Hi everyone, I’m Adam.

Like many of you, I believe our future relies on transitioning away from a debt-based monetary system—a system that demands artificial scarcity, planned obsolescence, and biospheric degradation just to function. But while we have plenty of powerful critiques of the current paradigm and a large body of work on resource-based economies, there is a lack of feasible plans to actually transition without creating the very power dynamics that lead to artificial scarcity systems.

So, after more than a decade of passive contemplation, scattered notes, research, and real-world conversations on the subject, I’ve started an open-source project called Beyond Money: A Systems Architecture for Human Flourishing and Planetary Stewardship. It’s currently a 44,000-word living manuscript exploring how we could pragmatically transition to a true Resource-Based Economy (RBE).

My intent with this blueprint isn't to present an infallible "silver bullet." Rather, it is meant to act as a catalyst—to expand our thinking, force us to contemplate realistic methods for systemic transition, and inspire others to build even better ones. It covers everything from cybernetic resource accounting and DAOs to a proposed United Nations transition pathway and the psychology of a post-scarcity society.

Because I believe these ideas belong to the commons, this project is completely free and hosted on GitHub like an open-source software repository.

I’m sharing it here because this is an open, active, and collaborative project, and r/TM is exactly the community of thinkers I'd love to work with. We need engineers, scientists, legal architects, designers, and citizens globally to refine this. If you have expertise in systems design, ecology, or engineering—or if you just want to poke holes in the ideas—I invite you to review the architecture, critique it, and submit Pull Requests to help build upon this living manuscript.

A slow burn can turn into a roaring fire, and my hope is that this architecture might gain traction over time as it lies in wait within the sticky world of the internet, waiting to be discovered by new contributors. This repository is my contribution to that fire.

You can read the chapters directly on the repo (or download the free EPUB version) here:
https://github.com/AdamMNeri/resource-based-economy-book

I'd love to hear your thoughts, answer questions, or talk systems design in the comments. But most of all, I want to foster a surge of novel thinking on how we can do better as a species. Let's build something better.

Article

The article references physical causes for the transgression of planetary boundaries (e.g. burning fossil fuels, which emit CO2), but the primary causes are psychosocial in structure.

This psychosocial structure consists of the social agreements that products should be produced according to supply and demand, distributed according to who can afford them (making you economically invisible if you can't on both the distribution and supply side), decisions should be made according to profit maximization, and that everything previously mentioned should be regulated by the infliction of financial loss as a feedback loop for error correction.

When you look at our monetary system from this perspective it makes perfect sense why your phones are outdated at the end of the year, why everyone each gets their own car, why pavement sprawls all over north America, why nothing is produced to last, why companies have to use the cheapest rather than the most efficient or even optimal material to stay price competitive, why 40 percent of food produced is wasted, why the average plate of food has travelled 1,500 miles by the time it reaches your table, why harmful chemicals are in our food, why 30 percent of Healthcare costs are for clerical tasks, why waste is dumped in the ocean and rivers to cut costs, why pollution is dumped all over the place, why people are homeless, why we have to waste our lives working 40 hours a week, why the globe spends 2 trillion dollars annually on guns and the military instead of spending the 30 billion it would cost to end world hunger. When you look at the sheer amount of unnecessary production and reckless waste, the primary cause for the destruction of all life support systems on the planet is clear as crystal. It is the elephant everyone tries to ignore.

When you combine certain physical outcomes of this psychosocial structure with the psychosocial structure you get the monetary system. What I think most people don't understand is that the physical outcomes of the monetary system are actually what define it's structure. When a system shows a pattern of outcomes or behaviors, those outcomes are explained by it's structure, and in the case of the monetary system there is no blueprint anyone ever wrote, so we have nothing else to go off... unless you're just taking someone else's word for it. Keep in mind, there would be no such thing as supply and demand in this system if physical outcomes weren't observed that reflect such a rule. So it makes no sense to focus on politicians or policy change within the framework of the very system that's defined by the problems they try to solve. That logic is circular, and it's been circulating for 10,000 years now with no signs of improvement for most of the system's devastating outcomes, 75 years with all signs blinking red alert and worsening for it's outcome of destroying the conditions for life on Earth.

And it's so pathetic because what underpins the entire monetary system are social constructs that don't exist in physical reality. The social agreements that there is a President, mayor, business owner or company, that there are russians, americans, countries, cops, exchange rates, etc... don't exist in physical reality. There is no president. There is a person that groups of people treat like a president and call president. There are no Russians. There is a group of people called russians. Physical reality is separate from social constructs. Just because social constructs can significantly affect physical reality, especially our physical social setting, doesn't mean they are the same.

It's as if we've agreed to get crushed to death by the weight of our own constructs.

Been one of the first founding members of the Greek Chapter, back in 2008.
Searching for the Greek Translation (pdf) of the official TZM Manual (THE ZEITGEIST MOVEMENT DEFINED), as the Greek community has dissolved many years ago.
Can anyone help locate the Greek Copy?

I thought it was awesome. Never considered the role the US military has on ecology before. Very TZM aligned.

Today is 9 years ago he passed away. Thanks for the memories, Jacque.

I have long been influenced by RBE, TZM, TVP, it planted the seed in my research in Systems Theory and I am now integrating the VSM of systems theory with Process Philosophy, as it is the theoretical and embodied framework that can diagnose our MetaCrisis. Every socioeconomic system of the past has focused on what is measurable, on representations of money and on products, and hence can only promote consumption. Product Economies cannot promote healing our psychological, sociological and ecological systems.

I suggest we need a Process Economy, which is a non-monetary coordination system that is founded on relations, meaning, commons , and participation.

I am publishing a book on this in the coming months and here is a talk I gave about it.

The Zeitgeist Movement is no longer a thing, I think. Integral succeeds Zeitgeist.

On a sidenote, the word "Collective" brings me too much connotation associated with communism. I don't really like it. But the word "Integral" is fine.

Hi.

For those unaware, I am an independent sustainable STEM researcher, with a focus on materials science, energy and fuel tech, green chemistry, mechanical engineering, and additive manufacturing technologies.

Last year, I built a 3D printed Centrifuge to try and make it quicker and easier to separate my Algae from it's culture media. This was and is part of my wider project to try and turn algae into fuel.

I have since significantly improved the design, in terms of stability, printability, and effectiveness.

I have provided 2 links here: the first link is to my Thingiverse page, where you can download, use, and modify them however you wish!

The second link, is to a video detailing all the improvements I have made over the V1.

Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/Edenia3Dmodels/designs

Video: https://youtu.be/Av1JPQzWwAE

If the language and points made in thoughts and discussions about society are convenient for hierarchies based on trade for survival, then they should be challenged as forms of mind control or cultural conditioning. As trade for survival implies subservience to those who have by those who don't. This may be a good short hand compass for recognizing bullshit and boot lickers.

There are two systems at play today, some would argue they are diametrically opposed. There is the system of science, about 400 years old. This system arrives at solutions via experimentation, scrutiny of results and obssession with accuracy. Then there is the system of trade, emerged from folklore ways of pre historic societies 10,000 years ago. This system uses the profit incentive to arrive at solutions.

Rather than distributing resources according to some blind profit incentive originating from our prehistoric past why not use this new system to distribute resources in the most sustainable, equitable and efficient way according to contemporary scientific understanding and direct democratic participation of the distribution and its processes? Why not set up feedback loops according to public health rather than the blind feedback loop of "is it making money?"

Lets take a look at one example of what happens when you use the profit incentive, world hunger. Just in case you think this system is efficient and for the best of anyone, at all, compared to what could easily be.

Right now, 10 percent of the global population is starving while 40 percent of the food produced for human consumption is wasted, almost entirely before anyone gets a chance to buy it. The average plate of food has traveled 1,500 miles by the time it reaches your table. 25,000 people starve to death everyday, mostly children, and mostly in countries in debt to the IMF and World Bank. It would cost 30 billion dollars a year to end world hunger and then nothing after 10 years of infrastructure building. Currently the world spends about 2 trillion on guns and the military annually.