How to build a world: a webinar with the Worldbuilding Academy's core team

[Til]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
Planet Earth. Not so far in the future. Poverty isn’t an issue anymore, but people starve for meaning/purpose.

[IreneE]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:

[gopipgo]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:

[Rainer]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
As reality is often even more extraordinary than fiction, see the weird example of the Messina social cluster, I suggest to combine/link this great project of collective writing of science fiction stories with researching 10 to 15 real stories like the one of Messina were people in real life are experiencing new paradigms and alternative ways of organizing. It could also cross fertilize the collective inspiration.

[IMNA]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:

[alberto]

@Phillip

These ideas provide a strong philosophically justifiable foundation for an economy in which everyone partakes of the value of their labor, and so has incentive to produce, but in which everyone has an income simply because they are members of that society. This ends poverty, but incentivizes work and creativity.

Wow, what a post! Hope you help us out with the worldbuilding, you clearly have much to offer. Even though: these fair systems have existed, but they tend to be subverted. Do you have any idea for making them stick?

@atelli

Excited to meet all worlders soon:)

Same here, @atelli

@dmgallagher1302

I’m a writer who would like to be involved early in the hopes of contributing meaningfully after the world has been established.

Welcome, then! At the webinar you will have the chance to meet our first settlers, @yudhanjaya and @Joriam. And we’ll take it from there.

@fjanss

I have many ideas at many levels, but mostly abstract/conceptual schemes and theories rather than particular stories.

This fits in with what @yudhanjaya calls “iceberg”. The stories are the tip of an iceberg: below it, underwater, are languages, economies, value systems, fashion etc. I would say most of the worldbuilding happens underwater, so you are right on target.

@AlexAlmeida

I think it’d be interesting to see an economic system based on long term consequences instead of short term transactions. I

Exactly! I am also very interested in that, @LeonardoWild and @Phillip . Maybe we could have a go at it together. Back in the day, I did some work on the Benedictine economy that still inspires me. Now, that’s long term!

@Aste

Sadly the majority of immersive storyworlds reproduce current economic models, meaning these worlds are often just more of the same. I am intrigued to find out more about this projects and whether/how I might get involved.

You are absolutely right, because “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. Let’s take a crack at that!

@brooks

I want to get behind the idea that any sufficiently advanced economic system is indistinguishable from ecology, and any sufficiently advanced agent in that system is a subject with its own experiences and viewpoints.

Hello @brooks, long time no see. And this is very on Zeitgeist, seen as economics is more and more influenced by biology (in fact, like Harari says, this is “the age of biology”, though he would probably disagree with you on conscience. Indeed, I too am looking forward to such an exploration.

@gceh22

I am interested in economic information systems that might supplement or replace price systems for coordination and allocation, as well as open strategic indicative planning. Models in the real world are OGAS and Cybersyn.

That sounds like a planned economy… maybe an idea whose time has come?

@AlastairBall

A world where there are different domains based on different political/philosophical ideas and you have the freedom to live in the domain that suits your personal outlook.

This will definitely be there. Not new in sci-fi – for example Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota cycle. But a great architecture to start from.

[zplakias]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
I am interested to explore possible future food systems that depart from the ultra low-tech/ultra high-tech binary that seem to characterize many existing future food system visions.

[Phillip]

Alberto-

Thank you – I’ve been spending much of the last couple of years reading about this stuff and trying to develop the basis of a fair economy that is not directed (but is regulated to correct externalities) from the top. There is a libertarian/anarchist element, such that people would be freed to set their own goals

The carrot in such a system is that everyone would get a deposit in their account, say, once a month. People would sit up and notice. The sticking point, of course, would be that much of what capitalists think they “own” would be nationalized or taxed. Heinlein’s book skated over the transition and landed the hero in the full-fledged Utopian society, which is so 19th century and removes the conflict – the hero just spends all his time listening as the benefits of the new system are extolled, and the creative conflict of a novel is lost. And that conflict would be useful as a way of describing what kinds of obstacles would arise and what consequences would result when moving toward this model of society.

So this means there are elements: first is how do we design the body that determines the payments? It would attract enormous pressure to set the level at a point which would be in accordance with the interests of one part of the society or another – the rich versus the workers, of course. They would need to evaluate what the portion of overall capital represents the value of existing patented processes, plus the value of all production contributed by the land itself, which you know includes all natural resources – this amount would then be distributed to the population. This issue would probably form the main conflict in a novel, and provide the drama. It would be too easy to arrange for “bad capitalists, good workers” – less cardboard characters should be used. In the classic scifi novel the people who would resolve the conflict would be technocratic warriors – number crunchers to the rescue! But of course in 2020 we have seen how technocracy can be undermined by subverting our faith in science in the interests of one group, and drawing in a large portion of the workers by stroking their nationalism and their religion. And technocracy itself is dangerous – look at Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 book “Player Piano”, as well as the British sociologist Michael Young’s venture into science fiction, the 1958 “The Rise of the Meritocracy”. If only the smartest rule, then democracy is no more, and the less smart and less well educated will resent them, as we already see in the US and Europe – to the benefit of populists. All these obstacles must be avoided to succeed.

But then you get a society in which people really can pursue their dreams. You know Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”? Not scifi, but it describes the need of any creative person for a stable place and income in order to create. If I want to be an entrepreneur, I can keep at it longer without needing to have the “right” color face or gender or religion or nationality to receive a loan. If I want to make things, like medieval swords or works of art or fine furniture, I can do so – this, by the way, might well be a way to overcome to some extent the problems associated with a pure technocratic rule – skilled artisans and farmers and entrepreneurs and other producers would also have a role. One thinks of William Morris’ 1890 “News From Nowhere”.
,
How to incentivize people not to be couch potatoes? This is to some extent a behavioral economics question. A significant part of modern society is depressed. Stress levels are very high. What would be the social psychological effects of dramatically reducing the society-wide levels of stress? I think very significant. There will be couch potatoes, but not nearly as many as a skeptic might worry. Inasmuch as base “social credit” would be calculated from actual income from historical capital and land, this would be independent of any assessment of “need”. But a VERY back-of-envelope calculation for the US is:

2018 GDP per capita: $62,795.
Proportion of GDP contributed by labor: US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 58.4% as of 2016
By the way, the proportion of labor vs capital is declining over time, contributing to inequality
Capital share is around 40%. About 40% of industries are patent intensive, so, say,24%
The World Bank calculates natural resources rents in the US as of 2017 at 0.7% of GDP.
So, say 25% of GDP is about $$16,000/yr for every man, woman and child in the USA.
That’s enough to live on, but not well – there would be incentive to work to produce income.

[Rootstock]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
Make one of the key guiding design principles focused on having full and constant awareness of the interdependence and interpenetration of all things and all beings.
Likewise, design the ‘direction of awareness’ for the participants to maintain a dynamic balance between the ‘Arc of Possibilities and Potential’ that is always represented by the horizon, as well as the ‘Wheels’ of existence (cycles, hierarchies, mechanics, materiality, knowledge, biological requirements, rule sets etc)

[Beatriz]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
Let’s assume that we need to make the population decrease. In that case, we have to think of a kind of social and economic organization that contemplates its gradual reduction and the problems that it implies. During a period of time, the population piramide will have a narrow base and a large top, and that will change little by little. We have to think of infrastructures that will serve to respond to the needs of people and guarantee their rights during this transition. Ideally, these infrastructures will be easily transformed once they have accomplished their function.

[flaviagoma]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
Global collective Intelligence + gift economy:

SINTROPIA - Global collective intelligence platform

[atelli]

An additional resource from the perspective of women labor into world futures: https://memory-work.com/
Hope to meet most of you at the online call on Monday:)

[yudhanjaya]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:

[Sal]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
I’m mainly joining out of interest in learning from others. As far as my own primitive ideas go, I’d like to see modelling of future consequences of growth-based capitalism, versus new (i.e. previously impossible or otherwise unattempted) forms of socialist economic systems aided by current technologies.

[Graceleopoli]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
Considering the grounded process of becoming, and cultural production of knowledge rooted in decolonial, queer and posthuman convergence.

[hubert_brychczynski]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
I’m interested in a world where personal identification systems are not viable anymore, and the effects it would have on the economy. It could be achieved by some kind of freely available, democratic technology, e.g. an instant cloning device, or a time machine that transports its user to a unique timeline with every use, with the implication that people from other timelines (often fugitives) could and would also enter ours and impersonate others. Or an epidemic that would cause irreversible prosopagnosia, or a global failure of ID databases and software. Or some kind of personal cloaking/anonymizing technology. Whatever it would be, it would need to make identification useless.

[filipnystrom]

I filled in the form, but my answer doesn’t show. Not sure what’s up. But here goes, form-free:

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
I’m mainly here to listen and to get inspired at this point. But I am interested in the potential of visionary narratives for political and world changing purposes and how stories can push our boundaries and break normative frameworks. I want to envision a world where conflict can become a positive force instead of something to avoid, and where difference is not rhetorically and politically circumvented. A political and economical system that creates potentialities for subjectivities to meet in their actual strangeness, and see what would bloom from the friction in between. Super abstract…

[sheila]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
S.C. Mullooly’s World-building Strategy:
Translingualing, or operating between/across languages, as a form of freedom from monolingual restraint as well as a means of resisting monolingual bias.

[alex_levene]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
Unsure at this stage

[GiulioNRC]

I want to take part in the webinar.
Yes

My idea/suggestion for building the world:
Informal settlements around a major city have been attracting displaced and disenfranchised communities for decades. Used to a dynamic and constantly shifting economic reality, they have become increasingly reliant on digital tools and gig economy roles on the internet, as smartphones became more universally accessible. Following several pandemics started with the Covid-19 and become more frequent and brutal due to climate change, tourism, leisure and commerce industries have almost disappeared, city centres are now emptying out due to unemployment and office buildings are almost deserted. Suddenly, work from home is the new normal, and the previously marginalised communities become the engine of a new economic system.