The End Of Your Wrist

Sometimes stories start at the end and go backwards. The is one of those stories. It's about self-reliance. Get it before it's too late. The helping hand you're seeking is as close as the end of your wrist.

The future isn't here yet. There's an old Zen saying: The only thing you can change is the past. Change it or get content with more of the same. A new mode of production that doesn't depend on.....
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There are two sets of solutions as stability and financialized "growth" slide into instability and DeGrowth.

1. Acquire skills that will be increasingly scarce and a network of collaborators, customers and suppliers who value/make use of these skills.

2. Create a new mode of production that doesn't rely on central banks, states and global finance to function: in effect, a decentralized, localized networked system that exists in parallel with the centralized hierarchies of the current mode of production which is centralized, industrialized, globalized, financialized, neofeudal, neoliberal, neocolonial, and dependent on ever-expanding leverage, debt, central planning, regulatory capture and fossil fuel consumption.

I describe the first set of solutions in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

The second set of solutions are the subject of my book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology & Creating Jobs for All.

Ultimately, these two sets of solutions are two facets of the only solution: a more sustainable, just, efficient, decentralized, transparent and opportunity-for-all mode of production.

Naysayers love to claim that these solutions can't possibly work for the usual array of reasons, which boil down to 1) my identity is dependent on poking holes in others' solutions or 2) my status and livelihood are dependent on the status quo continuing exactly as it is now or 3) an unexamined faith that the current mode of production is the only possible mode of production.

Note to naysayers: the "solution" that can't possibly work is the continuation of the status quo. There are only two pathways as the status quo arrangement destabilizes, decays and decoheres: 1) a doomed nostalgia for "solutions" that are no longer attainable (for example, Cargo Cults of "endless growth") or 2) an alternative set of solutions that are sustainable because they are localized, networked, democratized, opt-in and self-funded.

We are about to start a painful learning process about what is "impossible" and what is inevitable. Once it becomes self-evident that the current mode of production is not sustainable, we'll have no choice but to try more sustainable modes of production that are not just more efficient but that offer greater stability, opportunity and social mobility.

charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2016/10/two-sets-of-solutions-as-status-quo.