The most common objection to accessism, as well as other open-access/resource-based economies is the so-called economic calculation problem.
Now, some in the socialist camp have handwaved it by saying that we can broadly approximate the basic needs of people and communities, so it’s close enough, or that once the workers seize the means of production, actually having to be efficient won’t matter.
Others in the market socialist camp, have instead embraced the free market as the most efficient way of solving the problem, instead opting merely to have coops and/or state-owned companies as the ones producing.
But the answer to the question instead is in the palm of the ones mocking the other’s economics as inefficient and deadly.
And no, I’m not talking about your stereotypical pampered rich kid, criticizing capitalism, and quoting Marx like scripture, on his high-end flagship smartphone, since this applies just as much to the free-market fans, making and sharing memes mocking the former.
Because inside each little computing device, be it some low-end, off-brand smartphone, or the most advanced and distributed supercomputer used by some Bond-esque secret service agency, there are algorithms, kernels, drivers and load balancers, making sure every component of your phone, from power, to input, to processing and networking, is organized gracefully and efficiently.
And before you say that a global economy is different from browsing Youtube, most of the crucial software is the same, be it used by:
- your low-end smartphone;
- your personal computer;
- the server hosting this website;
- the AWS distributed clusters making sure someone’s Amazon Prime Videos are delivered to him and millions of other users with bandwidth optimized across all the regions of the planet;
- some Linux supercomputer currently conducting cutting edge research.
We don’t need to speculate if such a resource-distribution system works or not, or how scalable it is, we know it already does.
Because modern computing already solved a problem that economics has failed to: how to coordinate heterogenous resources without chaos, and without tyranny.
When your laptop runs a program, the CPU, memory, peripherals and network aren’t auctioned off in a bidding war between processes.
You don’t have to decide whether your browser or your music player “deserves” RAM, or if your video has enough funding to use your mouse and keyboard.
The operating system simply balances resources in real time, allocating what is needed, where it is needed.
Now imagine if computing worked like capitalism:
- Every app would need its own budget.
- Every process would negotiate contracts.
- Crashes and bottlenecks would be constant.
Absurd, right? Yet that’s exactly how our economies still work.
In the same way operating systems distribute computing resources efficiently without markets, an Open Access Economy would use cybernetic balancing&feedback, AI, and open data to coordinate physical resources.
- Imagine farms and food distribution that are balanced like computing workloads.
- Imagine housing allocated by need and availability, not speculation.
- Imagine transport coordinated like network routing.
- Image energy shared and stabilized like a power grid, not traded as a commodity.
But such a system introduces a terrifying possibility, of software being softly tweaked to make sure certain groups are marginalized and silenced when it comes to their share of the Earth’s common resources, just like today, in our capitalistic, monetary system, yet also utterly dependent and locked in to the flawed code.
The same situation happened decades ago, in the software community, when they realized the software they bought, even for exorbitant prices, could be restricted, or even rendered useless with one update, or computer/platform switch, leaving them beholden to greedy mega-corporations and regional restrictions.
This led to the creation of open-source, and the free software movement, by people determined in the beliefs that the computer, and it’s software, should belong to the users, not some faceless corporation, stealing and spying on their own customers.
It wasn’t an easy fight.
While individual hackers had to start from scratch, the same corporations that once had such a large market share had way more programmers to pay, and already established software to compete with, as well as plenty of money and influence used to smear the nascent movement.
Yet, year by year, it grew more and more complete, to the extent that you can legally own a computer who’s schematics, both hardware and software, are totally free and transparent, without paying a single dime, except for the actual physical gear.
But just as software was liberated from proprietary code, humanity can liberate the essentials of life from proprietary economics.
Most people today take open source for granted. Your phone, your browser, even the internet itself runs on software created, shared, and maintained freely.
No one pays a license fee every time a packet crosses the web. No one has to bid for CPU cycles just to load a page. The infrastructure works because the knowledge is open and the system balances resources automatically.
But when it comes to the economy: food, housing, transport, energy, we’re still stuck in the equivalent of closed, proprietary code. Access is locked behind paywalls, patents, rents, and markets. The result is artificial scarcity in a world that already has the tools to provide abundance.
Open source has already shown the world that cooperation beats competition when it comes to progress, and accessism extends that principle from code to civilization itself.
The question is no longer whether the idea works.
We already live inside a working proof every time we open a browser or send a message. The only question is whether we will keep treating food, shelter, and energy like licensed software from the 1980s, or finally free them as part of our shared human commons.
The future is open.
The future is access.