leery of the model's emphasis on the NGO model, especially the reliance of a lot of time banks on grants (things like licensing fees for time bank accounting software don't help). that said, any method of valuing so-called "informal" or "household" economic activites (really these are core economic activities) in a way that lets people get things they need from performing those activities is an improvement.

i dont have any good ideas on how to turn time banking from a reformist project into a genuinely revolutionary project, but i think disconnecting from the government grant system and hooking time banks up to local agriculture and shelter building has to be part of it, so that people can get the necessities of life completely outside the corporate economy
#3
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shennong posted:
that said, any method of valuing so-called "informal" or "household" economic activites (really these are core economic activities) in a way that lets people get things they need from performing those activities is an improvement.




I was thinking this too...
perhaps you could have a theoretical currency that accounts for such activities in its value?

not only would this give autonomous timebanks the option to synchronize + percolate with each other, but could potentially allow workers trapped in the low-wage capitalist economy to quantify their exploitation, with mischievious results

shennong posted:
i dont have any good ideas on how to turn time banking from a reformist project into a genuinely revolutionary project, but i think disconnecting from the government grant system and hooking time banks up to local agriculture and shelter building has to be part of it, so that people can get the necessities of life completely outside the corporate economy



obv the capitali$t esconomy is all-pervasive, so we need a multi-pronged offensive to clear some space from it.
timebanks are great but there needs to be muliple rolling fronts (which is why i talk about hackerspaces & blah blah in the same breath)

i doubt such a setup allows us to avoid confronting capital (like the autonomists in the 70s did), but i think in 'cold war' situations it shifts the entity under siege from us to them

#4
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shennong posted:



emphasis on the NGO model


licensing fees for time bank accounting software


"I am white and Jewish." - Edgar Cahn

#5
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lol, ya. i see timebanking as one community credit tool that can be appropriated and altered to serve genuinely anticapitalist needs. i think it's a useful example of a really-existing modern community credit system that we can learn from rather than a model to be slavishly imitated. Cahn et al have jumped through all the regulatory hoops already so time banks are already enshrined in law as untouchable by taxation authority, which could potentially provide air cover for legitimately revolutionary projects using Cahn's phraseology as dissimulation imo
#6
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systems dynamics is the stuff that large organizations and engineers alike use. for optimization, there's linear programming. the original textbook on the latter can be downloaded for free and includes all kinds of practical problems that mostly came from the experience with war planning and involve distance, time, etc. the guy that wrote it, Dantzig, also co-authored a really cool book on explicitly utopian urban planning that has been long out of print, but can be found used