[kristopolous]

am I crazy to think the cultural shift in the rich world will actually be to more local communities, a return to rewarding physical labor such as gardening and craftsmanship to form a low ecological impact society of selected technology?

I don't see the upcoming generation as being dazzled by accumulation and owning stuff. Nor do I see them wanting to ride on the hands of leisure. I see a culture of rejection of the codependence of infrastructure.

When looking at 2040 you have to look at teenagers right now and understand what kind of society they'll be building.

And personally I don't see one with a bunch of robotic assistants.

Sure they have lots of screentime but that's for communication far more than labor reduction. These teens aren't tabulating Excel columns for hours on end. We are amidst a revolution of distributive communication that's being manifested by a revitalization of community.

The barriers to engagement will eventually be expunged, not fortified.

[thangalin]

> a return to rewarding physical labor such as gardening

Gardening for food, no. Craftsmanship, yes.

From a previous thread...

Everyone thinks about food in terms of economic costs. Few people consider the time that's involved. Yes, food is already cheap, but it isn't free because of the time humans spend involved in its production. That time must be remunerated, otherwise we'd call it slavery.

Imagine removing humans from the food equation, altogether. Production (vertical farms), harvesting (automation), distribution (electric vehicles), clean energy inputs (geothermal, solar, fusion), and maintenance (growing crops that can be used to manufacture replacement parts [e.g., organic polymers and carbon-based electronics] combined with modular, 3D-printed robotics) needs to be addressed. Difficult, but not insurmountable.

Once food is actually free (not merely inexpensive), how will it affect the economy? A large part of our economy is based on trading work for food (also known as indentured servitude). Such trades probably predate agriculture.

Hunger, humanity’s everlasting, unrelenting stressor is timeless and impelling. Hunger calls us all to consume, to feed corporate machines. Machines that were forged in the flames of the Industrial Revolution, when rich men hammered out schemes for our future. Their plans, perhaps unwittingly, followed the template of slave-driven civilisations wrought throughout the ages. Caste societies wherewithin the wealthy commanded the masses through control of food and knowledge.

The printing press and, on a larger scale, the Internet, have liberated our minds. In his plan for food control genocide, Henry Kissinger wrote, "Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents."

Wholly automated, indoor farming has the potential to liberate how we spend our time by removing another way to control the masses. In much the same way that lowering the cost to disseminate information liberated humanity from traditional slavery.

In that same 1974 plan, Henry Kissinger proposed rationing food in developing nations to restrict population growth. Starve people today to prevent people from starving tomorrow. How brilliant. Decades later, researchers learned that empowering women to make educated decisions about their own wombs reduces birth rates. Imagine that. Kissinger was wrong about the best way to curb birthrates, but right about how to shackle a population.

With the pressures of work, family life, and other societal impacts, time is the most precious of commodities. What if we didn't have to work for food, but, instead, could invest our time devoted to our passions?

Yes, there are people who have the opportunity to love their work, but I assure you, when compared with the global population, they are an insignificant minority. And yes, there are people who will loaf about in ways that contribute little to the advancement of humanity, but shouldn't that, too, be a right--if not, who are we to say how people should spend their time?

What's ironic about this idea is that the outcome of a work-free society is a consequence of free-market capitalism. Capitalism is the driving force behind maximum efficiency at minimal cost. Once food is free, capitalism implodes. And maybe that's a good thing.

[kristopolous]

I thank you for the time it took to write this! I'm looking at it from the perspective of already irrigated land though.

Recently I've taken up urban harvesting. There's a loquat tree at a local gas station. Out by the river there's an orange and lemon tree. Near my office there's an avocado tree.

We have mostly ornamental horticulture in urban environments. I'm suggesting it will tend to be more functional overtime as resources are strapped and people turn to more fresh, natural, and regional foods.

The other aspect is that it's good for the psyche: urban harvesting is meditative and calming. There's been a large rise in community gardens and a number of schools have set aside plots of land for it.

In a way, you need to categorize it with physical recreation. Put it in the same group as say, jogging, yoga, martial arts, pickup soccer.

Every trajectory in rich-people's food culture is going exactly this way. When I introduce the idea to my peers in the 100k+ income group, something clicks and now they are mapping out where the trees are and some have started planting their own.

I routinely engage with teenagers (through aikido) and when I've told them about this, the reaction has been almost universal: "Oh you just started doing that? Do you know about the pomegranate tree over yonder, or the kumquat tree near this fence?"

Those are the people that will be running the world in 2050.

And what about the low-income people who have succumbed to food deserts after the corporate supermarkets exited the market? Recently, in south LA, cooperative farming initiatives have been popping up. There's one I saw in Lynwood and two in South Gate. I've heard about a budding one in Compton. This is the communities response to the corporate exit.

The change will and has always come from the people - not their possessions.

[whatnotests]

Expand on this - you've got a great blog article right there.

[kristopolous]

If you want to read about this approach I'll recommend http://www.culturechange.org/auto_free_times.html and http://www.bioneers.org/ . Note that the first one ended publication over 13 years ago. You may read it in the context of green radicalism of 1997 and realize that it's becoming the dominant culture of 2016.

For innovations you can look towards organizations like http://dignityvillage.org/ ... Literally, a legally recognized homeless community.

If you are expecting to find future cultural innovation coming from elite organizations, you're looking in the wrong place.

The disenfranchised through radical organization is where that occurs.

As it happens it deradicalizes. Things such as not smoking, abstaining from red meat, not attending religious services weekly or not getting married were once radical positions. But as the cultural barriers imposed by radical animosity fell, personal reservations against these habits fell with them and they gave rise to cultural change.

That's why you can't simply elongate the status quo by 20 years in a linear trajectory and get "The Future!"