The Venus Project is Coming Soon

If there's anything more powerful than money, it will be our self-motivation and sense of intrinsic value. Jacque Fresco, founder of The Venus Project knows this well enough and has been planning for a post-scarcity society for more than 80 years. He is 101 years old this year and I've been studying some of his works, and personally think that he's one of the sanest voices around (in an idealistic sense, probably not stoic / pragmatic, depending on your level of cynicism / optimism).

Before continuing, let's consider the following definition of a post-scarcity economy, found on Wikipedia:-

Post-scarcity is a hypothetical economy in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labour needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.

Post-scarcity is not generally taken to mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all consumer goods and services; instead, it is often taken to mean that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services, with writers on the topic often emphasising that certain commodities are likely to remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.

In Jacque Fresco's vision of a cybernation, where all the world's resources are transparent and made known, the biggest obstacle to such a plan is of course, to get all nations to disclose information of their repositories and silos. A resource-based economy is politically impossible to pull-off in the traditional sense where money and resources are mostly state-controlled.

Ever since getting my head into blockchains, I've been thinking that this piece of technology may be a precursor to post-scarcity, sustainable societies. It's difficult to determine the carrying capacity of the world's resources, but it's now definitely possible to bootstrap a certain kinds of resource-based economies by people from all corners of the world. All with a mobile device and an Internet connection.

Sometimes.. some people and their ideas are way too ahead of their time, even before the necessary technologies are available to make things possible. Even if that's not the case, mere discussion over one-of-a-kind ideas are valuable and interesting. I hope more users around here will embrace such ideas despite how some may think about globalism, communism, socialism, etc. Labels are too limiting.

So yup, I'm definitely excited to see The Venus Project taking my rather evangelistic email seriously and consider blockchain technology more seriously. I'm happy to be able to spend some time walking them through the landscape, before getting onto this platform as @thevenusproject. I'll be having a Skype session with them on Tuesday at 13:00 UTC.

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